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I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed

jamesdrandall.com

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Re: I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed

#591

Post by danparsonson »

nunez wrote: post #505
raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My job for the last 8 years has involved Talking to sales to get an idea what the customer wanted from the business side (first B2B at a product company and now consulting) -> talking to the customer and hashing out more detailed requirements -> designing the architecture and a proposed technical plan -> presenting it to the stakeholder (sometime internal sometime external) -> doing the work or delegating and leading…

Look, there are at least dozens of us who like and enjoy programming for programming's sake and got into this crazy industry because of that. Many of these people made many of the countless things we take for granted every day (networking, operating systems, web search; hell, even the transformer architecture before they got productized!). Seeing software development --- and software engineering by proxy --- get redu…

> Look, there are at least dozens of us who like and enjoy programming for programming's sake and got into this crazy industry because of that.

You and me both, and I truly sympathise, but really we were just lucky that we could enjoy our passion at work.

> It's even more depressing to see folks on HACKER news boost the "programming never mattered" mentality that's taken hold these last few years.

Delivering stuff to customers for money is always what we've been paid for; that's not new, it's just that perhaps many of us didn't really pay much mind to that in the past. That's perhaps why there's traditionally been so much complaining about artificial deadlines and managers and sales teams; many of us also didn't really notice that the programming was never the thing that our employers cared about; it is just a link in a long chain from idea to income.

The way I'm looking at our current situation is this: I spent my whole career and much of my free time learning to become a great furniture maker, and I take a lot of pleasure producing functional and elegant items. Now someone has handed me some power tools. I can mourn the loss of care and love that goes into hand-crafting something, but I can also learn to use the tools to crank out the good-enough cabinets that my employer wants me to make, focussing on the more abstract elements of the craft and doing less of the laborious stuff. I think I can still take pleasure and pride in my work in this way, and personally I find the design aspect of software development to be a lot of fun. I can still hand-craft things sometimes too; there will no doubt always be important difficult parts of a project that would take as long to describe to an LLM as they would to write by hand, at least for those of us with sufficient experience of the latter.

I can also, hopefully, finally knock out some of those side projects that I have had on my list for many years but never had time to make. I would prefer that those things existed in a less than perfect state, than that they were perfect but only in my head :-)

Re: I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed

#592

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

carefree-bob wrote: post #581
raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #555

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They would know when you are two or three times slower producing code because you insist on having your own handcrafted, bespoke artisanal code that doesn’t meet the requirements any better than Claude could do.

Two to three times faster? Has productivity doubled or tripled? Stuff shipping in 1/3 the time? I'm not aware of this - which company is now shipping features twice as fast? AI can produce greenfield code faster, sure, but you spend more time debugging it. If you write the code, it's slower to get the first version out, but then you understand the code and can debug much faster going forward. You can also use AI to w…

It’s copium to think that LLM code is more buggy than your median to slightly above median developer or that’s all that most companies need - median developers.

And debugging code is also easier with AI. Just today I had to revisit code that I personally wrote from the design, the implementation the refactoring, etc from the first git init and I couldn’t remember half the decisions I made. I launched Codex and started asking it questions about the code.

Where is the productivity gain? How many junior developers and mid level ticket takers are struggling to find a job now because the market is saturated and those true seniors who can operate at a larger scope and impact can do the work themselves without having to delegate

My personal anecdote is that I had four offers within 3 weeks after being Amazoned in late 2023. One was from the company that acquired the startup I left in 2020 where I would have been responsible for leading the integration between all of the companies they acquired [1] and the other was a former coworker who was now a director st a well known non tech F500 company. He wanted me to lead the migration and “modernization “ efforts. I decided to stick with consulting.

Those offers didn’t come because of my coding abilities. That’s a commodity.

I was looking again in 2024. It took one outreach and talking to the right people. Absolutely no one asked me the first thing about coding even though I do it maybe 60%-70% of the time.

