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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

#381

Post by DanielBMarkham »

As a self-taught polymath, I did a lot of research many years ago on how good teams create good products. I reached some unusual conclusions at the time, but they've stood the test of time.

The main one in regards to John's tweet is this: desired behavior has to "force" out code and architecture. Typically teams and individual developers carry a lot of presumptions and assumptions into their solution space. They probably pick this kind of thing up from reading HN, Twitter, and the like. We all do this.

It's these "things you do but don't really think about" that are so pernicious in technology development. Guess what? Looks like AI is going to master that kind of thing since with each social media post we continue to train it on "How things are usually done"

By taking an extreme "force me to write code" approach, you end up developing a wide range of skills: DevSecOps, analysis, database design, and so on. In fact, you don't really know what you're going to develop when you start working on it.

That's the point. That's the job. Always has been.

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

#384

Post by [deleted] »

habibur wrote: post #367
RivieraKid wrote: post #283

Here's my current thinking on the impact of GPT-4 on the developer job market: - I expect developer productivity to go up 1.5x - 15x over the next several years assuming GTP-4 based tooling is integrated into IDEs. - There will be two opposing forces acting on developer wages. First, developers will be more productive, therefore the price of one hour of work should go up. But - the supply of developer output will inc…

> - I expect developer productivity to go up 1.5x - 15x over the next several years assuming GTP-4 based tooling is integrated into IDEs. Hardly. 10% of the time spent is in writing code and the other 90% goes behind debugging and fixing things. Even if AI shrinks the time spent in that 10% in writing by another 90%, you still have have to take full time for maintaining that code. Changing, debugging, testing, deploy…

[deleted]

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

#385

Post by Ygg2 »

pjmlp wrote: post #73
raincole wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not kindergarten child at congitive level. It's a different kind of cognition than humans, if you can call it "cognition" at all.

Regardless, it is foolish to belive it won't improve.

It's foolish to believe it will improve indefinitely or reach human parity.

Wasn't AI driving just few years away for 5 years?

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

#386

Post by jordanpg »

> Keep your eyes on the delivered value, and don't over focus on the specifics of the tools.

Sure, but the aspects of the job that some people enjoy may be closely linked to the tools. If software development becomes less about coding and more about creating prompts, test suites, or specifications, then some may lose interest in the work.

At least for me, it was never really about delivering value. If I am honest, I was completely indifferent about some of the industries I worked in. It was always just about solving interesting technical problems, learning stuff, keeping my brain active.

It's easy for me to imagine that software development may someday become the province of people who are more like designers.

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

#387

Post by textread »

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…

    Educators, generals, dieticians, 
    psychologists, and parents program. Armies, 
    students, and some societies are programmed.
by Alan J Perlis, the first Turing Award recipient.

Managers, CEOs, Department Heads...are already 'programming'. As the abstraction moves higher up, some people that have excessively narrow expertise will be made redundant.

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

#388

Post by cowl »

anon7725 wrote: post #122
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…

> Since they hire software developers to make the specification more rigid, and the managers don't seem to be getting better at this over time, why would you believe this skill set is going to go away? Are we sure that an AI could not engage in enough back and forth conversation to firm up the spec? You’re kind of assuming that systems will be generated from a one-shot prompt, but it seems more likely that an interac…

Yes but even in that case The role will be of a "AI Prompter", it will not be done by the managers because of the time factor. Even though AI can give you the result much faster, building upon it and testing/verifying, then coming up with the refined prompt is a time consuming thing. Only the Write part of the write/eval loop will be faster but not neccesarily easier.

Especially the "debuging" part will be much harder. Noone can look under the hood to understand what is wrong and all you can do is shoot random prompts in the dark hoping it will create the right result.

It is scary right now how confidently and spectacularly wrong the chatGPT is and it will create disasters.

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

#389

Post by bjornsing »

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…

As an engineering manager I’m usually more concerned with those engineers that tend to spend all their time fiddling with IDEs etc, so that they will some day (that never comes) be soooo productive.

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

#390

Post by jocaal »

chii wrote: post #263
pcthrowaway wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

The programmers back in the day were pretty good, i think a decent programmer from 30 years ago would be better that the average today.
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