The impact likely begins in 2024 or 2025. I think a team of 5 may become a team of 2 or 3. In that sense, yes, I think it can have a very real impact to salaries and available opportunities.
Coding Jobs and GPT-4
31–40 of 58 posts
Re: Coding Jobs and GPT-4
#32GPT is good at boilerplate and is very bad at understanding and fleshing out complicated requirements, coming from N stakeholders with varying opinions and personalities. So I don't think GPT is a threat to human engineers in the "essential complexity" space.
Then, how much time do we collectively spend on boilerplate? Stackoverflow + the rich collection of open source libraries and frameworks have been doing a great job minimizing boilerplate for typical architectures. E.g., building a Flask app today vs building with Apache mod_perl in 2000 is like a >90% reduction in boilerplate.
So I don't think LLMs are much of a threat to engineers.
Re: Coding Jobs and GPT-4
#33[deleted]
Re: Coding Jobs and GPT-4
#34Prompt engineering will be interesting to follow for the quantity output. If one gets good at asking the right questions the system will provide you with better detail.
But that's on a technical level.
On the cognitive and reflective matter it will not be as interesting or job-overtaking.
Writing code is 1/6 of the job. The rest is communication, debugging and testing. That's not for GPT.
It has made me a better programmer on the technical level but that was the easy part :)
Re: Coding Jobs and GPT-4
#35Not for a while. They seem decent at generating scaffolding or algorithms, but like for any of the projects I've done recently, it's "figure out what this big piece of mangled code does, take some requirements or high-level idea that's not fully complete and probably has some contradictions, work with people to flesh those out, figure out a way to cram that in, which layer of the code it should be in, or which layers…
[dead]
Re: Coding Jobs and GPT-4
#36It will reduce the demand for sure.
- Faster learning, debugging, template code generation, optimizing, etc.
- Faster documentation, meeting notes, everything non-core things that engineer engage in.
It will also increase the opportunities. - Small companies and individuals will learn to be 10x more efficient. - Many, many newer business and side hustles will pop up in matter of days.
Re: Coding Jobs and GPT-4
#37Going a bit against the grain here I think but: I think tools like GPT-4 and beyond will increase the value of software engineers for companies as time goes on.
Folks building software can be more ambitious with the things they create, and it can become easier to plug in another software engineer to your team if tooling can make them more predictable in their output.
I see people here saying that increased efficiency is going to reduce their team's headcount which makes zero sense to me. I've never been on a team where there wasn't enough work to be done, it's usually a problem of too much work and needing to choose which is most important.
That being said, as someone who's been heavily using GPT-4 in their work and personal projects I feel like the gains are minimal. It's really great when I'm exploring an API I was unfamiliar with before, but for stuff I've been doing daily for years it's really not much help at all. Even places where ChatGPT shines, it takes some discernment to sift through the bullshit.
Re: Coding Jobs and GPT-4
#38Yes 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.
>de-dollarization
American social media has been surprisingly loud in their predictions about the total imminent collapse of the US dollar and economy since February 2022.
As a European I would like cheaper American products and services caused by a weakened US dollar. But I don't see it happening yet. The US dollar is still strong, American companies are still competitive, and the S&P500 is a lucrative ingredient in most European pension funds.
Re: Coding Jobs and GPT-4
#39Yes 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.
Where are future devs experienced with the company's code supposed to come from if not new hires?
Re: Coding Jobs and GPT-4
#40Yes 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.
while chatgpt and bing are useful, they absolutely do not replace the pipeline of jr devs one needs to someday have sr devs with deep domain knowledge. IMHO it's a great 'search' technology, but it shouldn't be taken for granted or assumed correct. Also, re de-dollarization. This pops up every 5 years or so when some autocratic regime gets tired of operating under the us dollar hegemony, but I don't see any other opt…
This time is definitely different because its the executives talking about seriously in way that's a first for me in my current role.