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I'm OK being left behind, thanks

shkspr.mobi

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Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#311

Post by fatata123 »

theptip wrote: post #294
stiiv wrote: post #33

> If this tech is as amazing as you say it is, I'll be able to pick it up and become productive on a timescale of my choosing not yours. Broadly speaking, I think this is a wise assessment. There are opportunities for productivity gains right now, but it I don't think it's a knockout for anyone using the tech, and I think that onboarding might be challenging for some people in the tech's current state. It is safe to…

Ok, here is the risk of being left behind - if we have moderately fast take-off, the 1-2 years required to upskill in AI might mean you find yourself unemployable when your role gets axed. I don’t think folks are taking seriously the possible worlds at the P(0.25) tail of likelihood. You do not get to pick up this stuff “on a timescale of my choosing”, in the worlds where the capability exponential keeps going for an…

[dead]

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#312

Post by diehunde »

augusto-moura wrote: post #164
stiiv wrote: post #33

> If this tech is as amazing as you say it is, I'll be able to pick it up and become productive on a timescale of my choosing not yours. Broadly speaking, I think this is a wise assessment. There are opportunities for productivity gains right now, but it I don't think it's a knockout for anyone using the tech, and I think that onboarding might be challenging for some people in the tech's current state. It is safe to…

What I get a bit annoyed is companies forcing AI tools, getting usage metrics and actively hunting the engineers that don't use the tool "enough", I've never seen anything like it for a technically optional tool. Even in the past, aside from technical limitaions, you were not required to use enough of a tool. It just sounds like a giant scheme to burn through tokens and give money to the AI corps, and tech directors…

As an employee of a big tech company doing this, it's all fear mongering. We are being told that if everyone doesn't use these tools, our competitors will wipe the floor with us because they are using them and will ship features 10x faster. But many engineers are suspicious as well.

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#313

Post by nclin_ »

hsaliak wrote: post #213

My experience so far tells me that the default path with AI tooling is that it lets us create without learning. So the author is right in that they can pay for a seat in this revolution whenever they want. A practitioner with more experience maybe a few percentage points more productive, but the median - grab subscription, get tool, prompt, will be mostly good enough.

I think this is true at the solo developer scale, but I suspect experience will be much more evident when working with a team.

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#314

Post by keiferski »

LeonidasXIV wrote: post #282
keiferski wrote: post #56

I actually think the opposite approach might be the most optimal one, at least from a monetary perspective. That is, be on the cutting-edge of something, but be willing to bail out at the moment its future starts seeming questionable. Or even more specifically, maximize your foothold in it while minimizing your downside. Bitcoin is a good example: if you bought it 15 years ago and held it, you're probably quite wealt…

If you bought into NFTs when they were hot you would have lost money. Not every new tech is worth investing immediately.

When they were hot is not when they were new.

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#315

Post by RobinL »

For me, it's beyond doubt these tools are an essential skill in any SWE's toolkit. By which I mean, knowing their capabilities, how they're valuable and when to use them (and when not to).

As with any other skill, if you can't do something, it can be frustrating to peers. I don't want collegeues wasting time doing things that are automatable.

I'm not suggesting anyone should be cranking out 10k LOC in a week with these tools, but if you haven't yet done things like sent one in an agentic loop to produce a minimal reprex of a bug, or pin down a performance regression by testing code on different branches, then you could potentially be hampering the productivity of the team. These are examples of things where I now have a higher expectation of precision because it's so much easier to do more thorough analysis automatically.

There's always caveats, but I think the point stands that people generally like working with other people who are working as productively as possible.

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#316

Post by jedberg »

It's more about job seeking than anything. If you jump on a fad early, and it turns out to be the winner, when you're looking for work you can say you have X years of experience with it, which will be a few more than most of the other candidates.

It also shows a passion for learning and improvement, something hiring managers are often looking for signals of.

But of course it's a trade off. This rewards people who don't have family or other obligations, who have time to learn all the new fads so they can be early on the winners.

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#317

Post by [deleted] »

irishcoffee wrote: post #252
jghn wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A friend told me about bitcoin in early 2010, back when the coins were effectively free. I laughed at the idea and called it stupid. I still think it's stupid, but I'd be a whole lot richer if I went along with it at the time!

I distinctly remember staring at my check/bank/debit card laying on the desk in front of my keyboard, all the info punched in to buy $500 of bitcoin for something like $0.29 a coin. Didn't pull the trigger. I just tell myself I'd have sold them when they doubled in price or they'd have been hacked in one of the mt. gox attacks and I'd have lost them anyways. Today it would be about 120m. Oh well.

[deleted]

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#319

Post by rurp »

HolyLampshade wrote: post #268
augusto-moura wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I get a bit annoyed is companies forcing AI tools, getting usage metrics and actively hunting the engineers that don't use the tool "enough", I've never seen anything like it for a technically optional tool. Even in the past, aside from technical limitaions, you were not required to use enough of a tool. It just sounds like a giant scheme to burn through tokens and give money to the AI corps, and tech directors…

> I've never seen anything like it for a technically optional tool Cloud had a very similar vibe when it was really running advertising to CIO/CTOs hard. Everything had to be jammed into the cloud, even if it made absolutely no sense for it to be run there. This seems to come pretty frequently from visionless tech execs. They need to justify their existence to their boss, and thus try to show how innovative and/or co…

I agree with you but man the absurdity of aggressively pushing cloud or AI adoption as a cost cutting move is off the charts.

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#320

Post by garyfirestorm »

stiiv wrote: post #33

> If this tech is as amazing as you say it is, I'll be able to pick it up and become productive on a timescale of my choosing not yours. Broadly speaking, I think this is a wise assessment. There are opportunities for productivity gains right now, but it I don't think it's a knockout for anyone using the tech, and I think that onboarding might be challenging for some people in the tech's current state. It is safe to…

Counter point. It’s always advantageous to learn and grow as things evolve. This way you have an active role and maybe a say in how it will evolve. And maybe you could contribute towards that evolution (despite poor execution openclaw showed what LLMs could be doing)

> There are a 16,000 new lives being born every hour. They're all starting with a fairly blank slate.

Not long ago we were ridiculing genZ for not knowing why save icon looks like a floppy disk.

Do you want to feel like that in next 5-10 years?

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