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Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine

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Re: Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine

#461

Post by mrob »

bjornsing wrote: post #379
noodles_nomore wrote: post #54

An average programmer's main job is to track down and fix bugs that shouldn't exist inside software that shouldn't exist build on frameworks that shouldn't exist for companies that shouldn't exist solving problems that shouldn't exist in industry niches that shouldn't exist. I'm 100% convinced that, if someone comes along and creates something that actually obsoletes 95% of programming jobs, everyone would very quick…

I’m leaning in this direction too. I saw someone on Twitter phrase it quite well: “You can believe that most jobs are bullshit [jobs]. And you can believe that GPT-4 will completely disrupt the job market. But you can’t believe both.”

Bullshit jobs exist because upper management can't know exactly what everybody in the company is doing, which leaves opportunities for middle management to advance their own interests at the expense of the company as a whole. Upper management might suspect jobs are bullshit, but it's risky for them to fire people because the job might actually be important.

But upper management can know exactly what LLMs are capable of, because they are products with fixed capabilities. ChatGPT is the same ChatGPT for everybody. This makes firing obsolete workers much safer.

Re: Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine

#462

Post by cowl »

oh_sigh wrote: post #404
cowl wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes but even in that case The role will be of a "AI Prompter", it will not be done by the managers because of the time factor. Even though AI can give you the result much faster, building upon it and testing/verifying, then coming up with the refined prompt is a time consuming thing. Only the Write part of the write/eval loop will be faster but not neccesarily easier. Especially the "debuging" part will be much harde…

Why would sufficiently advanced AI even need a prompter? The AI could play the role of the greatest prompter in the world, and ask the same questions to the end user that the human prompter would.

This is a misconception of how our industry works. Yes there are market resesearches with users but often those come after the problem space has been defined. Most of you see in the tech sector today are "Created Needs" by imagining a solution that the users didn't even know they needed. To ask a question you first need to define a problem that is defined by that/those questions. This is the difficult part and the main reason why People still believe "the Idea is the most important factor". Ofcourse this is not true, there are hundreds of factors that come into play. Imagine an AI asking circa 2000 to the users what kind of virtual social space did they need. The answer would not have been Facebook. (There were other social networks before Facebook but the time was not right for the "Social" explosion). By learning on existing solutions, The AI would have learned it's lesson that global virtual Social networking is not something that the users want. And part of this problem was as much sociological/psychological and outside of the realm of what the AI could consider that we would not have what we have today.

Not that we would have missed much from missing the particular implementation of this idea that Facebook gave us but the idea and what it unleashed is much more than that particular implementation.

Re: Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine

#463

Post by lordnacho »

carlmr wrote: post #29

Looking back we had one CS professor who in 2007 predicted we'd all be jobless in ten years, i.e. 2017. His prediction was based on the trends he was seeing at the time. But it wasn't even AI. Instead he made this prediction because he saw the rise of no-code tools replacing software developers because managers could finally cut out the pesky "translators", i.e. software developers. I said it then and I will say it n…

Watching the Ukraine war gave me some related thoughts.

You may have seen that there's now a load of drones flying around, doing things that were never possible until now. Dropping bombs on soldiers in trenches, giving support for assaults, targeting artillery.

The fact is war changes with technology. Spearmen and cavalry are obsolete now. Maybe pilots will be soon as well.

But the generals are not. There's always a need for someone to say "given the position we're in, and the logistics we have, and the resources we have, and what we know about the enemy, we should do this..." and this role is still recognizable through history.

Whether computer jobs become obsolete depends on whether you're closer to the general end or the footsoldier end.

Re: Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine

#464

Post by _-____-_ »

jmfldn wrote: post #40

Carmack has a point, we should focus on the problem we're solving and the value we're delivering. It can be hard for programmers to get this sometimes, but it will make you much better at your job now, it's not just about future-proofing. That said, I love technology and delivering it through code, so I would struggle on a personal level in this future unless there were interesting technical roles left to do. I have…

I'm not sure "product person" was the right choice of words for what Carmack is trying to say. It seems to me that the distinction he's drawing between managers and programmers is one of precise communication skills. The most talented programmers (and the best product managers - which is maybe what he was getting at) are talented because of their ability to communicate precisely - currently, that means communicating between stakeholders and computers. In the future, it will mean communicating precisely between stakeholders and AI tools. But the fundamental demand for people with a knack for precise communication is not going anywhere.

Re: Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine

#465

Post by asah »

First off, there's a lot of people shooting off their mouths - ignore anyone who hasn't used ChatGPT extensively: it takes some training to learn to use it.

Several senior developer friends have been using ChatGPT quite a bit and it seems to work well in lots of places: - isolated algorithms and fiddly bits - it writes complex SQL statements in seconds, for example. LLMs should makes quick work of fussy config files. - finding, diagnosing and fixing bugs (just paste the code and error message - really!) - unit tests and examples - comments and documentation

Professional developers will recognize that we're talking 50-90% of the LABOR-HOURS that go into software development, and therefore fewer developers to get the same work done. Sure, we just do more - but then we quickly hit other speed limits, where coding isn't the problem. I can see layoffs among the bottom-N% of developers, while more sophisticated developers add LLMs to their toolbox and use this productivity to justify their high $/hour.

