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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

#351

Post by kragen »

jcgrillo wrote: post #211
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…

In a similar vein, some days I feel like a human link generator into e.g. postgres or kafka documentation. When docs are that clear, refined, and just damn good but it seems like nobody is willing to actually read them closely enough to "get it" it's just a very depressing and demotivating experience. If I could never again have to explain what a transaction isolation level is or why calling kafka a "queue" makes no…

last night someone told me about objdump -S. i wish i'd known about this many years ago; it would have saved me so much work

in my defense, though, it's possible the option didn't exist when i first read the objdump manual

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

#352

Post by iLoveOncall »

michaelteter wrote: post #350

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…

It saved you 2-3 months over a 5 months period?

Unless one is an absolutely terrible developer working on incredibly simple problems, this is simply impossible.

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

#353

Post by iLoveOncall »

JackMorgan wrote: post #296
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'…

For myself it's an incredible tool for learning. I learn both broader and deeper using chat tools. If anything it gives me a great "sounding board" for exploring a subject and finding additional resources. E.g last night I setup my first Linux raid. A task that isn't too hard, but following a tutorial or just "reading the docs" isn't particularly helpful given it takes a few different tools (mount, umount, fstab, blk…

Okay but this is not programming, more about an enhanced tutorial. This isn't at all what the original commenter is talking about.

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

#354

Post by manmal »

JackMorgan wrote: post #296
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'…

For myself it's an incredible tool for learning. I learn both broader and deeper using chat tools. If anything it gives me a great "sounding board" for exploring a subject and finding additional resources. E.g last night I setup my first Linux raid. A task that isn't too hard, but following a tutorial or just "reading the docs" isn't particularly helpful given it takes a few different tools (mount, umount, fstab, blk…

You’ve given two examples for “broad”, but none for “deep”. I’ve also used LLMs for setting up my homelab, and they were really helpful since I was basically at beginner level in most linux admin topics (still am). But trying to eg setup automatic snapshot replications for my zfs pool had me go back to reading blog posts, as ChatGPT just couldn’t provide a solution that worked for me.

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

#355

Post by sevensor »

SoftTalker wrote: post #270
sevensor wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny, my world is full of the other kind of engineer. We all come with domain knowledge built in, and programming is the complex domain many people don’t want to learn.

I've worked in higher ed. Many of the masters students I see want the credential but they have no desire to write code. Copying and plagarism are rampant.

Which is short sighted, because if they’re on the other side of the interview table from me it takes about 60 seconds to find them out. Competence speaks a different language than fraud.

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

#356

Post by crystal_revenge »

bluepizza wrote: post #339
crystal_revenge wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 engine…

I have a hard time imagining someone who has "curiosity, passion, focus, creative problem solving" regarding programming and yet hasn't stumbled upon bitwise operators (and then immediately found them interesting). They're pretty fundamental to the craft.

I can see having to refresh on various bit shifting techniques for fast multiplication etc (though any serous program should at least be aware of this), but XOR is fundamental to even knowing the basics of cryptography. Bitwise AND, NOT, and OR are certainly something every serious programmer should have a very solid understanding of no?

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

#357

Post by ThinkBeat »

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…

I think this is a valid and important point.

You can categorize get people who are average at several things devOps. But you will not get someone with a deep background and understanding in all the fields at the same time.

I come from a back end background. and I appalled at how little the devOps I have worked with know about even SQL.

Having teams with people who are experts at different things will give a lot better output. It will be more expensive.

Most devOps I have met, with a couple of exceptions, are front end devs who knows a couple of Javascript, knows Javascript and Typescript. When it comes to the back-end it is getting everything possible form npm and stringing it together.

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

#358

Post by krosaen »

bluepizza wrote: post #339
crystal_revenge wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 engine…

Yegge no longer thinks knowing these kinds of details matter so much, can’t find the exact timestamp but it relates to the skills shifting to being really good at prompting and quickly learning what is relevant

https://youtu.be/dTVXTo6Umfg?si=bBBwSutb6ned7o-X

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

#359

Post by Retric »

sgt101 wrote: post #324
TeMPOraL wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is happening across the board, not just to IT workers, and I suspect it's the major factor as for why the expected productivity improvements from technology didn't materialize. Think of your "DevSecOps" people doing 3x the work they should. Do you know what else are they doing? Booking their own business travels. Reconciling and reporting their own expenses. Reporting their own hours, broken down by business cat…

And yet we are told that competition will determine that capital and talent will flow towards that most efficient organisations over time. Thus, surely organisations that eschewed this practice would emerge and dominate? So, either capitalism doesn't work, or your thesis isn't quite right... I have two other counters to offer, first we have seen GDP per capita gradually increasing in major economies for the last 50 y…

> And yet we are told that competition will determine that capital and talent will flow towards that most efficient organisations over time. Thus, surely organisations that eschewed this practice would emerge and dominate?

That’s really not how competition works in practice. Verizon and AT&T are a mess internally but their competitors where worse.

GDP per capita has a lot more to do with automation than individual worker productivity. Software ate the world, but it didn’t need to be great software to be better than no software.

At large banks you often find thousands of largely redundant systems from past mergers all chugging along at the same time. Meanwhile economies of scale still favor the larger bank because smaller banks have more systems per customer.

So sure you’re working with more complex systems, but how much of that complexity is actually inherently beneficial and how much is legacy of suboptimal solutions? HTML and JavaScript are unbelievably terrible in just about every way except ubiquity thus tools / familiarity. When we talk about how efficient things are, it’s not on some absolute scale it’s all about the tools built to cope with what’s going on.

AI may legitimately be the only way programmers in 2070 deal with ever more layers of crap.

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