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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

#261

Post by finikytou »

Philip-J-Fry wrote: post #201
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.

I think it's more like telling a DJ in the 80s, "Don't worry that mixing vinyls won't be a thing forever. It's not about the tools but about the product, as a DJ your job is to mix good music and you can do that with vinyls, cassettes or with MP3s."

except that many DJ now are physically attractive people (mostly women) that don't have to know anything anymore as technology evolved to the point that all the hard stuff to learn on mixing with vinyls disapeared. I could be a DJ tomorrow with a 1hour tutorial on youtube. a few decades ago it required hard training for years and musicality.

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

#262

Post by wizofaus »

krisoft wrote: post #210
jackblemming wrote: post #2

If programmers can be replaced by AI, so can every other white collar job and humanity will look very different than what it is now. And I’ve been using ChatGPT and copilot and it’s a nice tool but nowhere near a replacement for knowing how to program.

> If programmers can be replaced by AI, so can every other white collar job If programmers can be replaced by AI, so can it replace even the blue collar jobs. Because if it can’t that is what this developer here will be working on.

I'm pretty sure the reason human physical labour hasn't been replaced yet in many areas isn't because AI tech hasn't advanced sufficiently - there are real engineering challenges in automating physical interactions with the real world that it's hard to see how ever more advanced LLMs will help much with (though they could certainly assist in the design process). That humans are still needed to cook/assemble burgers or peel veggies is in some ways more surprising than the code and language generation capabilities of ChatGPT.

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

#263

Post by chii »

pcthrowaway wrote: post #9
jackblemming wrote: post #2

If programmers can be replaced by AI, so can every other white collar job and humanity will look very different than what it is now. And I’ve been using ChatGPT and copilot and it’s a nice tool but nowhere near a replacement for knowing how to program.

This person is asking about career prospects 10-15 years out though. I'm sorry, but the landscape in then might be as alien to someone asking today, as todays would have been to someone asking 15 years ago (2008). What John said is correct, but personally I think he's underplaying how much people could be affected. Those "product skills" take years of grinding to really sharpen, and in 15 years only a few people migh…

> as todays would have been to someone asking 15 years ago (2008).

i dont think, if you took someone from 15 yrs ago, and transplanted them here today, that they'd find it all that different technologically. Sure, machines are faster, slightly different, and such, but the fundamentals haven't changed. A software engineer could just as well write an app today as they had 15 yrs ago.

You'd have to go back 30 yrs, for computers (and the landscape of computing) to have been different enough, that you can't transplant a software engineer.

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

#264

Post by sidlls »

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?

That's literally what the language model is. It might correctly generate a solution to a "novel" question/problem that is sufficiently close to one with an existing, known answer. But then again it might not. And in software development, it's going to take someone who is knowledgeable to tell the difference.

I think software engineering is going to look very different in a few years, and likely be a smaller field with lower paying jobs. But it's not going away in the near (5-10 years) future.

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

#265

Post by raincole »

wizofaus wrote: post #244
TheLoafOfBread wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am actually finding amusing that managers will generate 100k lines project with AI and then will start figuring out that it does not work as they want to. Then they figured out actual developers are needed to fix it, either in a very strict way telling AI what should happen (i.e. higher level programming) or directly fixing code generated by AI.

You're assuming that the AI is even generating anything that will make sense to a human. It seems inevitable we'll reach the point that for SaaS the AI will do everything directly based some internal model it has of what it believes the requirements are (e.g. it will be capable of acting just like a live web server), whereas for desktop and mobile apps, while that paradigm still remains relevant, it will generate the…

> It seems inevitable we'll reach the point that...

It's inevitable that we'll reach AGI. It's inevitable that humans will extinct.

Everything you described is not how today's AI works. It's not even a stretch, it's just pure sci-fi.

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

#266

Post by chii »

drclau wrote: post #185
MarkusWandel wrote: post #67

The computers are coming for jobs ever up the white collar scale. When I started working there were (barely) still secretaries who typed and filed things for their bosses, and quite a few geeks had jobs that involved assembly language programming. AI will take jobs. Super frustratingly, it'll probably make call centers even more useless (has anyone ever gotten anything useful out of one of those ("Hi, I'm ____. Can I…

> AI won't take plumber or electrician jobs away in the foreseeable future. I see this argument way too often. How many electricians and plumbers does the world really need? And if the market becomes over saturated, how much will those jobs pay? How often will you actually have a job to do?

> And if the market becomes over saturated, how much will those jobs pay?

AI makes everything else so cheap, that by just working for a small bit of time, you can afford all the necessities?

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

#267

Post by wruza »

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…

But it is true, just in a different area than predicted. I hear all the time that scientists and analysts, while being non-programmers, do write various queries without asking a programmer to do it… I am a programmer and not even sure how much time it would take to implement their regular joins with windowing, aggregates etc in a record-based file format. Can I even do that?

SQL was a typical failure in this regard. It was seen as a savior but at the same time was designed for at least math-versed people. The prediction was right, its scope was wrong. Since then we failed many times and as I see it, we tend to diverge from this idea more and more. And the reason is there’s no one controlling our stacks vertically, so it takes more jobs than it could to make an app.

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

#268

Post by aflag »

411111111111111 wrote: post #160
gregjor wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My career predates relational/SQL databases so I can confirm what you wrote. When Oracle came out the buzz was that a whole bunch of programmers would go away because managers and executives could write queries in a “natural” English-like language. That never happened. SQL is hard to master, but it’s the easy part of understanding the relational model and any particular schema. Instead Oracle and the other RDBMSs tha…

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…

You're considering that every company that needs SQL today would hire enough developers to essentially write most of it from scratch. While some might, most companies that use SQL would not exist, because the cost of developing their product would be prohibitive.

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

#269

Post by gumballindie »

tester756 wrote: post #116
gumballindie wrote: post #12

Just avoid careers in software development. These are not high paying, if you factor in total time invested and spent working; and you have to waste your life away sitting in an office chasing tickets. Nothing engineery about it. It’s modern day assembly line work.

I do wonder why you're being downvoted I've came to the same conclusion: I'm earning more than my friends, but I've spend years doing it at work, I've been learning it for years at college and I've been doing it for years during my "free" time. The $ per hour spent ratio doesn't seem to be very good. When talking just about $/hour spent ratio then there are jobs which pay well and you can start earning decent faster.…

> I do wonder why you're being downvoted

Because it is indeed a shocking conclusion and hard to swallow. Few folks in software engineering are aware of what’s going on in the world around them. People stuck at their desks chasing tickets easily lose touch with their surroundings.

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

#270

Post by gooroo »

If you become a programmer / sw eng because you love it, i.e., building software or tinkering with teh, you'll be fine. AI will just be another tool. And tour career building won't feel like hard work. You are going to have a blast.

If you do it to have a high paying career, just don't. There are already too many people of that type in the industry. Any colleague who got into it for the money (or 'stable career') is usually much less fun to work with.

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