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Domain expertise has always been the real moat

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Re: Domain expertise has always been the real moat

#521

Post by jaggederest »

addaon wrote: post #190
jaggederest wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have not used a debugger in anger in perhaps a decade. I write tests, and if that's not enough, I write more tests. Tests stick around and prevent future problems, whereas the debugger only shows me something once.

But tests show you if a bug is happening, they don’t help you understand the underlying cause of the bug. In a decade, you haven’t hit a compiler codegen issue, a silicon erratum, a race condition, or anything that required actually spending effort understanding the causal path?

I don't know what to tell you besides that I've found more, better bugs using comprehensive testing than I ever found with a debugger.

The sole exception to that is that, back in the very early days, troubleshooting IE6 really required a debugger. But everything else, from memory leaks to thread hang issues to deadlocks, testing is better.

Re: Domain expertise has always been the real moat

#522

Post by jaggederest »

trojans1290 wrote: post #281
jaggederest wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where I am headed, I think, is to basically be a platform engineer. The job is to create the guardrails, validation, prompt library, and both agent and manual reviews; that keeps the domain experts safe when they start using coding agents. It's a little bit like being T2/T3 customer support [or support engineer], but internal. You're there to catch the dangerous spots, the weird edge cases, and to make sure that ever…

Can you elaborate more on this type of role? Stack? Etc.

I honestly just go with whatever the company is using - these days often typescript, and I build tooling and systems that catch errors and review PRs produced partially or completely by the domain experts. Nothing fancy about it, just good old engineering, where when an issue arises you create a test for it and make sure it can never reoccur, educate users, set up the correct infra, and lock down permissions (it's never been easier or more fun to set up an incredibly draconian role in e.g. aws IAM)

Re: Domain expertise has always been the real moat

#523

Post by Mezzie »

the-clonenator wrote: post #519
Mezzie wrote: post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm this person, and I do find AI to be quite helpful, though I'm mostly just playing around at this point. I'm the daughter and granddaughter of programmers, and I learned the basics of how to code as a kid. I'm good at it and have a knack for it, but I didn't want to do it for 8+ hours a day and then spend my nights on it as well, so I didn't pursue it as a career. I did an undergraduate degree in Linguistics, whic…

> which has been really helpful for having an intuitive sense for what 'language as data' can accomplish and for a strong understanding of the difference between language as data and language as meaning. 100%. I think, intuitively, software developers understand that there's a strong connection here, but most fail to translate that into practice. It always amuses me when someone comments on the triviality of creating…

This is so true.

And even when there is a well laid out information design, it often is laid out from the wrong point of view. Elegant information design should create a pattern subconsciously enabling people to build a mental model of the tool they're using without realizing they're doing it. But software whose information design works wonderfully from the point of view of a SDE is not going to be approachable to the average user. There are so many tools I've used where I can very clearly see the reasoning behind the decisions and the design and use it well and also be aware I could never explain how they work to the average person.

Re: Domain expertise has always been the real moat

#524

Post by lelandfe »

esikich wrote: post #209
lelandfe wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You use websites a lot. Should AI make you really good at frontend development?

Infinitely better than I was before it, yes. If not, what's the point?

I will answer my question as you answered a different one:

No, you do not become a really good FE dev from having used websites with AI in the mix.

Why should chess be different?

Re: Domain expertise has always been the real moat

#525

Post by abalashov »

Mezzie wrote: post #515
abalashov wrote: post #483

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having descended from a humanities social background and blundered into professional programming rather incidentally, a lot of this resonates with me. I've frequently been credited as a person who can really string all the disparate elements of tacit knowledge together into a unified fabric in our particular subdomain, and helped a lot of people plug Swiss cheese gaps in their knowledge that way and come away with th…

In theory, it's because we're going to be better at steering an LLM in some ways. A lot of the friction and hold up in building comes in the communication between people/departments/organization. If you eliminate that by holding the knowledge in one person/department, you see an efficiency gain. What they're not saying is that they think we're more valuable because they think we'll be cheaper. They think they can hav…

This is an underappreciated bit of insight and perspective, and I thank you for sharing it.

Thoughts that really stood out for congruence with my own experience:

> Most people with the knack for programming and thinking in systems know they have that knack

> Hiring is optimizing for exact matches and experience, and that's the opposite of how this skill set actually functions.

> I've found these skills are best developed by being placed in a room where you know very little about what's going on and forcing you to develop heuristics and approaches over time for getting that context.

> We're far more likely to work somewhere, get enough domain knowledge, and then bounce to start our own thing

Re: Domain expertise has always been the real moat

#528

Post by linhns »

chopete3 wrote: post #242

Whenever I read articles like this one that appear to be very generic and give advice about dealing with AI, I remind myself that he software industry is like the construction industry. It will never be organized, never fully optimized, and it will always be custom — because it has to cater to the reality of wildly different tastes, contexts, and localities. There may be some good tools, raw materials that show up on…

Spot on. This needs to be said more, and it’s why a lot of us do it.

Re: Domain expertise has always been the real moat

#529

Post by rightbyte »

layer8 wrote: post #460
throwaway2037 wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that you raise some excellent points here. I want to dive deeper into what is meant by domain knowledge -- as a I see it. This phrase comes to mind: "Those who know, do. Those that understand, teach." (Google search tells me that it is frequently misattributed to Aristotle.) People who cannot clearly articulate rules for their domain only "do". However, those that can clearly articulate will "teach". Thus, I…

I largely agree, but want to note that there’s the counterpoint “Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach” (from George Bernard Shaw’s 1903 play Man and Superman ), which also has some nugget of truth in it.

Case on point is Youtube where a lot of almost good amateurs give a lot of advice on niche channels on things they hardly master.

Re: Domain expertise has always been the real moat

#530

Post by batshit_beaver »

ElProlactin wrote: post #436
batshit_beaver wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The real risk isn't that some 19 year-old vibe coder is going to replace you, it's that there's simply less need for more experienced engineers. The market is shrinking. That last sentence is verifiably false if you look at SWE job postings and their recovery since 2022. It’s also a poor take in general, buying very much into the narrative propagated primarily by OpenAI and, especially, Anthropic, who nonetheless c…

> That last sentence is verifiably false if you look at SWE job postings and their recovery since 2022. Source? https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IHLIDXUSTPSOFTDEVE And it's probably worse than it looks because phantom job postings are a real thing. > ...who nonetheless continue to hire large numbers of SWEs while paying double the market rate. Tech companies have laid off over 200,000 people since the beginning of…

Yes that’s the right source. There would be no recovery in SWE market after the higher interest rates killed it if LLMs had any major impact on SWE employability.
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