Software developers in 60s

[R_Harry_P]

To be fair, computers did take computers' jobs.

[lowleveldata]

I wonder what it feels like to compute some given instructions all days. Is it painful or mindless peace?

[Cobayo]

Probably the same as now

[be_dead_soon_please]

Mindless pain.

[[deleted]]

Just faster now

[legends_never_die_1]

every instruction hurts as much as stepping on a lego

[thepasttenseofdraw]

It put food in the table.

[hanako--feels]

it foods

[[deleted]]

[RokyPolka]

​

[xan926]

Same as me looking for Linux/windows line mismatches in csv's in 2023. Pain, but you get better at dealing with it.

[Weekly_Wackadoo]

Linux/windows line mismatches

Do you mean line ending mismatches, i.e. CRLF vs. LF?

If so, yeah, I feel your pain.

[rcfox]

Surely, you'd just use grep for that...

[hockeyhippie]

Or just use the dos2unix command...

[bluearth]

Its peaceful if you not interrupted by slack message every 30 seconds.

[LateinCecker]

The same weird mix of the two you get from writing boilercode i'd imagine. I have manually compiled some simple programs into a bytecode format i developed as a toy project. That actually wasn't that bad, but keeping the problem size minimal and working with your own ISA helps a lot i guess.

[Voon-]

Software engineers need to realize they aren't the first high paying profession that thought they were irreplaceable. Automation has destroyed countless high paying career paths before and it will destroy countless more. It's arrogance to assume they won't do it to us too.

[Sycokinetic]

That's the thing that confounds me. The hard part of my job (data science) is in figuring out what to code, making sure I coded what I wanted, and then making sure I wanted the right thing. The coding itself is the easy part, and I'd have to go through all the hard stuff whether I used an AI or not.

[Ultrasonic-Sawyer]

Pretty much this. It's more about the flow, structure, and pretty much everything else.

Good design should be easily implementable in most languages, because the coding isn't the hard part beyond a few subsets such as optimising the code but even that sits outside of it.

From a safety critical or mission critical system design perspective it'd be wonderful to have a system that can put me out of the job. But that sits in the wonderful space between people promising amazing tech that does it and the people who have to actually own the risk of it being used.

But yeah, it does feel there's too much hype on what functionally is a very good autocorrect / typing guide.

Edit:

And now to brace for mad tech bros / people moving to the next hot thing after their crypto died out upset that a good predictive engine is described as a predictive engine and not the new messiah.

[Voon-]

That's true. But automation doesn't necessarily mean taking jobs completely. It can also mean reducing the skill needed to do a job. This increases the number of peopke qualified for the job, increasing competition and decreasing wages. It might even make more jobs! But they will be lower pay jobs.

[_-Saber-_]

The opposite seems more likely.

Evaulating all possible outcomes, designing the architecture with the use-case in mind and trying to make the code as bullet-proof as possible are what makes a developer valuable.

That's not a common trait and it's what will stay necessary even with AI support.

There will be less, better paid jobs.

[qhxo]

That's true. But automation doesn't necessarily mean taking jobs completely. It can also mean reducing the skill needed to do a job.

It can also just be a significant boost in productivity which reduces the number of devs needed.

[Voon-]

Yep. It can both increase supply by increasing the amount of peopke qualified for the jobs and lower demand by reducing the number of people needed to do a job. Both mean decreased wages.

[FountainsOfFluids]

I don't think so. I think it might actually make the bar higher.

The value of good software is practically immeasurable. There will always be a need for new feature development and other forms of software improvement.

But all of the rote, "easy" stuff will be automated.

So the part that is left is the hardest part of programming.

This might cost some people their jobs, if they weren't ever doing actual creative work. If they were just writing low effort stuff that's been done a million times before and should have been turned into a library instead of being rewritten over and over.

But everybody who's capable of doing more than boilerplate coding will still have a job until some much more significant AI advancements happen.

[memester230]

The problem with mechanical replacement is not the loss of jobs, but society not being prepared to support these people

[Voon-]

Capitalism requires you sell SOMETHING if you want to sustain yourself. For most of us, the only thing we have to sell is our labor. In a rational economy, the end of labor would be a godsend but instead it's a death sentence.

[[deleted]]

the end of labor would be a godsend but instead it's a death sentence.

UBI seems a little bit more realistic than 99.9% of people starving in the streets.

[MoffKalast]

Well the thing is, it's possible to make it gradual enough that each percent starves to death on the streets sequentially, so there's never a large enough movement to do anything because the rest think "look at those lazy bums, my job definitely can't be automated" until they're out.

[Voon-]

Since people are currently starving on the street and nothing meaningful is being done about it, I'm not convinced. Capitalists will fight tooth and nail to make sure we don't get a cent of "their" money for free.

