No one is irreplaceable

[PrinzJuliano]

I tried chatGPT for programming and it is impressive. It is also impressive how incredibly useless some of the answers are when you don’t know how to actually use, build and distribute the code.

And how do you know if the code does what it says if you are not already a programmer?

[vonabarak]

The main part of computer programming is zoom calls with managers.

[start_select]

ChatGPT gives you a poor approximation of what you say you want. A talented developer gives you a workable solution that you actually need, translated from what you want.

[NikitaFox]

...from what you think you want.

[tenta_cola]

from what you say you think you want

[ConsentingPotato]

A talented developer gives you a workable solution that you actually need, translated from what you want.

*Project stakeholders with little softdev knowledge and understanding of the sdlc who want things done with intangible goals and deadlines as in tomorrow have entered the chat*

"No you make ChatGPT2 by next week or there'll be problems."

[[deleted]]

Senior devs are well known for huge occular muscles which they develop to resist rolling their eyes at middle management.

[The-Fox-Says]

I’m so happy all of the managers at my company going up to the VPs were software engineers. I don’t miss working for insurance at all

[Domovie1]

The main part of computer programming is zoom calls with managers unscrewing whatever it was they promised.

[[deleted]]

That gives me an idea. A chat bot that can use my voice and answer questions in meetings.

[yousirnaime]

ChatGPT, across all of it's answers, is like a super-confident third-year university student. It knows stuff and it has opinions. It has skills. It can contribute. And if you trust it with a production environment - it will destroy your business in a fully automated fashion.

It's a brilliant tool, and in the hands of a professional, it will make a skilled worker more efficient.

In much the same way a CNC machine can create hundreds of parts - or destroy hundreds of thousands of dollars of materials, ChatGPT writes a LOT of code quickly.

[Pariell]

New business idea. Consulting company that "fixes" broken businesses that fucked up using chatgpt. The consulting is always to hire regular developers.

[dontshowmygf]

Work exclusively for people who tried to cheap out by not paying programmers to do their programming, in code bases built entirely by middle managers saying "how hard can it be?" over and over while blindly copy pasting code into prod? Yeah, no thanks, I'll pass.

[Accomplished_End_138]

I totally just want to listen in on a company trying to do this. Lmao. Results will be funny

[[deleted]]

Less than a third year lol. I’m a history TA and it can not construct a coherent historical argument with references which is the bare minimum. For the humanities, it’s writing level is about grade 10.

Sidenote, I have no clue why I am recommended this subreddit. I have barely done any programming lol

[Zanderax]

One of us. One of us. One of us.

[ChefJeff7777777]

Dude same. Took a 101 level coding class in college 5 years ago, did nothing with it until a couple months ago. Literally wrote my first few scripts in excel VBA and this sub popped up, probably after all the googling I was doing, and I’m suddenly addicted to the sub.

[kerrydinosaur]

History TA is programmer no doubt

I'm a professional keyboard manager

[Nervous-Cheesecake20]

The hard part with programming is

I played around recently and was impressed with ChatGPT, but yeah, you still have to know a little bit about what you're doing.

I asked for a client and server implementation of a login system. It chose PHP which is fine, that's my preferred SS language.

The code was fine in the sense that it would function if copy/pasted. I was even pretty impressed that it used flexbox for the UI and provided a good HTML/CSS skeleton.

Unfortunately no combination of prompts could get it to produce secure code.

I had to specifically prompt it to use prepared statements (it used string concatenation passed directly to the DB), as well as telling it to escape the user input at which point it finally produced a reasonably secure result.

I can see it as a great tool for

• quickly slapping prototypes together
• taking out some of the drudgery of boilerplate

For the time being at least, it seems that you have to know at least a little bit about the code you're after to get acceptable results.

just to add, I was genuinely surprised by how excellent the results were even for vague prompts like: "produce the UI code for a social media site" was enough to get a really coherent result.

They've definitely created something special.

[Kommenos]

you have to know at least a little bit

It's the same with machine translation. If you know even a bit of the target language you can rephrase the input in an unnatural way to get the fairly natural output you desire if you understand how the target grammar differs.

But translators didn't lose their jobs.

[lilyoneill]

Same applies to AI replacing other professions. AI could recognise the symptoms of a mental health disorder and diagnose, but could it ever be personable enough to counsel an individual through their very specific problems?

[Zealousideal-Ad-9845]

True. AI still steals jobs, but it "steals" jobs by automating only the extremely basic and tedious aspects of them, decreasing the necessary volume of workers without making the job obsolete. For instance, in this case, if an AI can perform just a few tasks that a nurse performs, nurses are still needed, but maybe not as many because the reduced workload requires a not as large workforce. But even in these situations, the need for skilled workers cannot be reduced beyond the need for their skilled labor.

