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Effects of Gen AI on High Skilled Work: Experiments with Software Developers

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Re: Effects of Gen AI on High Skilled Work: Experiments with Software Developers

#81

Post by SoftTalker »

iwontberude wrote: post #64
danielvaughn wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh god yes, LLM for bash scripting is fantastic. Bash is one of those languages that I simply don't want to learn. Reading it makes my eyes hurt.

Bash is a terrible language in so so many ways and I concur that I have no interest in learning its new features going forward. I remember how painfully inadequate it was for actual computation and its data types are non existent. Gross.

You have to understand the domain in which its intended to be used.

Bash scripts are essentially automating what you could do at the command line with utility programs, pipes, redirects, filters, and conditionals.

If you're getting very far outside of that scope, bash is probably the wrong tool (though it can be bent to do just about anything if one is determined enough).

Re: Effects of Gen AI on High Skilled Work: Experiments with Software Developers

#82

Post by dartos »

neilv wrote: post #78
choilive wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its been a while since my undergrad (>10 yrs) but many of my peers were majoring in CS or EE/CE because of the money, at the time I thought it was a bit depressing as well. With a few more years under my belt I realized theres nothing wrong with doing good work and providing yourself/your family a decent living. Not everyone needs the passion in their field to become among the best or become a "10x"er to contribute.…

Yeah, I think that the quality of work (skill + conscientiousness), and the motivation for doing the work, are two separate things. Off-the-cuff, three groups: 1. There are people who are motivated by having a solid income, yet they take the professionalism seriously, and do skilled rock-solid work, 9-5. I'd be happy to work with these people. 2. There are other people who are motivated by having a solid or more-than…

I’m in group 3 for sure.

The hardest part of any job I’ve had is doing the not so fun parts (meetings, keeping up with emails, solidly finishing work before moving on to something new)

Re: Effects of Gen AI on High Skilled Work: Experiments with Software Developers

#83

Post by jacobsenscott »

moolcool wrote: post #12
danielvaughn wrote: post #2

A 26% productivity increase sounds inline with in my experience. I think one dimension they should explore is whether you're working with a new technology or one that you're already familiar with. AI helps me much more with languages/frameworks that I'm trying to learn.

I've found Copilot pretty good at removing some tedium, like it'll write docstrings pretty well most of the time, but it does almost nothing to alleviate the actual mental labour of software engineering

Removing the tedium frees your brain up to focus on the interesting parts of the problem. The "actual mental labor" is the fun part. So I like that.

Re: Effects of Gen AI on High Skilled Work: Experiments with Software Developers

#84

Post by carlmr »

sgarland wrote: post #27
alternatex wrote: post #5

I wonder if the study includes the technical debt that more experienced developers had to tackle after the less experienced devs have contributed their AI-driven efforts. Because my personal experience has involved a lot of that in one of the companies listed in the study. Also, I've personally seen more interest in AI in devs that have little interest in technology, but a big interest in delivering. PMs love them th…

> Also, I've personally seen more interest in AI in devs that have little interest in technology, but a big interest in delivering. Thank you, this says what I have been struggling to describe. The day I lost part of my soul was when I asked a dev if I could give them feedback on a DB schema, they said yes, and then cut me off a few minutes in with, “yeah, I don’t really care [about X].” You don’t care? I’m telling y…

>Cloud was a mistake; it’s inculcated people with the idea that chasing efficiency and optimization doesn’t matter, because you can always scale up or out.

Similarly Docker is an amazing technology, yet it enabled the dependency tower of babels that we have today. It enabled developers that don't care about cleaning up their depencies.

Kubernetes is amazing technology, yet it enabled the developers that don't care to ship applications that constantly crash, but who cares, kubernetes will automatically restart everything.

Cloud and now AI are similar enabler technologies. They could be used for good, but there are too many people that just don't care.

Re: Effects of Gen AI on High Skilled Work: Experiments with Software Developers

#85

Post by SoftTalker »

jstummbillig wrote: post #4
danielvaughn wrote: post #2

A 26% productivity increase sounds inline with in my experience. I think one dimension they should explore is whether you're working with a new technology or one that you're already familiar with. AI helps me much more with languages/frameworks that I'm trying to learn.

That might be. It might also be a consequence of how flexible people at different stages in their career are. I have seen mostly senior programmers argue why ai tools don't work. Juniors just use them without prejudice.

Juniors don't know enough to know what problems the AI code might be introducing. It might work, and the tests might pass, but it might be very fragile, full of duplicated code, unnecessary side-effects, etc. that will make future maintenance and debugging difficult. But I guess we'll be using AI for that too, so the hopefully the AI can clean up the messes that it made.

