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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

#511

Post by mecsred »

scaramanga wrote: post #501

"I am concerned that the cotton gin will make slavery obsolete and all my slaves will lose their value" Insert similarly ridiculous and offensive comment about women being replaced by any number of domestic labour-saving devices.

Is this an attempt to conflate... Negative AI speculation with racism and misogyny? Yes this technology could be used to reduce the need for human labor. Technology usually isn't actually used in that way and instead just used to concentrate wealth. That's what's being discussed here.

The issues you are bringing up have much more to do with the discriminatory practice of forcing particular demographics to do the menial labor and what conditions they are made to work in. Also an important discussion, but mostly orthogonal to the topic of AI making software devs more efficient.

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

#512

Post by optoman »

I think that the true nature of what Carmack is alluding to here is that true Value, even in the domain of software engineering, is usually attained by the application of critical thinking. The notion that a person who knows how to form correct syntax is equally as productive as someone who understands the problem a business or user faces and can come up with a working technical solution to that problem does not stand up to scrutiny. Its like saying someone who knows how to wield a pencil is equally as capable as Tolstoy in the discipline of writing. An LLM that can code is the same but the pencil wielder will be exposed as one who adds no value and Tolstoy will become even more powerful.

I predict that the real and more radical problem than some Stack Overflow Copiers losing some marketability is when Product and Management start buying the idea that the technical domain is something that doesn't need to be well understood anymore because we have an LLM that keeps coming up with plausible answers. I work in mortgage technology where there is a great deal of thought and discipline that needs to go into the technical modeling of who gets underwritten for a mortgage. Imaging a mortgage company that built its underwriting rules and models using an LLM with you as the head LLM seance holder. All of the sudden a mass of customers got denied mortgages for some unknown reason and Management comes to you to ask what happened.

Would you know what happened? Could anyone even know what happened?

"Sorry, Customer! We actually don't know anything about what we built or how it works."

LLMs may eventually eliminate the act of typing code but the real question is will they eliminate the need for critical thought.

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

#513

Post by grugagag »

surgical_fire wrote: post #273
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…

The dude you replied to you gave out the sort of bad take I come here for. If anyone thinks genuinely that ChatGPT can meaningfully replace a software developer should be starting a tech business right now. You can replace basically your largest cost (staff wages, especially for expensive pesky software developers) with a $20 account that will work overtime, will never get tired, and whose performance will never fluc…

Im curious why you pick your bounds of 12 and 235?

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

#514

Post by CuriouslyC »

naasking wrote: post #482
josephg wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pr…

And unlike code, if the model fails it'll be more obvious and less costly.

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

#515

Post by kirso »

IMO this is a great take.

There will always going to be a lack of product builders. Not software engineers. But product people who can think of not only "HOW" but also "WHY" and "WHAT".

Sure, the way we work will probably change, but the need for people who are building something useful and consciously finding ways how to deliver value won't cease.

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

#516

Post by grugagag »

bodhi_mind wrote: post #426
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…

I want to agree with this. It makes sense in the current environment. But what about when the ai has more memory and is able to ask the right probing questions to be effective at requirements gathering?

That would make it an even better tool.

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

#517

Post by furyofantares »

noobermin wrote: post #260

It's funny seeing this attitude here from developers types, but when it comes to art or writing or legal work, it's all "disrupt" talk instead. Of course you guys are the ones with the special sauce, something those pesky managers can never grok. Meanwhile continue your work to put them out of a job, the manager definitely won't decide to fire you too as soon as he can justify it to the c suite

Whenever I use midjourney, which is a lot, I think about what I could accomplish if I actually had art skills, to feed to it, and to edit and compose its results, and if all these tools were tightly integrated into existing tools.

It seems similar. New heights are possible for those with skills, and the barriers are lowered for those without training. There will be new demand for both things, competition for quality at the top, and new applications where it wasn't worth it to produce art before at the bottom.

Both art and programming seem hard to predict what value you'll get out of investing in skills now, because there's both barriers being broken down and demand being opened up.

I do think there is a key difference, though, which is software hasn't shown signs that it's getting close to done "eating the world" yet, due to the universal nature of the turing machine. It's nothing to do with programmers being special and everything to do with computers being a single tool that's applicable to everything and has sustained decades of exponential gains in power.

I wouldn't stop someone from investing in art skills if that's their interest, and I wouldn't stop someone from investing in programming skills if that's their interest. But if they were interested in both equally, I would absolutely suggest programming.

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

#519

Post by mybrid »

I think it will be a niche. Frameworks will be updated to AI Frameworks where AI has known patterns to plug and play with.

Given the way capitalism works there will be a market for AI software. However, the cloud server provides have created Frankenstein patchworks of technologies in order to deploy the stuff on the cloud. DevOps will still very much be a thing.

To whit, Wordpress is about to get a whole lot more functional.

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

#520

Post by silvestrov »

mdorazio wrote: post #441
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 think you have two common misconceptions here. 1) Wages have very little to do with value/productivity in a free market. They are almost entirely determined by supply and demand. Value simply places a ceiling on compensation. Thus, if far more people can perform a "programming" job because of GPT-X, unless the demand for those jobs rises significantly the net result will be wage reduction. 2) There's this weird thi…

> competent business analyst

with the danger of invoking the "No True Scotsman" fallacy, I'd say that competent business analyst are even more difficult to get hold of than a competent programmer.

I've had so few managers that were competent at managing people and projects.

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