• conditional_soup@lemm.ee
    10·
    2 months ago

    The client wants to drag and drop their own personalized excel file with no guaranteed formatting or column order or data contract in order to import their data into our system <3

  • hperrin@lemmy.caEnglish
    5·
    2 months ago

    I’ve been a professional software developer for over two decades. There is zero chance my job will get taken by an AI any time soon. Anyone who thinks my job is to write code doesn’t understand my job. That’s like saying a bus driver’s job is to turn a steering wheel.

    My job is to turn vague ideas and nondescript feelings into APIs and (sometimes) UIs, then turn those into specs, then split those into tasks, then sometimes I’ll write the code for them and sometimes someone else does. About 90% of my time is turning ideas into plans, and about 10% of my time is turning those plans into code.

    When I was young and was a junior engineer, my job was more to receive the specs from the senior engineers and turn that into code, but even then, I was still designing my own stuff. Maybe more like 40/60 time instead of 90/10.

    Now that I’m a grizzled old man forged in the fires of task management software, I’m doing almost all of the design work myself. I manage a project that has about 250,000 lines of code. An AI isn’t going to be able to build new features into that, let alone decide which features to build in the first place.

      • hperrin@lemmy.caEnglish
        1·
        2 months ago

        Yeah, that’s probably true. Remember how all the execs decided to replace cashiers with robots, then the stores started losing money because a. it made stealing a lot easier and b. people would avoid stores that only had self-checkout robots and never had anyone to help you because a robot doesn’t know where the flour is. Now the self checkouts are being decommissioned and we’re going back to regular human cashiers. It turns out cashiers do more than just scan barcodes. But, upper management didn’t get to where they are by being smart.

        • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
          1·
          2 months ago

          Now the self checkouts are being decommissioned and we’re going back to regular human cashiers.

          Maybe this is North American thing because in Europe they never really got rid of human cashiers, they just had the automated systems alongside the human cashiers.

          I don’t know of any store that went over to 100% self-checkout

      • hperrin@lemmy.caEnglish
        0·
        2 months ago

        Any place that is replacing junior devs with AI is probably going to really regret it when they have no senior devs in a few years. Being a junior dev in a team is kind of like an apprenticeship. You learn the trade, but you also learn the shop. Then when the senior dev moves on, you have all that knowledge and can step into the role of senior dev. If a team decides to not have junior devs anymore, then they’ll have no one to take over when a senior dev leaves.

        So the answer is yes, it is already replacing junior devs, but that’s only because management hasn’t learned how bad of an idea that is yet. Ultimately, it will cost them more through losing foundational team knowledge.

        You also have to hold an AI’s hand the entire way through coding something, whereas you can kind of just let a junior dev go do their own thing, and eventually they’ll probably get it right. An AI “agent” tries to hold its own hand, but that doesn’t seem to work out usually when I’ve tried it. It starts making changes that are really bad, then just seems to always double down and eventually make a huge mess.

          • boonhet@lemm.ee
            1·
            2 months ago

            Last company I worked for and now contract for, explicitly set out to hire promising juniors over seniors. Reason being, they had to fire a guy with nearly a decade of experience because he was completely unable to adapt and learn new things, so his experience was all doing the same stuff over and over again.

            A small company that has cash reserves will absolutely hire a bright grad who can hold a conversation in the interview, only trouble is the ratio between candidates and job openings.

  • superkret@feddit.org
    2·
    2 months ago

    No, the customer wants a button that does a very specific thing.
    He can’t tell you what that is, though. You’re the expert!
    Also, can you put in more ads? And make it so the users can’t close the tab until they bought something.

    • ssfckdt@lemmy.blahaj.zone
      0·
      2 months ago

      cries in left_pad

      It’s kind of astonishing how many people leaned on that library just to add fucking spaces to strings

      • boonhet@lemm.ee
        1·
        2 months ago

        It should be in the standard library anyway. Why the hell is it not?!

        I mean yeah, I can write my own function to do the same thing and probably I’ve done it at some point in some coding exercise as a beginner, but this seems like such a common thing to use, it should be in the standard library of any sane language.

  • Lovable Sidekick@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    2 months ago

    AI can’t replace programmers right now, but I’ve said all through my software dev career that our ultimate goal is to eliminate our jobs. Software will eventually be able to understand human language and think of all the right questions to ask to turn “Customer wants a button that does something” into an actual spec that generates fully usable code. It’s just a matter of time. Mocking AI based on what it currently can’t do is like mocking airplanes because of what they couldn’t do in the 1920s.

    • Shanmugha@lemmy.world
      0·
      2 months ago

      I had a number of points to discuss, but they pale before this:

      Software will eventually be able to understand human language

      First, someone surely must have tried to code it, but I never heard of any system like that. Second and more important: anyone understands how we understand? And how the distance between understanding and communicating is covered? Someone? Anyone?

      And before some smart person tries for the thousand’s time this “but computers will get bettah” shit of argument: even with the whole task of putting it to code aside, we know shit about how we think, understand and speak, that’s coming from me having Master’s degree in linguistics

      • Lovable Sidekick@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        2 months ago

        Yes, the main problem with developing AI is that we really don’t understand how we think. Current AI doesn’t understand anything, it just imitates human output by processing a vast amount of existing output. But we do know a lot more now about how we think, understand and speak than we did a hundred years ago, and as a linguist you know this work isn’t standing still,. Compare it with genetics - 70 years ago we didn’t even know about DNA, and now we can splice genes. The fact that there’s still a lot of baseline work to do shouldn’t cast doubt on the goal, should it?

        • Shanmugha@lemmy.world
          0·
          2 months ago

          Oh yes it should. We have spent thousands of years looking at these things, and look where we are

          • Lovable Sidekick@lemmy.worldEnglish
            0·
            2 months ago

            For almost all of those thousands of years, no tools existed to analyze the actual mechanics of brain function. The development of all sciences has been exponential in the last couple centuries. I’ll be here if you decide you want to converse like someone with a master’s degree instead of a mediocre high school student scrolling lemmy on the toilet.

  • vordalack@lemm.eeEnglish
    02·
    2 months ago

    Good, I hope so. Whatever puts an end to the hipster, activist dev is a solid win.