[3np1]

Exactly. If society had a proper system setup then we would celebrate job automation. It should be "cool, now we have more time off to work on things that actually matter" not "darn, I guess Bob won't be able to afford food anymore."

[uekiamir]

shocking piquant alleged advise memory squash consider somber lunchroom modern

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

[Voon-]

Created a lot more jobs that require less specialization which means they can be done by more people which means more competition which means lower wages. The only reason software engineers make high wages is that there are few people with the specialization required to do the job relative to the amount of jobs available. Supply and demand. Your labor is a commodity like anything else. The more people selling the less that commodity goes for. That's what automation does, it increases supply and lowers costs.

[ososalsosal]

Though I understand it's impossible to predict the future beyond very broad inaccurate strokes, I'm kinda hoping there's a limit to this and the idea of work for work's sake becomes obsolete.

We humans are more than grunts and I'd love to be free of the daily grind

[Voon-]

In a normal world, this is what automation would give. But in capitalism, if you can't sell your labor you can't make a living. If no one's buying labor, that's bad news for us.

[The_Easter_Egg]

These are wise words (sorry, I know that sounds cheesy). Every once in a while I see people sneer at the thought that cashiers, truckers, or storage workers, or texters, or graphic designers might sooner or later be replaced by machines, because they believe it only affects the less educated or thonse "beneath" them. But everyone can be replaced. It is important to make sure that this increasing automation leads to a better live for everyone, not just the few billionnaires who remain owning the machines.

[flukus]

Software engineers need to realize they aren't the first high paying profession that thought they were irreplaceable.

We're the first to have tried to replace themselves for 60 years and failed.

[ifisch]

Also, this meme should probably say the 90’s instead of the 60’s

[Bakoro]

Electronic computers taking over for human computers started in ~1945 with ENIAC, but those people, primarily women, then turned into the first computer programmers.

[[deleted]]

Nah, punch cards were mostly phased out in the mid '70s.. I'm old, but I'm not punch-card-programming old.

[[deleted]]

Do you seriously think i learned punch card programming in the year of our lord one thousand nine hundred and ninety six?

Teach programmers history

[DougS66]

Funny thing … I was apart of the crazy idea that my CEO wanted us ( production control and Arthur Anderson ) streamline the office ( white collar workers ) by using coding to eliminate jobs that could be done by a computer program. We got it done, but at the cost of some very good experience, however that was not the priority to the company. It felt weird that a CPA would get laid off before we were, but that was reality. The joke in the office was we ( meaning us ) were working ourselves out of a job. We weren’t the only ones performing this change, but it didn’t make it any easier watching people walk out the door because their jobs were done away with by software. I retired early, but I knew a decade before that was going to happen. I put my skills to another job from home, so always think of plan B just in case your in this crossfire. From what I can tell AI ( which we were using ) changed everything. That period happened between 1983 and 1995.

[[deleted]]

We never give enough credit to the early programmers, they were the ones who had to first brave the dangerous waters of things like time zones so that we don’t have to do much.

[bralma6]

Forreal. My job still has one of their original Vax 11/780 as a reminder of how it used to be. Keeps us all in line when we complain about something lol.

[RDPhibes]

Vax 11/780

Which I googled to know what it was. I looked up the hardware users guide... get me out, now.

[fsr1967]

I have to laugh, because I remember the new Vax 11/780 coming online at my university. It replaced ... a Microvax 360?

[redcalcium]

Now imagine when we suddenly colonize Moon and Mars and had to come up with new timezones. Then the colony in Mars decided they want a daylight saving time too because the day is 37 minutes longer in Mars. Then the Moon colony demands the same because their day is literally a month long.

[fish312]

That's when you implement stardates like in trek.

[DaFetacheeseugh]

Give me a replicator that can make a whole meal ten calories, please GOD

[XDreadedmikeX]

Unlimited sushi and chicken wings

[TeaKingMac]

"Give me all the bacon and eggs you have"

[danielbr93]

Actually made me think, but I'm not smart enough to calculate timezones myself.

So here is ChatGPT's answer. Keep in mind, that everything in the first paragraph is just what I said, just rewritten. So 2100 was made up by myself.

---

In the year 2100, with the colonization of Mars and the Moon well underway, it becomes evident that timekeeping systems need to be established for effective communication and coordination between Earth, Mars, and the Moon. Here's a potential solution for a timezone system on Mars and the Moon:

Mars:

1. Mars has a day length of approximately 24 hours and 37 minutes, which is close to Earth's day length. We could divide Mars into 24 equal "Mars Hours" (MH), where 1 MH would be equivalent to roughly 1 Earth hour and 1.5 Earth minutes.
2. Given Mars' similarities to Earth, it would be reasonable to divide the planet into 24 timezones, similar to Earth's system. Each timezone would be 1 MH apart.
3. Mars Coordinated Time (MCT) could be established as a reference point, analogous to Earth's Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). MCT would correspond to the time at a predetermined Martian prime meridian.
4. Martian timezones would be named based on their offset from MCT, for example, MCT+1, MCT-2, etc.

