Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine • Hacker News Board

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

#481

Post by mrits » Sun, Mar 19, 2023, 2:24 PM UTC

krab wrote: post #473

mrits wrote: post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is a modern IDE? It seems like the more recent trend has moved away from bloated IDEs and more to a bring your editor and own plugins environment. From my perspective IDEs lost and things are now closer to how Vim users have been coding for decades.

It doesn't seem so to me. With LSP, those editors, including Vim, can be very large and featureful. A modern (or any) IDE, in my opinion, can debug your code, push parts of the editor into REPL (with debugging), understand code for things like autocomplete, linting, quick navigation and usage search. And yes, Vim can serve as a modern IDE if you spend enough time with it.

It seems like you start out by disagreeing and then just give a summary of why you don't need an IDE.

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

#482

Post by naasking » Sun, Mar 19, 2023, 2:24 PM UTC

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?

Tell ChatGPT it's a product manager overseeing engineers and providing executive summaries. Create a system that feeds executive emails inquiring about project statuses into ChatGPT and emails the developers asking for updates. Developers reply with jargon-heavy details about tickets for next milestone, ChatGPT writes an executive summary that eliminates jargon and sends to executives.

Not the full job, but it can probably be built right now.

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

#483

Post by raincole » Sun, Mar 19, 2023, 2:24 PM UTC

camdenreslink wrote: post #412

raincole wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I don’t think it is inevitable we’ll reach AGI. I think that question is very much up in the air at the moment.

My point is "It's inevitable that {scifi_scenario}" always sounds kinda plausible but doesnt necessarily means anything.

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

#484

Post by throwbadubadu » Sun, Mar 19, 2023, 2:24 PM UTC

Simran-B wrote: post #396

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So exact in fact that they will need to specify a program in a click and drag interface, or in human language. This. I started programming in Machine Code, where the "editor" was a pad of graph paper. I've watched management- and business-focused people sneer at us geeks for my entire career, and watched them drool over the thought of finally getting rid of us. Hasn't happened yet. > I'd be surprised if the next st…

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

This! And tbh, compared with the "bad manager type" (Dilbert type) that won't feel worse :D

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

#485

Post by coffeebeqn » Sun, Mar 19, 2023, 2:25 PM UTC

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…

> up 1.5x - 15x over

I wish! I still often find out my team members don’t know basic text/Unix tools. Heck one guy took our list of enums in a JSON file and wrote on his keyboard by hand each of them into a class. It took me maybe a minute in Sublime Text when he wasted at least a day

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

#486

Post by dtagames » Sun, Mar 19, 2023, 2:26 PM UTC

sarchertech wrote: post #437

DandyDev wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is so true! I see people in this thread talking about the contempt that "idea people" have for programmers/software engineers, but at the same time I have experienced Product Managers (the quintessential idea people?) who were really good at turning their ideas into super detailed specs. As an aside, I'm getting a bit tired from the "programmers vs product/business people" trope. The average software engineer wo…

Many of us were working before product managers became a thing. When I went to school engineers were trained to work directly with customers and subject matter experts to gather and develop requirements. And that’s what we did when we started working. I think dividing work into programmer/UX/product manager is an actually huge regression.

This is so true. We waste so much time now because of the separation of these roles which must inevitably come together in the real codebase where the rubber meets the road.

Software is of lower quality today and requires far more do-overs than it used to. As someone who liked working closely with customers and making decisions in all these areas (for their benefit), it has made the entire career far more of a slog than it used to be.

Also, I find these endless internal cyclical conversations to be much more draining than actually writing code. Looping over and over with planners and ideas folks isn't energizing like actually writing the product is.

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

#487

Post by krab » Sun, Mar 19, 2023, 2:27 PM UTC

mrits wrote: post #481

krab wrote: post #473

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't seem so to me. With LSP, those editors, including Vim, can be very large and featureful. A modern (or any) IDE, in my opinion, can debug your code, push parts of the editor into REPL (with debugging), understand code for things like autocomplete, linting, quick navigation and usage search. And yes, Vim can serve as a modern IDE if you spend enough time with it.

It seems like you start out by disagreeing and then just give a summary of why you don't need an IDE.

I'm saying the trend (IMHO) is not away from a full blown IDE and that smaller editors with plugins and LSP can fill the the role as well, including the resource consumption.

Vim can be very slow with a ton of plugins.

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

#488

Post by seydor » Sun, Mar 19, 2023, 2:27 PM UTC

I can definitely see writing games with natural language in the near future. Not everyone can do that of course, but they don't need to be programmers either, just people who are into the thing.

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

#489

Post by anthomtb » Sun, Mar 19, 2023, 2:28 PM UTC

brtkdotse wrote: post #100

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.

Sure, but in the time of DJs and hell, Spotify, you probably can’t expect to make a decent living as a live musician.

You couldn't make a decent living as a live musician well before Spotify came into existence.

Source: raised and largely surrounded by musicians who either complained to high heaven about the pay or did something else to supplement their income. Engineers were a particular target of vitriol which led to me becoming one.

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

#490

Post by TheCoelacanth » Sun, Mar 19, 2023, 2:28 PM UTC

BulgarianIdiot wrote: post #454

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 exa…

They're working on the 200 programs that suddenly became economically viable to create because of the vastly decreased cost of making programs.

It takes drastically less programming effort to create programs than it did 50 years ago. Did that decrease demand for programmers? No, it drastically increased it.