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

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

#681

Post by krsna » Sun, Mar 19, 2023, 6:11 PM UTC

coffeebeqn wrote: post #494

krsna wrote: post #476

The discussion here has me wondering whether code produced by an advanced AI would need to use the same coding patterns / abstractions that we've come up with over the past several decades. If a human won't be maintaining the code and a v2 could literally be rewritten from scratch, would we end up with giant balls of spaghetti code that only the AI could truly understand? At some point will we treat this code like a…

We already don’t understand the AIs inner workings exactly. If those algorithms keep getting optimized then maybe we’ll just have black boxes of “neurons” that somehow does the thing. Machine code could be just used to run the GPU instance

Totally. I find the videos of people asking ChatGPT to make them "a web app that does X"—which causes it to print out gobs of JS, HTML and CSS—to be hilariously human-focused. In a machine-focused world, wouldn't it just spit out an optimized binary executable, containing the web server too if necessary? Why would it need to separate the concerns at all?

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

#682

Post by latency-guy2 » Sun, Mar 19, 2023, 6:14 PM UTC

lucidlive wrote: post #442

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #381

As a self-taught polymath, I did a lot of research many years ago on how good teams create good products. I reached some unusual conclusions at the time, but they've stood the test of time. The main one in regards to John's tweet is this: desired behavior has to "force" out code and architecture. Typically teams and individual developers carry a lot of presumptions and assumptions into their solution space. They prob…

Calling yourself a polymath is akin to calling your self a genius.

There's nothing wrong with being confident with your skills. Humbleness is only seen as a virtue because people have an ego and don't like to be reminded that they are unskilled.

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

#683

Post by wizzzzzy » Sun, Mar 19, 2023, 6:14 PM UTC

tmountain wrote: post #670

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, a…

I've found that at some point, the most efficient way to express what you want is to write the code yourself. Anything where you can express what you want fairly easily seems to be where it excels.

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

#684

Post by danaris » Sun, Mar 19, 2023, 6:14 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…

> assuming GTP-4 based tooling is integrated into IDEs.

And how, exactly, is this going to work?

Is every IDE going to pay some license fee to OpenAI? Will that be up to the companies or—even worse—individuals who use the IDEs?

What happens when OpenAI decides that GPT-4 is passé and it's time to move on to something else? Will the existing IDEs that are designed to interact with GPT-4 stop working?

Will GPT-5 or whatever provide the same kinds of assistance, or will there be regressions? Will they require a completely different license for it?

See, these are some of the important questions that come with assuming that a fairly new for-profit company will act as the backbone for your marvelous programming renaissance—particularly when the service in question is one that takes quite a lot of resources to continue to operate.

Personally, I would be interested in some kind of LLM-assisted IDE, but no way in hell am I going to make any significant portion of my job dependent on an organization that decided, as soon as it was clear there was real interest in what they were doing, that they'd just toss the "Open" part of their name and principles out the window and just go for closed-source proprietary product and maximum hype for more profit.

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

#685

Post by kaashif » Sun, Mar 19, 2023, 6:17 PM UTC

antupis wrote: post #553

josephg wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes you think that’s true?

if GPT or copilot make developer 5-50x more productive then you need just 2 good programmers instead of team of 10-100 person, so out of window goes all formalized agile processes, safes etc so you don't need anymore those managers who are doing communicating, process planning and other big business stuff. Of course this will also affect for developers but I bet less because there is huge need for software developers…

If C makes developers 5-50x more effective compared to writing assembly, then you just need two devs instead of a team of 10-100.

Obviously that didn't happen. And people actually made predictions like that once upon a time.

As software becomes cheaper, and the production of software can be done with fewer people, demand has always increased and I don't see any reason that's going to stop.

Reminds me of this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox but the situation with software is a bit different.

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

#686

Post by Buttons840 » Sun, Mar 19, 2023, 6:26 PM UTC

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…

> If your managers could specify what they need in a manner that no-code tools, or now AI, can generate the code they want, they will have to be extremely exact in their language. So exact in fact that they will need to specify a program in a click and drag interface, or in human language.

One day a corporate genie appeared to a middle manager and granted him one wish. The manager wished that their business logic could be edited by a graphical tool and that programmers were no longer needed. "Granted", poof!

The next day the manager came to work, all the programmers were gone, fired by upper management. The manager sat down and opened the new graphical tool that had magically appeared on his computer. The interface was beautiful, except for what appeared to be a hairball drawn in the middle of the screen. The manager asked his manager about the hairball, "oh, that's our business logic, you have to zoom in to see the individual rules". The manager zoomed in and surveyed 180,000 business rules, intertwined in a complete graph.

