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Do I belong in tech anymore?

ky.fyi

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Re: Do I belong in tech anymore?

#61

Post by rkagerer »

rkagerer wrote: post #54

I feel like all this hype around generated code overlooks a distinct opportunity for enterprising focus on excellent, clean, maintainable, curated code - baked by humans, for other humans.

We also haven't really seen how large volumes of generated sourcecode will stand up over time (like, decades) in terms of maintainability. My prediction is you'll encounter a lot more disposable software. That's fine for making general code more of a commodity (cheap and accessible), but where you get commodities you eventually find demand for more premium flavors of product. Those tend to derive from taste and opinion (attributes which, for example, were major success factors of the iPhone at its peak design).

The act of software development formalizes paradigms, surfaces unknowns and forces their resolution. Traditionally the work product gets better over time as you iterate. My own coarse rule of thumb is on average it takes until version 3 or so - i.e. 3 rewrites - until you to land at the kind of high caliber product that stems from really understanding the problem space and having worked in it extensively enough to have a good mental model and have uncovered the edge cases and hammered out an optimal solution.

While AI is famous for fast iteration, I expect in cases where the designers wielding the tool lack a deep understanding of what's going on, potentially exacerbated by never actually having to work with the codebase, it may actually turn out to impede their ability to reach that plateau. Not saying this will be true for all use cases, just that the tool makes it seductively easy to fall into that trap.

Re: Do I belong in tech anymore?

#62

Post by Paul-Craft »

dd8601fn wrote: post #58
Paul-Craft wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you willing to wake up at 3 AM when that "valuable" AI-written code pages on-call? I agree there is some value in AI tools, but implementation details do matter. People shouldn't be pushing unread code to prod. That's how you end up with security holes and other bugs. That's how you end up dropping millions of orders on Amazon.com.

I think the last ten+ years has taught us that massive security breaches are more of an insurance claim problem and some $4/mo credit monitoring payouts. And major corporations certainly don’t seem to care that much about leaving massive amounts of money on the table from jr level tech issues. I see it all the time. I mentioned a few from Walmart, Meta, and Amazon recently. Everyone talks like these things matter, bu…

Excuse me? Amazon lost more money in one day than most companies have in revenue, from dropped orders. I would say that matters. Believe it or not, the systems we work on do things that matter in the real world.

Re: Do I belong in tech anymore?

#63

Post by Paul-Craft »

jimmydoe wrote: post #51
AbbeFaria wrote: post #44

I work at MSFT and I feel burnt out too and am in a similar situation where I feel like resigning would be better for my mental health but AI isn’t a big contributing factor. I do have some arguments against speculative uses of AI though. Experimenting with speculative uses is fine, technological breakthroughs require lot of iterations and some would naturally never make it but with the enormous amounts of capex that…

CEO see performative work happening as the cut is still not deep enough.

Can you add in the missing words that make this comment make sense, please?

Re: Do I belong in tech anymore?

#64

Post by dewey »

Paul-Craft wrote: post #52
dewey wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find that to be a very defeatist take. It always mattered how much value you provide to the business. Writing pretty code or arguing about some implementation detail never really mattered. If you are good at coming up with solutions to problems AI is just one additional tool in your toolbox and personally it allows me to do much more than before. There were fakers before, and there will be fakers after.

Are you willing to wake up at 3 AM when that "valuable" AI-written code pages on-call? I agree there is some value in AI tools, but implementation details do matter. People shouldn't be pushing unread code to prod. That's how you end up with security holes and other bugs. That's how you end up dropping millions of orders on Amazon.com.

People pushed unread and buggy code to production long before AI.

Re: Do I belong in tech anymore?

#65

Post by maplethorpe »

ej88 wrote: post #49

"The psychic toll of AI" -- It's sad, but each of these scenarios (barring the AI notetaker, which I haven't found to be an issue personally but ymmv) are indicative more of the culture of the company than the tool itself. From my experience it seems like the most frontier companies have the best AI-use culture. I work at a very 'AI-pilled' company, but: - Everyone reads and reviews every PR and leaves human comments…

Are there any companies that aren't AI-pilled at this point?

Re: Do I belong in tech anymore?

#66

Post by nunez »

dgb23 wrote: post #42

> The point of a code review is not simply for good code to make it into a codebase, but to build institutional knowledge as people debate and iterate and compromise, slow as it may be. I feel like this is a very profound insight. Of course processes like this can become about the immediate utility. Reviewing is then checking work so, it can be merged and used. But the process is more about us than the code. And we l…

it's an extension of the principle that the purpose of writing code is to write it for your successor.