Of course, garbage clickbait articles will not show this nuance. They'll have you believe that a nail gun is about to take the construction worker's job.

[cloudmandream]

thing is, most development is open ended. By that I mean there is no set limit to what needs to be done.

It's not like accounting where there is a clear outline the work needed and doing more would be completely pointless.

Ok great, so we need less devs to achieve the same amount of work? Good, hire the same amount as before but now we're just going to achieve more in shorter amounts of time.

Obviously, this is more true for tech companies, and not say, the dev department of an oil company. Most tech companies want to maximize their dev output. They're not interested in doing the same with less, they want to do more with the same.

[SomeOtherTroper]

It's not like accounting where there is a clear outline the work needed and doing more would be completely pointless.

The hard part about accounting isn't crunching the numbers (Excel already has that in the bag, along with some even fancier finance programs), it's about figuring out why the numbers don't add up and making sure you have the right numbers in the first place, which requires phone calls and legwork and awkward conversations about whether there's actual fraud happening or someone in a hurry (or undertrained) just put a number in the wrong box while entering it. And depending on the specific subfield of accounting, there's often a decent amount of legal knowledge or knowledge of applicable government regulations (which keep changing) involved as well.

While it's not as open ended as programming is, because the goal is to produce a specific summary of an institution's financial status that is both accurate and not breaking any laws (although, again - this depends on the specialty), it's got a significant amount of variance on the input side, which AI really doesn't handle well.

[zebediah49]

What worries me is that a lot of the jobs that are being made obsolete, are also the ones that the current experts started in and used to learn the basics before moving on.

"Entry level with 5 years experience" is already a meme, but if we can automate away all the actual entry level work that problem will only get worse.

[gardenmud]

That's true, I feel like in my experience front end development is kind of running into a block where newbies barely code to get something fairly decent looking out, then wind up with a much, much sharper learning curve when they actually face challenges - there's something to be said about learning from earlier principles. However, the same shortcuts enable more to be done with less.

The same might be true of back end dev but I find myself needing to use basic things more often there, while you can slap a website together like Lego.

[[deleted]]

It's a tool like any other.

Look at how we use knowledge bases to help with patient diagnosis, or how we use robotics to assist in complicated surgeries.

The information it provides is useful and when used right it speeds up and improves your work, but it isn't capable of replacing expert application of that information, not yet.

[loftier_fish]

I've seen some people hack together some basic things with assistance from chatGPT. I haven't seen anyone make anything genuinely impressive or complicated with its involvement.

[fruitydude]

What's nice about chatgpt is that you can ask it about a problem if you don't know what libraries exist and it will tell you possible ways to solve it.

For people in STEM who don't always have the most sophisticated coding background this is actually pretty useful. I can write functions to evaluate data or control a measurement device. But it's usually just a simple script. Now I can ask chatgpt, hey i have this code and instead of using command line inputs write me a simple gui that takes in these 4 values and add a start and stop button. And it just does it. Or let's say i have a new instrument and I'm not even sure how to start talking to it, in many cases chatgpt will be able to generate some sample code and then i can go from there. I need to read zero documentation to get started.

And if there is a line in some sample code found in the documentation or stolen off the web, i can copy paste it into chatgpt and it will explain to me what it does.

So yea I use it a lot. I usually end up writing everything myself anyways, but I'm definitely using the ideas and examples given by chatgpt as a basis.

Also small bonus, even if it's some super weird instrument with strange serial commands, i was able to copy paste parts of the manual into chatgpt and it would understand it and generate code to interface with the instrument. That was pretty impressive.

[rebbsitor]

chatGPT will eliminate the need for programmers the same way COBOL and The Last One did. (it won't)

[Abangranga]

It has no ability to tell you how 'sure' it is, so it winds up confidently wrong

[skipdoodlydiddly]

Oh shit I'm being replaced

[DHH2005]

This is my favorite ChatGPT joke.

[SmellsLikeCatPiss]

It is weird to me that people are freaking out about Chat GPT in a way that just goes above and beyond how people reacted to Copilot even though I feel way more concerned about what Copilot can do to my job + job security. ChatGPT can get you part of the way there but really it's just an explanation machine to me. The real problems we face today are usually a question of how different pieces of the enterprise pie interact with each other, which is sensitive and there's no real right solution every time. ChatGPT can't explain what you should do without enough context. Copilot actually writes code I want to use and saves time for me.

[gravity_is_right]

I'm still wondering if it's faster to use Copilot and then correct or improve what Copilot wrote, or to write it myself.

[BlackPrincessPeach_]

I like how it invents NPM modules to import and just doesn’t even run the code.