I see AI writing code that casual human readers don't really understand, but this is OK because the AI includes comments -- just like developers do for each other today.

Re: Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine

#466

Post by ivan_gammel »

AI can make some jobs obsolete. This was a promise of no-code tools too, but they failed, because they were tools, not solutions. I've seen plenty of startups doing the same thing again and again: building conversion funnel, setting up some basic app where customers can register and receive some service. Outside of their USP, the jobs to be done for end users are in the 99% of cases the same. In 2023 this should have not required any engineering or even advanced configuration effort, yet there it is. We see lots of CMS, CRM and other half-baked or too enterprise-focused systems which deliver a tool rather than a solution to the end user problem. And a tool needs an operator for it. Startup founders should not need a dedicated person in a performance marketing team to launch some basic campaign on Facebook or in Google, get and convert website visitors etc. It must be a content problem, not a technical problem to solve. But no-code simply sucks and we still hire people to set up GA, Zapier, Hubspot and Squarespace website. The barrier is still too high. Why? Good solution must guide and educate people on how to use the tools. It must offer reasonable defaults. It must suggest content. It must suggest operational processes optimized for the specific use case. It must cover that use case end-to-end, without requiring users to find out how to complete the remaining 10% of task (often a very big uncertainty).

All of this can and must be achieved with the help of AI. AI is THE missing component in no-code. What if CMS auto-filled SEO metadata based on the page content? What if CMS provided usability heuristics? What if CRM proactively suggested the email engagement campaign based on the funnel performance? What if all those tools detected their usage patterns and educated users on how to improve productivity and introduce best practices in their work?

We do not need engineers to build a login or user profile page, this is a very stupid way to spend the money. Yet there are plenty of them which still build login and user profile pages. They must loose their jobs. But AI creates a lot of opportunities for those, who want and have intellectual capability to work on more interesting tasks: just integrating AI and offering great UX is an enormous challenge for the next two or three decades. Even if some work becomes redundant soon, there's still enough to keep even the youngest generations of software developers busy until their retirement.

Re: Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine

#467

Post by coffeebeqn »

howderek wrote: post #392
eldritch_4ier wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All points the horses made before cars all but replaced them. “The humans need to get from A to B and it’s not like they’ve gotten any faster with their own 2 legs”. How does this manager-engineer look like now? Managers specify what they need in plain language, and both parties go back and forth with increasing complexity to create based on the shared vision. Managers can already pull off a similar dance with ChatGP…

The horse population has decreased by half or so since the early 1900s. And horses have stayed pretty valuable, too. Most of them just don't have to work as hard anymore. The horses used for sport never went away, only the horses used for labor or transport. So if your horse analogy is accurate, then maybe half of software engineers lose their jobs and the industry stops growing. Those that keep their jobs keep their…

Even the work horse breeds still exist and do work at some small farms but it’s probably 1% of the peak demand for them. Not a good outlook necessarily if we are the workhorses

Re: Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine

#469

Post by krsna »

jfvinueza wrote: post #394
joenot443 wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a pretty funny example because if you follow the DJ scene much, you know the barrier for entry is literally on the floor now. A 10 year old with an iPad app can beat-match and “DJ” a 2h mix together in a way that 20 years ago required thousands of dollars of gear. The tragic part is that unless someone’s got some familiarity with what “good” mixing sounds like, they wouldn’t be able to tell they’re listening…

The "technical" aspect of djing will never be as important as the sense of what song should go next, and there's no shortcut for that.

Truthfully, picking what song goes next feels like a job well suited for an AI, or even just a basic recommendation system based on up and down votes.

Of course there's a real time component to DJing as well. Paying attention to the crowd and how they're reacting to your mix. That's the magic that's harder to automate.

Re: Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine

#470

Post by coffeebeqn »

bakuninsbart wrote: post #118
carlmr wrote: post #29

Looking back we had one CS professor who in 2007 predicted we'd all be jobless in ten years, i.e. 2017. His prediction was based on the trends he was seeing at the time. But it wasn't even AI. Instead he made this prediction because he saw the rise of no-code tools replacing software developers because managers could finally cut out the pesky "translators", i.e. software developers. I said it then and I will say it n…

> In essence what has happened in software development is that the level of abstraction has gone up while the machine has taken over more and more of the nitty gritty details. From punchcards, to assembly, to COBOL, C, Perl, Java, Python, Erlang, Rust. I feel like there's currently a movement towards slightly lower abstraction, or at least simplified, consistent APIs, less magic. The rise of Go and Rust are examples…

Feels like a rediscovery of systems languages. I certainly love Go (and probably Rust once I look into it) because I almost never have the experience of searching and searching to find some concrete code rather than just layers and layers of interfaces.
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