Going way back to 2016, I had two offers - one interview was me doing a merge sort on the whiteboard the other interview was me talking about strategy with the then new director who needed to build up a software development team. He asked me about my experience. He didn’t mske me stand up and do some algorithmic test on the whiteboard. He treated me like an industry professional

[1] I did the whole “lead integration efforts by a company owned by private equity acquiring other companies” thing before I joined the startup - never again.

Re: I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed

#593

Post by marcus_holmes »

lelanthran wrote: post #570
iqp wrote: post #564

Earlier quoted context omitted.

^ This. People bemoan the death of coding, but easily 80%+ of the code I've written commercially was just CRUD or ETL shite. I've done a few interesting things (a formula parser, a WYSWIG survey builder for signature pads, a navigation controller for line-guided industrial vehicles, etc.) but yeah, don't miss writing reams of boilerplate. I always tried to take a Kent Beck inspired Smalltalk/TDD inspired approach to…

> I always tried to take a Kent Beck inspired Smalltalk/TDD inspired approach to the code I wrote and took pride in my work, but ultimately you're working in a shitty corporate environment where none of your colleagues cares because they're burning at both ends, the management only does lip service to Quality, and Deadlines and the Bottom Line are Everything. LLMs are a multiplier. If this depressed you, then there i…

It's not that none of my colleagues care, or that management is necessarily bad. That doesn't help, but it's not the cause.

It's the nature of the job. A CRUD REST server needs to be built. It's a shitty job, but someone has to do it. The interesting part of the job is over there, in whatever actually-novel part of the system is being built. But someone still has to build the CRUD REST server. There are frameworks and patterns that help, but not as much as you'd think, or they claim.

It's just part of the job. By far the largest and least interesting part of the job.

Re: I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed

#594

Post by pjmlp »

gitlinuxgreat wrote: post #464
_aavaa_ wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you state “in 6 months AI will not require that much knowledge to be effective” every year and it hasn’t happened yet then every time it has been stated has been false up to this point I think that this has been true, though maybe not quiet a strongly as strongly worded as your quote says it. The original statement was "Maybe GP is right that at first only skilled developers can wield them to full effect, but it…

Using a LLM to program is simply another abstraction level. Just how C was to assembly.

Fortran to Assembly.

Re: I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed

#595

Post by pjmlp »

qingcharles wrote: post #368
bigstrat2003 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you were a smart dev before AI, chances are you will remain a smart dev with AI. I don't think that's what people are upset about, or at least it's not for me. For me it's that writing code is really enjoyable, and delegating it to AI is hell on earth.

AIs have made me realize that I don't actually care about writing code, even though it's all I've done for my entire career. I care about creating stuff. How it gets from the idea in my brain to running on the computer, is immaterial to me. I really like that I go from idea to reality in half the time.

Thing with factories, is that only like 25% of the original employees are left to take care of the belt, and remaining actions not covered by the robots.

Everyone is hoping to be part of those 25%.

Re: I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed

#596

Post by rhubarbtree »

aabajian wrote: post #127

It seems AI is putting senior developers into two camps. Both groups relate to the statement, "I started programming when I was seven because a machine did exactly what I told it to, felt like something I could explore and ultimately know, and that felt like magic. I’m fifty now, and the magic is different, and I’m learning to sit with that." The difference is that the first camp is re-experiencing that feeling of wo…

I feel positive about it. I always want my code to be perfect, and now I can get much closer to that. I can review and nitpick the hell out of it and get it to fix things. I can spend time on elegance and architecture.

I am concerned though that the younger crowd will churn out slop and we’ll race to the bottom. Already i notice software qualify tanking - even Anthopic’s products are super buggy - kinda like going to mass produced cheap consumer products that are much lower quality than their predecessors. Yes, you can choose quality, but most humans are intellectually incapable of seeing beyond price (that’s a psychological fact, not a moan - don’t have references to hand though).