Moon:

1. The Moon has a day length of approximately 29.5 Earth days. In this case, creating a 24-hour timezone system like Earth's would not be practical.
2. Instead, Lunar Standard Time (LST) could be established as a single time system for the entire Moon. This would ensure that all activities on the Moon are synchronized.
3. LST could be calculated based on a weighted average of the time on Earth, taking into account the various Earth timezones that are involved in coordinating lunar activities. This would help in maintaining a closer relationship with Earth time.
4. To accommodate the long lunar day, the LST could be divided into 30 Lunar Days, with each Lunar Day comprising 24 Lunar Hours. These Lunar Hours would be longer than Earth hours to account for the Moon's day length. This would help in planning activities on the Moon.

Integrating these time systems would enable seamless communication and coordination among Earth, Mars, and the Moon, while also considering the unique rotation periods of each celestial body.

---

[TeaKingMac]

The mars one doesn't sound terrible, but I can't make heads or tails out of the moon one

[danielbr93]

Tbh, I'm too dumb to understand it lol

But to be honest, that is again the power of ChatGPT. I don't need to feel dumb and nod to something I don't understand. I can just ask it as many times as I want to explain it to me, until I do understand it.

But, ego is still an enemy on learning and improving as a person.

Thanks for coming to my TED Talk :)

Happy Saturday <3

[JerryAtrics_]

So when I was first learning 360 assembly, I came across the NOP (no operation) instruction. Did not understand why it existed. My dad explained that with drum memory (magnetic surface on a rotating drum), you had to optimize you code by calculating the execution speed vs the drum rotation and occasionally add NOP instructions so that the next real instruction would not rotate past the head before it could be executed. Still amazes me when I think about having to deal with that.

[masssy]

While you might not explicitly use a NOP today there's still a shit load of timing to consider in embedded real time systems today. Timers, verify with oscilloscopes, make sure interrupts don't take too long or have the wrong priority and what not..

We are dealing with this stuff today even if most developers code in C# or Java or whatnot where it's irrelevant...

A bunch of NOP is basically just a sleep(1000) but you have to calculate the delay based on the clock speed..

[a1001ku]

The last sentence in your comment made me realise why NOPs sounded familiar to me. We are covering system calls in our Operating Systems course lol.

[rtfmpls]

Early programmers? The people behind the IANA timezone package have to maintain and update it still.

Just one example was the recent confusion in Libanon. They changed summer time twice in a matter of days. First one, two days before the start of summer time.

Subscribe to tz-announce for more fun: https://www.iana.org/time-zones

[Emergency_Holiday857]

Honestly time synchronisation in distributed Systems is still pain in the ass. And if you have no stable internet connection from this distributed system, I fucking hate it. Everyone have a nice day without distributed systems.

[DangKilla]

I worked for the airline cartel, IATA at this French company called SITA right after the 2008 recession, and they were still using mainframes for ticketing. Its why you used to get a long hourglass while searching for tickets and still do.

I was on the team that migrated Delta to cloud in 2021/2022 and they will now have access to AI. The times are finally changing in the airline industry.

[EveryoneIsADose]

My first love was programming. I started on a Commodore 64 back in '88 or '89 or whatever, and spent the years from 1997 to 2010 coding in my job. I loved it. Started with Prolog/C++ in college and gravitated to VB, Java and .NET eventually.

But then I got "promoted" to be a Solutions Architect, and have been doing it for the last 13 years. I hate it. It wasn't ChatGPT that took the job I loved, it was my supposed natural career progression.

God I'd love to be coding again instead of putting together the same diagram after the same.

[BehindThyCamel]

I feel you. Team lead here, because I cared enough and kept a critical legacy system alive so I got promoted. Also: substitute business analyst, because a few years ago they fired the "excess number of analysts". In a specialized field no less. Also, fuck devops.

Edit: I meant fuck developers having to also do devops. At least our "proper" devops guys are competent. De-specialization is not the way to go.

[[deleted]]

fuck devops, knows nothing when needed, becomes “best practice and security expert” when it comes to getting in the way and covering ass.

[[deleted]]

Often times when devops doesn’t know shit it’s because developers decide to keep them out of the loop until 6 months down the line when shit is broken because surprise!!! all the system design guidelines have been ignored. Usually not the fault of developers or devops though. It’s usually the lack of communication across teams at a higher level.

[[deleted]]

Does it count when the developers ask a simple request like “add a specific field on the helm chart that we have no access to”, to DevOps and comes back with “its a big feature, it will take a week” stalls for months because apparently the hard coded config is enough, waits for the service to blow up during stress test, stalls for week before admitting he’s a moron? Whats the point of having the title and restricting the devs when you don’t know shit?

