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The jobs we’re talking about here, podcasting, development, etc aren’t jobs where everyone is forced out. Everyone is just more into making money these days and

The jobs we’re talking about here, podcasting, development, etc aren’t jobs where everyone is forced out. Everyone is just more into making money these days and decide they want to make money doing those things rather than just fun. Let’s not try making excuses.

rglullis 3y ago
You are getting at it backwards. People are doing podcasts about investing, cooking, music production, <anything> because even those careers are being automated away and the money that they could be getting working is going away. Even Software Engineers: take all the swaths of engineers who were productive but didn't want / didn't make to a FAANG company and now are having to compete in a world where most companies can replace a lot of the people they don't need a team of 8 engineers because their team of 4 now can have Co-Pilot and most of their "middle management" roles could be effectively replaced by some cheap, off-the-shelf SaaS. I'm literally in this scenario. I'm too old to be interested in competing with someone who is 20 years younger than me but can call themselves a "programmer", and whatever knowledge/experience I have can be had at a fraction of my "cost" by using a commodified service that automates a process. So, what is left for me? Either I need to go downmarket and work for "programmer" jobs (further increasing the supply and lowering salaries) or I need to find someone who is willing to invest in my "idea for a startup" (thus getting into the Silicon-Valley way of life), or I need to find a way to take my unique experience and repackage as something of value - and then get to be called "greedy" by people like you. By the way, may I interest you in becoming a customer of my not-yet VC funded company (https://communick.com https://communick.com) and/or join the people sponsoring me for $4/month for my Fediverse work (https://github.com/sponsors/mushroomlabs https://github.com/sponsors/mushroomlabs)?
- simion314 3y ago
  I do not believe you can replace a competent developer with an AI, or say you have 2 and replace them with 1 dev and 1 AI. You can't just type in ChatGPT something like "write me GTA5" and you get running code, just seen today an example of someone complaining that he asked soemthing like "Create a website in PHP for a company that does X" and they were expecting that by magic a website will just appear.
  - rglullis 3y ago
    Aside from clueless people on Elance and upwork, no one goes to a developer and says "write me GTA5" or "make a website in PHP that does X", either. What AI will do is leverage productivity of the individuals. Any new story will have its complexity reduced because the developer will be to use the existing codebase and say "hey, our current code is connecting with Foobar via the Zoberg SDK, now we are adding a customer that uses the BazBah platform and they need to change the order flow for 'deliver on payment' to 'deliver on invoice sent'. Show me what changes are needed to make this happen, and please write the integration tests to make sure that we are not breaking things from existing customers" This goes from a one week task that will require three hour-long to something that can be done in an afternoon, reviewed by the developer and (most importantly) cheap to throw away if the original requirements change.
    - simion314 3y ago
      Does this work today? I guess it might be able to write tests but does the rest just work? In my experience the AI - uses bad code practices because there is more bad code on the internet then good - hallucinates APIs , so it tells you to use X but X does not exist in the library/framework you asked for - suggests wrong solution - if your language is not precise it gives you the answer to the wrong thing, like you see the answer and you realize it did not understand you In my experience if your developers are 20% more productive you do not fire 20% of them because there always is a big backlog of features or bugs to be handled.
      - rglullis 3y ago
        One of the reasons that I didn't drop out of college (almost 25 years ago) was because I was working part-time proofreading (and occasional translating tech manuals) for a translator who used to get about $25 per 1000 "touches". It could be good money for an experienced translator, but nowadays it's a dead profession outside of legal documents who need a certified notary. Google's automatic translation was not good enough at the beginning to replace the translator's job, but by the time I was already graduated it was good enough for her to not need my proofreading and it was good enough for her to effectively get 60% of the job done. She has then effectively become the proofreader for a bad translator. And nowadays, the bad translator is good enough to the point where her customers can just throw the original document on Google and do themselves the proofreading. This is what will happen with programming tools. Code generation tools are still just at the "smart autocomplete" stage and the experienced programmer is still needed to act as reviewers, but as AI gets better, it will be cheaper to drop the "professional expert" altogether and let someone with tangential knowledge (maybe a product manager) in charge.