It is weird to see the end of my profession and to be the unlucky ones to suffer it. The answer is to absolutely engage with AI in every way. For some the answer is also to become expert in building it, analogous to machine tool work in the Industrial Revolution.

So long as the amount of software output rises accordingly, we will still have jobs. But we need to reskill.

Re: I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed

#597

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

lelanthran wrote: post #590
raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #576

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess the entire thing is I like building working systems . I love talking to business folks, I love when I can do that “git init”. I love that new AWS account smell and molding a complete architecture. Now I can do a lot more if it by myself. It was a time problem before - not a knowledge problem What has made me valuable for 30 years is an ability to go from business goal -> to working implementation. They can pa…

> What has made me valuable for 30 years is an ability to go from business goal -> to working implementation. Look, it seems we are at about the same level of industry experience. I'm not even a f/time programmer anymore, and haven't been for some time (technically, I'm a professional problem solver, I suppose). I am saying that, while I don't need to delve into details (unless it's a hobby project), what makes me va…

I hate to sound like a broken record. But I consider my skillset at 51 all of the things I said that involve getting from signed contract to happy customer at the end. I’m actually slowly working on moving even further up and becoming halfway competent at pre-sales.

You cdn substitute customer for “the business”.

When you step back “the code” is the smallest part. Once I learned how to take a holistic view of the entire system - I specialize in AWS architecture + app dev - including how to deal with people.

In enterprise dev - no one cares about the code - they care about functionality. They never cared about the code. In large tech companies they have to care about the code.

Re: I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed

#598

Post by plastic-enjoyer »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #92
sho_hn wrote: post #14

My advice to everyone feeling existential vertigo over these tools is to remain confident and trust in yourself. If you were a smart dev before AI, chances are you will remain a smart dev with AI. My experience so far is that to a first approximation, the quality of the code/software generated with AI corresponds to the quality of the developer using the AI tool surprisingly well. An inexperienced, bad dev will still…

> If you were a smart dev before AI, chances are you will remain a smart dev with AI. I don't think that's what people are upset about, or at least it's not for me. For me it's that writing code is really enjoyable, and delegating it to AI is hell on earth.

> I don't think that's what people are upset about, or at least it's not for me. For me it's that writing code is really enjoyable, and delegating it to AI is hell on earth.

Maybe this is the reason why I don't care that much about coding agents or have a strong opinion about them, because code was only a means to an end for me. What I enjoy is to learn about and understand systems and designing those systems, whether it's computers, operating systems or software architectures. I never did enjoy just hacking away or writing CRUD stuff.

Re: I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed

#599

Post by lelanthran »

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #597
lelanthran wrote: post #590

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What has made me valuable for 30 years is an ability to go from business goal -> to working implementation. Look, it seems we are at about the same level of industry experience. I'm not even a f/time programmer anymore, and haven't been for some time (technically, I'm a professional problem solver, I suppose). I am saying that, while I don't need to delve into details (unless it's a hobby project), what makes me va…

I hate to sound like a broken record. But I consider my skillset at 51 all of the things I said that involve getting from signed contract to happy customer at the end. I’m actually slowly working on moving even further up and becoming halfway competent at pre-sales. You cdn substitute customer for “the business”. When you step back “the code” is the smallest part. Once I learned how to take a holistic view of the ent…

> When you step back “the code” is the smallest part.

For me, the coding part is not even small, it's non-existent!

I still feel that the coding skills I have make me much more valuable.

Re: I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed

#600

Post by aryehof »

abustamam wrote: post #553
dzonga wrote: post #508

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you also have bozo managers like my recent one measuring metrics like PR time open, review count while the team hasn't shipped anything useful in 6 months.

Honest question — why don't managers like this get fired? My team wants us to ship fast. If I don't ship for a month I'm probably gonna lose my job, and rightly so. If a whole team is spinning its wheels at the behest of its manager I feel like the manager should get axed.

Because the managers of those managers don't know the difference.
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