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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

#101

Post by jajko »

ang_cire wrote: post #90

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 mea…

So its not going to stop. Typical C-suite who holds real power has absolutely 0 clue about IT complexity, we are overpriced janitors to them. Their fault, their blame, but they are probably long gone when these mistakes manifest fully.

In my banking corp, in past 13 years I've seen massive rise of complexity, coupled with absolutely madly done bureaucracy increase. I still could do all stuff that is required but - I dont have access. I cant have access. Simple task became 10 steps negotiating with obscure Pune team that I need to chase 10x and escalate till they actually recognize there is some work for them. Processes became beyond ridiculous, you start something and it could take 2 days or 3 months, who knows. Every single app will break pretty quickly if not constantly maintained - be it some new network stuff, unchecked unix update, or any other of trillion things that can and will go wrong.

This means - paper pushers and folks at best average at their primary job (still IT or related) got very entretched in processes and won, and business gets served subpar IT, projects over time and thus budget, perpetuating the image of shitty tolerated evil IT.

I stopped caring, work to live is more than enough for me, that 'live' part is where my focus is and life achievements are.

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

#102

Post by nuancebydefault »

insane_dreamer wrote: post #77
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 haven't found it that useful in my main product development (which while python based, uses our own framework and therefore there's not much code for CoPilot to go on and it usually suggests methods and arguments that don't exist, which just makes extra work). Where I do find it useful are 1) questions about frameworks/languages that I don't work in much and for which there is a lot of example content (i.e., Qt, CS…

It is revolutionary no doubt. How many pre-AI tools would accomplish an amount of 4 big features you mentioned at once?

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

#103

Post by diob »

arexxbifs wrote: post #53

My hunch - it's just a hunch - is that LLM-assisted coding is detrimental to one's growth as a developer. I'm fairly certain it can only boost productivity to a certain level - one which may be tedium for more senior developers, but formative for juniors. My experience is that the LLM isn't just used for "boilerplate" code, but rather called into action when a junior developer is faced with a fairly common task they'…

I think it can be abused like anything else (copy paste from stack overflow until it works).

But for folks who are going to be successful with or without it, it's a godsend in terms of being able to essentially ask stack overflow questions and get immediate non judgemental answers.

Maybe not correct all the time, but that was true with stack overflow as well. So as always, it comes back to the individual.

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

#104

Post by Kiro »

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…

I don't think it's that clear cut. I personally think the AI often delivers a better solution than the one I had in mind. It always contains a lot more safe guards against edge cases and other "boring" stuff that the AI has no problem adding but others find tedious.

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

#105

Post by acedTrex »

chasd00 wrote: post #88
acedTrex wrote: post #68

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. 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.

I am not necessarily arguing against GenAI. I am sure it will have somewhat similar effects to how the explosion in popularity of garbage collected languages et al had on software back in the 90s.

More stuff will get done, the barrier of entry will be lower etc.

The craft of programming took a significant quality/care hit when it transitioned from "only people who care enough to learn the ins and outs of memory management can feasibly do this" to "now anyone with a technical brain and a business use case can do it". Which makes sense, the code was no longer the point.

The C++ devs rightly felt superior to the new java devs in the narrow niche of "ability to craft code." But that feeling doesn't move the needle business wise in the vast majority of circumstances. Which is always the schism between large technology leaps.

Basically, the argument of "its worse" is not WRONG. Just, the same as it did not really matter in the mid 90s. Does not matter as much now, compared to the ability to "just get something that kinda works."

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

#106

Post by acedTrex »

wahnfrieden wrote: post #97
acedTrex wrote: post #68

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. 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.

You're playing status games

I mean... in a way yes. The status of being someone who cares about the craft of programming.

In the scheme of things however, that status hardly matters compared to the "ability to get something shipped quickly" which is what the vast majority of people are paid to do.

So while I might judge those people for not meeting my personal standards or bar. In many cases that does not actually matter. They got something out there, thats all that matters.

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

#107

Post by nuancebydefault »

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.

Now some junior dev can quickly make something new and fully functional in days, without knowing in detail what they are doing. As opposed to weeks by a senior originally.

Personally I think that senior devs might fear a conflict within their identity. Hence they draw the 'You and the AI have no cue' card.

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

#108

Post by blibble »

shadowgovt wrote: post #87
carlmr wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 sem…

> 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?

hopefully some of those that did a computer science degree?

(all of what you've said was part of mine)

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

#109

Post by Delk »

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.

For what it's worth, a (former) team mate who was one of the more enthusiastic adopters of gen AI at the time was in fact a pretty good developer who knew his stuff and wrote good code. He was also big on delivering and productivity.

In terms of directly generating technical content, I think he mostly used gen AI for more mechanical stuff such as drafting data schemas or class structures, or for converting this or that to JSON, and perhaps not so much for generating actual program code. Maybe there's a difference to someone who likes to have lots of program logic generated.

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

#110

Post by simonw »

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 a developer who loves using AI, and I’m confident that I was a capable developer producing high quality code long before I started using AI tools.
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