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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

#731

Post by eggsmediumrare »

austin-cheney wrote: post #336
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…

I completely disagree because of how this batch of AI learns. It learns by studying what is currently available as opposed to supplying something new. Bad developers on the way of becoming obsolete by AI will see drastic improvements from the thing that’s about to replace them. Otherwise it’s slightly better intellisence integrated in your editor. The difference is that bad developers are primarily concerned with lit…

I think a lot of "good" developers making this very argument will be in for a nasty surprise when they find out which bucket they're actually in

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

#732

Post by djmips »

joenot443 wrote: post #340
Philip-J-Fry wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's more like telling a DJ in the 80s, "Don't worry that mixing vinyls won't be a thing forever. It's not about the tools but about the product, as a DJ your job is to mix good music and you can do that with vinyls, cassettes or with MP3s."

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…

Aren't producers already using digital sax for years now? The saxophone market for session players has probably already been decimated.

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

#733

Post by 908B64B197 »

irrational wrote: post #618
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…

> 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. This is also one of the main reasons why all programming jobs were not outsourced to India.

> This is also one of the main reasons why all programming jobs were not outsourced to India.

There's a whole industry here in America that re-shores programming contracts. They know they can't underbid Indian/foreign body shops so they just wait a few months and call back the companies who went with cheaper programmers. If the company is still around it's generally a complete re-write.

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

#734

Post by djmips »

mnsc wrote: post #458
cableshaft wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can still get paid for making NES games today. You just have to crowdfund it. This one raised over $180,000 just four years ago, for example: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/morphcat-games/micro-ma... This one raised $32k just this past December: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1222722105/full-quiet-a... Another that raised $49k: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/megacatstudios/ronius-t... $55k: http…

I don't think the person in the dm would have liked this answer. "if you build a career in developing plumbing and glue code, in the future you could have a successful Kickstarter where nostalgic developers buy your curiosities"

A career in developing plumbing and glue code has already been significantly in jeopardy from the consolidation at plumbing and glue code factories in the video game industry. There's still a number of large companies doing bespoke game engines but not like it used to be. Nevertheless, there is still work in understanding the market leader engines and providing more of a mechanics job.

Those Kickstarter opportunities are something you do once you already have a viable income in something else because in the end they don't pay particularly well I feel. It has to be a labor of love.

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

#735

Post by lelandbatey »

wizofaus wrote: post #705
uh_uh wrote: post #495

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You're assuming that the AI is even generating anything that will make sense to a human. Why wouldn't it? It's trained on code generated by humans and already generates code that is more readable than the output of many humans me included.

But why would anyone bother with using AI to generate human readable code if the AI can generate the final desired behavior directly, either on-the-fly or as executable machine code?

Because the AI's, at least right now, can't generate/change code so that it correctly does what's expected with the confidence intervals we expect. I've tried to get it to happen, and it just doesn't. As long as that's true, we'll need to somehow get the correctness to where it needs to be, and that's going to require a person.

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

#736

Post by javajosh »

rvba wrote: post #301
gregjor wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

As someone trying to learn SQL it feels that there are much more steps: * language syntax * the relational model (relatively easy? It is just "there"?) * database schema, where I have 3 000 tables, or 50 0000 tables (that's how ERPs are made) * actualy knowing how to use the language * building those queries that join columns from 15 different tables together to deliver the needed data -> it sounds easy, but Im strug…

Tools matter. When I learned SQL long ago it was with FoxPro for DOS, and it was a great tool for doing both SQL and text based UIs (as with curses). Later, I used MS Access 97 and it was an even better tool and sparked a lifelong interest in data modeling. The ui for building up tables (specifying column data types, etc) was really trail-blazing at the time and the interaction remains good today. The built-in ERD charting tool was good, showing your tables in relationship to each other. The visual query builder was...well, I never used it but I suppose it was good? You just had lots of good tools to build tables, flip through their contents, and visualize their relationships.

I don't know of any modern environment that functions like that, on any platform.

