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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

#371

Post by bluepizza »

tel wrote: post #368
bluepizza wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's probably a matter of domain, but most backend engineers who are working in Java/Golang/Python/Ruby systems have very little use of those, and they don't come up easily. Frontend (web or mobile), it comes up even less. Can you tell me how this knowledge makes one a serious programmer? In which moments of the development lifecycle they are crucial?

Without judgement, this feels like a switch up. It seems to me that the prior author did not suggest they were necessary, but instead ambient, available, and interesting. Indeed for many they are not useful. At the same time, that might be a good indication of passion: a useless but foundational thing you learn despite having zero economic pressure to do so. In the domains you have worked on, what are examples of suc…

It is not a switch up. The author said that an engineer would find these during their journey, and I am asking when. I don't have a strongly held opinion here, I literally want to know when. I am curious about it.

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

#372

Post by dragon-hn »

GeoAtreides wrote: post #301
dragon-hn wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an unfortunate attitude. The current state of things in our industry is a reflection of this “not my job” way of doing things.

We can call it job specialisation. I don't do project managing, I do coding. Not my business to coordinate everyone, my job is to write code.

My job is typically to deliver features that make the company money. The writing of code is just a part of that.

In my experience the people who solely focus on the code end up being significantly less effective.

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

#373

Post by Delk »

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…

My approach is typically to follow some kind of a guide or tutorial and to look into the man pages or other documentation for each tool as I go, to understand what the guide is suggesting.

That's how I handled things e.g. when I needed to resize a partition and a filesystem in a LVM setup. Similarly to your RAID example, doing that required using a bunch of tools on multiple levels of storage abstraction: GPT partitions, LUKS tools, LVM physical and logical volumes, file system tools. I was familiar with some of those but didn't remember the incantations by heart, and for others I needed to learn new tools or concepts.

I think I use a similar approach in programming when I'm getting into something I'm not quite familiar with. Stack Overflow answers and tutorials help give the outline of a possible solution. But if I don't understand some of the details, such as what a particular function does, I google them, preferring to get the details either from official documentation or from otherwise credible-sounding accounts.

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

#374

Post by dasil003 »

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.

I think you’re probably right, though I fear what it will mean for software quality. The transition from assembly to high level languages was about making it easier to both write and to understand code. AI really just accelerates writing with no advancement in legibility.

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

#375

Post by serallak »

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.

Somebody said: "God was able to create the world in 6 days because he didn't have an installed base."

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

#376

Post by Wytwwww »

matrix2003 wrote: post #182
trashtester wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I did ML at insurance companies and got branded as an insurance ML guy. If you're an "ML insurance guy" outside of the US, it may be quite lucrative compared to other developers. It's really only in the US (and maybe China) that pure developers are demanding $200k+ salaries. In most places in Europe, even $100k is considered a high salary, and if you can provide value directly to the business, it will add a lot to…

> In most places in Europe, even $100k is considered a high salary I think it's worth adding here that US developers can have a much higher burden for things like health insurance. My child broke his arm this year, and we hit our very high deductible. I would like to see numbers factoring in things like public transportation, health insurance, etc., because I personally feel like EU vs US developers are a lot closer…

> I would like to see numbers factoring in things like public transportation, health insurance, etc

If that's worth more than $50k or so anyone living in the US that's not making significantly more than the median wage or would be in pretty horrible spot financially.

> hit our very high deductible.

Isn't the maximum deductible that's allowed "only" $16k?

Also taxes are usually significantly higher in Europe with some exceptions (e.g. Switzerland vs California, though you need to pay for your health insurance yourself in Switzerland ).

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

#377

Post by rednafi »

wokwokwok wrote: post #234
simonw wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Hm… I think it’s fair to say that as a learning tool, when you are not familiar with the domain, coding assistants are the extremely valuable for everyone . I wrote a kotlin idea plugin in a day; I’ve never used kotlin before and the jetbrains ui framework is a dogs breakfast of obscure edge cases. I had no skills in this area, so I could happily lean into the assistance provided to get the job done. And it got done.…

What you’re describing is the manifestation of Gell-Mann Amnesia in the AI space.

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

#378

Post by finikytou »

lrem wrote: post #312
matrix2003 wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In most places in Europe, even $100k is considered a high salary I think it's worth adding here that US developers can have a much higher burden for things like health insurance. My child broke his arm this year, and we hit our very high deductible. I would like to see numbers factoring in things like public transportation, health insurance, etc., because I personally feel like EU vs US developers are a lot closer…

It’s not really about the numbers. My pile of money at retirement would definitely be larger if I moved across the pond. But here my children walk themselves to school from the age of six. I don’t worry about them getting killed by a madman. And even the homeless get healthcare, including functional mental health support. Things no employer can offer in the US.

Im in western europe and I would never let my children walk themselves to school at 6. europe is far from being a safe place minus some eastern europe.

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

#379

Post by Viliam1234 »

crystal_revenge wrote: post #356
bluepizza wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yeah, that sounds like someone claiming to be passionate about math, but who never heard of prime numbers. It's not that prime numbers are important for literally everything in math (although coincidentally they also happen to be important for cryptography), it's just that it's practically impossible to have high-school knowledge of math without hearing about them.

What other elementary topics are considered too nerdy by the cool people in IT today? Binary numbers, pixels...? What are the cool kids passionate about these days? Buzzwords, networking, social networks...?

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

#380

Post by BadHumans »

usrnm wrote: post #370
bluepizza wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's probably a matter of domain, but most backend engineers who are working in Java/Golang/Python/Ruby systems have very little use of those, and they don't come up easily. Frontend (web or mobile), it comes up even less. Can you tell me how this knowledge makes one a serious programmer? In which moments of the development lifecycle they are crucial?

You're talking past one another. The whole point of being interested and passionate about a topic is that you want to learn stuff regardless of whether or not it's useful

I can be interested in front-end development and learn everything there is to know about templating while never knowing about bitwise operators. Point is domains are so large that even if you go beyond what is required and learn for the sake of curiosity, you can still not touch what others may consider fundamental.
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