Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

811–820 of 829 posts

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

#811

Post by urthor »

m-ee wrote: post #752
osigurdson wrote: post #533

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The economy is so good at generating value that it is somehow possible for large portions of participants to create zero or negative value.

In Bullshit Jobs Graeber terms our current system as "managerial feudalism". It's not capitalism in the same way Adam Smith or Marx envisioned, we don't have firms brutally competing to generate the most value at the lowest cost. Instead we have a system of rent extraction largely done by a small number of powerful players. You don't need to be efficient to extract rent, so you end up with a court, or org chart in mo…

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_law_of_oligarchy

I never realised Bullshit jobs was written by an actual academic.

It's not a new idea.

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

#812

Post by thomastjeffery »

mattfrommars wrote: post #779
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…

Great post and I agree with you 100%. After playing around it and reading the theoretical aspect of how it works. There is an elephant in the room that should not be ignored. The hype, more appropriately the cult following claims it will replace jobs and analogous to, second coming of Christ in the aspect of change the world. What it appears to me is there is massive money to be made. It as if, because how strong the…

The biggest point I want to make us that that cult narrative isn't just people mistaking what they read about LLMs. That narrative started with how LLM authors write about LLMs.

An LLM is not a language model, it is a text model. An LLM does not lie, it provides whatever continuation happens from modeling the prompt into the training corpus; with no notion of truth or fact. An LLM does not invent novel behaviors to solve patterns, it finds patterns that were already in the text that humans consider novel.

Practically everything I have just said is in conflict with how LLMs are presented by their authors. That's where the cult narrative is rooted.

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

#813

Post by ilyt »

eldritch_4ier wrote: post #723
sarchertech wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

How do they apply to software engineers exactly? The founder “job” is literally “do anything that needs doing in the business”. Now the job of a CEO or CTO is much more narrowly defined and I can see that seeing automation sooner, but the founder role is kinda unique in that it’s just “do everything and if you’re successful you should be constantly replacing your job with an employee”. Founders are the jobs trying th…

> Founders are the jobs trying their hardest to replace themselves (with hires and go can do the work better) and yet still always find more to do. That’s very unique

Not really. They are not "replacing self", the coordination is always needed, just hire the people to the point coordinating the company is their only job. I.e. finding peasants to do their dirty work and they can just rule over them.

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

#814

Post by mattfrommars »

thomastjeffery wrote: post #812
mattfrommars wrote: post #779

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great post and I agree with you 100%. After playing around it and reading the theoretical aspect of how it works. There is an elephant in the room that should not be ignored. The hype, more appropriately the cult following claims it will replace jobs and analogous to, second coming of Christ in the aspect of change the world. What it appears to me is there is massive money to be made. It as if, because how strong the…

The biggest point I want to make us that that cult narrative isn't just people mistaking what they read about LLMs. That narrative started with how LLM authors write about LLMs. An LLM is not a language model, it is a text model. An LLM does not lie, it provides whatever continuation happens from modeling the prompt into the training corpus; with no notion of truth or fact. An LLM does not invent novel behaviors to s…

> That narrative started with how LLM authors write about LLMs.

Great point. Was oblivious to it but it is hard to ignore now.

Interesting discussion happening right now here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35226364

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

#815

Post by m-ee »

urthor wrote: post #811
m-ee wrote: post #752

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Bullshit Jobs Graeber terms our current system as "managerial feudalism". It's not capitalism in the same way Adam Smith or Marx envisioned, we don't have firms brutally competing to generate the most value at the lowest cost. Instead we have a system of rent extraction largely done by a small number of powerful players. You don't need to be efficient to extract rent, so you end up with a court, or org chart in mo…

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_law_of_oligarchy I never realised Bullshit jobs was written by an actual academic. It's not a new idea.

This seems overly pessimistic (unsurprising given that it’s written by an eventual fascist). Egalitarian societies do exist, but they take work to maintain. The Mondragon corporation functions as a cooperative despite its large size. I know less about it’s day to day organizing that I’d like to unfortunately, would be very interested to learn more.

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

#816

Post by gregjor »

ozim wrote: post #717
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…

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.

About 90% of Excel spreadsheets contain errors according to some evidence:

https://www.zdnet.com/article/excel-errors-microsofts-spread...

I have seen this multiple times. Got called into a corp. audit once because CFO's spreadsheet didn't match reports from database. His SUM() function was missing some rows, ZIP Codes got converted to scientific notation and he didn't know why, that kind of thing.

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

#817

Post by ozim »

gregjor wrote: post #816
ozim wrote: post #717

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

About 90% of Excel spreadsheets contain errors according to some evidence: https://www.zdnet.com/article/excel-errors-microsofts-spread... I have seen this multiple times. Got called into a corp. audit once because CFO's spreadsheet didn't match reports from database. His SUM() function was missing some rows, ZIP Codes got converted to scientific notation and he didn't know why, that kind of thing.

Seems like that’s my point making excel calculations correctly is at least as hard as doing calculations with SQL.

If you get experienced db guy to do excel I bet he will do it correctly.

If you get “data jockey”, whatever tool he gets it will be a mess.

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

#818

Post by chiefalchemist »

sarchertech wrote: post #810
chiefalchemist wrote: post #757

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny enough, last week I was talking about Copilot with a colleague. Out loud, I wondered if there was a diminishing return from Copilot. That is, Copilot is great at filling in boilerplate / the obvious, and I get to focus on the more intricate parts of the solution. But can my brain operate at the higher level day after day? Week after week? TBH I have my doubts. Maybe it's going to be AI enables quality more than…

Same thing is happening with doctors. I read a post from a GP a while back talking about how it used to be that he got a wide mix of acuity/difficulty all day long. Now all the "easy" patients go to the Nurse Practitioner, and all he gets is the difficult ones. He's still expected to put in the same amount of time, but now he has to expend brain power the entire time.

Sounds like we're both making the case for the 4-Day work week.

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

#819

Post by urthor »

m-ee wrote: post #815
urthor wrote: post #811

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_law_of_oligarchy I never realised Bullshit jobs was written by an actual academic. It's not a new idea.

This seems overly pessimistic (unsurprising given that it’s written by an eventual fascist). Egalitarian societies do exist, but they take work to maintain. The Mondragon corporation functions as a cooperative despite its large size. I know less about it’s day to day organizing that I’d like to unfortunately, would be very interested to learn more.

It's something to be aware of.

I think it's an underestimated aspect of why CEO's get paid the big bucks.

They're paid money to not let this stupidity happen.

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

#820

Post by gregjor »

ozim wrote: post #817
gregjor wrote: post #816

Earlier quoted context omitted.

About 90% of Excel spreadsheets contain errors according to some evidence: https://www.zdnet.com/article/excel-errors-microsofts-spread... I have seen this multiple times. Got called into a corp. audit once because CFO's spreadsheet didn't match reports from database. His SUM() function was missing some rows, ZIP Codes got converted to scientific notation and he didn't know why, that kind of thing.

Seems like that’s my point making excel calculations correctly is at least as hard as doing calculations with SQL. If you get experienced db guy to do excel I bet he will do it correctly. If you get “data jockey”, whatever tool he gets it will be a mess.

Maybe I’m misreading, but “not much harder than” implies SQL and Excel aren’t that hard to learn. “At least as hard as” implies both are similarly difficult.
Post reply on HN