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Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine

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Re: Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine

#211

Post by rukuu001 »

raincole wrote: post #62
carlmr wrote: post #29

Looking back we had one CS professor who in 2007 predicted we'd all be jobless in ten years, i.e. 2017. His prediction was based on the trends he was seeing at the time. But it wasn't even AI. Instead he made this prediction because he saw the rise of no-code tools replacing software developers because managers could finally cut out the pesky "translators", i.e. software developers. I said it then and I will say it n…

> His prediction was based on the trends he was seeing at the time. But it wasn't even AI. Instead he made this prediction because he saw the rise of no-code tools replacing software developers because managers could finally cut out the pesky "translators", i.e. software developers. It might sound really crazy and stupid today, but when SQL came out, it's advertised as one of "program-generating" languages and was su…

Funny - also COBOL was intended for the 'business' community to write their own programs.

Even funnier - we've already lived through the great 'software development adoption' by business and hardly noticed, except some of us got work out of it. A lot of small businesses (legal practices and accountancies were particular suspects) grabbed MS Access with both hands and went wild in the 90s/early 2000s. Timesheets and other HR functions were popular applications.

Re: Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine

#212

Post by acatnamedjoe »

beachy wrote: post #150
acatnamedjoe wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see the plumber/electrician thing a lot. But talking to my friends who do these jobs it always seems like it would be even more vulnerable to AI than programming. Experienced electricians get paid decent wages because they have had lots of training and then have seen loads of different problems. So they intuitively know things like 'This is a 1960s house so if there's a problem with the lighting the first thing I s…

The most recent electrician jobs we've had done were: - fitting a timer into the switchboard to control the hot water cylinder. A simple job, but the sparky also had to talk to me (the client) to get us both on the same page. - fitting an EV fast charger in the garage. Not much science, but a lot of cable running and clipping down, then the garage switchboard needed to be swapped out for a larger one that could take…

But in all of those cases presumably someone needed to figure out what needed doing? (In your case maybe you're savvy enough that you knew what the issue was and just needed a certified person to do the work, but most clients won't be).

My argument is that it is the 'figuring out' that drives electricians wages, not really the doing part. Because while clipping down cables and extracting switches is fiddly work, I'd argue it isn't a skill with enough barrier to entry to maintain high wages (as compared to brick laying or plastering, for example, which you simply can't do to a professional level without years of practice).

So most of the value delivered by an experienced electrician is in talking to clients and identifying the correct technical solution, and is therefore pretty much analogous to the value delivered by software developers.

Therefore if we accept the logic that software developers will no longer be required (or that their value will be greatly diminished) it's hard to see how that wouldn't apply to electricians too (in the sense of being a well-paid trade over and above your average manual job).

(Btw - I DON'T think either will happen, but I just think electrician is a weird choice of example for those that do think that)

Re: Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine

#213

Post by ben_w »

lozenge wrote: post #173
411111111111111 wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mine doesn't predate it but it's very confusing for me to read this opinion. From my point of view, it totally did happen? Can you imagine how many programmers the company would've needed to get all the data a business analyst casually queries per day? What you're looking at is the quantity of people actually employed in the industry, not how many SQL made obsolete. The industry just grew so much that it didn't becom…

The industry grew because the desire for data analysis grew, which is because the technology's ability to meet the desire grew. This can repeat itself a couple more times.

Cotton gins and the Jevons effect.

Give what even pessimistic AI alignment people are saying, I think you're correct that there are a few more repeats possible before AGI.

(Whether the pessimists are correct that all of them will happen before the 30s, I cannot say).

Re: Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine

#214

Post by surgical_fire »

hnfong wrote: post #195
surgical_fire wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ChatGPT will definitely make a dev job obsolete if their job is simply copying and pasting code they found online. By all means, that is part of everyone's job. Sometimes I really can't remember how to do some specific thing. I know precisely what I want, but I don't remember the proper way to do it. I would have resorted to a web search until last year, now I ask chatGPT. It is faster, more concise, and surprisingly…

> It is not, it can only give out known answers to known problems based on language statistics. Are you sure you actually tried, or is this an a priori argument?

I use it on a daily basis.

Re: Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine

#215

Post by _puk »

carlmr wrote: post #29

Looking back we had one CS professor who in 2007 predicted we'd all be jobless in ten years, i.e. 2017. His prediction was based on the trends he was seeing at the time. But it wasn't even AI. Instead he made this prediction because he saw the rise of no-code tools replacing software developers because managers could finally cut out the pesky "translators", i.e. software developers. I said it then and I will say it n…

The parallels are there for DevOps too - think of the wholesale move to AWS, GCP, and Azure, and the move to things like IaC.

Sure one class of job has taken a huge hit (sys admins, supposedly ops), but it's been replaced by another that needs intimate knowledge of the tooling required to do what was being done previously (just in a more "scalable" way). DevOps have been demanding a premium for years now.