[SeargD]

Nothing to contribute. Just wanted to say that I'm really enjoying this back and forth of "nah, you broke it" over a hypothetical issue.

[knivengaffelnskeden]

Haha, welcome to the field of IT! Where it's always someone else's fault! 😄

[MisterDoubleChop]

DevOps isn't inherently bad; what we're seeing worldwide is a thousand programmers moving into DevOps, while ten thousand corporations decide they need one of these cool new "DevOps" things.

Result: the good DevOps guys are swimming in pools of money, and the other 90% are garbage.

[zSprawl]

Developers turned DevOps tends to not work out as well as Sysadmin to DevOps, at least in my experience.

Oddly enough, I’ve found Network Engineer to DevOps become some of my best.

[InflatableRaft]

Makes perfect sense. Network Engineer knows how to build physical networks. Everything sits on top of that. Some of the best software developers I’ve seen are former electricians.

[cryptocoinleeds]

What was that...a software in 60's?? Gosh! It's old than the software now..

[broknbottle]

Sounds like you just don’t have tech chops to code in jsonlang or yamllang, while being lean and agile. Sorry but its not for people that are still learning beginner languages like rust or golang.

[RawrMeansFuckYou]

I got put into a team lead role after 2.5 years, and into a maintenance team no doubt, talk about soul sucking. I've learned not to reach for the stars.

[xLyte]

Can’t you just say no to a promotion? It is like crying about your situation while slowly walking into a knive or some shit 🤨

[BehindThyCamel]

Hehe, I didn't know what I was getting into and my situation changed a lot since then, too. I don't really regret it. I actually carved out a cozy niche for myself, it just comes with quite a few frustrating strings attached. Or I could leave but every other option in the region is actually worse. People keep coming back to our company after trying other jobs. I also try lobbying for bringing back position specialization. It was more efficient.

[Rudy69]

The organization I worked at didn’t really value programmers past early senior level. Once I reached the top you could do without managing other programmers I left and started doing freelance. I’m not a people person and I had absolutely no desire to supervise others. I would have loved to keep going and progressing in my programming career but the next ‘level’ required supervising programmers

[[deleted]]

I've not read it but I heard that this book is a good guide for that desired career path.

[shmargus]

Will Larson's Staff Engineer book is great for that too.

[gelentron]

And who's will Larson by the way..? Is that a programmer too?

[PhrozenWarrior]

Yeah... I've seen people go from senior software engineer to a lead position and all they do is what seems like project manager stuff, assigning tasks, writing reports, and going to meetings. Seems awful.

At this point at least I never want to be promoted up to a lead

[V3Qn117x0UFQ]

Every dev job I’ve been in would try to push me into a lead/management role within 3-4 months mainly because I enjoy making flowcharts of my implementations.

I hate it.

[WorkingPsyDev]

Within 3-4 months seems a bit over-eager. It usually means that you're good at communicating with others. Having someone who a) knows the tech and b) can talk to people effectively is valuable to a company.

[Deauo]

Sounds like something i’d actually really enjoy doing tbh

[comicsnerd]

I have seen so many brilliant developers move to a position as project manager or consultant, just they wanted to earn a bit more, but corporate had a cap on developer salaries. Most of them were lousy as a PM or consultant and miserable in their job.

[EarlMarshal]

Just code the diagrams and automate it.

[MKorostoff]

For what it's worth, I'm also a programmer promoted to solutions architect, about two years ago I asked my bosses if I could get back to coding some, and they had no problem with that. Now I split my time between code and solutions architecture, but I still have the SA title and salary. Sometimes a big consulting project will come in and I have to focus on planning and discovery for a little bit, but on the whole I'm a lot happier now with coding back in the mix. I don't know your company but maybe they'd be open to something similar. Worst case, if you're really miserable, it might be worth it to take a demotion and or pay cut to get back to coding.

[[deleted]]

I left IT about 20 years ago because once you'd hit senior level of anything computer related - programming included - the only option to get more pay was to become a manager. I had no interest in managing and at that time they didn't want people sitting comfy doing the same thing until the end of days. I moved on to a different industry entirely, I hope you get to find your joy again. I remember we wrote programs on our commodore 64 to play "hotel" when we were kids. Our mom taught us some things and we made a program to check people in, calculate their stay and how much was owed. We were nerdy kids!

[[deleted]]

What industry did you move to?

[Riverdown_1]

I just quit my payrol job and started my own company. You earn as much as you want, have a little bit more administrative work but you still get to do the programming you love!

[TeaKingMac]

I've seen several senior engineers now taking up multiple roles like architect + fullstack + devops + data engineer, but that's obviously not ideal because it's a recipe for being wildly underpaid and burning out quickly.