rglullis 3y ago

You are getting at it backwards. People are doing podcasts about investing, cooking, music production, <anything> because even those careers are being automated away and the money that they could be getting working is going away. Even Software Engineers: take all the swaths of engineers who were productive but didn't want / didn't make to a FAANG company and now are having to compete in a world where most companies can replace a lot of the people they don't need a team of 8 engineers because their team of 4 now can have Co-Pilot and most of their "middle management" roles could be effectively replaced by some cheap, off-the-shelf SaaS. I'm literally in this scenario. I'm too old to be interested in competing with someone who is 20 years younger than me but can call themselves a "programmer", and whatever knowledge/experience I have can be had at a fraction of my "cost" by using a commodified service that automates a process. So, what is left for me? Either I need to go downmarket and work for "programmer" jobs (further increasing the supply and lowering salaries) or I need to find someone who is willing to invest in my "idea for a startup" (thus getting into the Silicon-Valley way of life), or I need to find a way to take my unique experience and repackage as something of value - and then get to be called "greedy" by people like you. By the way, may I interest you in becoming a customer of my not-yet VC funded company (https://communick.com https://communick.com) and/or join the people sponsoring me for $4/month for my Fediverse work (https://github.com/sponsors/mushroomlabs https://github.com/sponsors/mushroomlabs)?

simion314 3y ago
I do not believe you can replace a competent developer with an AI, or say you have 2 and replace them with 1 dev and 1 AI. You can't just type in ChatGPT something like "write me GTA5" and you get running code, just seen today an example of someone complaining that he asked soemthing like "Create a website in PHP for a company that does X" and they were expecting that by magic a website will just appear.
- rglullis 3y ago
  Aside from clueless people on Elance and upwork, no one goes to a developer and says "write me GTA5" or "make a website in PHP that does X", either. What AI will do is leverage productivity of the individuals. Any new story will have its complexity reduced because the developer will be to use the existing codebase and say "hey, our current code is connecting with Foobar via the Zoberg SDK, now we are adding a customer that uses the BazBah platform and they need to change the order flow for 'deliver on payment' to 'deliver on invoice sent'. Show me what changes are needed to make this happen, and please write the integration tests to make sure that we are not breaking things from existing customers" This goes from a one week task that will require three hour-long to something that can be done in an afternoon, reviewed by the developer and (most importantly) cheap to throw away if the original requirements change.
  - simion314 3y ago
    Does this work today? I guess it might be able to write tests but does the rest just work? In my experience the AI - uses bad code practices because there is more bad code on the internet then good - hallucinates APIs , so it tells you to use X but X does not exist in the library/framework you asked for - suggests wrong solution - if your language is not precise it gives you the answer to the wrong thing, like you see the answer and you realize it did not understand you In my experience if your developers are 20% more productive you do not fire 20% of them because there always is a big backlog of features or bugs to be handled.
    - rglullis 3y ago
      One of the reasons that I didn't drop out of college (almost 25 years ago) was because I was working part-time proofreading (and occasional translating tech manuals) for a translator who used to get about $25 per 1000 "touches". It could be good money for an experienced translator, but nowadays it's a dead profession outside of legal documents who need a certified notary. Google's automatic translation was not good enough at the beginning to replace the translator's job, but by the time I was already graduated it was good enough for her to not need my proofreading and it was good enough for her to effectively get 60% of the job done. She has then effectively become the proofreader for a bad translator. And nowadays, the bad translator is good enough to the point where her customers can just throw the original document on Google and do themselves the proofreading. This is what will happen with programming tools. Code generation tools are still just at the "smart autocomplete" stage and the experienced programmer is still needed to act as reviewers, but as AI gets better, it will be cheaper to drop the "professional expert" altogether and let someone with tangential knowledge (maybe a product manager) in charge.