And there are still sys admins out there doing what they've always done..

Re: Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine

#216

Post by Radim »

Yes, human economy is about the exchange of value between humans – a cheap tautology from Carmack. Money is indeed irrelevant to a snail, as opposed to a would-be SW engineer.

But Nature is about making better use of energy gradients, always doing more with less, the principle of least action. Using any surplus to do it again (i.e. evolved life). That's the properly grounded perspective. In that sense "Get skills to satisfy humans and you'll probably be fine!" sounds super myopic.

The anxiety we humans feel when confronted with AI is not only that we'll be out of our job as a programmer, or doctor, or driver, or teacher, or whatever.

It's the broader sense of unease that humanity's gradient-razing days, spectacular as they were all the way to nuclear fission and fusion, may soon be over. And "economy" as a useful tool advancing that Nature's mission will have evolved beyond us.

"Making humans satisfied" is not terribly relevant from that perspective. Vast swathes of the human economy are just scaffolding to support the rest: humans reproducing to keep the optimization machine going. The overhead is tremendous. Once Nature finds a way to do more with less, I have zero doubt much of that scaffolding will be optimized away. That's some definition of "fine".

Or maybe I misunderstood and Carmack is merely suggesting individuals try to adapt and hope for the best. What else can you do anyway? That would be the honest answer. Rather than bloviating about "Guide AI with your product skills to deliver value to humans" – an embarrassing category error.

Re: Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine

#217

Post by microtonal »

onion2k wrote: post #49
pharmakom wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2008 wasn’t so different was it? I guess the big new thing in work since then is the “gig economy”.

We've had LLMs for about 5 years so far in non-academic research. If we're talking 10 years out that means we're looking at tech that's about 1/3 through its development to date. Take any mature-ish technology that you use today and compare the version 1/3 through its life to the version you use now. Look at Chrome 20 compare to Chrome 111, or React 14 compared to React 18, or an iPhone 4 compared to an iPhone 14, or…

When I started reading your comment I thought you were going to argue the opposite. Getting my first iPhone (3G) was a huge change. iPhone 4 to the latest are mostly incremental improvements. Aside from the camera, I could probably live with an iPhone 4 without many issues. Only the software is a lot more bloated now.

We still had a Moto X from 2013 that my wife would power on every now and then to test an app that they were developing (iOS household), and besides the camera it still looks like a perfectly usable modern smartphone. When using it, it doesn't feel like a phone from the prehistory.

Re: Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine

#218

Post by dzikimarian »

cwillu wrote: post #46
choppsv1 wrote: post #33

I love to code, as much as I loved math in college, but coding paid better and I'm pretty good at it. Those were my choices though b/c I want to do something I love. Sure, I keep my eye on the "Delivered Value" by making sure I engineer solutions to real problems, but I've never wanted to move out of coding and into managing engineers to build stuff. I want to code. It seems to me that the advice given here would be…

It's like telling a musician to become a DJ because the point of performing is to entertain people. It's not wrong, but it's also not applicable to all people who enjoy performing an instrument.

Well that's correct, but again you can't expect you'll stay relevant if you are into Romenian-Death-Disco-Country-Rap. Your technology of choice may become exactly that in a few years.

Re: Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine

#219

Post by jongjong »

If anyone wants to avoid wasting their software development career. DO NOT EVER work on developer tools as the product. Developer tools is one of these areas where it doesn't matter how good your product is, no matter how much developers say they like it or how much time it saves them, it's not going to make it. Big tech companies will not allow their employees to use the tool and it will be a commercial failure. It will be a failure no matter what... Ok, unless maybe you can raise a ton of funding from well known VCs who will foist your tool onto various companies they have connections with... But then quality of the tool doesn't really matter at all.

Otherwise, even if it's the best tool ever built for certain use cases, company directors won't have the deep tech knowledge to understand the nuances which make it so useful. As for rank-and file developers who are meant to use the tool; they are more interested in over-engineered, very complex tools which maximize billable hours than in tools which makes them more efficient in their job.

In other words, the only people who could possibly want your product won't understand your pitch and those who can understand your pitch won't like it because it doesn't align with current perverse industry incentives for their roles.

Some developers consciously reject any tool which would make their jobs easier, others reject them due to a subconscious bias in favor of tools which facilitate complexity, disagreements and long meetings.

Re: Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine

#220

Post by [deleted] »

avereveard wrote: post #25
pjmlp wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right now it is a kindergarten child at cognitive level, and like humans it will grow up and evolve, unless we nuke ourselves before it happens.

right now it will only solve problem someone else already knows the solution to, so not even at that. that said, I expect an ai assisted clerk to be order magnitude faster than not. it will be though for people at the bottom of the learning curve for a bit, but in half generation the educational offering will include how to work toghether with ai, massively improving worker productivity that is not to say it won't ha…

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