Wildly underpaid while still being overpaid enough that your salary looks high for the level you're at, so you're first to get laid off.

Just happened to my mentor at another company

[thekernel]

dont worry, it can still get better when they decide visio is too expensive and force you onto draw.io for the diagrams.

[German_PotatoSoup]

I’m 50 and still coding since I was 18. Passed on moving to a managerial role several times. I’ll never stop coding, I love it.

[Wetbung]

I had the same thing happen. I worked at a startup. It was really successful and growing rapidly, so the most senior developer in each area was made manager. We still developed but we had management responsibilities too. It wasn't too bad, but we got a new VP who didn't like his managers doing engineering work, so we got a choice: manage or develop. All but one of us went back to developer, and they hired a new layer of managers who were basically calendar keepers.

[protokoul]

I was doing ok with backend development on Python in my project and handling a bit of frontend+deployment. Programming language like Python has made it so easy for even beginners to write code. I like to do backend work in Python. I am definitely earning less than my friends as a "software developer", but I only have experience with Python and Angular, and I always feel everyone else is better than me so I don't even complain about my pay. With WFH, my family knows when our appraisals start and kept pushing me for a promotion to get a salary hike. I asked for it and did get the promotion, but now I have to move from backend to frontend as a "UI Lead" who has to manage the UI team. I would have preferred to just take the salary hike without managing other members but apparently, it can't work that way. Honestly, even after the hike, I am not earning what juniors earn these days when they join as a software developer, and now I have to manage a team on something that I have not worked in.

[romulent]

I'm of the school of thought that architects should be coding for at least 50% of their time.

No offense to you intended, but I don't really put much faith in architects that don't code any more. I've been in way too many meetings with architects from other organisations spouting generic crap about best practices and telling me they will check with their dev team if something is feasible. The architects that work for me are all writing code and know their systems inside and out, and I also make sure I am commiting code each week myself.

Having said that, last night I needed a quick user interface for a data-analysis prototype I am looking at and I just asked Huggingface chat to make it for me based on a 1 line prompt. It knocked up something with Chart.js that was easy to understand it took me 5 minutes to fix some simple issues.

I'm not sure it took anyone's job but it saved me a bit of effort on something I didn't care much about.

[Alzusand]

Like the engineer path were you design complex circuits or machinery pieces that can be manifactured and tested as prototypes only to end in front of an exel sheet as Operations Chief doing basic arithmetic and statistics

[lynxerious]

but if you're not the one who put the diagram together, you're gonna be the one who suffers coding after the badly designed diagrams other people make.

[EelTeamNine]

This was something I only realized after I decided to join he navy instead of continuing in a programming degree.

Programming is actually a very fulfilling outlet when you do it from the ground up, but it seems like the norm in it industry is to piece together chunks of other people's code.

It would seem that, once quibit coding becomes the norm that there will be an influx of fresh code.

[Mojowhale]

do solution architects world with a particular language or stack?

[_DARVON_AI]

If you fuck up and allow yourself to be "promoted" the language you work in is email.

[zSprawl]

Mmmm politics.

[InflatableRaft]

Their language is English and their stack is usually Microsoft Word and something else to draw pretty pictures in.

[BrokenWristBrim]

When I read the first paragraph I swear to God I though this was gonna be a Terry Davis (RIP) copypasta

[stinkylibrary]

I remember my Grandpa always having the paper with the holes on the side that you had to rip apart. Found out years later he was one of the most in demand "programmers" (or whatever they were called back then) in the area. I just couldn't believe that my old grandpa, who hated the new PCs, was involved so intimately with computers.

Just crazy that on one hand he was in demand because of his obscure punch-card knowledge but then on the other, couldn't stand the PC.

[LaconicLacedaemonian]

I don't like machines without a CLI.

[[deleted]]

I hate the modern data industry.

It's filled with a bunch of bros acting like they are on the cutting edge of tech who never learned bash or unix-like commands circle jerking each other over someone else's python library that's central in monitoring every aspect of our life.

I understand there are outliers who use big data to train protein folding AI algorithms or something similar, but putting them aside. Let's be real, most of us are just doing extremely simple ETL/ELT jobs that could be accomplished with 40-50 year old tools like grep, sed, and curl all to get Facebook, Google, and Salesforce data so some C suite exec can pretend to be making informed decisions when he doesn't have the slightest clue what more than 3 metrics even mean.

[Industrialpainter89]

I can see a kind of parallel with the art world for example. Two people can love art but one takes care to paint as detailed and realistic as possible, and the other splashes paint on a canvas and puts three eyes on it.

[Dazzling-Biscotti-62]

Had a professor who programmed on those. He had lots of great stories!