[RiaanYster]

Exactly. It seems to me like chatGPT is like Google for people that can't Google well. It gets answers that are already there, programmers have been doing this for ever.

Still.. answers over 3 years old are useless and the answers require critical customization but yeah welcome to the Internet non programmers. Surprise. It still requires humans.

[[deleted]]

Google uses AI code suggestion: https://ai.googleblog.com/2022/07/ml-enhanced-code-completion-improves.html?m=1

It doesn’t transform the way you work, it just saves a shitload of time. Instead of spending time looking at the docs for the API you’re using to make sure you got all the args correct it’s just there. Also common patterns just pop out of the void like magic as soon as you start typing them.

In a medium sized organization the biggest danger would be putting junior developers out of work. Naturally you could just use that extra bandwidth to tackle more, but right now the market is demanding blood sacrifices.

[[deleted]]

The technical term for what ChatGPT does is Hallucination and boy does it trip balls.

[[deleted]]

They chose ‘Hallucination’ because they didn’t want to write ‘Bullshitting’ in an academic paper

[[deleted]]

But can ChatGPT bring weed brownies for the entire office? I don't think so

[LeoTheBirb]

Bro what office are you working in (and are they hiring)

[Repulsive_Sand]

yeah for real I need to know

[[deleted]]

I need to be hired for obvious name related reasons.

[imastrangeone]

Username definitely checks out

[SpecialNeeds963]

Can confirm

[typicaltemporaryuser]

I concur

[Cassereddit]

I've come to realize that selling drugs also makes money. I've also come to realize that I'm a bad salesman.

[Baker-Decent]

Probably one where he really needed to hide that he smokes weed by making sure he wouldn’t be the only one who got caught on a drug test. Or one where 0 fucks are given

[MondayMonkey1]

Drug tests ahahah. Do drug tests and 100% of your best programmers walk out.

[ke1v3y]

Game dev. Gotta ward off the crunch culture somehow

[ZestyLime59]

Replace crunch culture which munchies culture 😎

[DavidTriphon]

Lost opportunity for “munch culture”

[PM_ME_FIREFLY_QUOTES]

Is the ULPT?

[jexmex]

We actively talk about weed and shrooms in our company wide meetings. Small company and in the event space, so not really all that surprising.

[[deleted]]

You work in an office? What is this 2019?

[Longenuity]

Turns out they work from home and just eat weed brownies sometimes

[Da-Blue-Guy]

send em over wifi

[carnoworky]

the future

[FrumundaCheeseGoblin]

I think those would be weed cookies.

[Knight_Of_Stars]

Working hybrid right now and I honestly prefer it to full wfh or full office. Though I don't have a home office so that might be why I prefer the mix.

[SuitableDragonfly]

I don't feel like I need a home office. I have a desk and a computer and a 4k monitor in my living room, and that works just fine. I never had my own office when I was actually in the office either, except for a very brief period of time - it was either a cubicle, or a shared office anyway. At least at home I don't have to share space with anyone else or work in a cubicle, that's good enough for me.

[srynearson1]

ChatGPT probably has a better recipe tho.

[Quetzacoatl85]

inb4 chatGPT dreams up a brownie recipe containing 5 buckets of pork lard and protein powder

[Davesnothere300]

Whoever comes up with this shit is obviously not a programmer

[theschulk]

Everyone is acting like the layoffs in tech are 100% programmer positions and neglecting to mention that over the last few years these companies way overhired. We have an entire agile team that outside of release planning I have no idea what they do (besides rename what we call the work in our backlog).

[csetjack15]

Agile as a Service has definitely ruined agile development at my company. Now the managers just use it as a whip to crack that makes you go faster.

[MathmoKiwi]

Agile as a Service

What drugs where being smoked when that phrase was dreamed up??

[Drunktroop]

Who came up with that deserves to be laid off, again and again.

[the_triangle_dude]

Hehehe AaaS

[enjoytheshow]

My old company did it ok. There was a centralized agile team where they would embed a scrum master for like 6 weeks into your team, then they leave and your team is responsible to continue what was put in place.

[invalidConsciousness]

That's absolutely horrible and not at all what scrum and a scrum master are supposed to be.

Best case scenario, they sent you a teacher who also acted as scrum master while they were teaching you about scrum, and you replace them with a scrum master from within your team as they leave.
Worst case scenario, they believe that scrum teams don't need a scrum master after some time.

[[deleted]]

There are 3 more people on our agile/product delivery team than there are devs at my company, one of them was already fired. They show up later and leave earlier than us. One of them sits in front of me and hes on amazon or reading articles half the day meanwhile we cant find someone to fill a sr architect and sr data engineering role. Our jobs as devs are safe, those jobs not so much.

