• hperrin@lemmy.ca
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    3 days 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.ca
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        3 days 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
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          3 days 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

          • Narauko@lemmy.world
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            3 days ago

            I hate shopping at Lowe’s now because they physically removed the regular checkouts and only have a square of self checkouts. They did this so one “cashier” can watch over everything, saving labor on multiple cashiers. They also paired down every other department so it’s just as hard (or possibly harder) to get assistance in a department as at Home Depot. Feels like I’m watch the death spiral in full swing.

            Less shoppers means less staff. Less staff means service suffers. Poor service means less shoppers. Rinse and repeat. This is happening at almost every brick and mortar retail business though, not just Lowe’s. It’s like the entire economy has turned into Circuit City trying to keep the lights on.

          • hperrin@lemmy.ca
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            3 days ago

            I live in California, so any place that sells alcohol needs at least one real cashier. A lot of places took that “at least one” to be an upper limit, not a lower one. For a while there, going into Albertsons was a nightmare. Twenty minutes shopping, another twenty waiting to check out because everybody had alcohol.

          • SaharaMaleikuhm@feddit.org
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            3 days ago

            I only know a single place with exactly two of them. The nearest Ikea. Other than those two it’s human cashiers everywhere.

          • Lyrl@lemm.ee
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            3 days ago

            My local grocery store has half the self checkouts they installed permanently disabled, and plans to remove them. They never got rid of human cashiers, but they misjudged the optimal ratio of selfcheck/cashier way too heavily on the self check side.

        • sheogorath@lemmy.world
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          3 days ago

          It’s no guarantee. I tell you, the CEO position is like a poison to the brain. My company CEO is so hopped up on LLMs I’m highly suspecting that his slack messages are written by an LLM.

      • hperrin@lemmy.ca
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        3 days 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.

          • Mikina@programming.dev
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            2 days ago

            I can share my experience with college, which it took me a while to appreciate but eventually I realized that while it wasn’t apparent at the time, it did make a difference. But of course, your mileage may wary, it’s just my personal experience.

            I felt like I’m forced to go through a lot of bloat I’ll probably never need - why do I have to learn stuff like Prolog, Lisp, Smalltalk and other obscure languages that I’ll realistically never need? Why force so much in-depth math, I’ll probably never need to be able to formally prove the Big O of a Hashtable…

            After spending few years working after/during college in offensive cybersecurity, where most of my colleagues did not have a degree, I’ve eventually realized what was the point of all these classes. I noticed that people kept reffering to programming as in “I’m a python programmer”, or “I’m a java programmer”, but I never really felt like that - when someone asked me if I can write something in any language, it didn’t matter what it is, I can just relatively quickly pick up the syntax and write anything I need in whatever you need, and I eventually realized that that’s exactly thanks to the college - the point was not to make me a Smalltalk or Prolog programmer, but to give me a PTSD from every different style of languages, from OOP through functional to whatever Prolog is, and while I do not remember almost anything, I still have the basic understanding of how does that style works, and when I look up any new language I need to use for the job, I’ve already seen and was forced to once learn and understand (well enough to pass exams) something with similar concepts.

            And that’s a really big advantage that people without degrees don’t usually have (at least from my experience with my colleagues). It will teach you how to relatively quickly pick up different technologies and use new things, and that is a really valuable thing. And it’s the same about data structures and other math - you will probably not remember it, but the feeling that “wait a minute, this problem sounds familiar, isn’t there like a obscure tree-thing structure that solves exactly this efficiently?” or “wasn’t there some magic with stacking trig coeficients for this?” will stay with you, and give you a headstart in looking up the concrete details that would be pretty hard to find otherwise.

            So I’m really glad I went to college. And in addition to that, it was amazing for networking - I had a masters in Gamedev and while that didn’t teach me almost anything new, it gave me a lot of friends and an amazing community of passionate people that I keep on making games with.

          • boonhet@lemm.ee
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            3 days 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.

          • hperrin@lemmy.ca
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            3 days ago

            I can’t answer that for you. I’ll tell you, I don’t think a computer science degree is a waste.

          • CrackedLinuxISO@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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            3 days ago

            Whether or not you’re wasting your time in college is only something you can answer. However, there definitely are jobs out there for junior software devs right now. If economic outlooks improve, I’d expect demand for juniors to rise also.

