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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

#331

Post by agumonkey »

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…

devops is a great idea but if the design/engineering part is not actually easier, it ends up as additional mental effort

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

#332

Post by rgblambda »

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…

At my company, our sprint board is copy/pasted across teams, so there's columns like "QA/Testing" that just get ignored because our team has no testers.

There's also no platform engineers but IaC has gotten that good that arguably they've become redundant. Architecture decisions get made on the fly by team members rather than by the Software Architect who only shows up now and again to point out something trivial. No Product Owner so again the team work out the requirements and write the tickets (ChatGPT can't help there).

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

#333

Post by YawningAngel »

intelVISA wrote: post #305
trashtester wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're realizing that 10x (+) developers exist, but think they can hire them at 1x developer salaries. Btw, they key skill you're leaving out, is to understand the business your company is in. If you can couple even moderate developer ability with a good understanding of business objectives, you may stay relevant even while some of the pure developers are replaced by AI.

> If you can couple even moderate developer ability with a good understanding of business objectives, you may stay relevant even while some of the pure developers are replaced by AI. By 'stay relevant' you mean run your own? Ability to build + align to business objectives = $$$, no reason to be an Agile cog at that point.

I know plenty about IAM and card issuance, but I don't back myself to compete with Ping or Marqeta

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

#334

Post by thiht »

jakub_g wrote: post #131
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 only use (free) ChatGPT sporadically, and it works best for me in areas where I'm familiar enough to call bullshit, but not familiar enough to write things myself quickly / confidently / without checking a lot of docs: - writing robust bash and using unix/macos tools - how to do X in github actions - which API endpoint do I use to do Y - synthesizing knowledge on some topic that would require dozens of browser tabs…

Same for me. I also use it for some SQL queries involving syntax I’m unfamiliar with, like JSONB operators in Postgres. ChatGPT gives me better results, faster than Google.

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

#335

Post by yieldcrv »

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…

Partially agree

It is so much easier to deploy now (and for the last 5-10 years) without managing an actual server and OS

It just gets easier, with new complexities added on top

In 2014 I was enamored that I didn’t need to be a DBA because platforms as a service were handling all of it in a NoSQL kind of way. And exposed intuitive API endpoints for me.

This hasn’t changed, at worst it was a gateway drug to being more hands on

I do fullstack development because it’s just one language, I do devops because it’s not a fulltime job and cloud formation scripts and further abstraction is easyish, I can manage the database and I haven’t gotten vendor locked

You don’t have to wait 72 hours for DNS and domain assignments to propagate anymore it’s like 5 minutes, SSL is free and takes 30 minutes tops to be added to your domain, CDNs are included. Over 10 years ago this was all so cumbersome

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

#336

Post by crystal_revenge »

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…

> whether the decline in IT worker quality

I think it entirely has to do with a generation of software people getting into the field (understandably) because it makes them a lot of money, rather than because they're passionate about software. These, by-and-large, are mediocre technical people and they tend to hire other mediocre technical people.

When I look around at many of the newer startups that are popping up they're increasing filled with really talented people. I chalk this up largely to the fact that people that really know what they're doing are increasingly necessary to get a company started in a more cash constrained environment and those people are making sure they hire really talented people.

Tech right now reminds me so much more of tech around 2004-2008, when almost everyone one that was interested in startups was in it because they loved hacking on technical problems.

My experience with Cursor is that it is excellent at doing things mediocre engineers can do, and awful at anything more advanced. It also requires the ability to very quickly understand someone else's code.

I could be wrong, but my suspicion is this will allow a lot of very technical engineers, that don't focus on things like front-end or web app development, to forgo needing to hire as many junior webdev people. Similar to how webmasters disappeared once we have frameworks and tools for quickly building the basic HTML/CSS required for a web page.

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

#337

Post by shinycode »

XenophileJKO wrote: post #307
jcgrillo wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Easy: exclude developers who try it. Learning--be it a new codebase, a new programming language, a new database--takes time. You're not going to be as productive until you learn how. That's fine! Cheating on your homework with an LLM should not be something we celebrate, though, because the learner will never become productive that way, and they won't understand the code they're submitting for review.

The truth is that the tools are actually quite good already. If you know what you are doing they will 10-20x your productivity. Ultimately not adopting them will religate you to the same fate as assembly programmers. Sure there are place for it, but you won't be able to get near as much functionally done in the same amount of time and there won't be as much demand for it.

Do you agree that the brain-memory activity of writing code and reading someone else’s code is totally different ? The sand castle analogy is still valid here because once you have a x10 productivity or worse a x20 one, there is no way you can deeply understand the things the same way than if you wrote it from scratch. Without spending a considerable amount of time and getting productivity down, the understanding is not the same. If no one is responsible because it’s crap software and you won’t be around enough time to bear responsibility… it’s ok I guess ?

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

#338

Post by _w1tm »

IgorPartola wrote: post #254
nostrademons wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One person can do the work of 3 and regularly does in startups. I think that what the MBAs miss is this phenomena of overconstraint . Once you have separate the generic role of "developer" into "developer, operations, and security", you've likely specified all sorts of details about how those roles need to be done. When you combine them back into DevSecOps, all the details remain, and you have one person doing 3x the…

I think there is another bit to this which is cargo cult tendencies. Basically DevOps is a great idea under certain circumstances and works well for specific people in that role. Realistically if you take a top talent engineer they can likely step into any of the three roles or even some others and be successful. Having the synergy of one person being responsible for the boundary between two roles then makes your ROI…

> There is no methodology (organizational, programming, testing, etc.) that can make excellence out of mediocrity.

That’s a pretty toxic statement. No one was born writing perfect code, every one of us needed to learn. An organizational culture that rewards learning is the way to produce an organization that produces excellent software.

It doesn’t matter how excellent someone is if the organization puts them to work on problems that nobody needs solved. The most perfect piece of software that nobody uses is a waste of bytes no matter how well it’s written.

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

#339

Post by bluepizza »

crystal_revenge wrote: post #336
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…

> whether the decline in IT worker quality I think it entirely has to do with a generation of software people getting into the field (understandably) because it makes them a lot of money, rather than because they're passionate about software. These, by-and-large, are mediocre technical people and they tend to hire other mediocre technical people. When I look around at many of the newer startups that are popping up th…

While you have a good point, I think the experts also branched off with some unreasonable requirements. I remember reading Yegge's blog post, years ago, saying that an engineer needed to know bitwise operators, otherwise they were not good enough.

I don't know. Curiosity, passion, focus, creative problem solving seem to me much more important criteria for an engineer to have, rather than bitwise operations. An engineer that has these will learn everything needed to get the job done.

So it seems like we all got off the main road, and started looking for shibboleths.

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

#340

Post by andai »

shinycode wrote: post #337
XenophileJKO wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The truth is that the tools are actually quite good already. If you know what you are doing they will 10-20x your productivity. Ultimately not adopting them will religate you to the same fate as assembly programmers. Sure there are place for it, but you won't be able to get near as much functionally done in the same amount of time and there won't be as much demand for it.

Do you agree that the brain-memory activity of writing code and reading someone else’s code is totally different ? The sand castle analogy is still valid here because once you have a x10 productivity or worse a x20 one, there is no way you can deeply understand the things the same way than if you wrote it from scratch. Without spending a considerable amount of time and getting productivity down, the understanding is…

I write at 1x speed and I can't even understand my own code the next day.
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