5 ms·

Hot gptchat take of the minute: programmers are less threatened than middle management Imagine replacing middle managers with basically dictation and tracking

Hot gptchat take of the minute: programmers are less threatened than middle management Imagine replacing middle managers with basically dictation and tracking personnel and delegatingdecisions and report to chatgpt.

skippyboxedhero 4y ago
A colleague who is non-tech but does light ETL work (this relates to the subject: only in the UK could they fail to hire someone to actually do this work properly) was propounding to me about the benefits of ChatGPT. He could ask it for Python or SQL, and he could just paste it in and it would do all his tasks. His conclusion was: programmers are getting replaced, and he will replace them. In reality, he will get replaced because all he is doing copy-pasting snippets. To actually build a full system that will slough away staff requires domain knowledge that a chatbot doesn't have. ChatGPT will come first for the people using it most now. I often think about starting a business-process outsourcing company in the UK. I know there are companies in Japan (also a country known for overhiring). But then you talk to managers about their processes, and you realise they genuinely do not understand anything about technology...it is just pointless, like trying to teach German to a chimp. The stuff you see in local govt/healthcare would bring people on here to tears. The local govt was trying to hire people to improve processes...their listed tech contained no programming languages and just included managed services. You see tech roles, and it is all the same: just managed services, no actual coding...it is incredible.
- cosmodisk 4y ago
  I'm currently in some surreal world because of a large government contract our company had won. Multiple companies are involved. Lack of any meaningful systems, people who have no technical understanding about anything making decisions, data requests have timelines as we could simply magic them up on demand. People don't understand data, statistics, not to mention systems. Some are paid handsomely for, frankly speaking ,not doing much. I often have an imposter syndrome,but it looks like the bar is really really low.
  - skippyboxedhero 4y ago
    I think this is the issue everywhere with govt (if you are not based in the UK). But yes, it isn't the lack of use of tech in management, they aren't even aware of what modern tech is. From what I have seen, the managers are "experts" in managed services deployments, there is no capacity for actual tech hires (and then they hire consultants who fuck it up, and they complain about how hard tech is...when a core part of their job should be to hire and run the project). Complaining about govt is eternal though. My local council offers unskilled, internal-only jobs at pay levels similar to dev jobs in the private sector at the same level of seniority...and the council has twenty people to the job of one person...what can you say?
- _dain_ 4y ago
  >The stuff you see in local govt/healthcare would bring people on here to tears. The local govt was trying to hire people to improve processes...their listed tech contained no programming languages and just included managed services. You see tech roles, and it is all the same: just managed services, no actual coding...it is incredible. you talk about hiring under-qualified people, but they also hire over-qualified people and don't know what to do with them. I got hired out of university as a "data scientist" in the govt; but it turned out they actually didn't have any data science to give me. they just slotted me into the same excel clusterfuck workflows they always had. the inefficiency was unimaginable, it was like the spreadsheet dark ages. i tried to clean things up on my own initiative, automate them, have proper version control and data pipelines in code rather than manual steps described in piles of word documents; but I was the only person in my section of the org chart who had the skills or even cared about the problems. I could make things better in my tiny corner, but everyone I had to work with was clueless, so there was only so much I could do. so I just quit out of boredom and frustration. then I got a SWE job for more than twice the pay.
  - incone123 4y ago
    My friend told me about a government department that got an outside firm to run an online survey. The responses were delivered as one PDF per response. The department had a bunch of junior staff copy pasting these into Excel.
    - lordnacho 4y ago
      I was a junior guy on a trading desk at a hedge fund once, and I got sent out to our fund administrator to help them produce a NAV for the fund. All our trading was done by computers, with everything written to a database. I show up at the fund admin's office, and what do I see? There's two young guys my age sitting there with the printed trades, thousands of them... typing them into a computer. One typing, one double checking. They had been at it for days when I arrived.
      - skippyboxedhero 4y ago
- incone123 4y ago
  Managed services? Luxury! I've seen people using table grids in MS Word to do tasks that belong in Excel.
  - MonaroVXR 4y ago
    Glad that I'm not the only one.
- InCityDreams 4y ago
