Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

defragzone.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

831–840 of 886 posts

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#831

Post by smeeger »

lordofgibbons wrote: post #821
ArnoVW wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the same reason that we still have a finance and legal department even if you can outsource them, and for the same reason that non technical CTO’s don’t exist. You can outsource the execution of a task but only if you know how to formulate your requirements and analyze the situation.

> You can outsource the execution of a task but only if you know how to formulate your requirements and analyze the situation. What fundamental limitation in AI makes you believe reasoning agents in 2 years won't be able to do this?

no answer. dont hold your breath

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#832

Post by rightbyte »

beretguy wrote: post #812
Havoc wrote: post #132

That’s what people said about outsourcing too. The corporate meat grinder keeps rolling forward anyway. Every single department and person believes the world will stop turning without them but that’s rarely how that plays out.

I ones worked for a company that used to hire 70 developers from Vietnam to work on their product. Then one day they decided to hire ~5 developers from US. These 5 developers did the job faster, better and cheaper than 70 Vietnamese developers. So they fired all overseas developers and doubled the size of US team to about a dozen.

When comparing sweatshops to a proper inhouse team I think the ingroup and outgroup can be left unspecified. I fear I one day wake up and have become a jingoist.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#833

Post by smeeger »

groos wrote: post #684

A good analogy from not-so-distant past is the outsourcing wave that swept the tech industry. Shareholders everywhere were salivating at the money they would make by hiring programmers in India at 1/10 the cost while keeping their profits. Those of us who have been in the industry a while all saw how that went. I think this new wave wave will go roughly similarly. Eventually, companies will realize that to keep their…

what if india had programmers that were just as good? that would be a more apt comparison to what we will be facing in the near future. an alien country where the supply of programmers is infinite and they are better than any human. i bet five years ago you would say chatGTP, this very conversation, would be impossible or 1000 years off. you dont know anything

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#835

Post by [deleted] »

999900000999 wrote: post #375
pockmarked19 wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People who look forward to retiring are like people who look forward to heaven: missing out on life due to the belief their “real” life hasn’t begun yet.

I want to spend all day making music, and small games. I haven't figured out a way to do that in a manner that supports myself. Every job is ultimately filing out TPS reports. The reports might look a little different, but it's still a TPS report.

[deleted]

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#836

Post by kmoser »

gorjusborg wrote: post #810
kmoser wrote: post #459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We will see both: lots of poor code, lots of neutral code (LLMs cranking out reasonably well written boilerplate), and even some improved code (by devs who use LLMs to ferret out inefficiencies and bugs in their existing, human-written codebase). This is no different from what we see with any tool or language: the results are highly dependent on the experience and skills of the operator.

You've missed my core point if you think those isn't different. Before AI there was always someone who understood the code/system. In the a world where people are having machines build the entire system, there is potentially no human that has ever understood it. Now, we are talking about a yet unseen future; I have yet to see a real world system that did not have a human driving the design. But, maintaining a system…

Humans will always have a hand in the design because they need to explain the real-world constraints to the AI. Sure, the code it produces may be complex, but if the AI is really as smart as you're claiming it will eventually be, then it will also have the ability to explain how the code works in plain English (or your human language of choice). Even today, LLMs are remarkably good at summarizing what code does.

Philosophical question: how is LLM-produced code that nobody has ever understood any different from human-written legacy code that nobody alive today understands?

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#837

Post by DrFalkyn »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #558
whynotminot wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn’t this kind of thing the story of tech though? Languages like Python and Java come around, and old-school C engineers grouse that the kids these days don’t really understand how things work, because they’re not managing memory. Modern web-dev comes around and now the old Java hands are annoyed that these new kids are just slamming NPM packages together and polyfills everywhere and no one understands Real Software…

> Modern web-dev comes around and now the old Java hands are annoyed that these new kids are just slamming NPM packages together and polyfills everywhere and no one understands Real Software Design. The real issue here is that a lot of the modern tech stacks are crap , but won for other reasons, e.g. JavaScript is a terrible language but became popular because it was the only one available in browsers. Then you got a…

With Web Assembly you can write in any language, even C++.