            Anecdote: I saw stats shared on social media by a CS professor at my former college. Enrollment for their classes is way down this year, when “back in my day” they were packed. Make of it what you will, but it’s possible young people might no longer be seeing software development as an easy career to get into. That could make it a more attractive prospect for someone who’s in it for more than just money.

    • toastmeister@lemmy.ca
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      3 days ago

      Could AI allow you to write code in python, and then turn the python into a static language with static variables at least?

      • cx40@programming.dev
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        2 days ago

        But the main benefits of static typing is in making the programming part easier. What do you gain from translating dynamically typed languages into a statically typed language?

        • toastmeister@lemmy.ca
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          2 days ago

          Well python is slow due to garbage collection and dynamic types, if AI could fill those in it would make programming far easier at least.

          You could write low level drivers in python.

  • conditional_soup@lemm.ee
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    3 days 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

    • ulterno@programming.dev
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      2 days ago

      If those project managers could read, they would actually be able to use Jira.


      I regret what I wrote.
      I realised, just being able to read, doesn’t make sure they can actually use Jira

  • superkret@feddit.org
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    3 days 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.

    • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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      3 days ago

      make it so the users can’t close the tab until they bought something.

      Why do they always request that? They’ve never seen any website on the internet work like that yet they actually think that they are the first people to come up with that idea.

  • JakenVeina@lemm.ee
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    3 days ago

    You know what we, in the industry, call a detailed specification fo requirements detailed enough to produce software? Code.

  • Rhaedas@fedia.io
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    3 days ago

    This is when the AI, in a microsecond, decided to destroy the human race.

      • anomnom@sh.itjust.works
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        3 days ago

        This is why we definitely shouldn’t rewrite the nuclear launch software. A project manager could unintentionally push a programmer into justifiably ending the fucking planet.

    • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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      3 days ago

      That’s when you load all middle managers onto a spaceship and send them off under the guise of colonising a new world.

  • Blackmist@feddit.uk
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    2 days ago

    “Can we jazz it up a bit?”

    This is a real request from a real manager. They have played us for absolute fools.

    • slappypantsgo@lemm.ee
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      2 days ago

      My favorite was to make it “crisp”. My boss was sympathetic when I joked about it being “crispy and delicious” but he still acted like we basically should have known what that means.

    • Elvith Ma'for@feddit.org
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      3 days ago

      Help, Debian has libbutton only in 1.4.3 and libdosomething is not in my repo. I compiled libdosomething from source, but now it needs libbutton >= 2.4.1 and compiling that version of libbutton fails, as my GCC and make are too old and incompatible!

      I already tried it on my other PC, but that isn’t based on glibc, which makes all these dependencies even worse…

  • rational_lib@lemmy.world
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    3 days ago

    AI Project Manager: Create a button on a webpage that, when clicked, displays an alert saying “Hello World!”
    AI Programmer: “What a sensible requirement! Here you go.”
    AI Billing Department: “Project completed, that’ll be 10 million dollars.”
    Client AI Payments Department: “Sounds right, paid!”

    • pinball_wizard@lemmy.zip
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      2 days ago

      AI Quarterly Call Bot: Delivery is on time and synergy is high!

      AI investment selector: This company looks profitable. Purchase!

  • BleatingZombie@lemmy.world
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    3 days ago

    I had a client once explain to me that his request for the 75% redesign of his mobile app would be simple because “it’s just 3 pages”

    That was the exact quote

    I know that was hardly related to the post, but it reminded me of that and I needed to vent to my therapist (aka strangers on Lemmy)

    • Shanmugha@lemmy.world
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      3 days ago

      I feel you. Just ended coding “a little special case” that resulted in dozens of files changed, all because I refused to make it with dirty hidden hack, and that was a clear-cut technical if-branching even, no vague ideas

      Talking to a client is times that amount of hurdle

  • resipsaloquitur@lemm.ee
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    3 days ago

    Managers about to find out the hard way that all the requirements are in the brains of those they laid off.

    I’m sure coding bootcamp and AI will turn them into leet hax0rs.

    • ripcord@lemmy.world
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      3 days ago

      Definitely happening at at least one major company I’m familiar with.

      Requirements and everything else.

    • IMALlama@lemmy.world
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      3 days ago

      I feel this in my bones. Even before the recent round of restructuring we’ve had a significant about of turnover. Our infrastructure is a massive rube golberg machine with multiple houses of cards built on top of it. Institutional knowledge was never written down and it has been leaving the company at an accelerating rate over the past 5 years. Tons of “new blood” making lots of assumptions on how things work is resulting in… humorous end results.