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I'm OK being left behind, thanks

shkspr.mobi

741–750 of 800 posts

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#741

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We’d probably get better outcomes too.

For society, yeah, since the AI training corpus is more normal people than sociopaths. Shareholders would be mad, I bet.

> Shareholders would be mad, I bet.

But think of how much profits will improve by not paying $tens of millions to employ a CEO!

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#742
The mistake is that 1 every N waves of hype are in fact monumental shifts and it makes sense to embrace as soon as possible. Also being early to the right thing can have massive implications in appreciating the shift before the general public, which is upstream from making smart resource allocation (investments, career choices). I have a friend that went to super early OpenAI as a designer. He has more equity than most AI researchers there and made a 0.001% amount of wealth. Being early does very much matter in the right conditions.

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#743
post #7

I agree with the conclusion but not with the premise. The conclusion is, "I don't have to be an early adopter," but the premise seems to be "there is zero utility in getting in on anything early."

That's not quite what they write: > Might I be 7% more effective if I'd suffered through the early years? Maybe. But so what? I could just as easily have wasted my time learning something which never took off.

[deleted]

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#744
post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's really insane what is happening. My wife manages 70 software developers. Her boss mandated that managers replace 50% of the staff with AI within a year. And, she's scrambling trying to figure out if any of the tools actually work and annoying her team because she keeps pushing AI on them. Unsurprisingly it's only slowed things down and put her in a terrible position.

Brutal. But probably all too common. One of my clients has very suddenly gone all-in on agentic AI and they're in this crazy hurry. (Probably the most annoying part is they want to automate stuff that I built a POC for using GPT-4o, two years ago - at the time they saw no use for it, but now they're all-in on the hype.) This started literally two weeks ago and a couple of days ago I talked to one of the admin people…

> Probably the most annoying part is they want to automate stuff that I built a POC for using GPT-4o, two years ago - at the time they saw no use for it, but now they're all-in on the hype.

I’d have guessed the most annoying part would be that you’re assisting them in a hare brained scheme to terminate some people’s employment.

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#745
post #29

It's a horrifying feeling facing the possibility that the career I spent so much time and money to get into is fading away. Sure, LLMs are not there yet, and they might not ever quite get there. But will companies start hiring again? If productivity has gone up, and it seems like it has, then no. So, a decade of hanging by a thread, getting by and doubling down on CS, hoping that the job market sees an uptick? Or try…

Green is always greener on the other side. You can always work on that, get an apprenticeship and work on it. Why don't you do it? Because you know not everything's so rosy. These are hard jobs, not super well paid.

But well, I feel like you too.

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#746
post #47
post #29

It's a horrifying feeling facing the possibility that the career I spent so much time and money to get into is fading away. Sure, LLMs are not there yet, and they might not ever quite get there. But will companies start hiring again? If productivity has gone up, and it seems like it has, then no. So, a decade of hanging by a thread, getting by and doubling down on CS, hoping that the job market sees an uptick? Or try…

> But will companies start hiring again? Anecdata, but the few people I know who were looking to switch gigs all had multiple offers within a few weeks. One thing they all had in common was taking a very targeted approach with their search and leveraging their networks. Not spamming thousands of resumes into the ether.

I'm looking for jobs after my PhD and I notice the same things. I only get interviews and advance in processes when I target the right jobs and companies. Sadly, not too much network to leverage.

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#747
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But will companies start hiring again? Anecdata, but the few people I know who were looking to switch gigs all had multiple offers within a few weeks. One thing they all had in common was taking a very targeted approach with their search and leveraging their networks. Not spamming thousands of resumes into the ether.

so you either are well connected or you starve, got it guess it's death and destitute for introverts edit: please explain the downvotes, i'm curious why you think i'm wrong if what op says it's true, that today only networking works, then it easily follows that if for some reasons you do not have a network then you don't get hired

Selecting where to apply and who you contact for it is also very important.

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#748
post #33

> If this tech is as amazing as you say it is, I'll be able to pick it up and become productive on a timescale of my choosing not yours. Broadly speaking, I think this is a wise assessment. There are opportunities for productivity gains right now, but it I don't think it's a knockout for anyone using the tech, and I think that onboarding might be challenging for some people in the tech's current state. It is safe to…

What I get a bit annoyed is companies forcing AI tools, getting usage metrics and actively hunting the engineers that don't use the tool "enough", I've never seen anything like it for a technically optional tool. Even in the past, aside from technical limitaions, you were not required to use enough of a tool. It just sounds like a giant scheme to burn through tokens and give money to the AI corps, and tech directors…

I am seeing this at my work right now. They are about to start using token consumption as _part_ of the performance review process. Obviously this is a coarse and problematic proxy for productivity.

OTOH, it’s an attempt to address a real problem. There are people who are in fact falling behind (I’m talking literally editing code in notepad), and we can either let them get PIPped eventually, or try to bring them along. There is a real “activation energy” required to learning new tools, and some people need an excuse/permission. Not saying that token count is a GOOD signal, but I haven’t heard many better ideas

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#749
post #595

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In the 90s the same argument was directed at this new thing called the internet, and those who placed a bet on it being a fad ended up being forgotten by history. Allow me to introduce you to the dot-com boom, where everyone who bet on the internet went broke.

The Google founders did ok.

Google raised only a single large round of institutional funding before going public, with the investors contributing $12.5 million

I can be much more specific about “everyone” if you’d like.

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#750

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm definitely having a blast, but I agree with the author. You're not going to get left behind, the "getting left behind" rhetoric was just cryptocurrency pump-and-dumpers. It's fine to wait and not engage if you don't want to.

I agree with you, which is why I think it's a straw man. How many real devs are actually banging the "you're getting left behind!" drums?

> How many real devs are actually banging the "you're getting left behind!" drums?

My CEO/CTO :)

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