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Coding Jobs and GPT-4

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Coding Jobs and GPT-4

#21

Post by 908B64B197 »

stuckinhell wrote: post #13

Yes it absolutely decimate demand for junior coders. My firm has basically frozen hiring, and all existing devs are expected to boost their productivity using one of the all the various AI's or get fired. We expect the economy to get way worse as de-dollarization seems to be looming on the horizon, and preparing now.

> Yes it absolutely decimate demand for junior coders. My firm has basically frozen hiring

What pipelines were you recruiting from?

I see AI decimating "become an engineer in 10 weeks bootcamp" types of coders, but proper engineers? The demand is still exceptionally strong, especially now that Twitter and Meta released a lot of talent on the market at the same time.

> We expect the economy to get way worse as de-dollarization seems to be looming on the horizon, and preparing now.

Economists and computer scientists confirmed it: The de-dollarization will happen the same year as the year of the Linux desktop!

Re: Coding Jobs and GPT-4

#23

Post by carapace »

The correct way (I think) to think of these talking computers is as the third great User Interface paradigm:

    I    CLI
    II   GUI
    III  Human language
Computer programming just isn't that hard. (I maintain that if you can solve a Sudoku puzzle you can program a computer.) The market for programmers was based on people being unwilling to learn CLI or GUI interfaces but this consideration doesn't affect Linguistic UI systems because, of course, people learn to talk automatically as children.

Ergo, I suspect that not only will GPT et. al. drastically reduce demand for coders, it will reduce demand for e.g. computer languages, frameworks, stacks, etc. What I mean is that questions like "which programming language to use?" will become obsolete.

Re: Coding Jobs and GPT-4

#24

Post by furyofantares »

Who knows what will happen with GPT5, but speculating about just GPT4 I think there might be a little initial reduction/reshuffling but it will then increase demand for coders substantially. Just like all previous coding productivity gains have.

The reason is fairly simple - software isn't done eating the world.

Make it easier and cheaper to write software and two things happen 1) more problems are worth solving with software and 2) all existing software must improve or get eaten by a competitor who uses productivity gains to improve.

Re: Coding Jobs and GPT-4

#26

Post by 908B64B197 »

zh3 wrote: post #12

As a 'professional coder', I've been very much pondering - and experimentinng - with how best to use AI coding tools. For big, complex, programs I work on (multiple C programs up to 100k LoC) it's hard to frame a question in such a way that it doesn't need to know details of the codebase. For peripheral stuff it's pretty useful as a quick way to get some cut'n'paste code ('write me code to read the load average on li…

> For peripheral stuff it's pretty useful as a quick way to get some cut'n'paste code ('write me code to read the load average on linux and log it to a file every second' - I know exactly how to do that, but it's a faster typer).

For public APIs that might be the killer feature; a better way to look at doc (or rather, rely less on doc) if it can look at different code bases and find snippets of code using a popular API.

Re: Coding Jobs and GPT-4

#27

Post by pubby »

furyofantares wrote: post #24

Who knows what will happen with GPT5, but speculating about just GPT4 I think there might be a little initial reduction/reshuffling but it will then increase demand for coders substantially. Just like all previous coding productivity gains have. The reason is fairly simple - software isn't done eating the world. Make it easier and cheaper to write software and two things happen 1) more problems are worth solving with…

That's a good point. Reminds me of Jevon's Paradox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

Re: Coding Jobs and GPT-4

#28

Post by mwcampbell »

mike_hearn wrote: post #11

A few thoughts based on my experience with GPT4 so far. 1. For now, not by much. It will make us more productive but the world is not short of projects with endless backlogs so huge nobody can ever drain them. Maybe some of those tickets are low value or obsolete, but a lot of them represent real bugs or ideas for improvement that the cost of software development makes prohibitive to reach. 2. It may change the natur…

> So - programmers who just want to play code golf, be ready for that to become more of a hobby than a job. But for programmers who always wished they had more hours in the day to get through all their ideas, it will enable them to create a lot more value and that value will in turn create demand for yet more value-add on top of that. So it should be a virtuous circle, in theory.

But to me, this also implies a vicious circle of yet more crappy, barely-good-enough, bloated, inefficient software. I wish this wasn't the case. I recognize the upside; more real-world problems will be solved. But we really need to do something about the excesses that lead to things like the old (Electron-based) Microsoft Teams.

Re: Coding Jobs and GPT-4

#29

Post by zh3 »

908B64B197 wrote: post #26
zh3 wrote: post #12

As a 'professional coder', I've been very much pondering - and experimentinng - with how best to use AI coding tools. For big, complex, programs I work on (multiple C programs up to 100k LoC) it's hard to frame a question in such a way that it doesn't need to know details of the codebase. For peripheral stuff it's pretty useful as a quick way to get some cut'n'paste code ('write me code to read the load average on li…

> For peripheral stuff it's pretty useful as a quick way to get some cut'n'paste code ('write me code to read the load average on linux and log it to a file every second' - I know exactly how to do that, but it's a faster typer). For public APIs that might be the killer feature; a better way to look at doc (or rather, rely less on doc) if it can look at different code bases and find snippets of code using a popular A…

Yes, could well be you've hit it there (i.e. stackoverflow has had its day).

Re: Coding Jobs and GPT-4

#30

Post by mattbrewsbytes »

No. GPT outputs text, it does not think, it can't negotiate trade-offs of solutions, it cannot communicate with stakeholders about risks or technical issues of current implementations, it may not understand the context of future/other work other people are doing, etc. An analogy that might work (apologies if this is off base): GPT might output helpful text for a grant you may be writing but I assume there is a whole set of many other activities like proposing the project, schmoozing the Dean (is that a thing?, lol), managing funding, materials, running experiments, etc. for scientific work than the act of typing up a grant proposal.

Coding (physically typing a solution) is a small percentage of a professional software engineer's time. Tools already exist to generate code, to find answers (stack overflow), etc. GPT will be another tool to help developers but much like stack overflow answers, you have to do some diverse research to make sure you're not getting BS or tangential but useless information. GPT can be confidently and completely wrong.

Then there are the legality concerns of sending Intellectual Property to a giant void that may output that IP to other parties. Its not a concern of mine, personally, but its a concern for the legal entity (aka corporation) that employs me.

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