Re: Do I belong in tech anymore?

#67

Post by dd8601fn »

Paul-Craft wrote: post #62
dd8601fn wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the last ten+ years has taught us that massive security breaches are more of an insurance claim problem and some $4/mo credit monitoring payouts. And major corporations certainly don’t seem to care that much about leaving massive amounts of money on the table from jr level tech issues. I see it all the time. I mentioned a few from Walmart, Meta, and Amazon recently. Everyone talks like these things matter, bu…

Excuse me? Amazon lost more money in one day than most companies have in revenue, from dropped orders. I would say that matters. Believe it or not, the systems we work on do things that matter in the real world.

I would too. I’m saying businesses don’t seem to. At least not like we assume.

Re: Do I belong in tech anymore?

#68

Post by nunez »

Good article.

I want to zoom in on the rise of AI notetakers. AI that generates transcripts alongside recorded video that you can watch later? Amazing. I can catch up later and find people asyhc if I need more info; the videos are discoverable/shareable and anyone who needs to be in the know can be. AI notetakers that give you a summary and nothing else? Useless. These generat concepts of overviews and tend to miss small, but, key details.

I'd rather (and often do) take notes manually than turn on the notetaker.

Re: Do I belong in tech anymore?

#69

Post by piloto_ciego »

Hey OP, I quit my job and said "screw it" at the start of the Year for very similar reasons.

I had a "good" job, it was extremely stable and in the public sector, the work hypothetically mattered... I was miserable because it didn't matter. If I would have died in my study, the system would have happily churned on accomplishing nothing without me. There were so many many obstacles to accomplishing anything too, like I'm all about "perfect shouldn't be the enemy of good" - but hypothetically we should do something. I went on vacation in November and when I got back the latest ServiceNow update nuked a bunch of the changes I had worked for months trying to get done.

I quit at the start of the year and honestly, it's been great? Not fast, not suddenly lucrative, but I've been taking it slow. I'm literally building little vibe-engineered tools for local companies. I can now do what would have taken me a team to do by myself, it is paying (albeit slowly), it's fun, and I have time to do the things I care about in this life.

Don't work for the man. Your job cannot love you back, in fact, it actively hates you.

Re: Do I belong in tech anymore?

#70

Post by mahirsaid »

I really don't see this getting better from the sound if it, at-least from all the headlines present at the moment. The spending taking place from these big tech companies is alarming, not only is it centralized to single category " well by a large percentage". We still don't have a clear picture of the landscape for tech yet, yes there are some great tech innovation taking place in the US.

Being cutoff from China " A market that is also advancing in the same sectors as the US.Not allowing competition to enter the west will cause a recipe for disaster in the future. The current government is not "focused" on growth, despite the contrary to what's being said publicly. Where this will take the US is a place were stagnation is okay, so to make up for it there is a surge in investments in AI craze at the moment. The feedback is required in order to grow that goes for companies too not just the junior-varsity wrestler at you local high school. I mean taking abundance of data to utilize a summarize tool so that it can auto complete a prompt was bound to happen sooner or later, take elastic search for example, it's a search bar that as you type shows what that database has to offer with either a weighted response or indexed response depending on setting. This tool also shows images and information in regards to the search query. All that was needed to happen in that scenarios was something to compute this mess of data in abundance and project a response from it not just a search result. Marvelous you might say, but it has been around for a while now.The idea was there, it just needed the actor to execute it. The firings alone tell you the health and implications of these actions taking place. There was promises behind these investments that this war is interrupting or severing the deals even post-conflict.

The DotCom bubble was push on society to use the web and to digitize some parts of our lives, which the few companies that survived DotCom era are whats driving the push to the next era of tech or digital. It seems the AI idea is born without a guardian nor ownership, but to leave the courage to act upon it is open to any takers. The overwhelming spillover of data had to go somewhere. The useless data " how fast does a 2001 Porsche 911 go?" was tiresome to search for anymore.

The education system is already fallen apart in the US and this only makes things worse. Where is education heading with all of the adoption of AI all around us, how will you argue with your children, how will you learn new things? I don;t think I'm the only one thinking this at the moment by all means. The solution? well I'm, not sure if there is a solution to this? Companies want to see results from their spending and they will not stop until that is evident.

optimism is clearer without fog.

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