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So great to see another fly.io blogpost As an aside I'm so happy now that GPT-4 exists, the other day I had the VP engineering discuss GPT-4 in a meeting and w

So great to see another fly.io blogpost As an aside I'm so happy now that GPT-4 exists, the other day I had the VP engineering discuss GPT-4 in a meeting and was considering firing and closing down junior positions. I'm also mixed on this but not surprised that junior positions will be less in the few years, it makes me wonder if CS grads would pursue software engineering at all if the future if the pipeline from junior to senior is eliminated.

andybak 4y ago
I'm not sure how that would work out. GPT can increase programmer productivity but it's not a "junior vs senior" thing. You might need less programmers for the same amount of output but I wouldn't expect that to be "all seniors" or even "all juniors".
mellosouls 4y ago
I had the VP engineering discuss GPT-4 in a meeting and was considering firing and closing down junior positions Did anybody ask him/her what VP engineering was for now that GPT4 can do all the non-tech stuff for their senior devs as well as the junior tech stuff?
gwoolhurme 4y ago
That’s very depressing. It does make me wonder why the VP of engineering is thinking of firing new blood into the company. Senior people don’t stick around that long. Among other problems with their logic. If it increases their productivity wouldn’t that mean you could get more of out the employees you have? My question to you is, if your company is probably going to fire more people, but it’s impossible stop. So what advice would you have to CS grads now? Just quit. Go find a job as an electrician. This isn’t worth it?
- ilaksh 4y ago
  The robots will be able to work as electricians within less than 5 years.
ilaksh 4y ago
The strange thing to me about almost all of these comments including this one is that there seems to be an assumption that the rapid progress will halt with GPT-4. You're talking about a few years in the future, yet in less than half a year the last version gained something like 30-40 IQ points. There is no guarantee that it continues, but assuming that everything stops is ridiculous. Unless the progress halts, it will be able to do everyone's jobs. You, me, VP or X, everyone. In fact, GPT-4 is probably already able to do most white collar work better than humans. People somehow feel superior when they test it and realize it can't one-shot their entire project off-the-cuff without reference to documentation or being connected to any tools or having the ability to iterate at all.
- spiderice 4y ago
  > GPT-4 is probably already able to do most white collar work better than humans I'm yet to see much white collar work it can do better than humans. Maybe it can do bits and pieces "better" (more like faster) than humans. But it requires so much oversight that I wouldn't say it can do it better than humans yet. Unless you have a counter example?
- vidarh 4y ago
  > In fact, GPT-4 is probably already able to do most white collar work better than humans. People somehow feel superior when they test it and realize it can't one-shot their entire project off-the-cuff without reference to documentation or being connected to any tools or having the ability to iterate at all. In fact, I just out of curiosity tested what 3.5turbo would say about a NPM module. It hallucinated something that suggests it wasn't in its training data. So I tried again with GPT4, and GPT4 told me it wasn't a real NPM module (might be new enough to be after the cutoff; really like that it now appears less likely to hallucinate) but added "but assuming it exists and is designed to X, I can provide you with a general guide on how to use it." where X was inferred from the package name. I then cut and pasted the documentation, and asked it how it might implement that package. It came up with a decent first attempt. I had the real code up in a separate window, so could compare and contrast. I asked it to expand on certain features. Asked it how it might DRY up some code. It did. It ended up with something significantly simpler and more elegant than the real thing (which is why I won't give the name - the dev in question did perfectly OK job and doesn't deserve to be hung out to dry) within about 15 minutes of prompting. In the process it taught me new things about some of the packages the original depended on, and leveraged features of that which the original code didn't take advantage of. I think a lot of the attempts that ends up with describing it as a failure comes from basically asking it to be a magic senior dev where they don't see the back and forth on requirements etc. that goes on behind the scenes with a human senior dev. When you treat it the way a more senior developer would interact with a somewhat less experienced peer which has encyclopaedic knowledge of all of the available tooling - discussing requirements, asking questions about the chosen solution, doing quick reviews etc. - the results are amazing. It's like pair programming without the annoying, slow typing (I don't like peer programming...). Even with the low speed of GPT4, the turnaround time is vastly better, and the outcome seems to be more reliable for a lot of aspects.
imwithstoopid 4y ago
I have to ask why fly.io staff spend so much time blogging and catering to HN...
- vidarh 4y ago
  Because attracting the attention of developers is a great customer acquisition strategy for a company that depends on buy-in from developers to make sales. And giving staff visibility like this is an excellent recruiting tool as well.
the_af 4y ago
> [...] I had the VP engineering discuss GPT-4 in a meeting and was considering firing and closing down junior positions I'm curious, how does the VP of engineering figure senior developers are created? Out of thin air? I wonder if we'll see more of this short-term thinking that will eventually create a serious shortage of experienced engineers in the future. I realize no individual executive is under any obligation to ensure the well-being of the industry at large, but if none of them care about it, they are dooming it.
- vidarh 4y ago
  Eventually, if enough people think like this, the hiring situation will get bad enough that people will start to compromise on seniority, and it will be hailed as a brilliant and unprecedented move by MBA's to hire more junior people cheaper and training them.

