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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

#661

Post by marcosdumay »

roundandround wrote: post #546
matwood wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SQL was also meant to give a wider range of people access to data. The “business analyst” comes to mind. And, I think SQL was successful. What it didn’t do was reduce the need for programmers, because the new SQL users always wanted more data to answer more complex questions.

I don't actually agree. SQL did replace the need for programmers, especially for complex questions. We sabotaged its interfaces to existing GUIs for mundane questions and made CRUD a limitless profession. The funny/sad part about computer science is that people don't want to understand the costs of customization and sales/management/marketing forever want it as a differentiator. SQL could have eliminated us from the…

SQL was too much ahead of its time, but we are indeed slowly adopting the "avoid operational specifications, use high-level languages, make your language fit the problem instead of the opposite" philosophy of the 4th generation languages.

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

#662

Post by CamperBob2 »

camgunz wrote: post #456
worthless-trash wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mon…

Some good points but maybe be more careful with your use of verb tense. I was thinking you were either overly-trusting or in possession of an ungodly-exotic prototype phone until you got to the part about the conditioning booth in the classroom. :-P

I'm bullish on recent ML advancements but it will be a long time before I give one my Schwab login.

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

#663

Post by throwaway4aday »

admissionsguy wrote: post #601
ilyt wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ye, often the "creator", the "head" gets credited with everything a whole team come up with. Sure, picking the good and directing it to consistent whole is important but they would be nothing without people that produced that in the first place.

PhD students and postdocs are mostly fungible, though. PIs are not, if only by the virtue of their position in the system. The same reason why menial workers earn so little relative to how hard they work. It would appear that both credit and money flow to those who enable things to happen rather than those who execute.

Interestingly, that's probably another area where a language model could be put into service. Consider, every workman with access to say GPT-6 now has an expert lawyer, MBA, secretary, manager, etc. at his beck and call. What happens when every individual can navigate the system as well as an entire team of professionals? I'm imagining headless corporations where the only humans involved are those engaged in physical interface with the world.

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

#664

Post by AnimalMuppet »

weatherlite wrote: post #621
linsomniac wrote: post #584

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…

How many people doing this job do we need compared to the tens of millions of people building programs by hand we have today?

If we had a specific quantity of software that was needed, that might be a good argument. But to me, it looks like the quantity of software we want is unlimited. (Or at least, the quantity of stuff that we want software to do.) To the degree that GPT enables the same software to be written with fewer programmers, to that degree we'll write more software, not have fewer programmers.

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

#665

Post by marcosdumay »

sarchertech wrote: post #424
eldritch_4ier wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe? A founders job is basically “execute the path to capitalize on the opportunity”. So you have to figure out the opportunity, and execute towards it by whatever means necessary - that’s a lot of jobs and hats. As long as there’s a human required to make a business possible, founders will exist. Get rid of software engineering, marketing, fundraising, identifying the opportunity, sales, customer support, etc then…

> But at that point every other human job is automated too. I’ve heard that exact same argument for software engineers. As an outside observer it sounds like you’ve switched from SE to founder, so you’re failing to apply the same standards because you (consciously or not) want to defend your current position.

> I’ve heard that exact same argument for software engineers.

Do you think it failed to hold?

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

#666

Post by m3kw9 »

Product manager: we need api 23145.1 be able to talk to api 83316..

This is something a product manager would never do, it still require a technical person to translate a business logic accurately for the AI to build.

Look to how 3d animators use GUIs to build, previously they had to use a lot more code, but the expertise needed for a good job are still highly sought after. This is what could happen to software

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

#667

Post by hungryforcodes »

nottorp wrote: post #315
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'd be surprised if the next step is "Hi, I'm an ideas guy, please give me an app that does Uber, for bicycles, but better." On an aside, this is the kind of bussiness idea a chatbot could generate now. But I don't think it could have generated the idea for Uber when Uber* was the first... * if you know the history of ride apps better, replace Uber with whoever was indeed first.

You have literally a prompt right there -- you should try it on ChatGPT.

"Please give me a business model like Uber, for bicycles, but better"

Let us know how it goes :)

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

#668

Post by anon7725 »

rocho wrote: post #415
anon7725 wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Since they hire software developers to make the specification more rigid, and the managers don't seem to be getting better at this over time, why would you believe this skill set is going to go away? Are we sure that an AI could not engage in enough back and forth conversation to firm up the spec? You’re kind of assuming that systems will be generated from a one-shot prompt, but it seems more likely that an interac…

In that case, how is the AI going to keep tens or hundreds of thousand of lines in memory to produce cohesive code that works with the rest of the codebase? It seems prohibitely expensive to build and run transformer models with that much capacity.

GPT 4 already has 32k tokens of context for prompts. Once we’re making arguments about scale only a few orders of magnitude larger than the current state of the art, it seems similar to arguments 10-15 years ago that real-time ray tracing is not feasible.

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

#669

Post by hungryforcodes »

krsna wrote: post #469
jfvinueza wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Truthfully, picking what song goes next feels like a job well suited for an AI, or even just a basic recommendation system based on up and down votes. Of course there's a real time component to DJing as well. Paying attention to the crowd and how they're reacting to your mix. That's the magic that's harder to automate.

I'd like to see it. As someone who's DJ'd a fair amount for large crowds (1000+) my value always seemed to be in choosing tracks that lit up the audience and made the set progress to a satisfying peak.

The technical aspects were always not that important.

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

#670

Post by tmountain »

I spent 5 hours this weekend building an app with Chat GPT, and I am not worried about software jobs “going away”.

The language to get things exactly right has to be incredibly precise, and this won’t change.

Think about how hard it is for an engineer and a product manager to be exactly on the same page. Now do that with a computer…

Point being, engineering skills are still extremely important to validate the work, and they will continue to be (at least for anything business critical).

These are new tools and exciting times to be building things. I have never felt more capable of delivering value extremely quickly. It’s an exhilarating feeling.

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