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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

#451

Post by sibit »

nvarsj wrote: post #311

What he says here is so true, and something I see many engineers get wrong. Don't glorify and build your career around a single language or methodology. I believe an engineer should learn to build things in the most pragmatic way possible using the best tool for the job. This requires breadth of experience across many areas, and a focus on delivery. The idea of "Java engineer", "Scala engineer", "Golang engineer", et…

> The idea of "Java engineer", "Scala engineer", "Golang engineer", etc. is so absurd to me.

I find the idea of being an expert in a language acceptable if it's been used for long enough. Almost all of my coworkers only know .NET and there are enough jobs needing people for new projects and legacy projects that they most likely won't have to learn anything else.

> or tool y

This is where the absurdity begins for me. I have a coworker who is 5 years into his career with the title of "senior react engineer". He started as a "junior react engineer" and at this point only knows how to solve problems with React. He has limited knowledge of the underlying language or general CS concepts. Every problem he encounters can and will be solved by installing NPM packages.

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

#452

Post by Frost1x »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #317
chiefalchemist wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

re: idea people True. And once their product hits the market, if it ever gets there, they don't thrive. Prior to launch they are sooooo in love with their idea that they are meticulous about features all the while thinking they're smarter than the market. They don't understand and appreciate the value of execution. Ideas are easy. Execution - because it involves people as well as adapting to change - is 10x harder. Y…

One of the things that I'm fairly good at, is walking people from "Crazy Idea That Will Never Work," through to "Finished Product That People Want." It tends to be a very long process, and often involves a lot of "trial balloons." I just went through that, in the last couple of years. The project we're realizing, looks absolutely nothing at all like what the CEO originally dreamed up, but everyone that has seen it, l…

Most all problems I see are just resource limited in some respect (occasionally its something humanity just doesn't know how to do yet, that's where the edges of science are). It's not something brand new that's never been done or explored, some prior work typically exists.

When someone says "can we..." or spills their idea they've often identified a real need but they often don't seem to do any sort of analysis further than identifying a demand signal. Chances are, you're not the first person to observe the problem and an opportunity to capitalize on it and there may be good reason no one has yet (its economically infeasible given current understanding, resources, and value people see in it).

The trick is to hold their hand and walk them through a feasibility analysis. Given infinite time and money, I'm confident I can arrive at pretty much any solution or at least a useful approximation that's an improvement on where we currently stand, so we start there and walk backwards. How much time do we really have, how much money do we really have. What's your appetite for risk within those bounds. Let's start talking about some tradeoffs of what you want to see and what I think we might be able to actually achieve.

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

#453

Post by mnsc »

jfvinueza wrote: post #394
joenot443 wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a pretty funny example because if you follow the DJ scene much, you know the barrier for entry is literally on the floor now. A 10 year old with an iPad app can beat-match and “DJ” a 2h mix together in a way that 20 years ago required thousands of dollars of gear. The tragic part is that unless someone’s got some familiarity with what “good” mixing sounds like, they wouldn’t be able to tell they’re listening…

The "technical" aspect of djing will never be as important as the sense of what song should go next, and there's no shortcut for that.

To me, this is what Carmack is talking about.

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

#454

Post by BulgarianIdiot »

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…

There exist many no-code tools that do exactly what you say is impossible.

Do I program when I retouch photos in Photoshop? It's a no-code environment that an artist can easily learn and use with no programmers needed.

What's new here is that you DO NOT NEED TO BE EXACT with AI. AI knows human nature and human speech and it can infer what you say and what you need, if you're approximately close, and then make the exact code to do what you need.

Even if you need programmers, you now need 1/100 of the programmers you needed before. What happens to the other 99?

Does it matter whether programmers are 99% unemployed or 100%? Same deal.

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

#455

Post by thuuuomas »

josephg wrote: post #419
Simran-B wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait until managers realize that their jobs are a lot easier to automate away with AI than the jobs of software developers.

What makes you think that’s true?

Human managers (who are good at their jobs) bring a little Bedside Manner, a modicum of compassion to Human Resource Allocation that will soon be seen as a luxury compared to low-cost, fully-automated Human Resource Monitoring & Reinforcement Systems

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

#456

Post by camgunz »

worthless-trash wrote: post #373
ilyt wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

And a founder likely easier again ;)

Probably the whole company.