  >they genuinely do not understand anything about technology...it is just pointless, like trying to teach German to a chimp. My monkey, just told you to "vaffanculo", but s/he genuinely does not understand anything about spiecies. Which is where i dodged a bullet...
- Nextgrid 4y ago
  Processes are a way to give a job, purpose and career prospects to various people in the organization. Despite everyone talking about "digital transformation" and other BS buzzwords, nobody would truly want automation that actually works, because doing so would either obsolete their position outright or force them to actually work hard to keep up with the machine (instead of merely attending endless meetings about "digital transformation" that will at best introduce more busywork rather than actually achieve its stated goal).
- precompute 4y ago
  Great comment. The economy exists to create jobs. Doesn't matter of what kind, because there's supposed to be X percentage of the population in a certain tax bracket to make everything work.
- MonaroVXR 4y ago
  Completely agree with this comment als other comments.
dumbfoundded 4y ago
Programmers just move up the stack with some staying behind to manage the edge cases and optimizations in the underlying tech. Same thing happened with the move to cloud. It's unclear which jobs with be enabled with more productivity vs replaced completely.
ben_w 4y ago
My experience with ChatGPT is that while it knows more than I do about anything I'm not an expert in, it isn't as good as me in my expertise — a literal jack of all trades and a master of none — so while I would expect it to be better than a junior manager fresh out of management school, and definitely better than someone who shambled into management by accident when they founded a company and needed to grow it, I don't expect it to be as good as even an average manager.
- staunton 4y ago
  The interesting question is: what roles will it be able to replace first when it gets yet much better at everything it does now?
  - ben_w 4y ago
    Propaganda. That is the first thing I can think of where it doesn't need to be particularly connected to reality. Even fiction needs to have long-term coherence; propaganda can be "arguments as soldiers".
- porknubbins 4y ago
  I work on cars and motorcycles and for fun I like to ask ChatGPT how to do certain repair tasks. It usually perfectly outlines the steps to complete the repair, then glosses over all the details a real world human would want to know. Like step 6 to rebuild a brake caliper will be something like “next rebuild the caliper”. I suspect this information is just not in its training data. It would be interesting if it could learn from youtube videos somehow.
  - ben_w 4y ago
    In principle it can be used as part of a larger system that learns from videos (NVIDIA did that with Minecraft) though I'd say it's a meaningfully different kind of AI at that point. https://youtu.be/5LL6z1Ganbw https://youtu.be/5LL6z1Ganbw
Spooky23 4y ago
That would be fun. “Hello individual contributor, this is WorkGPT, you have completed 6 TPS reports, and your minimal quota is 2. Rectify the situation immediately or join the PIP program. Have a Nice Day!”
- precompute 4y ago
  Brazil vibes
vsareto 4y ago
It's nice to imagine, but tech puts its quality gates around developers. That means developers will end up having to prove they are better than a manager-using-ChatGPT, rather than managers having to prove anything.
jollofricepeas 4y ago
The reason we have managers in engineering is: - some developers don’t want to work - some developers have no social skills and work to ruin the morale of everyone else on their team - some developers don’t want to interact with the client or the business - some developers don’t want to do anything that remotely looks like project management or agile or otherwise. - some developers have no idea what the business does or how to meaningfully contribute as engineers - some developers don’t want to pair, mob or provide training of any kind to junior engineers - some developers don’t want to participate in interviewing or recruiting others on the team - some developers just want to write code and go home there’s a reason we have middle managers and until devs want to do more than “just write code” than… …there will always be middle management in engineering.
- precompute 4y ago
  > some developers just want to write code and go home This is the only good point here. The truth is, middle managers exist because technical work is seen lowly anywhere the management is stupid enough to think that technical competency is easy to acquire. Also, these developers that never participate are usually the ones that get promoted to middle management.
  - jollofricepeas 4y ago
    Tried reading this comment a few times and I don’t understand it at all. Please clarify.
    - precompute 4y ago
      Sorry for the run-on sentence. Managers that do not value technical competence very often think that it is easy to acquire; that it only takes a few years of work, and / or that being able to interface with computers is a rather banal skill. This makes them grossly undervalue people that work with software / computers. Middle Managers are hence elected as buffer between them and the "peasants" (AKA "IT Guys"). Usually, these middle managers are elected right from the peasantry, and often it's the person that sticks out. This is also often the least technically competent member of the team / department.