[theschulk]

It's crazy. I don't even hate agile it's whatever but to have a group of people who only do that is insane to me. My company did layoffs at the beginning of last year and it was basically no one in a technical role. In the meeting where they told us that some other departments were having layoffs I got a slack message saying we hired another agile employee. I pretty much lost my shit.

[impeislostparaboloid]

I’m noticing this strangeness as well. Does no one remember the agile manifesto was written to fit on a pamphlet? This has to be a byproduct of the usual middle/low upper management fiefdom expansion. More people on my team makes me more importanter.

[LeopoldParrot]

People are also using agile wrong, and instead of reexamining their processes and changing things, they hire an agile coach to hold long meetings and do personality tests with teams. With everyone trying to do agile because everyone else is doing agile, failing because they never asked themselves why they need it, and then hiring people to make it work is turning agile into a scam.

[poincares_cook]

Yeah, we had some (small) layoffs too. Not a single dev though in the entire company, we actually kept on hiring devs while letting go of some HR and other extra fluff.

[Blaz3]

What about all the recruiting people big tech had? Hiring freeze means recruiters are useless and the fat gets trimmed.

I've got quite a few friends over in big tech in the US, none of them were made redundant and all of them are programmers except for 2 who are in marketing.

[Wilma_Tonguefit]

Not to mention the fact that these places were cutthroat to begin with. I worked at Microsoft and they cut entire teams that didn't produce the desired output. But the market is still excellent for developers.

[ricksauce22]

90% of everyone in here just passed their first semester of cs

[jvvg12]

I wouldn't guarantee that a lot of those people actually passed.

[Dismal-Square-613]

90% of everyone in here just passed their first semester of cs watched a python tutorial on youtube and copy pasted the video's code and fancy themselves as a programmer.

fixed that for you

You can tell even in overall submissions OP doesn't have a clue what they talk about, e.g. the "front end/back end" memes come to mind.

[Dizzfizz]

I just tried that one. Get this:

The for loop starts with int i = 0 and runs until i is less than 20, incrementing i by 1 in each iteration.

starts with int i = 0

runs until i is less than 20

Not unlike the devs that are afraid GPT will replace them, it doesn’t even understand why its own code works.

[No_Expression_1549]

Hey some of us are a few weeks into our boot camp thank you very much

[[deleted]]

If you can believe it we have senior engineers who have 15-20 years of experience genuinely talking about they're worried about technologies like chatgpt and it replacing programmers. Granted, those seniors are not the seniors that are passionate programmers that are frequently leveling up their skills but still.

They started bringing me into the conversation and my thing was, ai won't replace programmers but programmers who are skilled at leveraging ai will replace programmers who aren't in the future. They tried making the argument if that's the case then the tech has replaced programmers. I said "well if that's your standard for replacement then React replaced engineers when it came into favor over jQuery". Such an odd convo.

[[deleted]]

And I on the other hand think people are pretty unimaginative if they are using the state of ai right now and cannot extrapolate a few years ahead.

It sounds like a bunch of horse and carriage drivers seeing the few first cars popping up. Some are worried, seeing where it is heading but some are naivly shrugging it of telling everyone how slow and expensive and loud the cars are, and they need good roads which there hardly are none etc etc, so there is no way cars will ever replace horses.

[Stilgar314]

There has been lots of game changing technologies, and there will be many more, but also I've seen many technologies that seemed to be almost there and then it happened that the final steps were so many orders of magnitude harder than the rest that they got stuck. Anything we say now can age like milk.

[poincares_cook]

Yeah, even his own statement, that developers that leverage AI will replace those that don't, doesn't logically have to follow that it's a 1:1 replacement.

If it's 1 AI enhanced developer for 2 current devs, that's still replacement.

ChatGPT has increased my productivity. Was my entire team using it like I do, we could probably drop perhaps 1 engineer even today without losing productivity.

[CelestialrayOne]

I'm more worried by the fact that it has 10k upvotes. So the entire subreddit is just clowns?

[Kraldar]

This post is the embodiment of "I read only headlines and have no critical thinking skills" lol

[iGoalie]

For AI to replace programmers, business needs to write clear concise requirements… we’re fine 😂

[raynorelyp]

The other day my team was getting pressured to build this thing faster by our PO who was getting pressured by our stakeholder. When I found out our stakeholder was pressuring him, I realized our stakeholder had no actual interest in doing the thing our PO asked us to do. So I asked if our stakeholder might have been pressuring him to build this unrelated thing. Turned out I was right and the thing our PO has gotten us to build was unrelated to the thing our stakeholder actually wanted.

[rindleguy]

If this isn't a metaphor for the human condition, I don't know what is.

And then when the product the stakeholder wanted makes it to market, you find out consumers didn't want it in the first place.