I'm posting this to invite others to either a) correct me and tell me I'm wrong that tooling doesn't matter (a legitimate view, but wrong), and/or b) recommend some modern, OSS Access-like tools that might help flatten the learning curve for you. (And if you're more comfortable with a CLI and a REPL already, then you don't even need this hypothetical tool, but I myself am curious about it.)

EDIT: looks like LibreOffice Base is pretty close to MS Access circa 1997.

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

#737

Post by mdorazio »

RivieraKid wrote: post #691
mdorazio wrote: post #441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you have two common misconceptions here. 1) Wages have very little to do with value/productivity in a free market. They are almost entirely determined by supply and demand. Value simply places a ceiling on compensation. Thus, if far more people can perform a "programming" job because of GPT-X, unless the demand for those jobs rises significantly the net result will be wage reduction. 2) There's this weird thi…

1) Economic theory says that marginal product of labor (value) is equal to wages, at least in simple models. 2) With GPT-4 you still need to know how to program. A product manager can't replace you.

1) The real world is not a simple economic model. The wage rate is roughly equivalent to the rate it costs to replace an employee, not their marginal value. If your argument was true, company profits would tend toward zero as wages rise.

2) I specifically did not say GPT-4. If you think v4 is the peak of what will be possible when looking at how far we have come in just 2 years then I don't know what to tell you. Also, a product manager is not a business analyst.

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

#738

Post by surgical_fire »

throwaway4aday wrote: post #679
ilaksh wrote: post #559

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's 100% doing reasoning.

A type of reasoning. It's still bad at mathematical reasoning and advanced programming or at least translating very complicated written instructions into working code without any human intervention. We also don't know how good it is at reasoning about the physical world although I think Microsoft was doing some research on that. Then there's theory of mind and the reasoning that goes along with it. Then there's reaso…

Not even advanced programming.

ChatGPT is impressive, but gets many things wrong. If you know what you are doing it's an amazing programming assistant. It makes me noticeably more productive. It may lead someone who doesn't know what they are doing in weird rabbit holes that will lead nowhere however.

One silly example. I was using a library I hadn't use before, and I asked how I could get certain attributes. It gave me an answer that would't compile at all, the imports didn't exist.

Then when I mentioned that it didn't work, it game me a slightly different answer, that also didn't work, and explained that the previous answer was valid for 3.x. in 1.x or 2.x the new answer was the correct one.

But there's the catch. There's no version 3.x. there's not even a 2.x. It's language model just statically got to that conclusion.

Doesn't make it any less impressive to me. It gets things right often enough, or at least points me in a good direction. I effectively learned new things using it. But it can't replace a developer.

Using ChatGPT as if it was General AI is similar to eat a meal using a hammer and a screwdriver as utensils. You can probably do it, but nobody will have a good time.

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

#739

Post by teaearlgraycold »

pessimizer wrote: post #640
TheLoafOfBread wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am actually finding amusing that managers will generate 100k lines project with AI and then will start figuring out that it does not work as they want to. Then they figured out actual developers are needed to fix it, either in a very strict way telling AI what should happen (i.e. higher level programming) or directly fixing code generated by AI.

I know a small financial agency in the 00's that laid off their one-person IT department because they thought the computers would run themselves. It's honestly great that they're overselling AI, lots of messes to clean up. edit: Ultimately there are going to be iterative pipelines with traditional programmers in the loop rearranging things and reprompting. Math skills are going to be deemphasized a bit and domain ski…

Ah, the old:

"Everything's broken, why am I paying you?"

"Everything works, why am I paying you?"

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

#740

Post by roncesvalles »

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…

>could finally cut out the pesky "translators", i.e. software developers

The fallacy here is that programming is not a process of translation. It is a process of invention. Going from rough or high-level functional requirements to a functioning computer program requires inventing novel logic that has not been invented at any other step. It involves making business decisions that have not been made at any prior step.

Whatever can be categorized as menial "translation", i.e. a step in the business process where no new logic is added or business decision made, has already been automated away - compilers.

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