"How am I suppose to work with this?" the manager asked his manager. "You just click and move them around, it's easy", replied the upper manager. "Also, I've been meaning to ask, when do you think those new business rules we talked about last week will be implemented? We need them by Friday."

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

#687

Post by tmountain » Sun, Mar 19, 2023, 6:34 PM UTC

wizzzzzy wrote: post #683

tmountain wrote: post #670

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, a…

I've found that at some point, the most efficient way to express what you want is to write the code yourself. Anything where you can express what you want fairly easily seems to be where it excels.

I did something similar. I had it generate “primitives” and I used those as starting points for more complex “composed” modules.

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

#688

Post by Yoric » Sun, Mar 19, 2023, 6:36 PM UTC

sokoloff wrote: post #354

Yoric wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know a few people who are a bit younger (maybe 55?) and who, after a career in high impact jobs, found themselves without any possible position. I know that they're not nearly ready to retire. I don't know about how much savings they have. In these cases, that's entirely independent from AI, but I suspect that AI will only make it harder. And yes, it feels to me like society is failing for many people who are appro…

What is the driver underlying “no possible position”? Are they no longer capable/qualified to do anything that’s still done in the economy? Or are they just unwilling to take a rank-and-file position?

Let's try and come up with a few examples. I know two people who are former C-rank executives, both of them with strong ethical backbones. They have both led very high-profile projects (most people on HN know some of these projects). At this stage of their career, you could even say that ethics are not just part of their beliefs but also their personal brand.

They have both been on the market for a few years by now.

1. Nobody will hire them as rank-and-file. It just doesn't make sense.

2. At least one of them has received offers to be the ethical maskerade for a company that actually violently goes against their ethics. They said "no".

Last time I heard from them, they were both retraining in very different domains... with limited career success.

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

#689

Post by soraki_soladead » Sun, Mar 19, 2023, 6:39 PM UTC

thomastjeffery wrote: post #652

Real Artificial Intelligence? Yeah, that would definitely factor out a lot of the wasted work we call "engineering". Language Learning Models like GPT? Not even close. We should absolutely stop calling those "AI". They are not intelligent. They model intelligent behavior: human writing. We should probably even stop calling them "Language Learning". They don't know or care what language is: they learn whatever pattern…

> They are not intelligent.

Citation needed. Numerous actual citations have demonstrated hallmarks of intelligence for years. Tool use. Comprehension and generalization of grammars. World modeling with spatial reasoning through language. Many of these are readily testable in GPT. Many people have… and I dare say that LLMs reading comprehension, problem solving and reasoning skills do surpass that of many actual humans.

> They model intelligent behavior

It is not at all clear that modeling intelligent behavior is any different from intelligence. This is an open question. If you have an insight there I would love to read it.

> They don't know or care what language is: they learn whatever patterns are present in text, language or not.

This is identical to how children learn language prior to schooling. They listen and form connections based on the cooccurrence of words. They’re brains are working overtime to predict what sounds follow next. Before anyone says “not from text!” please don’t forget people who can’t see or hear. Before anyone says, “not only from language!” multimodal LLMs are here now too!

I’m not saying they’re perfect or even possess the same type of intelligence. Obviously the mechanisms are different. However far too many people in this debate are either unaware of their capabilities or hold on too strongly to human exceptionalism.

> There is this religious cult surrounding LLMs that bases all of its expectations of what an LLM can become on a personification of the LLM.

Anthropomorphizing LLMs is indeed an issue but is separate from a debate on their intelligence. I would argue there’s a very different religious cult very vocally proclaiming “that’s not really intelligence!” as these models sprint past goal posts.

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

#690

Post by Yoric » Sun, Mar 19, 2023, 6:39 PM UTC

sokoloff wrote: post #365

Yoric wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There will be an effectively endless demand for anyone who can create 10x the value while only demanding 3x the pay of the typical worker. That's one possible future. Another future is one in which a single AI assisted "full tech developer" can solve all the coding problems of a company within say, one week. No company will require the services of an entire "full tech developer", so society will employ roughly one…

Do you think that, within a week, anyone could even understand all the coding problems of a company large enough to employ an SWE today?

I've been interviewing with a lot of companies in the past few weeks. I'll agree that one week is probably optimistic, but most of them seem to have requirements that are in fact pretty simple.

Admittedly, reaching the one week stage might require better programming platforms and APIs.