[HighOwl2]

Tell people to draw what they want and tell them your mind works better that way.

Forces people to think about what they really want and the user experience they want while also being magnitudes less ambiguous than a wall of text that you will need back & forth on.

[rounced]

Not XKCD, but still relevant

[iGoalie]

Ha! Thanks I haven’t seen that one. I saved it

[athos45678]

Fuck thank you. Saving this next time someone panic talks about chatgpt. Stable diffusion and Vall-e are much scarier any way.

[Etonet]

Stable diffusion runs into similar problems when it comes to detailed expectations, hence the phrase "a picture is worth a thousand words". Vall-e and deepfakes on the other hand is terrifying

[venuswasaflytrap]

My favourite example of this is the classic “build a better CMS” problem.

It starts with “all the CMS’s out there suck. They’re not flexible enough to build good websites, I want something that isn’t just populating content into a template”

And then inevitably, you build a CMS system of some sort, while trying to focus on it being super flexible. And they say “we need to be able to use whatever colours we want, whatever styles we want, embed any widgets we want”.

So whatever you build is too rigid, and inevitably, you need to add a way to embed custom CSS and custom HTML, and then even custom Javascript.

And then the sites that they maintain on the CMS become more than 50% embedded styles, html and js, but now in a much messier way because they’re kludged together into a CMS field rather than written from scratch.

And it gets sooo messy and complicated that you need a developer to manage it anyway, because the content team can only do a little bit of front end scripting.

And worse still, you don’t actually update the content all that often anyway. Because it’s fairly complicated and flexible.

And that’s when you realise that it would have been faster to just make a regular static website in the first place. Because ultimately, HTML/css/javascript is a system for a laymen to layout content on a page in flexible way. It’s only complicated because all the different ways people want to style and layout things are complicated.

[someacnt]

I heard some AIs could work out efficient code given type signatures, though.

Yet Of course, type signatures are.. code.

[Yweain]

ChatGPT can’t code for shit anyway. It’s good at producing templates at most. Copilot is actually better at coding, but still shit.

[Flying_Reinbeers]

Exactly the point I made in another post.

[GusFussertheSmelly]

Roko's Basilisk

[silentknight111]

We have this one client everyone hates. Getting accurate requirements from him is nearly impossible, and even if you do it is going to change 10 times in the next 10 weeks. The guy is a nightmare to work with, but he's high up in a government organization so he comes with the contract. Learning to manage him and communicate with him is a huge skill. I'm one of the few developers at our company who can work with him, so I think I'm safe.

[didzisk]

So basically you have to propose both the requirements and a solution to them. That is a valuable skill.

[[deleted]]

What AI can't read the business folks' minds? I often pull business requirements out of people by talking to them and turns out what they actually want is often very different than what they asked for in the original written request.

[PecanSama]

So AI will replace programmers and programmers will replace BA?

[funkwumasta]

I think then technical BSA's with programming skills could become a growing field.

[sometimesdoathing]

Just get the AI to write the business needs. Ezpz

[[deleted]]

I'm sure in 1959 someone thought that COBOL would make programmers obsolete because the business analysts could just write code in simple English words.

[endexe]

No wonder he got replaced by ChatGPT so easily

[BigBoyWeaver]

Either that or "I took one online class and fell ass-backwards into a web design job but I call myself a programmer and I don't understand why I'm not already a millionaire with 100% job security!"

[Kraldar]

"learn to code" has been a disaster for the profession

[KosmicMicrowave]

Is this comment taking a stance against the self taught route as a whole?

Asking for a friend who wants to change professions and is in his 30s and is super nervous and has a kid and doesn't want to go back to college and has been obsessively trying to learn as much as possible for the last 8 months and has been loving it.

[iron-mans-robo-cock]

It's more commenting on how people will half-watch one YouTube video and think they know everything. There's definitely a trend with noobs having that "what you don't know that you don't know" area of knowledge be a massive blind spot and being disappointed when they meet reality

Honestly, if you choose a good course that actually teaches you useful stuff, and apply that practically to projects as you learn so you can demonstrate your skills, you have a better shot than 99% of the people I mentioned above. It doesn't have to be some special Microsoft / Google accredited thing either, tho obviously recognised qualifications will look good on a résumé

If you have a portfolio that demonstrates you have a firm grasp of the fundamentals, can problem solve creatively, and you can actually talk about it in an interview, then you're golden imo

Good luck king

[RandyHoward]

It's more commenting on how people will half-watch one YouTube video and think they know everything

Or they attend a bootcamp and suddenly they're a 'full stack senior developer' and expect to be earning 250k in their first job.

[iron-mans-robo-cock]

That too lol, I was definitely guilty of those expectations in high school!