andybak 4y ago

I'm not sure how that would work out. GPT can increase programmer productivity but it's not a "junior vs senior" thing. You might need less programmers for the same amount of output but I wouldn't expect that to be "all seniors" or even "all juniors".

mellosouls 4y ago

I had the VP engineering discuss GPT-4 in a meeting and was considering firing and closing down junior positions Did anybody ask him/her what VP engineering was for now that GPT4 can do all the non-tech stuff for their senior devs as well as the junior tech stuff?

gwoolhurme 4y ago

That’s very depressing. It does make me wonder why the VP of engineering is thinking of firing new blood into the company. Senior people don’t stick around that long. Among other problems with their logic. If it increases their productivity wouldn’t that mean you could get more of out the employees you have? My question to you is, if your company is probably going to fire more people, but it’s impossible stop. So what advice would you have to CS grads now? Just quit. Go find a job as an electrician. This isn’t worth it?

ilaksh 4y ago
The robots will be able to work as electricians within less than 5 years.

ilaksh 4y ago

The strange thing to me about almost all of these comments including this one is that there seems to be an assumption that the rapid progress will halt with GPT-4. You're talking about a few years in the future, yet in less than half a year the last version gained something like 30-40 IQ points. There is no guarantee that it continues, but assuming that everything stops is ridiculous. Unless the progress halts, it will be able to do everyone's jobs. You, me, VP or X, everyone. In fact, GPT-4 is probably already able to do most white collar work better than humans. People somehow feel superior when they test it and realize it can't one-shot their entire project off-the-cuff without reference to documentation or being connected to any tools or having the ability to iterate at all.

spiderice 4y ago
> GPT-4 is probably already able to do most white collar work better than humans I'm yet to see much white collar work it can do better than humans. Maybe it can do bits and pieces "better" (more like faster) than humans. But it requires so much oversight that I wouldn't say it can do it better than humans yet. Unless you have a counter example?
vidarh 4y ago
> In fact, GPT-4 is probably already able to do most white collar work better than humans. People somehow feel superior when they test it and realize it can't one-shot their entire project off-the-cuff without reference to documentation or being connected to any tools or having the ability to iterate at all. In fact, I just out of curiosity tested what 3.5turbo would say about a NPM module. It hallucinated something that suggests it wasn't in its training data. So I tried again with GPT4, and GPT4 told me it wasn't a real NPM module (might be new enough to be after the cutoff; really like that it now appears less likely to hallucinate) but added "but assuming it exists and is designed to X, I can provide you with a general guide on how to use it." where X was inferred from the package name. I then cut and pasted the documentation, and asked it how it might implement that package. It came up with a decent first attempt. I had the real code up in a separate window, so could compare and contrast. I asked it to expand on certain features. Asked it how it might DRY up some code. It did. It ended up with something significantly simpler and more elegant than the real thing (which is why I won't give the name - the dev in question did perfectly OK job and doesn't deserve to be hung out to dry) within about 15 minutes of prompting. In the process it taught me new things about some of the packages the original depended on, and leveraged features of that which the original code didn't take advantage of. I think a lot of the attempts that ends up with describing it as a failure comes from basically asking it to be a magic senior dev where they don't see the back and forth on requirements etc. that goes on behind the scenes with a human senior dev. When you treat it the way a more senior developer would interact with a somewhat less experienced peer which has encyclopaedic knowledge of all of the available tooling - discussing requirements, asking questions about the chosen solution, doing quick reviews etc. - the results are amazing. It's like pair programming without the annoying, slow typing (I don't like peer programming...). Even with the low speed of GPT4, the turnaround time is vastly better, and the outcome seems to be more reliable for a lot of aspects.

imwithstoopid 4y ago

I have to ask why fly.io staff spend so much time blogging and catering to HN...

vidarh 4y ago
Because attracting the attention of developers is a great customer acquisition strategy for a company that depends on buy-in from developers to make sales. And giving staff visibility like this is an excellent recruiting tool as well.

the_af 4y ago

> [...] I had the VP engineering discuss GPT-4 in a meeting and was considering firing and closing down junior positions I'm curious, how does the VP of engineering figure senior developers are created? Out of thin air? I wonder if we'll see more of this short-term thinking that will eventually create a serious shortage of experienced engineers in the future. I realize no individual executive is under any obligation to ensure the well-being of the industry at large, but if none of them care about it, they are dooming it.

vidarh 4y ago
Eventually, if enough people think like this, the hiring situation will get bad enough that people will start to compromise on seniority, and it will be hailed as a brilliant and unprecedented move by MBA's to hire more junior people cheaper and training them.