Unfortunately it doesn’t expose the DOM, so you still need JavaScript

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#838

Post by izacus »

iainctduncan wrote: post #343

I work in tech diligence. This means the companies I talk to cannot lie or refuse to answer a question (at risk of deals failing through and being sued to obvilion). Which means we get the hear the real effects of tech debt all time. I call it the silent killer. Tech debt paralyzes companies all the time, but nobody hears about it because there's zero advantage to the companies in sharing that info. I'm constantly go…

Yeeeah... I've seen plenty of startup companies end up in "dead man walking" state because tech debt situation paralized their ability to pivot and follow the growing market and couldn't respond fast enough to growing costs. The developers causing the issues also left when the work became unfun, so they ended up without employees as well.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#839

Post by Terr_ »

bgoated01 wrote: post #591
lolinder wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why wouldn't this be the case for people using LLM like it was for everyone else? I feel like it's a bit different this time because LLMs aren't just an abstraction. To make an analogy: Ruby on Rails serves a similar role as highways—it's a quick path to get where you're going, but once you learn the major highways in a metro area you can very easily break out and explore and learn the surface streets. LLMs are a G…

I'm the kind of guy who decently likes maps, and I pay attention to where I'm going and also to the map before, during, and after using a GPS (Google maps). I do benefit from Google maps in learning my way around a place. It depends on how you use it. So if people use LLMs to code without trying to learn from it and just copy and paste, then yeah, they're not going to learn the skills themselves. But if they are payi…

> I do benefit from Google maps in learning my way around a place.

Tangent: I once got into a discussion with a friend who was surprised I had the map (on a car dashboard display) locked to North-is-up instead of relative to the car's direction of travel.

I agreed that it's less-convenient for relative turn decisions, but rationalized that setting as making it easier to learn the route's correspondence to the map, and where it passed relative to other landmarks beyond visual sight. (The issue of knowing whether the upcoming turn was left-or-right was addressed by the audio guidance portion.)

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#840

Post by y-c-o-m-b »

mulmboy wrote: post #741
johnnyanmac wrote: post #715

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm happy you've only worked for altruistic, not-for-profit minded companies that care about employee growth and takes pride in their tach stack above all else. I have not had as fortunate an experience. >I expect that once many begin to do this, there will be some who do use it for productivity and they will set the bar. Yeah, probably. I've had companies so pinpointed on "velocoity" instead of quality. I imagine th…

> I'm happy you've only worked for altruistic, not-for-profit minded companies that care about employee growth and takes pride in their tach stack above all else. I have not had as fortunate an experience. No one is making this claim. My comment was a bit terse and provocative, rude, deserves the downvotes tbh. I'll take them. To elaborate ~ I've got a lot of empathy for the poster I was originally replying to. I've…

You say sorry, but it doesn't really come off very apologetic to be honest. Your initial reaction is very suspicious in itself. Why so emotional over what I said? You also presume a lot about me and my career choices and your assertions also teeter on some strong emotions, very odd. What's your personal stake in this that's got you so amped? A hidden insecurity perhaps? Clearly I hit a nerve here.

I've worked in big tech for a combined total of 6 years. Several of the other companies are Fortune 500 members. I've also worked at mid-size and small companies across mortgage, healthcare, fin-tech, point of sale, HR/payroll, and more. I surmise that you would categorize most of these as "intelligent" companies, which negates your argument about this being a "me" problem. Let's take Intel - where I worked for 3 years - as an example. Some would consider this an "intelligent company". I was there when Brian Krzanich took over for Paul Otellini. I think you will have a very easy time finding huge swaths of people/employees that consider Krzanich's leadership decisions to be very poor. In fact over the last few months, you'll find threads here on HN that directly pin the decline of Intel on his decision making.

We can argue the semantics of "intelligent" all day and make excuses for why leaders make irrational choices, but my point still stands. I don't think this is a "me" problem for one simple reason: If you take me out of the equation, the issue still exists.

Post reply on HN