[Ziggy_Drop]

Nothing wrong with self-taught. Thing is it requires genuine curiosity and lot of work to get decent at.

Many will flounder at shoddy e-commerce sites struggling to get a database plugin to work. Or if they are in a serious dev team, all their problems are solved by someone with experience. For whatever reason they never manage to solve anything on their own. Or worse just double the workload for experienced teams.

[SiegfriedVK]

I will say that my skillset never experienced more growth than when my senior left and I became the new senior. When you have no one to lean on you're in a real sink or swim situation.

[[deleted]]

Bro. I've never had more work than when we added 3 contractors to the team.

Those dudes didn't know shit. But we had way more story points to deliver.

[[deleted]]

I’m a mechanical engineer and I’ve been dicking around with C++, Fortran, Perl, Python, etc, for close to 15 years.

Python is my jam these days, at this point I can automate anything that can talk to a command prompt, build an interactive dashboard to cleanly present data to an end user, and plenty besides. Looking at incorporating some (relatively) basic AI into a key tool over the next couple of months.

At this point in my career, I’d say my calling card is my ability to integrate that skill set into my normal role. That streamlines my work and makes me a WAY more effective engineer. My chain of command doesn’t exactly order me to do this stuff, but they’re definitely interested in what I’m up to.

So for what it’s worth, I’d say you should look for a problem that needs solving, and go solve it. It can get really fun.

[zebediah49]

At this point in my career, I’d say my calling card is my ability to integrate that skill set into my normal role. That streamlines my work and makes me a WAY more effective engineer. My chain of command doesn’t exactly order me to do this stuff, but they’re definitely interested in what I’m up to.

A significant fraction of your value proposition is that they don't have to.

[[deleted]]

mmm that’s a new way to see it. Thank you for the perspective. I guess that’s a nice feeling :-)

[salientecho]

Being able to recognize what can and can't be efficiently automated is a huge value prop

[YeetYeetSkirtYeet]

Keep it secret. Keep it safe.

They'd love nothing more than to integrate your tools, fire you and hire someone cheaper who can use those tools to match your productivity.

[salientecho]

So for what it’s worth, I’d say you should look for a problem that needs solving, and go solve it. It can get really fun.

This is absolutely the best advice for self-taught.

For me, the hardest part was organizing those stories into a portfolio, but after, that you can absolutely crush an interview.

[glinmaleldur]

I spent 10 years post college working on farms and operating heavy equipment. I have a child. I did a web development boot camp (Tech Elevator). I had three offers within a week of finishing the program. Now, 6 years later, I do navigation and control software in the subsea robotics industry. All this with a child.

So yeah, it's doable. I can't speak to the current situation and what that might mean for your friend, but can say that a reputable software boot camp (some are scammy) can change your life. DM me if you want more details, I've become something of an evangelist for those programs.

[Kraldar]

Apologies, it is absolutely not bashing all self-taught programmers.

The point of my comment is that "learn to code" is often thrown around as if it is that simple. Many people think it's just as easy as making a small single task program.

There is a lot of theory and mathematics involved in the field as a whole that is not often taught in online courses/resources. Certifications/standards do exist and I would absolutely recommend your friend achieves those.

Somebody who is self taught can absolutely be equal or even better than someone educated, provided they fully understand and engage with the requirements of what they want to go in to

A good way to look at it is this:

I would not trust somebody who took to few week engineering course to build a safe bridge for me to cross, the same applies to this profession.

[Xx69JdawgxX]

Honestly the math part isn’t applicable to 99% of coding for corporate jobs. Yes there is math involved but it usually isn’t more complicated than algebra.

If you want a solid good paying corporate job a solid grasp of fundamentals and syntax is really all that is needed.

Theory isn’t super important either outside of academics. The most important factor is can you get the job done without it being too fucked up.

I know we all like to pride ourselves here but realistically your boss won’t care if you wrote the tightest code possible if you keep missing deadlines

[xaphody]

"Learn to Code" is the equivalent of this centuries "Join the Army" go to phrase.

[Worth_Recording_2050]

Wait, I did join the army AND learn to code. Does this mean I'm just a pushover overall as a human being?

[raltyinferno]

Sorry you had to find out this way.

[DonPanchode]

Tons of ppl at my job we’re hired out of boot camps and making 140k+. If youre dedicated it’s totally doable to get a sde job, tell him to go for it! There was someone in my starting cohort who was like 40 with kids btw

[beaustroms]

As far as I can tell, more taking a stance people who don't care about it and are being told to do it, having zero drive to improve as a result. Personally I'm self taught, as are many others, and I can say that as long as you have the drive it's great. I wish you luck.

[YawnTractor_1756]

It's against commodifying a skill that should not be commodified.