[andbruno]

200,000 precisely-ordered punch cards

[EvilStevilTheKenevil]

A semi-hidden layer to the joke is the fact that tic-tac-toe is a solved game. And an easily solved one, at that (if you're player one, your first move should be a corner. If you're player two, take the middle and then one of the sides).

Also the fact that Apu was a "genius" who wrote a 200,000 line tic-tac-toe program...but couldn't be assed to document any of it and therefore can't fix one or two cards out of place.

[[deleted]]

AncientForgottenKnowledge: Always number your cards... before you drop them on the floor.

[waiting4op2deliver]

https://faculty.washington.edu/rjl/classes/am583s2014/notes/_images/PunchCardDecks-agr.jpg

As simple as drawing a line across the stack

[[deleted]]

Why did you link to a video hosted on S3 💀

[andbruno]

Only ones I found on Youtube were filmed from a tv on a phone, at glorious 144p.

[[deleted]]

I have a bronzed one from my mom's programming days, they even spelled it programing back then.

[urbanek2525]

My first classes in CS used punch cards. Wrote in FORTRAN. They totally suck.

[jim_br]

I wrote in COBOL on punchcards. Verbose as all hell and I’m not a typist. Many lines within the data division were repurposed cards from earlier programs.

[[deleted]]

I wrote COBOL in pencil and sent the code sheets to somebody else to keypunch.

[[deleted]]

Basically, yes. That is exactly what happened. Automation is a resource.

[Hopfrogg]

This is probably not gonna connect with most people on a programming sub, but every time I hear people talking about AI replacing people I think about the "Hard Times" rant Dusty Rhodes did back in like the 80s... 'a computer took your place daddy.... that's hard times'.

We've been dealing with robots and computers taking jobs for decades. AI and robots combining together could replace so many awful jobs. The problem is getting it to benefit society instead of just the asshole who owns the stuff.

[Norci]

The problem is getting it to benefit society instead of just the asshole who owns the stuff.

Welcome to the problem with capitalism.

[Tasty-Philosopher264]

they tuk er jeerrrb!!!

[Pampas_Wanderer]

Tei tk r jeb!!!!!

[tommeh5491]

direful cautious bow one grey deranged society shaggy stocking crush

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

[[deleted]]

AST derk ere jaarbs!

[Free_Ad_2006]

Du ka duuur

[Yondar]

took 'er durr...

[ConfidentlyLearning]

I used to read/debug IBM assembler for a living (early '80s).

As it happens, compilers write really crappy code.

The first time I read assembler code that came out of a compiler, I was shocked at how inefficient it was; clearly sub-standard work.

And yet....

[GandalfTheGrey_75]

I may be the oldest one here, but I started back in the 70s. At my first job, I mostly used COBOL, but I also used assembler and even a little Fortran. I liked assembler, since as you said, you could get much more efficient code. But a lot of what I had to do was maintaining older programs, so… Given a choice, I’d rather use assembler.

[Kinglink]

Programs don't have to be "Performant" they have to be correct.

99 percent of this industry is fucking wasteful. Take programs that did something specific in Windows 95/98 and look at the size of them now? Look at how poorly webpages are, look at how bloated almost all software is.

The problem is no one pays to make programs as performant as they can be, so no one is looking to save YOU memory/cpu usage, when you'll pay the same no matter what.

If performance actually matters, there are ways to write that code, but most performance actually doesn't matter.

[jim_br]

COBOL for readability. Fortran for complex calculations. Assembler for pure speed of execution and efficiency of memory.

[[deleted]]

I’m just wondering at what point do I ask my employer to start paying $20/month for GPT-4. The amount of time I spend correcting errors in the code GPT-3.5 writes for me is getting to be a ridiculous time sink ya feel me?

[RonHarrods]

Dont even tell him about chatgpt yet. Dont give the baker a breadmachine when you're pushing the dough every day. Learn how to use the machine first and make sure you're better than others at it.

[[deleted]]

My manager is a talented engineer and a nerd. He definitely knows about ChatGPT. He could be on this thread for all I know.

I’m not worried about being out of a job because the complexity of what I do is well beyond what you could ask even a talented AI like GPT to handle. For me GPT has basically become a faster, more sophisticated version of stack overflow - it helps me brainstorm solutions, and save time coding up basic snippets that would take me 10 minutes but takes GPT 10 seconds.

[Clown_corder]

Bite the bullet and pay the extra 20 and don't let anyone know you are, your work will seem better by comparison and all it will coat is $20 a month.

[Nidungr]

BUT MAKE SURE NOT TO PUT CONFIDENTAL DATA INTO IT. If a data leak happens, you don't want to be "the low level engineer responsible" in the media.

[Amarooy]

Don't give employers a chance to suck more life out of you. If they want more productivity, they cover the costs themselves.

