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…
Effects of Gen AI on High Skilled Work: Experiments with Software Developers
281–290 of 532 posts
Re: Effects of Gen AI on High Skilled Work: Experiments with Software Developers
#282Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why did the prices for Uber/Lyft rise everywhere else too? It wasn't Seattle laws that did that. It's that those companies needed to go from Growth-Mode to Margin-Mode. They could no longer sell VC dollars for dimes.
>Why did the prices for Uber/Lyft rise everywhere else too? Presumably it rose in Seattle higher/faster than it would otherwise. The source that he provided in a sibling comment says sales dropped "immediately", which seems to corroborate this. It's lazy to argue "well prices rose elsewhere too so the minimum wage law couldn't possibly have had an impact"
Re: Effects of Gen AI on High Skilled Work: Experiments with Software Developers
#283When I'm using genai to write some code for me, I lose the internal mental state of what my code is doing. As such, when I do have to debug problems myself, or dream up ideas of improvements, I no longer can do this properly due to lack of internal mental state. Wonder how people who have used genai coding successfully get around this?
Re: Effects of Gen AI on High Skilled Work: Experiments with Software Developers
#284Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sadly. It is an onward trend. I have become so discouraged from this subject, that I am evaluating my career choices. Farming is a the safest bet for now.
Have you actually done farming? I grew up on a farm. It's no where close to a safe bet. It's capital intensive, high risk, hard work with low margins. Not at all like stardew.
As a farmer, if you think programming, CI/CD pipeline management, and database administration being consolidated into one job is a line too far... Brace yourself!
Re: Effects of Gen AI on High Skilled Work: Experiments with Software Developers
#285I 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…
If I don't deliver my startup burns in a year. In my previous role if I didn't deliver the people who were my reports did not get their bonuses. The incentives are very clear, and have always been clear - deliver.
Re: Effects of Gen AI on High Skilled Work: Experiments with Software Developers
#286Earlier quoted context omitted.
There’s certainly nothing wrong with enjoying the high pay, no – I definitely do. But yeah, it’s upsetting to find out how few people care. Even moreso when they double down and say that you shouldn’t care either, because it’s been abstracted away, blah blah blah. Who do you think is going to continue creating these abstractions for you?
...Someone else who thinks of actual web applications as an abstraction. In the olden days, we used to throw it over to "Ops" and say, "your problem now." And Junior developers have always been overwhelmed with the details and under pressure to deliver enough to keep their job. None of this is new! I'm a graybeard now, but I remember seniors having the same complaints back then. "Kids these days" never gets old.
I’m more of a solo full stack dev and don’t really have first hand experience building software at scale and the process it takes to manage a codebase the size of the Windows OS, but these are the kinds of issues I see regularly these days and wouldn’t in the past. I also use macOS daily for almost as long and the Apple software has really tanked in terms of quality, I hit bugs and unexpected errors regularly. I generally don’t use their software (Safari, Mail, etc) when I can avoid it. Also have to admit lack of features is a big issue for me on their software.
Re: Effects of Gen AI on High Skilled Work: Experiments with Software Developers
#287I 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've personally seen more interest in AI in devs that have little interest in technology, but a big interest in delivering. If I don't deliver my startup burns in a year. In my previous role if I didn't deliver the people who were my reports did not get their bonuses. The incentives are very clear, and have always been clear - deliver.
Re: Effects of Gen AI on High Skilled Work: Experiments with Software Developers
#288Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are you just working on personal projects or in a shared codebase with tens or hundreds of other devs? If the latter, how do you keep your AI generated content from turning the whole thing into an incomprehensible superfund site of tech debt? I've gotten a lot of mileage in my career so far by paying attention when something felt tedious or mundane, because that's a signal you need some combination of refactoring, to…
> Are you just working on personal projects or in a shared codebase with tens or hundreds of other devs? Like - I presume almost everyone - somewhere in the middle? That was a helluva dichotomy to offer me... > how do you keep your AI generated content from turning the whole thing into an incomprehensible superfund site of tech debt? By reading it, thinking about it and testing it? Did I somehow give the impression I…
In my own experience I've worked on repos with <10 other devs where I spent far more effort on consistency and mantainability than getting the thing to work.
Re: Effects of Gen AI on High Skilled Work: Experiments with Software Developers
#289Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I've personally seen more interest in AI in devs that have little interest in technology, but a big interest in delivering. If I don't deliver my startup burns in a year. In my previous role if I didn't deliver the people who were my reports did not get their bonuses. The incentives are very clear, and have always been clear - deliver.
Succesful companies aren't built in a sprint. I doubt there has ever been a successful startup that didn't have at least some competent people thinking a number of steps ahead. Piling up tech debt to hit some short term arbitrary goals is not a good plan for real success.
Here's a real example of delivering something now without worrying about being the best engineer I can. I have 2 CSRs, They are swamped with work and we're weeks away from bringing another CSR on board. I find a couple of time consuming tasks that are easy to automate and build those out separately as one-off jobs that work well enough. Instantly it's a solid time gain & stress reducer to CSRs. Are my one-off automation tasks a long term solution? No. Do I care? Not at the moment, and my ego can take a hit for the time being.
Re: Effects of Gen AI on High Skilled Work: Experiments with Software Developers
#290Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’ve never gotten avaricious small town business types to believe that the cheap thing to do if the proprietary language you spent a lot to buy is EOL is hire some interns from your local Uni who took a compilers class to write an implementation or translator for $0.00 and some good experiences although… it’s true.
Taking a college level compiler class will get you a toy compiler.