Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

371–380 of 829 posts

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

#371

Post by ivxvm »

xupybd wrote: post #23
ivxvm wrote: post #18

I wouldn't be surprised if John Carmack combines activities of product owner, game designer, and programmer. In most industry cases, programming jobs are not like this. There are dedicated positions for people who focus on delivered value and it's not programmers. So in scrum terms, he might actually be saying that programmers will be indeed obsolete, but product owners, game designers and other kinds of business ana…

Nope, the programmers simply are the suppliers of the product owner. Everything John said still holds true of their position.

Product owner is the one who analyses requirements, decides what should be implemented, and creates user stories for programmers. Currently programmers can use AI to help implement user stories but in future probably AI will be good enough take and implement user stories on its own. In more distant future it could replace product owner too. So that CEO can just talk AI directly into making a great product without much details, but at that point businesses like this will be less valuable because many can do that and there's no need for devteam and less need for investments.

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

#372

Post by ilyt »

jeffreygoesto wrote: post #346
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…

My theory is that _every_ exponential curve is just the start of an S-curve, we just don't know it's scale yet.

Investors in shambles, what do you mean by "it can't grow indefinitely?"

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

#373

Post by worthless-trash »

ilyt wrote: post #369
eldritch_4ier wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All points the horses made before cars all but replaced them. “The humans need to get from A to B and it’s not like they’ve gotten any faster with their own 2 legs”. How does this manager-engineer look like now? Managers specify what they need in plain language, and both parties go back and forth with increasing complexity to create based on the shared vision. Managers can already pull off a similar dance with ChatGP…

Manager would be easier to replace with ChatGPT than a software developer

And a founder likely easier again ;)

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

#374

Post by stavros »

eldritch_4ier wrote: post #350
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…

All points the horses made before cars all but replaced them. “The humans need to get from A to B and it’s not like they’ve gotten any faster with their own 2 legs”. How does this manager-engineer look like now? Managers specify what they need in plain language, and both parties go back and forth with increasing complexity to create based on the shared vision. Managers can already pull off a similar dance with ChatGP…

A software engineer's job isn't to write code, it's to make decisions. Going from "give me Uber for bicycles" to a working app that runs on a device takes a million decisions, which a bunch of people (designers, copywriters, engineers, etc) make.

Yes, the AI is good at taking low-level requests and turning them into reasonable code, and then refining them, but unless the CEO is going to sit down and spend days telling the AI "OK now make this button disabled when it's clicked until the table loads", you need someone to be doing that.

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

#375

Post by debesyla »

CSMastermind wrote: post #47

There's a weird phenomenon I've seen in a few domains of prideful ignorance. Backend engineers who proudly don't know how to write frontend code and vice versa. Professional engineers who refuse to learn how to use modern IDEs and monitoring platforms. People who don't know how to quickly prototype software as if building something without complete rigor is beneath them. People who refuse to learn or work in certain…

> Professional engineers who refuse to learn how to use modern IDEs

In my experience - I ignore the modern IDEs and systems purely because I don't have time to learn every new tool... :-D

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

#376

Post by ilyt »

klabb3 wrote: post #225
bcherny wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Mana…

> 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 dunno, I got what he meant from the start, and the same advice was given by many people in many forms, usually in variant of "well, the business doesn't give a shit about details but the end product".

> 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.

I joked some managers could be replaced by forward rule in mailing system, ChatGPT is an upgrade on that.

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

#377

Post by awesomeMilou »

Radim wrote: post #216

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…

> It's the broader sense of unease that humanity's gradient-razing days, [...], may soon be over.

No, the sense of unease comes from people fearing for their livelihood, given that it looks like that their raison d'être is about to be revoked by some AI automating their career away.

A point you so aptly summarized with: > Vast swathes of the human economy are just scaffolding to support the rest: humans reproducing to keep the optimization machine going.

The unease is, imo, only so palpable however, because every stakeholder that stands from profiting from such a development - i.e. capital owners - refuse to describe it as what the development really is.

Publicly advertising AI as "we're basicially moonshotting the largest job automation operation ever attempted, so 20-30% of you will be out of a job in the next 15 years" would probably cause unrest - and rightly so!

> What else can you do anyway?

Communism - and ya hate to see it (as an american)!

The means of production becoming dead-simple to use, that's a prelude for the proletariat being able to seize them.

On a more serious note, you can always protest, and escalate, which I'm hoping will happen.

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

#378

Post by gregjor »

aflag wrote: post #356
gregjor wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe. Before Oracle (mid-80s) every company did write their own database code. I think a lot of smaller companies would struggle if that was still a requirement, but if relational/SQL had not come along we’d have something else like it.

That's exactly my point, though. In the mid 80s there were a lot fewer companies producing software. Nowadays we have many more. Indeed SQL was not the only local maxima we could have gone for, but the point is that having an easy to use database with a powerful query language did not reduce the number of jobs, but instead increased it. Instead of a few companies hiring a lot of developers, we have a lot of companies…

I think plummeting prices for hardware since the 1980s drove that, not relational databases.

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

#379

Post by bjornsing »

noodles_nomore wrote: post #54

An average programmer's main job is to track down and fix bugs that shouldn't exist inside software that shouldn't exist build on frameworks that shouldn't exist for companies that shouldn't exist solving problems that shouldn't exist in industry niches that shouldn't exist. I'm 100% convinced that, if someone comes along and creates something that actually obsoletes 95% of programming jobs, everyone would very quick…

I’m leaning in this direction too. I saw someone on Twitter phrase it quite well: “You can believe that most jobs are bullshit [jobs]. And you can believe that GPT-4 will completely disrupt the job market. But you can’t believe both.”

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

#380

Post by j7ake »

ilyt wrote: post #368
j7ake wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This hits deep and resonates beyond tech. This “ideas” versus “make things happen” divide is also prevalent in science and art.

Ye, often the "creator", the "head" gets credited with everything a whole team come up with. Sure, picking the good and directing it to consistent whole is important but they would be nothing without people that produced that in the first place.

Yeah it seems natural to divide the credit evenly, just as midfielders and strikers and coaches get equal credit for winning a game.
Post reply on HN