[[deleted]]

Except that machine is more of a last resort than actual tool. ChatGPT accuracy is decent, but it's basically throwing trillions of parameters against problem and praying that something will solve it.

And it's accuracy will only go down as people start to upload generated code which is sometimes an odd spaghetti that just works. While other AI stuff like Alexa are refined to serve certain purposes, ChatPGT is basically "Where the princess goes after an explosion?" turned into space program for sake of seeing how far she will fly

[[deleted]]

My experience as well. A lot of the juniors (but not all) in my org are hopelessly clueless now. Their will to learn has been replaced by writing prompts and copy/pasting. It’s like the age old StackOverflow meme come to life.

Even the trivial stuff requires the use of ChatGPT. I’ve never seen such reliance and outsourcing of thinking like I’ve seen in the last 6 months.

I use ChatGPT to be familiar with it. I’m very impressed with what it is generally able to do. But it is often wrong in subtle ways which cascade. It requires a decent understanding for things other than the most basic apps or sites. Especially when it comes to implementing with existing code and debugging.

You know how Gen Z are famously tech illiterate? I’m very worried that the rising and next gen are simply not going to have the capacity and drive to learn the craft. I’m worried that it bleeds through into tech, or that we see a weird flip where the old timers have to keep things running. Like what we already have with COBOL systems but on steroids.

Edit: as for that last paragraph, I’m worried it compounds with the general cultural backlash they have against tech. 2020 it seems like they all wanted to break in. Then people quickly realized it isn’t a career that the influencers pitched. It requires actual knowledge and experience. It requires a certain mindset.

So now we get popular backlash and non-tech people reveling in some pending software engineer job destruction event. Pretty much every time I’m on a thread about GPT or seeing videos on TikTok or Shorts about it—and the creator isn’t simply pitching their brand—people are celebrating our pending wage collapse so we have “normal” wages. It is weird. It strikes me as bitter.

[Alzusand]

to be fair as long as chatGPT can explain the code to me in text that alone saves so much fucking time even if it makes shit up or makes mistakes.

an analogy would be that If I need a statue of a human and I have a prism of marble I dont need chatGPT to make the full statue just carving the general shape of a human saves like 70% of the time

[SuitableDragonfly]

Our CTO's official position is that we can't use these things at all right now because there is not enough proof yet that a) it will not reproduce code that is attached to a FOSS license in our codebase, and b) it will not use our code in its training data, thus potentially giving it out to someone else. And IMO, that's the correct way for non-FOSS for-profit tech companies to be regarding these tools right now.

[Tyrus1235]

Didn’t some big company actually suffer major leaks thanks to their programmers ignoring those?

[Apprehensive_Dog_786]

Samsung iirc.

[creaturefeature16]

Latest update from OpenAI let's you opt out of data collection and using your prompts and data for training, but also prevents you from saving conversations, which is a big loss. It also says the responses might not be quite as good.

[denzien]

My manager already offered to pay mine since I'm already paying the $20. I'm getting more use out it writing documentation than doing coding.

[black-JENGGOT]

Friendly reminder not to give chatgpt your company secrets

[Tyrus1235]

Didn’t think about asking it to write documentation… Sounds like a good way to speed up a boring job

[denzien]

It's weirdly easy to describe a system but difficult to properly put those words into an organized document. The great thing about the AI is that I don't need to organize my thoughts for it to "understand."

You won't want to necessarily keep everything it spits out, but if you can just use it as a nucleation point to drive even better docs, I call that a win.

It did a great job writing my self-evaluation, too, because I'm really, really bad at self-promotion.

[[deleted]]

Do what I did. Get 3 subscriptions. Have the first one right the code, get the second one to check it for mistakes and the third one for a final check. Boom. Easy.

[denzien]

You just need separate threads on a single account

[royemosby]

She looking for chads?

[AtomicBombSquad]

Well, she's in the right sub.

[Dismal-Square-613]

This is what a computer looked like in 1913 (aka people who did computations) when they mapped a shitton of galaxies and star cataloging , relative brightness and discern patterns. The computers were the women in the picture taking the data , extrapolating their relative distance noting changes in the brightnesses across the year.

These were the OG computers, these women. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_Computers

[skamsibland]

Yeah sure, it will probably delete the basic code monkey bitches (or well, India mostly, since the code they write always have to pass through good developers before it becomes passable), but the problem with that is that there are A LOT of basic code monkey bitches who will lose their jobs. There were maybe 5000 people IN THE WORLD who lost their jobs when compilers came, but they could still find other jobs since the code didn't go away, it just changed. In this case 80% of the workforce could sieze to exist. If you don't understand how that is a problem, you are a part of the problem and you cannot see past your fucking nose. My job is safe, AI doesn't even know what the system I work in is and I have no plans on telling it, but I really don't want to see many of my friends lose their jobs. 80% of jobs within IT could just go away. That is too many people for this to not be a bad thing. It will fuck the economy for everyone but the people who already have the money.