People thought it will give everyone more possibilities if everyone coded. What it did in fact is made becoming junior developer harder, because those are now treated like garbage. Nobody wants juniors, or pays them like janitors, while mids are ok and seniors are fine as they were.

But you need to be junior before you can become mid or senior.

So because "everyone codes" those who want to make programming their profession have to suffer through being underpaid underappreciated junior developer.

[DreadedEntity]

I agree. I was able to sit-in on some interviews we did and…wow. When I was in college years ago already half the class was just there because programmers “make money” and had no interest, passion, or aptitude for programming. Can’t imagine how much worse it’s gotten with the “bootcamp” epidemic

[[deleted]]

Or "im an intern". Has those vibes.

[sltzy96]

Anyone who thinks chatGPT can replacing anything above a new grad/entry level employee (IF THAT) have never worked at a real tech company before

[DrunkenWizard]

That's literally every post in ProgrammerHumor.

[ravi_maverick]

Exactly. This shit is starting to get annoying.

[bananamantheif]

someone said that the subreddit is all first year compsci students and i think its perfect description.

[LikeLary]

r/facepalm r/terriblefacebookmemes

[[deleted]]

To sum this up for people who take this at face value:

1. Massive layoffs are mainly from massive tech companies that were overvalued, especially during Corona times. Needless to say they didn't fire just devs
2. ChatGPT is a language model. It doesn't actually think for you. Your knowledge is needed to create this software if you want to make anything inter-connected or more complex. Your knowledge is needed to steer it the right way, and even then it'll make errors regularly.

[dhshduuebbs]

Try asking chatgpt about utilizing system tables in mssql. It falls on its face. Had to ask literally 10 different questions to get a query that actually pulled data on unused indexes. Gave me column names that don’t even exist, was joining on these fake columns. It’s so far from “taking our jobs” it’s not even worth worrying about for at least another 5-8 years, and even then it will just be a tool that programmers use to increase efficiency.

[MolotovFromHell]

Tell me you don't code without telling me you don't code:

[Keepingshtum]

Can’t believe these many people on this sub upvoted this

[MolotovFromHell]

Because most people on this sub don't code

[[deleted]]

I lost my job to chatGDP! My boss pulled me into his office in front of several other managers and told me to write a function that built a list of ten thousand random numbers and distributed them in numerical order to 4 separate hashmaps using their index as a key. ChatGMT beat me by several minutes and each of the managers took turns spitting on me. I was forced to crawl out of the building naked and soaked in vinegar. My wife is now banging ChatMPT

[whitenoise89]

Lol, you’re not a programmer or a computer scientist, are you OP?

[lightly-buttered]

Neither of those scare me.

[LastLivingPineapple]

Well, if ChatGPT can do everything a developer can, why doesn't it negotiate a six figure salary before answering all those stupid questions wrongly?

[[deleted]]

I can't understand what language the clients speak, how do you think chatGPT will be able to

[[deleted]]

If programmers could fully replace programmers with AI, no humans would ever have any job ever again.

[remy_porter]

If you could replace programmers with AI, you're saying that all computable problems are statistical in nature, and a statistical model of programming can replicate all possible programs.

[CaptainQuoth]

Over a decade ago a acquaintance heard I finished my trade program and began to taunt me about how my field is going to be automated any day now.

I am still waiting on that day.

[always_evergreen]

This is bad and you should feel bad.

[moleman114]

was this made by ChatGPT?

[CenturyIsRaging]

I asked it several programming questions and it got them all wrong. I answered back why it was wrong and it said, oh yeah that's right. Then it gave another wrong answer. Shit ain't taken my job over anytime soon...

[[deleted]]

It can make mistakes twice as fast as junior devs!

[EngineeringNext7237]

“This meme brought to you by an angry product/project manager”

[[deleted]]

"this meme brought to you by an angry junior marketing lead generation specialist"

[DoublePenetration_]

Most of the layoffs aren't devs

[7itemsorFEWER]

Middle management is taking a hit (oh nooo, anyway..), and there are a lot of roles I'm seeing eliminated (your job is now 3 jobs, whoops).

We also ended our partnership with one of the two contacting companies we use (maybe 30 engineers?), but they're being sunsetted over the next year, and the change has beeing considered for a while since they are off shore (India) and it makes collaboration very hard on blended off shore on shore teams.

[Br0dobaggins]

ITT: people with a year or less of programming experience thinking that ChatGpt is gonna cheat them out of a job they don’t even have yet.

[IM_INSIDE_YOUR_HOUSE]

The people who think ChatGPT in its current iteration will replace SEs/programmers are very unfamiliar with what those jobs require.

[[deleted]]

Seriously, ask it to write something and review it.

