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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

#581

Post by 6510 »

ghaff wrote: post #550
thuuuomas wrote: post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Good managers shield their reports from a lot of the crap that is inevitable at scale in a large organization. A large company can't just have individuals and small self-managed teams go off and do whatever they feel like. And, yes, if you just cut out all the intermediate layers, the VP with 150 direct reports will simply have to resort to automation based on simplistic metrics. "You didn't produce enough lines of c…

> A large company can't just have individuals and small self-managed teams go off and do whatever they feel like.

Right but how much of that is because humans don't scale? With the AI, if it can do a thing well enough it can do it 100 000 times per day.

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

#583

Post by samtho »

ghaff wrote: post #535
Keegs wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s a role called sales engineer that typically exists in the sales organization but requires a technical background. From the engineering org’s perspective, your SEs are there to make sure sales doesn’t oversell or undersell. At my company your pay is commission-based but with a higher base than sales proper.

Solution Architect is another common title. As someone else mentioned, Developer Relations is at least adjacent though that tends to be less salesy and, depending on the role/company, may be more focused on community aspects than building demos and the like. In any case, at software companies, there are definitely customer-facing roles that are more technical though they may not involve a lot of direct coding. For no…

I would say an SA (Solution Architect) is very different from an SE (Sales Engineer) in one fundamental way: the SA is focused on delivering value post-contract and the SE is focused on making sure the org is able deliver the value promised by working with sales in the pre-contract phase. In some smaller companies or organization within a company, I can see these roles being performed by the same person but in general that distinction between pre and post sales has been my lived experience.

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

#584

Post by linsomniac »

30 years ago I got tired of writing the same code over and over, so I went looking for something to cut out the repetition. Around a decade later I got tired of rewriting libraries or programs to make them exactly fit my needs. I used to really enjoy just coding for the sake of coding. But I started to value my time much more. I called this phase "losing my immortality".

Any code that ChatGPT can write, I don't want to write. I'm ok with it taking my job. If I can work in higher level constructs and get more done, I'm all over that.

Last week a coworker need some Python code to figure out how far through a day it currently is. I started thinking of the different ways to approach it (strftime, maybe time_t modulo 86400, twiddling datetime objects). Before I got very far I decided to ask chatGPT to write it, eyeballed the response (twiddling datetime objects), ran it and verified the response, and called it good. I should have asked it to write some tests for that code while I was at it.

I'm now trying to teach my son, an avid programmer, how to work with chatGPT. He's 13, so he's got a lot of opportunity to really integrate it into his career, but he also has a lot of blind spots where chatGPT can really lead him down some blind alleys and knife him.

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

#585

Post by visarga »

coffeebeqn wrote: post #491
kabes wrote: post #110

I'm not at all concerned with AI. On the short to mid term it's making my life easier by relieving me of the boring parts of my job. It's pretty good at writing unit tests for example. But I don't see the current generation of AI making complete software architectures. However, even when it does get there or in the long term a new generation comes along that can do it, then I'm still not concerned. I have enough soft…

If programmers are truly displaced then we’ll have something like a StartupGPT where anyone can create a software business in days. Heck I’ll be a owner instead of a worker

You will prompt a whole GPT company into existence, staffed with various bots each with its own role and personality profile. The bots could collaborate through regular tools like Slack or MS Office, and be like a remote company. They could do Zoom calls and use Github, interface with humans (customers, partners).

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

#586

Post by jasondigitized »

textread wrote: post #387
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.

Lawyers are basically programmers of the law when it comes down to it. The law is nothing more than a set of rules and instructions.

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

#587

Post by ilaksh »

mkl95 wrote: post #552

AI will make some CS jobs obsolete, but it will do so at a very slow pace. The main reason being that companies suck at structuring information in a way AI could parse it. Whenever I work on some feature I have to dig into some chaotic Notion page and a bunch of unlinked tickets written in broken English. There's no way an AI could do my job because it requires a deep understanding of the human psyche, i.e. figuring…

GPT-4 can understand screenshots, broken English, and the human psyche. If you want it to move around and have a verbal conversation attach it to a robot and text/speech. For example Eleven Labs sounds like a real person.

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

#588

Post by jasondigitized »

asah wrote: post #465

First off, there's a lot of people shooting off their mouths - ignore anyone who hasn't used ChatGPT extensively: it takes some training to learn to use it. Several senior developer friends have been using ChatGPT quite a bit and it seems to work well in lots of places: - isolated algorithms and fiddly bits - it writes complex SQL statements in seconds, for example. LLMs should makes quick work of fussy config files.…

If ChatGPT / GPT-4 or future versions can write unit / functional / integration tests, that's an absolute productivity game changer.

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

#589

Post by TigeriusKirk »

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.

I've been thinking that AI managers is the real killer app for AI. There are challenges, but none seem insurmountable even with the present base tech.

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

#590

Post by bee_rider »

doubled112 wrote: post #551
brookst wrote: post #523

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tell me more about this cheese straightener… that sounds amazing. Where do I prepay?

I wonder what straightening it provides. Like when the brick of cheese comes out of the freezer with an obvious bend? Or like when I don’t make a nice square cut and my sandwich is cheesier in some spots than others?

When you grate the cheese, it often curls a bit. My patent-application-indefinitely-pending cheese straightener uncurls it.
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