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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

#591

Post by bee_rider »

TigeriusKirk wrote: post #589
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.

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.

I kinda wonder if it would not be so bad, if a company asked chatGPT “prompt the engineers for status updates occasionally, then take their responses and produce high-level summaries for department heads” or whatever.

On their side, the engineers might even ask it “summarize my tickets and come up with an optimistic, business-friendly high level storyline.”

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

#592

Post by ilaksh »

acatnamedjoe wrote: post #99
MarkusWandel wrote: post #67

The computers are coming for jobs ever up the white collar scale. When I started working there were (barely) still secretaries who typed and filed things for their bosses, and quite a few geeks had jobs that involved assembly language programming. AI will take jobs. Super frustratingly, it'll probably make call centers even more useless (has anyone ever gotten anything useful out of one of those ("Hi, I'm ____. Can I…

I see the plumber/electrician thing a lot. But talking to my friends who do these jobs it always seems like it would be even more vulnerable to AI than programming. Experienced electricians get paid decent wages because they have had lots of training and then have seen loads of different problems. So they intuitively know things like 'This is a 1960s house so if there's a problem with the lighting the first thing I s…

There is no reason to expect robotic technology to halt. Look at what things like Tesla or Boston Dynamics robots can do. Eventually we will see very well articulated and high strength to weight ratio robots integrated with advanced AI systems. It is definitely not going to take 25 years.

If you look at what's happening today, in 25 years it seems plausible that fully autonomous superintelligent androids with much more dexterity than humans will be fully in control of the planet.

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

#593

Post by mr_tristan »

I'm more concerned AI will spew garbage we end up getting stuck spending time cleaning then actually replace me.

The software developer trades in abstractions, fundamentally, and not code. So if I could get an AI that actually helped me build and evaluate those abstractions, that would be fantastic. I don't think our current AI approaches are anywhere close yet, because it's all just fancy code generation, which isn't that useful, once you're in an ecosystem with good abstractions.

But, the world I fear might happen are pseudo-technical managers using AI generators to spit out "something cool" that has very poor definition, breaks all the time, and then just wants people to "make it robust". And then any change you recommend has to have some kind of business justification. This is the AI hellscape I fear.

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

#594

Post by theptip »

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 think your general point to look at who is doing the work now is good.

However, as Carmack says, many developers lack product skills, it’s not just the managerial class that lacks them.

So I think the correct advice is not “engineers don’t need to worry at all”, it’s “make sure you are learning how to build a product not just write code”. For many that’s trivial advice, but not for all.

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

#595

Post by Bonesdog »

I personally Hope and Enjoy machines taking over jobs. I am forever thankful the day shall pass that us humans can live out our creative freedoms rather than concern our daily life with tender.

Money is evil. Praise the lord as we are delivered from the evils of this land.

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

#596

Post by moffkalast »

choppsv1 wrote: post #33

I love to code, as much as I loved math in college, but coding paid better and I'm pretty good at it. Those were my choices though b/c I want to do something I love. Sure, I keep my eye on the "Delivered Value" by making sure I engineer solutions to real problems, but I've never wanted to move out of coding and into managing engineers to build stuff. I want to code. It seems to me that the advice given here would be…

What bugs me about it personally is that he reduces the entire CS field to something that's there for building "products". Why the fuck does it have to all be inherently capitalistic?

But if you know who he is and what he does these days, it makes sense I suppose. Can't be in that business environment day after day without going slightly nuts eventually.

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

#597

Post by donkers »

DanHulton wrote: post #580
ryandrake wrote: post #570

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MBAs are HN’s favorite punching bags. They are the only stereotype that it’s still ok to blanket-generalize about and dunk on here. Some MBAs are dumbasses. Some are brilliant business people. Some of them actually have tech skills and have been writing software longer than you’ve been alive. This is true for many degrees. I don’t know how some of the anti-MBA commenters think it works: A smart software engineer goes…

Because the promise of the MBA program was that you could be air-dropped into an industry that you had zero experience in, and your MBA education would automatically make you the smartest in the room. You (supposedly) didn't need that industry experience, applying MBA principles would be enough. And it destroyed enough companies that they developed a not-undeserved reputation. Now, if you already had relevant experie…

Having been a software engineer and gone on to do a MBA, none of what was taught for the degree reflected the attitude that you're describing. At no time did anyone tell us to ignore our prior experience - rather we were told that that our prior experience plus a business education would be valuable to future employers (which it is).

There was no expectation of being "air dropped" into an industry, and in fact, industry recruiters looked for candidates who already had prior experience when picking students for interviews and hiring. The students who had no relevant experience for the industry they were recruiting for (e.g. ex-Peace Corps or mgmt consultant looking to transition to tech or industry in general) were the ones who struggled to find roles. Your assumptions about what an MBA education entails are incredibly far off the mark.

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

#598

Post by mclightning »

noodles_nomore wrote: post #54

An average programmer's main job is to track down and fix bugs that shouldn't exist inside software that shouldn't exist build on frameworks that shouldn't exist for companies that shouldn't exist solving problems that shouldn't exist in industry niches that shouldn't exist. I'm 100% convinced that, if someone comes along and creates something that actually obsoletes 95% of programming jobs, everyone would very quick…

Existential crisis averted by another existential crisis... :D

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

#599

Post by ilaksh »

pbalau wrote: post #183
acatnamedjoe wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see the plumber/electrician thing a lot. But talking to my friends who do these jobs it always seems like it would be even more vulnerable to AI than programming. Experienced electricians get paid decent wages because they have had lots of training and then have seen loads of different problems. So they intuitively know things like 'This is a 1960s house so if there's a problem with the lighting the first thing I s…

You know what a tradesman does today and an AI cannot? Get under the sink, undo that rusted bolt, route that cable in that awkward position and so on.

Advanced robots will be able to do that in less than five years. Inexpensive ones in less than 20 years.

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

#600

Post by osigurdson »

I’m personally experiencing a bit of a honeymoon-over moment with ChatGPT (even 4). It seems to be better in the exploratory phase of a project - show me something about x or y. However, I thought / hoped it would be better at doing things that I know how to do but don’t feel like writing them or using a library (which then becomes a curation problem) since they should be I really struggled with it for example to write a base62 serializer (C#). It either came up with an O(N^2) solution, performed far too many allocations, missed edge cases and simply wrote incorrect code.

This is just one example of ~50 lines of code that you would just like to work.

In any case, I have felt in the past that LLMs could make me 10x more productive but today it feels more like 1.1x. I’m hopeful my disillusionment is temporary.

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