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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

#341

Post by Aeolun »

makeitdouble wrote: post #314
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…

> One person can do the work of 3 and regularly does in startups. Startup architecture and a 500+ engineer org's architecture are fundamentally different. The job titles are the same, but wont reflect the actual work. Of course that's always been the case, and applies to the other jobs as well. What a "head of marketing" does at a 5 person startup has nothing to do with what the same titled person does at Amazon or C…

> Startup architecture and a 500+ engineer org's architecture are fundamentally different

Certainly. The startup architecture is often better. I don’t know what exactly leads to those overcomplicated enterprise things, but I suspect its a lack of limitations.

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

#343

Post by rakejake »

WalterBright wrote: post #311
Buttons840 wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think those who run companies are often stupid and incompetent, and the workers are probably right most of the time. Just look at the quote again, there's lots of things people don't know when they're starting a company. It would be nice if being smart and competent was the key to success in our society, but you hint at the real key to success in your own comment--getting favor and money from those who already have…

> I think those who run companies are often stupid and incompetent If you've never run a business, it can sure seem that way. > the real key to success in your own comment--getting favor and money Nobody is going to invest in your startup unless you convince them that you're capable of making money for them.

Not sure why this thread got consumed by a strawman that "Most people running businesses are stupid/incompetent". That is obviously not true.

What I have realized is that most employees never do even a basic analysis of their industry vertical, the key players and drivers etc. Even low-level employees who will never come face-to-face with customers can benefit from learning about their industry.

The flip side is that a lot of business people (I exclude people who start their own companies or actively take an interest in a vertical) are also mostly the same. They care about rising from low-level business/product role to a senior role, potentially C-suite role, and couldn't care less about how they make this happen. Many times, it is hard to measure a business person's impact (positive or negative) - think about Boeing. All their pains today were seeded more than 20 years ago with a series of bad moves but the then CEO walked off into the sunset with a pile of cash and a great reputation. OTOH, there was a great article yesterday on HN from Monica Harrington, one of the founders of Valve whose business decisions were crucial to Valve's initial success, but had to sell her stake in the company early on.

I think business, despite its outsize role in the success/failure of a company, follows the same power law of talent that most other professions carry. Most people are average, some really good, some real greedy etc.

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

#344

Post by Aeolun »

_w1tm wrote: post #338
IgorPartola wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Sure, everyone can learn, but what leads to mediocrity is a lack of desire to learn.

You can certainly structure your organisation around that and achieve great results. There’s no need for excellent tech to solve most problems. That’s ostensibly true for almost everything, because our society wouldn’t be able to survive if everything needed to be excellent.

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

#345

Post by badpun »

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…

In every team I've worked with, DevOps didn't do any of the development, while being called DevOps. The only thing they were developing were automation for build, tests and deployment. Other than that, they're still a separate role from development. The main difference between pre-devops days and now, is that operations people used to work in dedicated operations teams (that's still the case in some highly regulated places, e.g. banks), and now they work alongside developers.

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

#346

Post by badpun »

Aeolun wrote: post #341
makeitdouble wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> One person can do the work of 3 and regularly does in startups. Startup architecture and a 500+ engineer org's architecture are fundamentally different. The job titles are the same, but wont reflect the actual work. Of course that's always been the case, and applies to the other jobs as well. What a "head of marketing" does at a 5 person startup has nothing to do with what the same titled person does at Amazon or C…

> Startup architecture and a 500+ engineer org's architecture are fundamentally different Certainly. The startup architecture is often better. I don’t know what exactly leads to those overcomplicated enterprise things, but I suspect its a lack of limitations.

Large org architecture is, most importantly, just much larger. The bank I worked in had 6000 _systems_. A lot of that was redundancy due to a lot of mergers and acquisitions that didn't get cleaned up (because it was really hard to do). Compare that to your typical SaaS startup, which typically has at most a couple systems.

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

#347

Post by kragen »

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.

if you are seeing 900% productivity gains, why did these controlled experiments only find 28%, mostly among programmers who don't know what they're doing? and only 8–10% among programmers who did? do you have any hypotheses?

i suspect you are seeing 900% productivity gains on certain narrow tasks (like greenfield prototype-quality code using apis you aren't familiar with) and incorrectly extrapolating to programming as a whole

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

#348

Post by jillesvangurp »

29athrowaway wrote: post #61

The study doesn't cover the long term effects of using generative AI on a project, which is the deskilling of your workforce. Because development will become an auction-like activity where the one that accepts more suggestions wins.

I look at this very differently. There are a lot of grumpy people jealously guarding their "skills" and artisanal coding prowess getting really annoyed at the juniors that come in and devalue what they do by just asking an AI to do the same thing and then moving on with their day. Young people are more mentally agile and most young people are now growing up with LLMs as a tool chain that was always there.

I'm actually fairly senior (turning 50 next month) and I notice an effect that AI is having on my own productivity: I now take on mini projects that I used to delegate or avoid doing because they would take too much time or be too tedious. That's not the case anymore. The number of things I can use chat gpt for is gradually expanding. I notice that I'm skilling up a lot more rapidly as well.

This is great because if you want to stay relevant, you need to adapt to modern tools and technology. That's nothing new of course. Changes are a constant in our industry. And there always are a lot of people that learn some tricks when they are young and then never learn anything new again. If you are lucky some of that stuff stays relevant for a few decades. But mostly a lot of stuff gets unceremoniously dumped by younger generations.

The ability to use LLMs is becoming an important skill in itself and one that is now part of what I look for in candidates (including older ones). I don't have a lot of patience for people refusing to use tools that are available to them. Tell me how you use tools to your advantage; not how you have a tool aversion or are unwilling to learn new things.

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

#349

Post by PaulHoule »

WalterBright wrote: post #249
PaulHoule wrote: post #247

Earlier 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.

Not the best but something that seems impossible to the small town businessman.

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

#350

Post by michaelteter »

ChatGPT and to a lesser degree Copilot have been very valuable to me this year.

Copilot often saves me a lot of typing on a 1-3 line scope, occasionally surprising me with exactly what I was about to write on a 5-10 line scope. It’s really good during rearrangement and early refactoring (as you are building a new thing and changing your mind as you go about code organization).

ChatGPT, or “Jimmy” - as I like to call him - has been great for answering syntax questions, idiom questions, etc. when applying my general skills based on other languages to ones I’m less familiar with.

It has also been good for “discussing” architecture approaches to a problem with respect to a particular toolset.

With proper guidance and very clear prompting, I usually get highly value responses.

I would rough guess that these two tools have saved me 2-3 months of solo time this year - nay, since April.

One I get down in the deep details, I use Jimmy much less often. But when I hit something new, or something I long since forgot, he’s ready to be relative expert / knowledge base.

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