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Now might be the best time to learn software development

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Re: Now might be the best time to learn software development

#311
post #252
post #131

In fact, in my opinion, one of the benefits of AI tools that is often overlooked is "psychological support". When you are stuck at work, it will give you a push. Even if it is not completely right, it is enough to get you moving. The feeling of "no longer fighting alone at work" is actually more important than many people think.

I'm always amazed that people feel anything when chatting with an AI bot. Don't people realize it's a machine "pretending" to be human?

Usually the feel part is the subconscius one that isn't swayed by knowing Like a phobia, its whole thing is being irrational, knowing it doesn't make sense doesn't diminish the feeling

Re: Now might be the best time to learn software development

#312
post #131

In fact, in my opinion, one of the benefits of AI tools that is often overlooked is "psychological support". When you are stuck at work, it will give you a push. Even if it is not completely right, it is enough to get you moving. The feeling of "no longer fighting alone at work" is actually more important than many people think.

To each his own. I'm completely drained after 30 min of "discussing" with an LLM, which is essentially an overconfident idiot. Pushes never come from the LLM, which can be easily seen by feeding the output of two LLMs into each other. The conversation collapses completely. Using Google while ignoring the obnoxious and often wrong LLM summaries at the top gives you access to the websites of real human experts, who oft…

I think a far more valuable tool than an LLM summarizer would be something where you can type up a prompt, and it brings you conversations or articles other humans have made about your exact kind of problem. Just the text, no websites to sift through.

Re: Now might be the best time to learn software development

#313
post #160
post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I asked my students to write a joke about AI. Sometimes humor is the best way to get people to talk about their fears without filters. One of them wrote: "I went to work early that day and noticed my monitor was on, and code was being written without anyone pressing any keys. Something had logged into my machine and was writting code. I ran to my boss and told him my computer had been hacked. He looked at me, concern…

Why do we assume that Prompt Engineering is going to pay less money? As usual, what one brings to the company is value, and if AI-generated code needs to be prompted first and reviewed later, I don’t see how prompters in the future could earn less than software engineers now. Prompt engineering is like singing: sure thing everyone can physically sing… now whether it’s pleasant listening to them is another topic.

The best paying jobs are ones that look inapproachable and are inapproachable. (even if that's for two entirely different reasons). Most people look at surgeons, for example, and go "I could never do that", and their jobs are, in fact, difficult and require lots of training, and the combination of those two factors primes people to be willing to give them a bunch of money. Jobs that look hard but are (compared to appearances) easy also tend to pay pretty well.

But jobs that look easy or approachable are in a much tighter spot. Regardless of how difficult they actually are, people are far less willing to give them large amounts of money. Pretty much all the more artistic jobs fall into this camp. Just because any idiot can open up Photoshop and start scribbling, it doesn't follow that competent graphic design is easy.

Right now, software development is incidentally in the "looks hard is hard" category, because the reason it "looks hard" is entirely divorced from the reason it is hard. Most of the non-tech population is under the obviously (to us) incorrect impression that the hard part of programming is understanding code. We know that that's silly, and that any competent programmer can pick up a new programming language in a trivial amount of time, but you still see lots of job postings looking for "Java Developers" or "Python Developers" as opposed to actual domain specific stuff because non-technical folk look at a thing they know is complicated (software development) see the first thing that they don't understand (source code) and assume that all the complexity in the space is tied up in that one thing. This is the same instinct that drives people to buy visual programming systems and argue that jargon needs to be stripped out of research papers.

The shift over to plain-language prompt engineering won't solve the underlying difficulty of software development (requirement discovery, abstract problem solving), but it does pose the threat of making it look easy. Which will make people less prone to giving us massive stacks of money to write the magic runes that make the golems obey their commands.

Re: Now might be the best time to learn software development

#315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To each his own. I'm completely drained after 30 min of "discussing" with an LLM, which is essentially an overconfident idiot. Pushes never come from the LLM, which can be easily seen by feeding the output of two LLMs into each other. The conversation collapses completely. Using Google while ignoring the obnoxious and often wrong LLM summaries at the top gives you access to the websites of real human experts, who oft…

If it's not overconfident, it's the opposite - they're too much of a "Yes man", which at the slightest whim will change their mind to fit your opinion, if they even detect you might have a different one. Then they'll change their mind to their original answer when you tell them "I wasn't disagreeing with you". Honestly, it's amusing, but draining at the same time.

