Hacker News Reader

Comment by smeej | Hacker News Reader

I'm trying to fight the schadenfreude, but after years as an operations person in tech companies, being told "just learn to code!" in the most condescending way possible, by people who couldn't fathom that I was actually contentedly living on a third of their annual salary, there's something about this that feels like karma.

The computers can learn to do your job too, as it turns out, which kinda makes a funny sort of sense if you think about it. After all, what should computers be more familiar with than computer code?

View on HN

> After all, what should computers be more familiar with than computer code?

Computers aren't really "familiar" with computer code. (Or anything, but, pedantry aside). Computers don't "speak" code, or at least not at the level that most engineers are writing it. There's a whole Rube Goldberg machine of layers upon layers between a file with JavaScript in it and what the machine actually does.

I don't think GPT is taking the job of any engineer worth their salt anytime soon. I've used it plenty, but it's just not currently at a level that could replace what I do. Sure, it can write a test, boilerplate, or a function, but it just doesn't have the necessary abilities to build a whole "system" at this point.

That said, engineers who refuse to learn its capabilities might well fall behind. I think it's a big step but I don't really fear for my livelihood yet.

True, but software engineering sure seems to be more threatened by AI as a profession than, say, nursing or cutting hair, simply because it already happens in information space – no complicated and messy adapters required.

> I don't think GPT is taking the job of any engineer worth their salt anytime soon.

That probably depends entirely on their experience. As somebody fresh out of a bootcamp or a newgrad I‘d be somewhat concerned, especially if the company doesn’t want to invest in building up in-house talent because they know they probably won’t have enough retention to justify it.

I agree it makes a tough road for juniors, since it can do a lot of the things they can do. But even for them, it could just as well be a tool for learning the basics more quickly.

I disagree that software engineering "happens in information space". I understand your point, and it makes sense, but coding just isn't the hard part of the job. It's dealing with people and requirements, and people who can do that are going to remain valuable for a long time (at least, until AI can just do it all without intervention from pesky humans).

> engineers who refuse to learn its capabilities might well fall behind

Disagree because the answers and code snippets from humans are still vastly superior to AI and most questions have answers readily found on the first page of a search engine. A helpful human on the internet is more likely to rewrite all your code faster than you'd be able to cobble together some crap from a chat bot.

The true end game always has been being an overseer of the technology. Sysadmins and sysops are one area that will never go away as there will always be another system to manage. It doesn't matter if that system is human, computer, or both.

One of my friends works as an admin. His group is shrinking fast as people retire and are not replaced. They are forced to automate everything they can as quickly as they can just to keep things going. Seems like pressure to reduce overhead is combining with sophisticate tools to put a squeeze on admins.

there is really no reason to keep doing things manually, when automation can do that.

Imagine horse carriage drivers refusing to learn how to drive a car - this is them.

sysadmins refusing to automate are dying breed that will be replaced by smarter newgrads who are willing to grind and learn.

free market mechanisms and competition doing its work.

Fully agreed. These people have put millions to billions of people out of a job over the last few decades across the entire spectrum from office work to physical labor of all kinds. They deserve no job security of their own.

We need people in the trades, learn how to plumb is what I say.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com