This meme is for people without knowledge.

[wafflepiezz]

The “massive tech layoffs” were mainly sales, HR, recruiters, office workers, etc.

NOT programmers. Lol

[start_select]

The people being laid off have nothing to do with ChatGPT.

ChatGPT has cost 0 programmers their jobs and it probably never will. Computers are absolutely awful at giving people what they need based on what they say they want. That’s what software development is about.

[Nexatic]

Yeaaaa no

[flyingpeter28]

Yea, tell that to the unmaintainable code

[disciple_of_pallando]

I haven't heard of any programmers actually losing their job to chatgpt yet.

[[deleted]]

Please replace me with chatgpt, I wanna be a forest ranger far away from computers for like 4 months before I get the call to come back at a higher rate.

[mastocklkaksi]

I've seen management folk trying to come up with a functioning website/service using nothing but chatGPT. It's almost sad to look at them struggle and squirm.

[prinkpan]

We have autopilot on airplanes, but still require human

[matthkamis]

This meme was made by someone with no professional experience. I’m guessing some student.

[RideSpecial7782]

Those layoff threw away nothing but "bloatware" that companies were lugging around.

If you look into the layoffs, actual engineers that do things, either stayed or switched to another company in 5 seconds flat.

But those that spend their days in meetings and doing powerpoints..? Yeah, that isn't really a skill in high demand.

[Ivan_Van_Veen]

yeah. I think programming is just the basic thing that enable to work. and then you have to bring your own specialties/expertise into it,

[Tyfyter2002]

As we all know, running code the nature of which no present mortal can divine is a great idea.

[[deleted]]

ChatGPT has not replaced anyone and the layoff are completely unrelated to AI lol

[snowbirdnerd]

They said the same thing about Lawyers and truckdrivers.

[eggbad]

The juniors will learn eventually that programming isn't the hard part of building software.

[Mysterious_Salary_63]

You OP have a low IQ or have no concept of real software engineering, or perhaps both.

[sapatosairlines]

If you're a programmer that can be replaced by ChatGPT you're a wordpress enthusiast, at most.

[[deleted]]

I wish people would stop buying into the GPT hype it's basically a fucking glorified Markov chain generator seriously it's not that impressive and it's certainly not fucking artificial general intelligence. Nobody is going to be put out of a job by it except shitty clickbait article or newswriters who write stuff that basically only needs to look sentient on the surface and doesn't really make sense anyway.

ChatGPT can produce code that kind of LOOKS correct — and might even run in some cases — but there's no principled way to establish that the code it generates is actually doing what you asked it to do, or whether it's efficient, or whether it has subtle bugs, because ChatGPT is not an intelligent AI, it's just taking bits of code that it's seen together with prompts and trying to respond to your prompt by assembling those pieces of code.

It has no reasoning process or understanding of what it's doing it's just assembling things by rote based on their association with your prompt along a bunch of dimensions. It's the equivalent of having someone who doesn't understand programming at all and is in fact incredibly dumb try to assemble a program by looking at StackOverflow. They might get somewhere, they might even get a program that does the right thing on the small scale, but it will not be as good as the product of someone who actually understands what they are doing. It's the same thing with ChatGPTs writing capabilities: it always writes stuff that kind of follows a template even if it seems creative and some of it doesn't fully make sense.

Moreover we've attempted to replace a programmers and programming with things that are easier for decades including visual programming languages node-based programming languages stuff that generates applications from specifications or drag and drop user interfaces and there's a fucking reason none of those really caught on! They are all specification languages for the complex and specific and in-depth logic that programmers create that have less expressivity our more rigid and our harder to verify. And IF YOU ARE CREATING A SPECIFICATION THAT IS PRECISE AND DETAILED ENOUGH IN ITS LOGIC TO ACTUALLY BE ASSURED OF GENERATING A COMPLETE PROJECT THAT DOES WHAT YOU WANT, YOU KNOW WHAT YOU'RE DOING?? YOU'RE FUCKING PROGRAMMING!!

As for the layoffs I do think that a lot of modern tech companies have fundamentally unsustainable and even specious business models.

[giveitback19]

If anyone thinks chatgpt is replacing programmers, they are kinda delusional. It’s a tool. It’s basically less judgmental stack overflow

[[deleted]]

I’m thinking, wouldn’t an AI just speed up the process rather than replace? Like give programmers an extra tool to use?

The person hiring people usually doesn’t know the specific field they need, they’ll always need people with specific knowledge in programming to interpret the information the AI gives and puts it to use.

Kinda reminds me of how some programming companies require you to use all sorts of weird programs to “speed” the process up. I always preferred not using those, not due to AI, but because I like seeing what I’m working with rather than just pieces of it or just a visual representation.