skippyboxedhero 4y ago

A colleague who is non-tech but does light ETL work (this relates to the subject: only in the UK could they fail to hire someone to actually do this work properly) was propounding to me about the benefits of ChatGPT. He could ask it for Python or SQL, and he could just paste it in and it would do all his tasks. His conclusion was: programmers are getting replaced, and he will replace them. In reality, he will get replaced because all he is doing copy-pasting snippets. To actually build a full system that will slough away staff requires domain knowledge that a chatbot doesn't have. ChatGPT will come first for the people using it most now. I often think about starting a business-process outsourcing company in the UK. I know there are companies in Japan (also a country known for overhiring). But then you talk to managers about their processes, and you realise they genuinely do not understand anything about technology...it is just pointless, like trying to teach German to a chimp. The stuff you see in local govt/healthcare would bring people on here to tears. The local govt was trying to hire people to improve processes...their listed tech contained no programming languages and just included managed services. You see tech roles, and it is all the same: just managed services, no actual coding...it is incredible.

cosmodisk 4y ago
I'm currently in some surreal world because of a large government contract our company had won. Multiple companies are involved. Lack of any meaningful systems, people who have no technical understanding about anything making decisions, data requests have timelines as we could simply magic them up on demand. People don't understand data, statistics, not to mention systems. Some are paid handsomely for, frankly speaking ,not doing much. I often have an imposter syndrome,but it looks like the bar is really really low.
- skippyboxedhero 4y ago
  I think this is the issue everywhere with govt (if you are not based in the UK). But yes, it isn't the lack of use of tech in management, they aren't even aware of what modern tech is. From what I have seen, the managers are "experts" in managed services deployments, there is no capacity for actual tech hires (and then they hire consultants who fuck it up, and they complain about how hard tech is...when a core part of their job should be to hire and run the project). Complaining about govt is eternal though. My local council offers unskilled, internal-only jobs at pay levels similar to dev jobs in the private sector at the same level of seniority...and the council has twenty people to the job of one person...what can you say?
_dain_ 4y ago
>The stuff you see in local govt/healthcare would bring people on here to tears. The local govt was trying to hire people to improve processes...their listed tech contained no programming languages and just included managed services. You see tech roles, and it is all the same: just managed services, no actual coding...it is incredible. you talk about hiring under-qualified people, but they also hire over-qualified people and don't know what to do with them. I got hired out of university as a "data scientist" in the govt; but it turned out they actually didn't have any data science to give me. they just slotted me into the same excel clusterfuck workflows they always had. the inefficiency was unimaginable, it was like the spreadsheet dark ages. i tried to clean things up on my own initiative, automate them, have proper version control and data pipelines in code rather than manual steps described in piles of word documents; but I was the only person in my section of the org chart who had the skills or even cared about the problems. I could make things better in my tiny corner, but everyone I had to work with was clueless, so there was only so much I could do. so I just quit out of boredom and frustration. then I got a SWE job for more than twice the pay.
- incone123 4y ago
  My friend told me about a government department that got an outside firm to run an online survey. The responses were delivered as one PDF per response. The department had a bunch of junior staff copy pasting these into Excel.
  - lordnacho 4y ago
    I was a junior guy on a trading desk at a hedge fund once, and I got sent out to our fund administrator to help them produce a NAV for the fund. All our trading was done by computers, with everything written to a database. I show up at the fund admin's office, and what do I see? There's two young guys my age sitting there with the printed trades, thousands of them... typing them into a computer. One typing, one double checking. They had been at it for days when I arrived.
    - skippyboxedhero 4y ago
incone123 4y ago
Managed services? Luxury! I've seen people using table grids in MS Word to do tasks that belong in Excel.
- MonaroVXR 4y ago
  Glad that I'm not the only one.
InCityDreams 4y ago
>they genuinely do not understand anything about technology...it is just pointless, like trying to teach German to a chimp. My monkey, just told you to "vaffanculo", but s/he genuinely does not understand anything about spiecies. Which is where i dodged a bullet...
Nextgrid 4y ago
Processes are a way to give a job, purpose and career prospects to various people in the organization. Despite everyone talking about "digital transformation" and other BS buzzwords, nobody would truly want automation that actually works, because doing so would either obsolete their position outright or force them to actually work hard to keep up with the machine (instead of merely attending endless meetings about "digital transformation" that will at best introduce more busywork rather than actually achieve its stated goal).
precompute 4y ago
Great comment. The economy exists to create jobs. Doesn't matter of what kind, because there's supposed to be X percentage of the population in a certain tax bracket to make everything work.
MonaroVXR 4y ago
Completely agree with this comment als other comments.

