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I quit. The clankers won

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Re: I quit. The clankers won

#191

Post by dspillett »

tasuki wrote: post #134
Supermancho wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've worked for 35ish companies (contract and fulltime), largely on the west coast of the US. I have experienced the lip service, from the vast majority. I have experienced maybe 2 or 3 earnest attempts at growing engineer skills through subsidized admission/travel to talks, tools, or invited instructors.

> I've worked for 35ish companies It seems they were correct not to invest in your skills. I've worked for six companies over almost 20 years. The majority invested in my skills, and I hope that investment has paid off for them!

I've worked for five companies, on the same products (well, variations there-of over time), for 25 years, due to take-overs (I nearly left ~10 years ago due to management numskullery, but a timely buy-out of the bit I worked for fixed my problems while the rest of the company died off).

Hanging around for a while (a long while) doesn't necessarily mean dedication worth investing in, it could just be that I have a shocking lack of ambition :)

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#192

Post by coldtea »

colechristensen wrote: post #118
qsera wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I got to do my hobby as a career for the past 15 years, but that’s ending. Frankly I don't think so. The AI using LLMs is the perpetual motion mechanism scam of our time. But it is cloaked in unimaginable complexity, and thus it is the perfect scam. But even the most elaborately hidden power source in a perpetual motion machine cannot fool nature and should come to a complete stop as it runs out.

This is silly. I can build products in a weekend that would take me a year by myself. I am still necessary 1% of the time for debug, design, and direction and those of not at all a shallow skill. I have some graduate algebra texts on the way my math friend is guiding me through because I have found a publishable result and need to shore up my background before writing the paper... It's not perpetual motion, it's very…

>This is silly. I can build products in a weekend that would take me a year by myself

Is the world any better for them existing? The decline of coding and sw engineering skills in humans from outsourcing the practice of it to AI is it worth it and sustainable long term?

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#193

Post by haspok »

ramon156 wrote: post #32
bitmasher9 wrote: post #8

Picking out my favorite idea out of many: we do need ways to stay mentally sharp in the age of AI. Writing and publishing is a good one. I also recommend stimulating human conversations and long-form reading. More and more the bar is being lowered. Don’t fall to brain rot. Don’t quite quit. Stay active and engaged, and you’ll begin to stand out among your peers.

I can confidently say that, yes, reading helps a lot. My mental model has shifted a bit that words are cheap (printing -> writing -> typing -> generating) and that we should accept there is something like high quality text. I haven't really been a reader, but I can definitely notice when a book/text is "hard". I'm currently reading the old testament, and I understand very little (even the oxford one that has a lot of…

I tried reading Proust's In Search Of Lost Time some time ago, in which the first 10-20 pages are about a guy lying in his bed at night and observing his own thoughts (roughly). And I quickly realised how I was reading the words and even sentences, but couldn't grasp the meaning of them - I couldn't produce a "mental model" or image of what it was about. It was a very humbling experience.

I used to be an avid reader as a child, even as a teenager. That was a long time ago. I'm looking forward to that time when I will have the mental capacity to read long prose again.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#194

Post by btreecat »

keybored wrote: post #15
btreecat wrote: post #7

"No AI" right above a robot voice playback button. Mixed messages fr Hot take, folks packing it in because of AI probably were not difference makers before AI, and wouldn't be difference makers after it either. I agree with the author, keep writing. It helps hone your ability to communicate effectively which we all need for some time to come (at least until we become batteries).

What does a synthesized audio playback button have to do with AI as commonly and hotly discussed?

> sythansized audio playback

Thats generated audio. It may not be LLM generated but it's not read by a human.

To draw an arbitrary line between _this kind_ of generated content but not _that kind_ is seemingly a matter of perspective and preferences.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#195

Post by jasomill »

simonw wrote: post #55
Waterluvian wrote: post #44

Improving developer skills is not valuable to your company. They don't tell a customer how many person-hours of engineering talent improvement their contract is responsible for. They just want a solved problem. Some companies comprehend how short-sighted this is and invest in professional development in one way or another. They want better engineers so that their operations run better. It's an investment and arguably…

> Improving developer skills is not valuable to your company Every company I've ever worked at has genuinely believed in and invested in improving developer skills.

Given the rest of the paragraph, I believe the parent is trying to say that merely improving developer skills is not valuable to the company, not that improving developer skills cannot provide value in terms of improved work product, morale, retention, etc.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#196

Post by coldtea »

qsera wrote: post #165
_aavaa_ wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would the capabilities drop instead of stagnate?

Because technologies, programming languages, best practices, won't stay frozen. If LLMs cannot catch up with it, I think it can be considered as a drop in capability. No?

Close, but no. What will happen is that "technologies, programming languages, best practices" will stay frozen because human innovation will drop, and the whole field will stagnate.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#197

Post by gruntbuggly »

zzzeek wrote: post #37

rants about AI from people who have already decided up front to never actually attempt to use the tools (which seems to be the case here from the post and the other one it links) are not really providing any value to the discourse. There is nothing new about using machinery to automate boring / repetitive tasks, including the wall of resistance that comes up. But it should be clear that genuinely useful tooling and a…

We're starting to rethink what an over reliance on plow based tilling has done for soil health. The point being that technologies are tradeoffs and it's helpful to understand the tradeoffs we are making.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#198

Post by jmmv »

catlifeonmars wrote: post #117
Waterluvian wrote: post #44

Improving developer skills is not valuable to your company. They don't tell a customer how many person-hours of engineering talent improvement their contract is responsible for. They just want a solved problem. Some companies comprehend how short-sighted this is and invest in professional development in one way or another. They want better engineers so that their operations run better. It's an investment and arguably…

Maybe I’m just getting extremely lucky, but I don’t use AI to code at work and I’m still keeping up with my peers who are all Clauded up. I do a lot of green field network appliance design and implementation and have not felt really felt the pressure in that space. I do use Claude code at home maybe a couple hours a week, mostly for code base exploration. Still haven’t figured out how to fully vibe code: the generate…

> the generated code just annoys me and the agents are too chatty

I’ve eyerolled way less with Codex CLI and the GPT models than with Claude.

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