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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

#711

Companies hate any skills set that can hold them hostage in the long run. Today that is the need for programming skills which is why salaries are so high. But the moment that a replacement for most programmers occurs, whether automation, AI, or zero code needed, employers will dump programmers before they can compile their last line of code successfully. In essence, this is the golden age for programming and the clif…

It's bad management that hates any people with skill set that equalize the power relationship, because those skilled in the arts might hold them accountable. If you're roaming the earth making the big bucks, but barely containing your imposter syndrome, the last thing you want is interaction with someone with actual competence.

Companies are legal fictions, and have no motives because they don't actually exist, the people who control the resources of the company are the ones to worry about.

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

#712

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…

> On the other hand, people working in agriculture have become much more effective, which lead to much fewer people working in agriculture, maybe because people need to eat as much calories per day as they did 100 years ago. Except population exploded also, and the only reason we could support such a population has been thanks to advances in agriculture (it could be argued that's not a good thing, as the larger popul…

Also, much like that law of bureaucracy stating how work expands to fill the time available, every employer I’ve worked for has been able to envision and request vastly more software functionality than any dev team has been able to produce, which might not extrapolate forever, but has sustained the field so far.

On the other hand, people are much more finite in the amount of food that they require

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

#713

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 human…

Citation needed for you!

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

#714
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 had similar experiences in the 90s. CASE and 4GLs were the bogeymen of choice.

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

#715

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a pretty funny example because if you follow the DJ scene much, you know the barrier for entry is literally on the floor now. A 10 year old with an iPad app can beat-match and “DJ” a 2h mix together in a way that 20 years ago required thousands of dollars of gear. The tragic part is that unless someone’s got some familiarity with what “good” mixing sounds like, they wouldn’t be able to tell they’re listening…

Is anyone willing to hire a 10 year old with an iPad to DJ at their wedding?

Is there a 10 year old that can MC the groom going for the garter, or the first dance? Doubtful.

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

#716
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…

>he made this prediction because he saw the rise of no-code tools replacing software developers

Given the way we had tremendously productive tools like Visual Basic 6 and Delphi, that seemed to be a reasonable interpretation.

But those tools gave way to C++ and all the .NET insanity. I don't know why someone would give up Delphi, which worked flawlessly and didn't generate any (as far as I can recall) re-only generated boilerplate, to C++ which was a mess, but it happened en masse.

Then most people abandoned personal computing, and the windows desktop for always internet connected pads and phones. Tools have gone severely downward in the past 2 decades as a result.

I suspect we'll get some really powerful AI tools, and go back to worrying about null pointers in a few years anyway.

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

#717
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. It might sound really crazy and stupid today, but when SQL came out, it's advertised as one of "program-generating" languages and was su…

My career predates relational/SQL databases so I can confirm what you wrote. When Oracle came out the buzz was that a whole bunch of programmers would go away because managers and executives could write queries in a “natural” English-like language. That never happened. SQL is hard to master, but it’s the easy part of understanding the relational model and any particular schema. Instead Oracle and the other RDBMSs tha…

I would argue that it is not much harder than using Excel.

But there are good reasons where you don’t want random people running sql queries on production database or having direct access to the data.

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

#718
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…

> 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…

> I get that, from "idea people," on a regular basis. They have nothing but contempt for us "Make It Happen" folks. They treat us as if we grow on trees, and are suckers, to boot.

Ideas are like assholes ... everybody has one and they're usually full of shit.

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

#719
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…

What you’re referring to here is “one shot” execution. The prompt given by managers is one that can be interpreted using context. This context can include current code, comms about what needs to be built, design assets available today, data, etc. Then the AI can ask questions to clarify what needs to be built.

What’s great is that you could also have AIs write tests - for performance or correctness. Then future prompts could rely on these tests to stay in the correctness bounds for existing projects.

Emulating cognition is almost limitless in what it can do once it gets sufficiently good. So good that it can operate itself. You could hire an AI founder and give them cognition and compute resources to solve any problem.

Here’s an example:

You: Build me a profitable company that uses AI generated content to entertain humans.

AI: How much can I spend on cognition and compute? How much time do I have?

You: I want you to spend at most $X before coming back to me. You have until Monday. Along the way I want to see your plan before we decide to execute. Spend at most 5% of that making the plan and 1% calculating its probability of success with confidence interval.

… within some small timescale

AI: Here’s my plan as a video with rough examples demonstrating the product and strategy. Here’s a table with our probability distribution of predicted success metrics and confidence intervals.

You: Plan approved you can spend the rest of the $X

… on Monday

AI: Done. We’ve made a profit of $Y, with total revenue so far of $Z. We have a plan for reinvesting these proceeds to make even greater future profit. Here’s a table of our expected success metrics based on reinvested amount. How much should we reinvest?

You: Reinvest 50% into perpetuity and deposit the remainder in my account. Book me a trip around the world using 25% of the current deposits with accommodations for my family.

Now go enjoy your life.

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

#720
I think it won’t take AI long to do anything humans can do and more. The next frontier is reshaping the physical world. Technology’s ability to move atoms has always been a limiter of progress. Manufacturing physical objects is always the bottleneck. Once that bottleneck is removed (probably by AI), AI becomes limitless.
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