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The rise of judgement over technical skill

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Re: The rise of judgement over technical skill

#11

Post by MangoToupe »

monero-xmr wrote: post #9

Nothing stopped anyone from hiring 10 to 100 offshore devs for every American software dev for the last 20 years. Yet Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and so on paid top dollar for the Americans. And American business still pays top dollar. Even more than before. The judgement was always the problem. If the issue was bodies in seats the problem was already solved. The #1 cause of layoffs in America is offshoring caused by…

> Pop music is mostly not about music quality - hits are always passable - but about celebrity.

Interesting and bold statement. How do you distinguish the two?

Re: The rise of judgement over technical skill

#12

Post by kusokurae »

Fr3dd1 wrote: post #10

Today, if someone uses LLMs for code generation, he/she will probably question the generated code and will put his own judgement above it. I am curious how fast that will change, especially for juniors. When will they start to question their own judgement and just go with the generated code becuase its "more safe"?

At present, when juniors do this at my company, they usually get fired within the month. The onboarding docs now explicitly state that though code review is a joint-responsibility process, you as the submitter are responsible for understanding it, ensuring it all works, and being aware of the broader scope and consequences. Maybe many companies have placed more responsibility on the reviewier to catch problems in the past?

Re: The rise of judgement over technical skill

#13

Post by roenxi »

Human judgement is like a house built on sand, it is basically provably feeble [0]. I've literally never in practice seen a human update their beliefs using Bayes' formula. I suspect we'll find that at some point fairly soon AIs will just have better judgement than us because they can be programmed to incorporate formal statistical concepts while humans have to rely on evolving grey goop which we haven't quite mastered. I imagine it'll be almost comical watching human experts going up against a system that can actually intuit the difference between a 60% and 70% chance of something happening in their risk calculations.

Humans will still have a role expressing preferences and subjective questions though. Questions like "how much risk do you want your investments to take?" or "does this look good?" ultimately can't be answered by AIs because they depend on the internal state of a human.

[0] See also, the academic field of psychology

Re: The rise of judgement over technical skill

#14

Post by kusokurae »

MangoToupe wrote: post #11
monero-xmr wrote: post #9

Nothing stopped anyone from hiring 10 to 100 offshore devs for every American software dev for the last 20 years. Yet Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and so on paid top dollar for the Americans. And American business still pays top dollar. Even more than before. The judgement was always the problem. If the issue was bodies in seats the problem was already solved. The #1 cause of layoffs in America is offshoring caused by…

> Pop music is mostly not about music quality - hits are always passable - but about celebrity. Interesting and bold statement. How do you distinguish the two?

Worth mentioning here that historically a lot of the famous pop hits have had plenty of interesting technical decisions typically only a mature composer would come up with. Weird short bars, time signature stuff, temporary key changes, weird jazz chords etc. You don't notice them because they're refined choices.

Re: The rise of judgement over technical skill

#15

Post by monero-xmr »

MangoToupe wrote: post #11
monero-xmr wrote: post #9

Nothing stopped anyone from hiring 10 to 100 offshore devs for every American software dev for the last 20 years. Yet Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and so on paid top dollar for the Americans. And American business still pays top dollar. Even more than before. The judgement was always the problem. If the issue was bodies in seats the problem was already solved. The #1 cause of layoffs in America is offshoring caused by…

> Pop music is mostly not about music quality - hits are always passable - but about celebrity. Interesting and bold statement. How do you distinguish the two?

Whatever schlock Taylor Swift manufactures next will be a global hit. Doesn’t matter the quality

Re: The rise of judgement over technical skill

#16

Post by CuriouslyC »

monero-xmr wrote: post #9

Nothing stopped anyone from hiring 10 to 100 offshore devs for every American software dev for the last 20 years. Yet Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and so on paid top dollar for the Americans. And American business still pays top dollar. Even more than before. The judgement was always the problem. If the issue was bodies in seats the problem was already solved. The #1 cause of layoffs in America is offshoring caused by…

The thing that stopped people from hiring 10-100 offshore devs per American dev lead/architect was communication primarily, with quality floor being an additional factor. Plenty of American companies have "hired 10-100 offshore devs" per American lead/architect, but they call it a foreign office, they solve the communication problem by having on-site managers that can serve as proxies, and they solve the quality floor problem by having the office in countries where the locals have strong expertise.

If AI can solve the communication and quality floor problems (it's pretty close), having 100 agents per dev lead/architect becomes perfectly viable.

Re: The rise of judgement over technical skill

#17

Post by bsder »

roenxi wrote: post #13

Human judgement is like a house built on sand, it is basically provably feeble [0]. I've literally never in practice seen a human update their beliefs using Bayes' formula. I suspect we'll find that at some point fairly soon AIs will just have better judgement than us because they can be programmed to incorporate formal statistical concepts while humans have to rely on evolving grey goop which we haven't quite master…

> I've literally never in practice seen a human update their beliefs using Bayes' formula.

Then you've never debugged anything genuinely difficult.

Moving from "Where did I screw up in my code?" to "Is this library broken?" to "Wait, that's not possible. Let's look at the compiler output on Godbolt." to "Are you kidding me? The SPI system returns garbage in the last bit for transactions of 8n+1 bits?" (BTW, Espressif, please fix that in the C6. Kthxbye.) is all about establishing ground truth and adjusting your Bayesian priors as you gather evidence.

Re: The rise of judgement over technical skill

#18

Post by gherkinnn »

ben30 wrote: post #6

This echoes my experience with Claude Code. The bottleneck isn't the code generation itself—it's two critical judgment tasks: 1. Problem decomposition: Taking a vague idea and breaking it down into well-defined, context-bounded issues that I can effectively communicate to the AI 2. Code review: Carefully evaluating the generated code to ensure it meets quality standards and integrates properly Both of these require d…

That matches my experience.

Decomposing a problem so that it is solvable with ease is what I enjoy most about programming and I am fine with no longer having to write as much code myself, but resent having to review so much more.

Now, how do we solve the problem of people blindly accepting what an LLM spat out based on a bad prompt. This applies universally [0] and is not a technological problem.

0 - https://www.theverge.com/policy/677373/lawyers-chatgpt-hallu...

Re: The rise of judgement over technical skill

#19

Post by 12112521312 »

bravesoul2 wrote: post #5

Does the technical skill give you better judgement though? Can a masterchef make better Star Trek replicator meals?

Yes, really good pianist often compose music that is interesting, that other composers don't make ( e.g. Listz, Alkan ).

In jazz, nothing can replace practicing your improv skills.

Re: The rise of judgement over technical skill

#20

Post by Fr3dd1 »

kusokurae wrote: post #12
Fr3dd1 wrote: post #10

Today, if someone uses LLMs for code generation, he/she will probably question the generated code and will put his own judgement above it. I am curious how fast that will change, especially for juniors. When will they start to question their own judgement and just go with the generated code becuase its "more safe"?

At present, when juniors do this at my company, they usually get fired within the month. The onboarding docs now explicitly state that though code review is a joint-responsibility process, you as the submitter are responsible for understanding it, ensuring it all works, and being aware of the broader scope and consequences. Maybe many companies have placed more responsibility on the reviewier to catch problems in the…

I would go a step further and dont let juniors use LLMs for code generation. The purpose and your role as a junior is to not only work but also to learn. When using genrated code, you miss a lot of opportunities to do so. Of course you could learn of some other methods or stuff from the frameworks you are using but imho thats not that big of an advantage.
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