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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

#221

Post by pcthrowaway »

kybernetikos wrote: post #115
ChatGTP wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s pretty true, someone today on here wrote, “teach it to understand swagger”, I actually laughed, like I’ve used swagger and it often turns into a Frankenstein, and sometimes for good reason. I completely understand the sentiment and I like swagger. I believe the world is wiggly, not geometrically perfect, intellectuals struggle with that because square problems are easier to solve. Ideal scenarios are predictable…

Actually chat gpt is quite good at understanding some kinds of wiggliness. I built a restful api and documented it in a readme.md file in the wiggliest of ways. I then asked chatgpt to turn the readme into a swagger spec and then give me a page that read the spec and gave me a nice doc page with api exercise tool. Both tasks it performed really well and saved me a whole bunch of time.

I have some meticulous API docs I've written, which I tried to get ChatGPT to convert into swagger

It failed spectacularly

I wonder if it's because the API is quite large, and I had to paste in ~10 messages worth of API docs before I was finished.

It kept repeating segments of the same routes/paths and wasn't able to provide anything cohesive or useful to me.

Was your API pretty small? Or were your docs pretty concise?

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

#222

Post by uxcolumbo »

oulipo wrote: post #135

Of course what John says is true, it is important (and will always be) to understand how to build a good product, but the discussion about the future of work should also include a discussion about tax and redistribution, because we cannot let a few corporation take the riches from the rest of the world

Exactly. This is an important point to discuss and to solve for otherwise we’ll end up in a world like shown in the movie Elysium.

What will those people do, whose job will become obsolete? Are there support systems available to help people learn new valuable skills society needs?

If only a few people at the top will benefit from these tech advancements and the rest will have to fight for scraps then society will eventually fail or end up in a total tech feudalistic system.

Back in the 60s it was said that future advancements and automation will transform our society into a leisure and more innovative society.

Whatever happened to that vision?

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

#223

Post by microtonal »

onion2k wrote: post #140
marginalia_nu wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh, the difference is almost entirely in presentation. At the core a car today doesn't do significantly more than a car in 1962.

Superficially they're similar in the "they both have 4 wheels and an engine" sense, but you could examine literally any part of a car today compared to one from the 1950s and find huge improvements. The efficiency, safety, comfort, tech, manufacturing... Everything is better.

I agree with the safety angle, but besides that driving a car from 2023 is not substantially different from the 1950s (in the sense that it opens up a lot of new possibilities).

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

#225

Post by klabb3 »

bcherny wrote: post #57
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…

The advice isn’t about coding vs managing. What John is saying is to deeply understand why you’re building something, so that you can build it better. If you over focus on the what — the implementation, the language, the approach — you won’t be as good, and your work may be increasingly replaced by AI.

> The advice isn’t about coding vs managing.

Definitely. Carmack is no dummy, but I’d argue this comment section proves that he gave a pretty bad answer here (bad for the audience, not if you know Carmack and what he means).

I guess it’s the impostor syndrome, but many programmers have an out-of-place reductionist view of their work. It’s not simple, and crud boilerplate proves little about the future prospects.

Managers OTOH really are in the zone of GPT parity. At least a much larger subset of their day-to-day activities. So are many soft skills. In fact, soft communication is where LLMs shine above all other tasks, as we’ve seen over and over in the last few months. This is supported by how it performs on eg essay-style exams vs leetcode, where it breaks down entirely as it’s venturing into any territory with less training data.

Now, does that mean I think lowly of managers? No, managers have a crucial role, and the ones who are great are really really crucial, and the best can salvage a sinking ship. But most managers aren’t even good. That has a lot to do with poor leadership and outdated ideas of how to select for and train them.

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

#226

Post by dzikimarian »

kybernetikos wrote: post #124
cwillu wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's a great analogy, and it makes me wonder just how closely did Carmack himself follow this advice early in his career. I suspect that he wouldn't have got where he is without an unusually deep interest in the nuts and bolts.

Well - I've read some about origin of Doom/Wolfenstein - it was definitely a mixed bag (as expected from young man), but there was definitely a focus on end result (smoother animation, better 3d), than coding just for the sake of coding.

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

#227

Post by 5350-uiop-1130 »

fhd2 wrote: post #177
matwood wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On one hand you’re right, but you’re missing the other side - business requirements have always expanded with each innovation. Basic web dev has been commoditized for awhile, but a company of any size requires much more than basic web dev. Humanity has an uncanny ability to devour any excess capacity, and I see no reason it won’t do the same with things AI makes easier/lower cost. What I do worry about is that AI wil…

"Humanity has an uncanny ability to devour any excess capacity" Well put! You could also see the pressure on lower skilled jobs as a positive thing in that light, I suppose: Right now it's not super cheap to run a terrible call center. If five years from now you'll essentially get that for free, companies might see an opportunity to rise above "cheap and terrible" to be more competitive, which would likely create job…

Yes. I see AI as a good thing.

- it allows us to focus on the goals and not the process

- we still need people who understand the PROCESS (developers)

- people who can build tools that bridges the gap between AI generated zero value spam and bespoke human created content.

- we need tools to introduce subtlety and craft to AI outputs

- those are things that are important in a high saturation low margin environment - attention to detail (consider videogame crash of 1980s).

At the moment if i generate image with SD very difficult to change something specific in a nuanced way. that is where tools will emerge made by good developers. high value work is nuanced and often extremely subtle.

An increased ability to introduce subtletly will also open up new niches of interest. because the creator can focus on expressing their ideas in very personal ways.

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

#228

Post by thequadehunter »

I hear this kind of stuff all the time working in IT. A surprising amount of people think they gotta "learn docker" and "learn Powershell" and "learn AWS" and it just doesn't make any sense to me. Just learn the basics well and apply it to whatever you're doing when necessary. AWS will come out with their weird lingo for stuff that already exists and all you need to do is map it to the concept you already know.

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

#229

Post by revelio »

pcthrowaway wrote: post #182
revelio wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh? Gmail was a spa and that dates from 2004. I don't think a VC writing a blog post says much about how tech had changed. Smartphones existed before the iPhone and Android, they just weren't as popular.

The term "SPA" wasn't in use until at least after 2009 and gmail was probably using some hacky AJAX (XMLHTTPRequest wasn't even standardized until, what, 2006?). Chrome wasn't launched until 2008 so they weren't able to get away with just adding the APIs they needed into the browser. Backbone wasn't even released until 2010 and Angular probably wasn't conceived of internally until late 2008. Yes, gmail might have had…

SPA is just an abbreviation of "single page application" and only means a web app that doesn't do full page reloads, it doesn't require the use of any specific framework, so Gmail definitely qualifies and it used it from version one. It wasn't even the first, XMLHttpRequest was created by Microsoft for Outlook Web Access and it shipped in 1999 in IE5. Before Gmail there was also Oddpost, another SPA webmail app, so people started using it to build non-reloading web apps almost immediately. Gmail was the iPhone of web mail: not the first, no real new tech, but just very well done overall and popularized the concept.

You seem to be trying to redefine SPA to mean something else and much vaguer - the use of some specific frameworks, or not being "hacky" whatever that means - but your history here is just off.

Also, jquery was written in 2005 and launched in 2006, and became popular very fast. It was definitely pretty well known by 2008 and of course jquery itself was nothing new, most companies had very similar sets of utility libraries for JS that they used. Jquery just happened to be open source and have a monomaniacal focus on terseness at almost any cost.

Reality is the web has changed relatively little since 2008. It got some more APIs that weren't new, they were used in native desktop/mobile apps for many years beforehand, and that's about it.

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

#230

Post by znpy »

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…

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