Uber was founded in 2009. Before that you could maybe hail a cab if you were in NYC, otherwise you had to call ahead. Someone would drive the cab to you, you'd get in it, and they'd drive you to where you wanted to go.

Now we have AI. Now instead of driving to a financial advisor's office or a bank loan officer's desk or my kid's school:

- I have an AI app that automatically invests my money and runs on my phone's neural processor

- I have an AI app that automatically tells me if I qualify for a mortgage based on a truckload data about me and runs on my phone's neural processor

- There's a booth in my kid's classroom that her teacher puts her into; he says, "hey Siri, teach this kid to stop throwing carrots", the AI teaches my kid in a kind, convincing way that carrots are food, not sports. This runs on the iPad inside the booth that is also the screen

- I have an AI app that tracks how long I'll live, and it ticks down 1.38 minutes whenever I set foot in an automobile, so I try and avoid it now. I can't believe people were ever so reckless.

The race now is who controls this. Probably what will happen is governments will deem it dangerous (disinformation, national security, export controls), and allow only megacorps like Google/Facebook/Microsoft to run them under strict regulations. As a result, these models won't run on our phones but on server farms, and we'll become (even more) dependent on these corporations. This will feel good to the US because it shores up our tech sector--a big economic advantage compared to every other country--while also looking sensible.

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

#457

Post by sarchertech »

ricksunny wrote: post #294
sidlls wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wit…

"One of the biggest differences that we saw from GPT-3.5 to GPT-4 was this emergent ability to reason better," Mira Murati, OpenAI's Chief Technology Officer, told ABC News." https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/openai-ceo-sam-altman-ai-r... I neither know how LLMs work nor how our brains work. And I don't know what could be parallel between these two. For my very very limited knowledge of how properties can emerge from…

I have no idea whether this is correct, but a quote from the CTO is essentially meaningless.

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

#458

Post by mnsc »

cableshaft wrote: post #338
zirgs wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Back in the 80-90s you could earn money by making games for the NES. You can still do it - lots of documentation, emulators and other tools are available. But nobody is going to pay for it now.

You can still get paid for making NES games today. You just have to crowdfund it. This one raised over $180,000 just four years ago, for example: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/morphcat-games/micro-ma... This one raised $32k just this past December: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1222722105/full-quiet-a... Another that raised $49k: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/megacatstudios/ronius-t... $55k: http…

I don't think the person in the dm would have liked this answer.

"if you build a career in developing plumbing and glue code, in the future you could have a successful Kickstarter where nostalgic developers buy your curiosities"

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

#459

Post by gregjor »

AdrianB1 wrote: post #334
gregjor wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A few things happened. Relational databases enabled more new development, larger databases, interoperability, all of which needed programmers. With more flexibility in the database companies could collect, store, and use more data. And that data had to get into the DBMS somehow: more code. Setting up and managing databases required DBAs, a role often filled by programmers in smaller companies, and still filled by pro…

In my department I recruited DBAs as recent as last month and this is a permanent position filled by a team of several people that do just DBA work. I saw developers ("programmers") try to do this work in some small companies or in areas where the databases were small (hundreds of MB, a few GB), but I did not see that when the databases exceed 100 GB or when there are dozens of production SQL servers that need to run…

Big companies have DBAs. Small companies don’t, the programmers do it or they outsource to someone like me.

Maybe ChatGPT will get good at designing relational database schemas, who knows?

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

#460

Post by sebzim4500 »

execveat wrote: post #232
kybernetikos wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, but now ask it to write a program that uses this API and then let it debug problems which arise from the swagger spec (or the backend) having bugs. I don't think LLMs have any way of recognizing and dealing with bad input data. That is I don't think they can recognize when something that is supposed to work in a particular way doesn't and fixing it is completely out of your reach, but you still need to get thin…

Have you tried it? If you copy the errors back into the chat I could imagine it working quite well. Certainly you can give it contradictory instructions and it makes a decent effort at following them.
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