"Numbers of completed tasks" might not be the best metric to use here.
No two tasks are the same level of complexity and one task may take 5x longer than another to complete.
Effects of Gen AI on High Skilled Work: Experiments with Software Developers
501–510 of 532 posts
Re: Effects of Gen AI on High Skilled Work: Experiments with Software Developers
#502Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I said:
> someone who has "curiosity, passion, focus, creative problem solving" regarding programming
would find this on their journey. Whereas you are describing someone who merely views programming as a job.
It's perfectly fine to view programming as "just work" but that's not passion. All of the truly great engineers I've worked with are obsessed with programming and comp sci topics in general. They study things in the evening for fun.
It's clear that you don't, and again, that's fine, but that's not what we're talking about.
Software for you is a job. I work in software because it's an excuse to get paid to do what I love doing. In the shadow of the dotcom bust most engineers where like this, and, they were more technical and show more expertise than most software engineers do today.
Re: Effects of Gen AI on High Skilled Work: Experiments with Software Developers
#503Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 might be an indication for passion, but not knowing them does not indicate lack of it. The thing is there are unfathomable amount of such things to learn, and if somebody doesn't stumble upon them or won't spend time with them it doesn't indicate lack of it.
I'm sorry but bitwise operators are the most fundamental aspect of how computing works. If you don't understand these things it does indicate a lack of passion, at least in regards to programming and computation.
Bitwise operators are not a particularly complex topic and extend from the basics of how logic is implement in a computer system.
Personally I think ever one interested in programming should have, at least once, implemented a compiler (or at least interpreter). But a compiler is a substantial amount of work, so I understand that not everyone can have this opportunity. But understanding bitwise operators is requires a minimal investment of time and is essentially to really understanding the basics of computing.
Re: Effects of Gen AI on High Skilled Work: Experiments with Software Developers
#504Earlier 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…
Slightly off topic, but there's currently work underway to introduce queue like semantics to Kafka interestingly enough - https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/KAFKA/KIP-932%3A...
Re: Effects of Gen AI on High Skilled Work: Experiments with Software Developers
#505Probably similar results as pair programming.
Re: Effects of Gen AI on High Skilled Work: Experiments with Software Developers
#506Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
There’s that, sure. But that’s also because everyone is way too happy to add another new system to the pile. Large enterprises generally have only so many business functions. I can get to about 100 necessary systems before feeling like they’re redundant. And all these people have been given fodder by the microservices revolution.
> Large enterprises generally have only so many business functions.
Well, no, the difference in quantity of business functions can be enormous due to duplication. A small business will have an accounting business function, but a large business may have 57 separate accounting business functions due to having operations in different countries, having subsidiaries and mergers&acquisitions (possible multiple concurrently ongoing ones) where you will merge accountings (multiple!) from the new acquisition into yours, but it has not yet happened.
Re: Effects of Gen AI on High Skilled Work: Experiments with Software Developers
#507I 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…
Anyone that says they are the “devsecops” person is doing it wrong. Companies should still hire for all three roles they just collaborate together. Someone sold that company a mountain of lies
Re: Effects of Gen AI on High Skilled Work: Experiments with Software Developers
#508Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’m in group 3 for sure. The hardest part of any job I’ve had is doing the not so fun parts (meetings, keeping up with emails, solidly finishing work before moving on to something new)
You're on the nominally right Web site. #1 is engineers, #2 is cancer, and #3 is hackers (possibly also engineers). :)
The problem being that interviews are often more likely to favor 2 over 1.
Re: Effects of Gen AI on High Skilled Work: Experiments with Software Developers
#509Earlier 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. PMs love them though. Is this a bad thing? Maybe I'm misunderstanding it, but even when I'm working on my own projects, I'm usually trying to solve a problem, and the technology is a means to an end to solving that problem (delivering). I care that it works, and is maintainable, I don't…
Caring that it works and is maintainable is caring about the technology.
No code solutions are often superior.
Around 15 years ago we were shipping terabyte hard disks as it was faster than the internet (until one got stuck in customs)
Re: Effects of Gen AI on High Skilled Work: Experiments with Software Developers
#510I 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…
Code quality is the hardest thing to measure. Seems like they were measuring commits, pull-requests, builds, and build success rate. This sort of gets at that, but is probably inadequate. The few attempts I've made at using genAI to make large-scale changes to code have been failures, and left me in the dark about the changes that were made in ways that were not helpful. I needed suggestions to be in much smaller chu…
WTFs per minute is the standard way of measuring code quality. Lower being better.