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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

#471

Post by jmull »

pcthrowaway wrote: post #85
pharmakom wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2008 wasn’t so different was it? I guess the big new thing in work since then is the “gig economy”.

Well I'm in web dev (though I was studying CS in 2008) and the 2008 landscape had almost none of the same things. jQuery was not yet a household name, let alone SPAs. Facebook had barely 100 million users. Marc Andreessen yet hadn't written about "software eating the world". Personally I was more optimistic. If anything, the last 15 years have seen the growth of an attitude of tech "entitlement" because hackers got t…

Regarding 2008 vs 2023… how to view it probably depends on where you were in your career in 2008. To me 2008 -> 2023 looks like mostly shifting details.

SPAs certainly were a thing back then, it was just called AJAX. (Not to mention the desktop apps that were, architecturally, almost the same thing.) jQuery was a response to the popularity of putting interactivity in the browser, not a precursor.

The questions remain the same, not just from 2008, but going back a long ways… Where does the code live? How is it transformed to execute, where does it execute and how it is moved there? Where does the data live, how is it transformed and moved to where it needs to be displayed, and how are changes moved back? When some of the answers shift, due to changing network capabilities, processing capabilities of nodes, or scaling needs, it’s doesn’t really change the overall picture.

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

#472

Post by throwawaymaths »

I think the claim is correct, but not total: As in, "AI will make most CS jobs obsolete", but not "AI will make all CS jobs obsolete". Most, both in quantity and kind. You probably should be thinking hard in the next few months if 1) KIND: what you do will be needed and 2) QUANTITY: even if it is whether you're good enough at it to not be replaced by someone who is better than you (for some metric of better -- could be a social metric) and who is now empowered to be 2-5x more productive thus obviating the need for you.

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

#473

Post by krab »

mrits wrote: post #433
CSMastermind wrote: post #47

There's a weird phenomenon I've seen in a few domains of prideful ignorance. Backend engineers who proudly don't know how to write frontend code and vice versa. Professional engineers who refuse to learn how to use modern IDEs and monitoring platforms. People who don't know how to quickly prototype software as if building something without complete rigor is beneath them. People who refuse to learn or work in certain…

What is a modern IDE? It seems like the more recent trend has moved away from bloated IDEs and more to a bring your editor and own plugins environment. From my perspective IDEs lost and things are now closer to how Vim users have been coding for decades.

It doesn't seem so to me. With LSP, those editors, including Vim, can be very large and featureful.

A modern (or any) IDE, in my opinion, can debug your code, push parts of the editor into REPL (with debugging), understand code for things like autocomplete, linting, quick navigation and usage search. And yes, Vim can serve as a modern IDE if you spend enough time with it.

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

#474

Post by coffeebeqn »

carlmr wrote: post #272
qsort wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Are we sure that an AI could not engage in enough back and forth conversation to firm up the spec? This is the doomsday argument. What would I do if there's a nuclear apocalypse before lunch? I guess I'll die like everyone else. An AI sufficiently advanced to do that is also sufficiently advanced to run the entire business in the first place, and also argue cases in court, do my taxes, run for president and so on.…

>You either believe that transformers models are "it", or you haven't actually removed the problem of specifying requirements formally. Which, you know, is actually much harder to do in English than it is to do in C++ This is actually something that makes me happy about the new AI revolution. When my professor said that I thought he was an idiot, because no-code tools always make it harder to specify what you want wh…

I’ve used no code tools since the 90s and it just has a fatal flaw. For simple demo use cases it looks simple and cool. Then when you go to the real world and start getting pivots and edge cases you have to fix in the interface then it becomes a 4D nightmare and essentially a very bad programming language

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

#475

Post by elif »

Carmack is, of course, 100% correct. But so is the student.

As someone obsessed with nuts and bolts coding, grinding on technical problems and cleverly eeking out performance, that type of career is sunsetting.

The role Carmack describes is one he is comfortable with because he has always been a product lead, even when he was a full-time coder. But in most organizations, that person is a product manager with social and personal skills, organization, and business sense.

For the best part of my career I was able to circumvent these social aspects of work for which my personality does not suit, and my philosophical perspectives on things like "business value" could be brushed aside as I dug into technical weeds.

Not just because of AI, but because of the power of computing, one-size-fits-all cloud pricing, and the perceived value of organizational understanding over that of raw performance, there is little room left for 'this type' of programmer. And the remaining space is ripe for people whose personality are suited to project manager roles to become the 'coders' Carmack references, not people like me.

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

#476

Post by krsna »

The discussion here has me wondering whether code produced by an advanced AI would need to use the same coding patterns / abstractions that we've come up with over the past several decades.

If a human won't be maintaining the code and a v2 could literally be rewritten from scratch, would we end up with giant balls of spaghetti code that only the AI could truly understand? At some point will we treat this code like a closed source library that exposes the API we want but whose implementation is unknown to us?

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

#477

Post by kristofferR »

habibur wrote: post #367
RivieraKid wrote: post #283

Here's my current thinking on the impact of GPT-4 on the developer job market: - I expect developer productivity to go up 1.5x - 15x over the next several years assuming GTP-4 based tooling is integrated into IDEs. - There will be two opposing forces acting on developer wages. First, developers will be more productive, therefore the price of one hour of work should go up. But - the supply of developer output will inc…

> - I expect developer productivity to go up 1.5x - 15x over the next several years assuming GTP-4 based tooling is integrated into IDEs. Hardly. 10% of the time spent is in writing code and the other 90% goes behind debugging and fixing things. Even if AI shrinks the time spent in that 10% in writing by another 90%, you still have have to take full time for maintaining that code. Changing, debugging, testing, deploy…

ChatGPT is better at that 90% than the 10%.

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

#478

Post by pyuser583 »

Software might just be a tool, but it’s a tool we fall in move with.

I loved coding as a kid. It was so much fun.

As a grownup, I loved learning Linux.

I tolerated containers, dreaded Kubernetes, and am indifferent to AWS.

But is that initial love that sucks you in.

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

#479

Post by elif »

elif wrote: post #475

Carmack is, of course, 100% correct. But so is the student. As someone obsessed with nuts and bolts coding, grinding on technical problems and cleverly eeking out performance, that type of career is sunsetting. The role Carmack describes is one he is comfortable with because he has always been a product lead, even when he was a full-time coder. But in most organizations, that person is a product manager with social a…

I would posit the example of Carmack himself being unable (despite being IMO the greatest programmer of our generation and having all the resources and responsibility he wanted) at Meta, to make this kind of coding valuable for them.

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

#480

Post by anthomtb »

joenot443 wrote: post #340
Philip-J-Fry wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's more like telling a DJ in the 80s, "Don't worry that mixing vinyls won't be a thing forever. It's not about the tools but about the product, as a DJ your job is to mix good music and you can do that with vinyls, cassettes or with MP3s."

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…

Is anyone willing to hire a 10 year old with an iPad to DJ at their wedding?
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