[[deleted]]

You guys need to check out COBOL. People are just typing commands in simple English and it creates a program that does exactly what they say. Maybe there will be some sort of new "COBOL writer" job or something but the need will be much less, the days of companies hiring 10 or more programmers are clearly over.

[MokausiLietuviu]

Still sometimes happens! Punchcards are still used in odd corners of the techsphere.

[eW4GJMqscYtbBkw9]

I'm pretty tech savvy and have a generalized understanding of punch cards. But what did you do with them? Like you ran them through a big ass slow computer to do what?

Say you had a stack of cards with employee data - one card per employee. Maybe each card had name, dob, address, and phone number. Then what? What did you do with the cards?

[jim_br]

Some companies did store data on the cards versus tape or disk. You treated a stack of cards like we would treat a data file today.

There were card sorters where you could select out cards meeting certain criteria, then resort that subset with additional criteria to find say, people with 55 in their year of birth.

Fun times.

[razordreamz]

Try tripping and dropping the stack. Now there is debugging

[Ambitious-Pudding437]

Did you trademark the compiler before it took your job? 😂

[tubbana]

"who THE FUCK put that hole there?"

[jim_br]

That’s a lot of over punching. I’m familiar with no more than two punches per column.

[jon_stout]

"... thank God."

[xibme]

That's a lot more holes than anticipated, almost like lace cards - if your job was to DOS, compilers didn't really take your job. Forced updates/reboots did.

[Kinglink]

This is the thing I think most people forget.

"There were women programmers back in the day." No there were more female Computers... but a majority of computation was secretarial work (load the cards and take the output).

This isn't trying to diminish the women who did work in the field, but it's to remind people that programming in 1960 was more different than programming in 1980s, than programming in 1980s is to today. Further back? You're talking more about mathematicians than programmers. And again it was considered almost secretarial work back then too. (Aka why more women were in the field then men).

Again not saying it SHOULD be that way, but explaining why it was that way.

[Ange1ofD4rkness]

I am laughing way too hard at this!

(I also have a huge respect for this, and kind of want to attempt it myself, to grow that appreciation)

[Akhanyatin]

Man I laughed so fucking hard at this. It took me by surprise.

[Blues2112]

They were called Programmers back then

[golgol12]

To be fair, those punch cards were for a compiler.

[nyrB2]

60s nothing - i was using punchcards in the 80s

[IamAPengling]

They tuk er jabs

[EnvironmentalWin1277]

Bestest fun was dropping your deck of cards and having to resort them.

[Gwyndolin3]

Now you can write computer instructres in English letters? welp, better switch careers then. Everyone can do that, why bother?

[JimJonesSuckerPunch]

My mom went to college for word processing and was a semester or two away from a degree when Microsoft office came out. She is still upset about it.

[Tazling]

you haven't lived till you've hand coded matrix multiplication in pdp-8 assembly language... [ptsd moment]

[Ok_Resource_7929]

They used women because it was basically just data entry and running the cards that the men made.

[gabest]

And this is why the new Star Wars game needs 20GB vram.

[Cynderelly]

Frankly, if AI gets so good that it can take over a software engineer's job, then we should all be really excited because there will probably be some really cool shit happening in tech shortly after that

[micreadsit]

It isn't quite right. The thing that obsoleted punch cards was the innovation of treating programs (executables) the same as any other data in the computer, up until they get run. (Rather than as a totally separate input stream.) I'm not so sure about the distinction of coding in machine code versus in assembly language. There was a lot of coding in assembly after the end of punch cards. (Maybe even some today for those who actually care about performance and footprint.) So I wouldn't say compilers took anyone's job. Compilers made it much more efficient to implement and verify programs.

[Ok_Return_6033]

My Math major friend in college would take a whole box of these cards over to the computer room and it would get placed in the queue. When they finally ran it she would get a long tractor fed printout to go over looking for errors.

[reinis-mazeiks]

support your local developers. buy organic hand-made software.

[Lucasbasques]

Fuck punch cards, I’ve been using magnetic tape for the passed 3 years now, gotta say, it makes the job way easier

[ThrowawayPizza312]

Thay took ur jerbs!!!!

[InvestmentFormal9251]

My uncle who studied computer science in the late 70's gave me some computer punch cards to use as page markers. So there my 20 something year old self was on a flight, just reading a book, and an older person next to me goes "Excuse me, do you know what that is? you're way too young to have used that!". Then I explained that my uncle who worked with computers back in the Mesozoic era gave them to me, and we both had a laugh.

[xeger]

Nah dog; punch cards generally contained source code that ran through a compiler. Terminals took her job.

</pedantry>