Re: Effects of Gen AI on High Skilled Work: Experiments with Software Developers

#86

Post by SketchySeaBeast »

ebiester wrote: post #70
SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am seeing that a lot - juniors who can put out a lot of code but when they get stuck they can't unstick themselves, and it's hard for me to unstick them because they have a hard time walking me through what they are doing.

Is that so new? We used to complain when someone blindly copied and pasted from stack overflow. Before that, from experts-exchange. Coding is still a skill acquisition that takes years. We need to stamp out the behavior of not understanding what they take from copilot, but the behavior is not new.

You're right, it isn't entirely new, but I think it's still different. You still had to figure out how that new code snippet applied to your code. Stack overflow wouldn't shape the code you're trying to slot in to fit your current code.

Re: Effects of Gen AI on High Skilled Work: Experiments with Software Developers

#87

Post by shadowgovt »

carlmr wrote: post #84
sgarland wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also, I've personally seen more interest in AI in devs that have little interest in technology, but a big interest in delivering. Thank you, this says what I have been struggling to describe. The day I lost part of my soul was when I asked a dev if I could give them feedback on a DB schema, they said yes, and then cut me off a few minutes in with, “yeah, I don’t really care [about X].” You don’t care? I’m telling y…

>Cloud was a mistake; it’s inculcated people with the idea that chasing efficiency and optimization doesn’t matter, because you can always scale up or out. Similarly Docker is an amazing technology, yet it enabled the dependency tower of babels that we have today. It enabled developers that don't care about cleaning up their depencies. Kubernetes is amazing technology, yet it enabled the developers that don't care to…

The fine art of industry is building more and more elaborate complicated systems atop things someone deeply cares about to be used by those who don't have to deeply care.

How many developers do we imagine even know the difference between SIMD and SISD operators, much less whether their software stack knows how to take advantage of SIMD? How many developers do we imagine even know how RAM chips store bits or how a semiconductor works?

We're just watching the bar of "Don't need to care because a reliable system exists" move through something we know and care about in our lifetimes. Progress is great to watch in action.

Re: Effects of Gen AI on High Skilled Work: Experiments with Software Developers

#88

Post by chasd00 »

acedTrex wrote: post #68
alternatex wrote: post #5

I wonder if the study includes the technical debt that more experienced developers had to tackle after the less experienced devs have contributed their AI-driven efforts. Because my personal experience has involved a lot of that in one of the companies listed in the study. Also, I've personally seen more interest in AI in devs that have little interest in technology, but a big interest in delivering. PMs love them th…

> Also, I've personally seen more interest in AI in devs that have little interest in technology, but a big interest in delivering. PMs love them though. Bingo, this, so much this. Every dev i know who loves AI stuff was a dev that I had very little technical respect for pre AI. They got some stuff done but there was no craft or quality to it.

i'm certainly skeptical of genai but your argument sounds very familiar to assembler dev feelings towards c++ devs back in the day.

Re: Effects of Gen AI on High Skilled Work: Experiments with Software Developers

#89

Post by neilv »

dartos wrote: post #82
neilv wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I think that the quality of work (skill + conscientiousness), and the motivation for doing the work, are two separate things. Off-the-cuff, three groups: 1. There are people who are motivated by having a solid income, yet they take the professionalism seriously, and do skilled rock-solid work, 9-5. I'd be happy to work with these people. 2. There are other people who are motivated by having a solid or more-than…

I’m in group 3 for sure. The hardest part of any job I’ve had is doing the not so fun parts (meetings, keeping up with emails, solidly finishing work before moving on to something new)

You're on the nominally right Web site. #1 is engineers, #2 is cancer, and #3 is hackers (possibly also engineers). :)

Re: Effects of Gen AI on High Skilled Work: Experiments with Software Developers

#90

Post by ang_cire »

I sometimes wonder about whether the decline in IT worker quality is down to companies trying to force more and more roles onto each worker to reduce headcount.

Developers, Operations, and Security used to be dedicated roles.

Then we made DevOps and some businesses took that to mean they only needed 2/3 of the headcount, rather than integrating those teams.

Then we made DevSecOps, and some businesses took that to mean they only needed 1/3 the original roles, and that devs could just also be their operations and appsec team.

That's not a knock on shift-left and integrated operations models; those are often good ideas. It's just the logical outcome of those models when execs think they can get a bigger bonus by cutting costs by cutting headcounts.

Now you have new devs coming into insanely complex n-microservice environments, being asked to learn the existing codebase, being asked to learn their 5-tool CI/CD pipelines (and that ain't being taught in school), being asked to learn to be DBAs, and also to keep up a steady code release cycle.

Is anyone really surprised they are using ChatGPT to keep up?

This is going to keep happening until IT companies stop cutting headcounts to make line go up (instead of good business strategy).

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