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

821–829 of 829 posts

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

#821

Post by worthless-trash »

camgunz wrote: post #799
CamperBob2 wrote: post #662

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Hah fair, could have used more editing :)) I'm skeptical too, but I assume this will just be Darwinian: curmudgeons like us will shamble along with our 5% gains and ill-behaved children, and the bulk of society will reap greater rewards. The worst part is our judiciousness won't even save us if we turn out to be right: society will still collapse whether or not you turned your life over to AI.

On that day, "I told you so" wont bring us back from the brink.

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

#822

Post by aws_ls »

nico wrote: post #704
aws_ls wrote: post #544

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just curious, so do you know how to program or not?

Hahah, of course I went against my dad’s advice. No I’m wondering if it was the right move.

Great thing you did. IMHO.

ps: I taught my kids programming.

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

#823

Post by dmpk2k »

chii wrote: post #284
dmpk2k wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's been the promise of increasing productivity for many decades, and yet...

if you were to life with only what was around at the time such productivity increases occurred - e.g., no internet, phone, and high speed computing, access to medical/transport improvements etc - you'd probably be able to live off minimum wage easily. People worked more today because they desired more. In fact, the desire outstripped their ability to increase their wages!

That is a common counterargument, and yet the common counter-counterargument matches my experience:

That sadly doesn't apply to housing or food, at least in the places I've lived. E.g. houses in the place I was born are now 5x the price, once you factor in inflation. Food and vehicles are 2x. Higher education went from "free" to $30K.

The really important things are far more expensive now, across the three countries I've spent decades in. Maybe the overall situation is different for the US of A.

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

#824

Post by [deleted] »

_-____-_ wrote: post #420
raincole wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not kindergarten child at congitive level. It's a different kind of cognition than humans, if you can call it "cognition" at all.

The lesson I've taken from ChatGPT so far is that "consciousness" may be much less interesting or "special" than we thought. It may turn out that it's nothing more than an emergent property of a shared language that models the world around us and gives us capacity to plan and communicate our actions.

[deleted]

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

#825

Post by arendtio »

In my opinion, people underestimate how much CS is about learning to analyze things objectively and to learn about the flaws of human processing. Coding is not just about building something, but also about recognizing how many errors you make. There are very few situations in life where you can't blame anybody else but yourself, but coding give exactly that opportunity.

I think there are many jobs which are more endangered.

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

#826

Post by ozim »

gregjor wrote: post #820
ozim wrote: post #817

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I would say that yes they are similarly difficult.

Getting basic queries or basic calculations in spreadsheet a person can learn in couple hours.

Somewhere after that comes zone "proficient enough to shoot himself in the foot".

Then there is level of excel or SQL where without months of experience you simply don't know what is happening.

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

#827

Post by BulgarianIdiot »

TheCoelacanth wrote: post #490
BulgarianIdiot wrote: post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There exist many no-code tools that do exactly what you say is impossible. Do I program when I retouch photos in Photoshop? It's a no-code environment that an artist can easily learn and use with no programmers needed. What's new here is that you DO NOT NEED TO BE EXACT with AI. AI knows human nature and human speech and it can infer what you say and what you need, if you're approximately close, and then make the exa…

They're working on the 200 programs that suddenly became economically viable to create because of the vastly decreased cost of making programs. It takes drastically less programming effort to create programs than it did 50 years ago. Did that decrease demand for programmers? No, it drastically increased it.

What you call a programmer today is on average nothing like the programmer from 50 years ago who'd fit Microsoft Excel in 80kb RAM on the original Mac.

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

#828

Post by whearyou »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #259
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…

> 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…

This is the most amazing comment I’ve read in a while.

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

#829

Post by whearyou »

samtho wrote: post #583
ghaff wrote: post #535

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Solution Architect is another common title. As someone else mentioned, Developer Relations is at least adjacent though that tends to be less salesy and, depending on the role/company, may be more focused on community aspects than building demos and the like. In any case, at software companies, there are definitely customer-facing roles that are more technical though they may not involve a lot of direct coding. For no…

I would say an SA (Solution Architect) is very different from an SE (Sales Engineer) in one fundamental way: the SA is focused on delivering value post-contract and the SE is focused on making sure the org is able deliver the value promised by working with sales in the pre-contract phase. In some smaller companies or organization within a company, I can see these roles being performed by the same person but in genera…

Agreed this was my experience with the SA role
Post reply on HN