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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

#521

Post by CuriouslyC »

mdorazio wrote: post #441
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 think you have two common misconceptions here. 1) Wages have very little to do with value/productivity in a free market. They are almost entirely determined by supply and demand. Value simply places a ceiling on compensation. Thus, if far more people can perform a "programming" job because of GPT-X, unless the demand for those jobs rises significantly the net result will be wage reduction. 2) There's this weird thi…

The developer can prompt for a solution with specific storage/performance requirements by specifying an algorithm, and specific scalability requirements using by specifying an architecture. Imagine a business analyst prompting for an app, and getting a ruby on rails monolith with O(N^2) performance for the core behavior for a service that is expected to have millions of requests daily.

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

#522

Post by zshrdlu »

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…

Computers lack non-monotonic reasoningas of now, you mean :D

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

#523

Post by brookst »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #259
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…

> So exact in fact that they will need to specify a program in a click and drag interface, or in human language. This. I started programming in Machine Code, where the "editor" was a pad of graph paper. I've watched management- and business-focused people sneer at us geeks for my entire career, and watched them drool over the thought of finally getting rid of us. Hasn't happened yet. > I'd be surprised if the next st…

Tell me more about this cheese straightener… that sounds amazing. Where do I prepay?

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

#524

Post by rg111 »

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…

So, it won't replace all programming jobs, but many programming jobs?

Won't that create stronger competition for fewer roles?

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

#526

Post by karmasimida »

eldritch_4ier wrote: post #350
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…

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…

This is good thing. Managers can clarify their ideas using AI tools.

But still, the real product needs to be fleshed out, back and forth, interactively.

Regardless of whether it is the manager or engineer who commands the tool, you can't entrust the AI to get everything 100% right. Some one has to proofread it, and that is the bottleneck, or where the value of human kicks in.

A human brain can only hold that many details by itself. It can't maintain all the details live all at once, and some business do have overwhelming number of details. A one man team with help of infinite AIs to replace an actual team isn't useful.

At some point, that human will start to fail to verify the system generated by AI is actually what he/she wants.

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

#527

Post by _fat_santa »

asah wrote: post #465

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.…

Like you I found that ChatGPT is not really all that great at coding, but great when you ask it to do very specific grunt work. I'm working on a new database and one thing I found it super useful for is generating test data, I would just tell it: "here's the CREATE TABLE statement, create 50 rows of test data off of it, with all of these specifications: this has to be this, that can only be 1 or 2, yada yada yada.

> Professional developers will recognize that we're talking 50-90% of the LABOR-HOURS that go into software development,

I call it 'dumb coding'. You have a type of programming that requires you to really think, and then there's the type where you just need to write 200 lines of code but you know exactly what to write. If AI could pickup the slack on 'dumb coding' and let us think about 'smart coding', we would all be way way more efficent.

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

#528

Post by chiefalchemist »

Frost1x wrote: post #452
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the things that I'm fairly good at, is walking people from "Crazy Idea That Will Never Work," through to "Finished Product That People Want." It tends to be a very long process, and often involves a lot of "trial balloons." I just went through that, in the last couple of years. The project we're realizing, looks absolutely nothing at all like what the CEO originally dreamed up, but everyone that has seen it, l…

Most all problems I see are just resource limited in some respect (occasionally its something humanity just doesn't know how to do yet, that's where the edges of science are). It's not something brand new that's never been done or explored, some prior work typically exists. When someone says "can we..." or spills their idea they've often identified a real need but they often don't seem to do any sort of analysis furt…

When someone says "can we..." or spills their idea they've often identified a real need but they often don't seem to do any sort of analysis further than identifying a demand signal.

In my experience, they've identified a want. Either their want or a want they think the market has.

It's not until further analysis do they / you / we get to root need(s). This is why (allegedly) so many "IT projects" fail. The client got what they wanted...not what they needed.

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

#529

Post by osigurdson »

CS / tech has always been an unstable career choice and I expect this will continue. You might make $500K for portions of your career or you might end up making $50K or less - hard to say. People should not go into the field unless passionate about it.

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

#530

Post by CuriouslyC »

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #448
lucidlive wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Calling yourself a polymath is akin to calling your self a genius.

Perhaps so, however I did not call myself humble. Apologies. I overstated. How about "I study a lot of stuff" And now the reply, if I've accurately modeled it, is "So you've studied a lot of stuff, what makes you an expert on any of it?" Programming at its heart has always been cross-discipline, so there's really no judgment of ability aside from solving problems involving those disciplines you're working for. I find…

For future reference, you can just use "autodidact."

Next time if you want to brag without looking like an ass, describe something really impressive you did in detail to illustrate a point using highly understated language. Not only will you not get penalized for bragging, people will give you bonus points for being humble.

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