dumbfoundded 4y ago

Programmers just move up the stack with some staying behind to manage the edge cases and optimizations in the underlying tech. Same thing happened with the move to cloud. It's unclear which jobs with be enabled with more productivity vs replaced completely.

ben_w 4y ago

My experience with ChatGPT is that while it knows more than I do about anything I'm not an expert in, it isn't as good as me in my expertise — a literal jack of all trades and a master of none — so while I would expect it to be better than a junior manager fresh out of management school, and definitely better than someone who shambled into management by accident when they founded a company and needed to grow it, I don't expect it to be as good as even an average manager.

staunton 4y ago
The interesting question is: what roles will it be able to replace first when it gets yet much better at everything it does now?
- ben_w 4y ago
  Propaganda. That is the first thing I can think of where it doesn't need to be particularly connected to reality. Even fiction needs to have long-term coherence; propaganda can be "arguments as soldiers".
porknubbins 4y ago
I work on cars and motorcycles and for fun I like to ask ChatGPT how to do certain repair tasks. It usually perfectly outlines the steps to complete the repair, then glosses over all the details a real world human would want to know. Like step 6 to rebuild a brake caliper will be something like “next rebuild the caliper”. I suspect this information is just not in its training data. It would be interesting if it could learn from youtube videos somehow.
- ben_w 4y ago
  In principle it can be used as part of a larger system that learns from videos (NVIDIA did that with Minecraft) though I'd say it's a meaningfully different kind of AI at that point. https://youtu.be/5LL6z1Ganbw https://youtu.be/5LL6z1Ganbw

Spooky23 4y ago

That would be fun. “Hello individual contributor, this is WorkGPT, you have completed 6 TPS reports, and your minimal quota is 2. Rectify the situation immediately or join the PIP program. Have a Nice Day!”

precompute 4y ago
Brazil vibes

vsareto 4y ago

It's nice to imagine, but tech puts its quality gates around developers. That means developers will end up having to prove they are better than a manager-using-ChatGPT, rather than managers having to prove anything.

jollofricepeas 4y ago

The reason we have managers in engineering is: - some developers don’t want to work - some developers have no social skills and work to ruin the morale of everyone else on their team - some developers don’t want to interact with the client or the business - some developers don’t want to do anything that remotely looks like project management or agile or otherwise. - some developers have no idea what the business does or how to meaningfully contribute as engineers - some developers don’t want to pair, mob or provide training of any kind to junior engineers - some developers don’t want to participate in interviewing or recruiting others on the team - some developers just want to write code and go home there’s a reason we have middle managers and until devs want to do more than “just write code” than… …there will always be middle management in engineering.

precompute 4y ago
> some developers just want to write code and go home This is the only good point here. The truth is, middle managers exist because technical work is seen lowly anywhere the management is stupid enough to think that technical competency is easy to acquire. Also, these developers that never participate are usually the ones that get promoted to middle management.
- jollofricepeas 4y ago
  Tried reading this comment a few times and I don’t understand it at all. Please clarify.
  - precompute 4y ago
    Sorry for the run-on sentence. Managers that do not value technical competence very often think that it is easy to acquire; that it only takes a few years of work, and / or that being able to interface with computers is a rather banal skill. This makes them grossly undervalue people that work with software / computers. Middle Managers are hence elected as buffer between them and the "peasants" (AKA "IT Guys"). Usually, these middle managers are elected right from the peasantry, and often it's the person that sticks out. This is also often the least technically competent member of the team / department.