Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I don't care how well your "AI" works

fokus.cool

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 808 posts

Re: I don't care how well your "AI" works

#171

Post by RHSeeger »

embedding-shape wrote: post #67
m_a_g wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm getting paid more than ever for a job I feel like I almost shouldn't get paid for (I'm just having fun) In my Big Tech job, I sometimes forget that some people can really enjoy what they do. It seems like you're in a fortunate position of both high pay and high enjoyment. Congratulations! Out of curiosity, what do you work on?

Right now I'm doing consulting for two companies, maybe a couple of hours per week, mostly having downtime and trying to expand on my machine learning knowledge. But in general, every job I've had has been "high pay and high enjoyment" even when I initially had "shit pay" compared to other programmers, and the product wasn't really fun, I was still programming, an activity I still love. Compare this to the jobs I did…

Mental exhaustion is a thing, too.

Re: I don't care how well your "AI" works

#173

Post by marbro »

IAmBroom wrote: post #134
raincole wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because tech corps overhired[0] when the interest rate was low. Even after the layoffs, most big tech corps still have more employees today than they did in 2020. The situation is bad, but the lesson to learn here is that a country should handle a pandemic better than "lowering interest rate to near-zero and increasing government spending." It's just kicking and snowballing the problem to the next four years. [0]: ht…

I think it was more sandbagging than snowballing. The pain was spread out, and mostly delayed, which kept the economy moving despite everything. Remember that most of the economy is actually hidden from the stock market, its most visible metric. Over half the business is privately-owned small businesses, and at the local level forcibly shutting down all but essential-service shops was devastating. Without government…

[dead]

Re: I don't care how well your "AI" works

#174

Post by Mountain_Skies »

embedding-shape wrote: post #20

> And yeah, I get it. We programmers are currently living through the devaluation of our craft, in a way and rate we never anticipated possible. I'm a programmer, been coding professionally for 10 something years, and coding for myself longer than that. What are they talking about? What is this "devaluation"? I'm getting paid more than ever for a job I feel like I almost shouldn't get paid for (I'm just having fun),…

Your complete lack of empathy is going to be your undoing. Might want to check in on that.

Re: I don't care how well your "AI" works

#175

Post by bgwalter »

The increasingly rough tone against "AI" critics in the comments and the preposterous talking points ("you are not a senior developer if you do not get value from 'AI'") is an indication that the bubble will burst soon.

It is the tool obsessed people who treat everything like a computer game that like "AI" for software engineering. Most of them have never written anything substantial themselves and only know the Jira workflow for small and insignificant tickets.

Re: I don't care how well your "AI" works

#176

Post by RHSeeger »

embedding-shape wrote: post #42
kalaksi wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> programmers should be some of the most worry-free individuals on this planet, the job is easy, well-paid, not a lot of health drawbacks... I don't know what kind of work you do but this depends a lot on what kind of projects you work on

Across ~10 jobs or so, mostly as a employee of 5-100 person companies, sometimes as a consultant, sometimes as a freelancer, but always with a comfy paycheck compared to any other career, and never as taxing (mental and physical) as the physical labor I did before I was a programmer, and that some of my peers are still doing. Of course, there is always exceptions, like programmers who need to hike to volcanos to setu…

> never as taxing (mental and physical) as the physical labor I did before I was a programmer

I find it... very strange that you think software development is less mentally taxing than physical labor.

Re: I don't care how well your "AI" works

#177

Post by CuriouslyC »

danaris wrote: post #145
grumbel wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is just not happening anywhere around me. Don't worry about where AI is today, worry about where it will be in 5-10 years. AI is brand new bleeding edge technology right now, and adaption always takes time, especially when the integration with IDEs and such is even more bleeding edge than the underlying AI systems themselves. And speaking about the future, I wouldn't just worry about it replacing the programme…

> Don't worry about where AI is today, worry about where it will be in 5-10 years. And where will it be in 5-10 years? Because right now, the trajectory looks like "right about where it is today, with maybe some better integrations". Yes, LLMs experienced a period of explosive growth over the past 5-8 years or so. But then they hit diminishing returns , and they hit them hard. Right now, it looks like a veritable pla…

Right about where it is today with better integrations?

One year is the difference between Sonnet 3.5 and Opus 4.5. We're not hitting diminishing returns yet (mostly because of exponential capex scaling, but still). We're already committed to ~3 years of the current trajectory, which means we can expect similar performance boosts year over year.

The key to keep in mind is that LLMs are a giant bag of capabilities, and just because we hit diminishing returns on one capability, that doesn't say much if anything about your ability to scale other capabilities.

Re: I don't care how well your "AI" works

#179

Post by RHSeeger »

embedding-shape wrote: post #124
Xenoamorphous wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the US seems to struggle with that specific point as of late, yet it remains true in the rest of the world Are you sure about that?

No, I'm just pulling anecdotes out of my ass/am hallucinating. Is there something specific you'd like to point me to, besides just replying with a soundbite?

Admittedly, there's the responses in this thread with people saying "I'm in and the market here is bad, too".

Re: I don't care how well your "AI" works

#180

Post by i_love_retros »

embedding-shape wrote: post #20

> And yeah, I get it. We programmers are currently living through the devaluation of our craft, in a way and rate we never anticipated possible. I'm a programmer, been coding professionally for 10 something years, and coding for myself longer than that. What are they talking about? What is this "devaluation"? I'm getting paid more than ever for a job I feel like I almost shouldn't get paid for (I'm just having fun),…

> I'm getting paid more than ever for a job I feel like I almost shouldn't get paid for (I'm just having fun), and programmers should be some of the most worry-free individuals on this planet, the job is easy

Eh?

I'm happy for you (and envious), because that is not my experience. The job is hard. Agile's constant fortnightly deadlines, a complete lack of respect by the rest of the stakeholders for the work developers do (even more so now because "ai can do that"), changing requirements but an expectation to welcome changing requirements because that is agile, incredibly egotistical assholes that seem to gravitate to engineering manager roles, and a job market that's been dead for a few years now.

No doubt some will comment and say that if I think my job is hard I should compare it to a coal miner in the 1940's. True, but as Neil Young sang: "Though my problems are meaningless, that don't make them go away."

Post reply on HN