I've had a couple of times where Gemini straight up tells me "Absolutely not, ..." and the explains how my assumptions are wrong and eventually leads me to find the right answer.

It's surprisingly good at reading my entire code, reading my assumptions of the code, and explaining what I'm getting wrong and how to fix it.

Re: Now might be the best time to learn software development

#316
post #293

Having experienced several overhyped corporate knee-jerk (and further press-amplified) silver bullets, I expect this will play out about as well as the previous ones. And by that, I mean corps will make poor decisions that will be negative for thought workers while never really threatening executive compensation. I see this latest one somewhat like TFA author: this is a HUGE opportunity for intelligent, motivated bui…

> If our jobs are at risk now or have already been lost, then we might as well take this time to make some of the things we have thought about making before but were too busy to do (or too fatigued). Do what you think is best of course, but is a very bad recommendation for those who have lost their jobs and are unlikely to find another in software any time soon (if ever). I said a few years ago when people were still…

True warning, but there are a few moments in recent history when bootstrapped startups have an edge. Circa 1997-2002 (when I first came up) and, I would argue, now.

During the rise of the net, there were unexplored green fields everywhere. You could make easy bank from ads. You didn't need an office or a factory to start a company (which was more or less a requirement previously). So the idea of a bootstrapped startup was new, but seemed somewhat obvious if you were paying attention.

Now? Everyone has LLMs and can see a bit into the future. Lots of these companies will bubble up and either fold or get acquired. A few will unicorn. But the key point remains: if you are unemployed or have some time and build something functional on this new stack, your value as an employee will be much higher in the future.

Don't sacrifice what you can't, but I think there may be a softer landing for failed AI founders in the near future.

Re: Now might be the best time to learn software development

#317
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're joking but it's true. I'm sure you know that. SQL had similar claims... Declarative, say what you need and the computer will do for you. Also written in English.

I'd long ago (1990s-era) heard that the original intent was that office secretaries would write their own SQL queries. (I'd love for someone to substantiate or debunk this for me.)

It kinda came true. "Office secretaries" became PMs/junior analysts/etc and those people generally know basic SQL nowadays

Re: Now might be the best time to learn software development

#318

Hi all - I write a lot for myself but typically don't share, hence the stream-of-consciousness style. But I thought this might be worth blogifying just for the sake of adding some counter-narrative to the doomerism I see a lot regarding the value of software developers. Feel free to tear it apart :)

I thought this was great writing, I assumed you are some long time development blogger. I hope you post more.

Re: Now might be the best time to learn software development

#319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not saying it won't turn around, but its been about 2-3 years.

If it’s been 3 years, then I’m pretty sure it’s not AI-coding driven.

Copilot has been around that long.

Re: Now might be the best time to learn software development

#320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People aren't paid by value brought to companies, they're paid by the scarcity of their skill. Your analog is actually perfect for this. There's a reason saying you want to be a professional singer is generally something only a child would say. It's about as reliable a career as winning the lottery, simply because everybody can sing, lots of them quite decently. And so singer, as a career, mostly isn't a thing - it's…

…unless the value created via prompt engineering is high enough to cause companies to rationally demand even more prompt engineers. The size of the pie is nowhere near fixed, IMO. There are many things which would be valuable to program/automate, but are simply unaffordable to address with traditional software engineering at the current cost per unit of functionality. If AI can create a significant increase in produc…

Again it's not about value, but solely supply vs demand. If there was somehow only one person who could do janitorial work in a city, that'd be one rich janitor.

For a more realistic example - the software side at many companies essentially is the company. They bring products all the way from inception to launch. Yet they tend to get paid less, often much less, than the legal side. The reason is simply that the labor pool for lawyers is much smaller than for software engineers.

If there's not significant barriers to entry for prompt engineering, wages will naturally be low.

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