And then they came for the programmers

[Shamone]

4 hours ago, leonardratso said:

botmen

Battyboys

[Odin]

1 hour ago, RJT1979 said:

That happened on a famous AI bot that posted on twitter. It became a Nazi and the university switched it off. Google it.

ah so if you let the AI run amock the singularity does arrive then and the AI starts to entrench the master race (the AI).

[eek]

11 hours ago, eight said:

I've met two of the other posters though.

That's part of the plan, the AI uses actors from Mechanical Turk when required...

[goldbug9999]

The hard part of programming is getting to point where you know enough about the problem to formulate a precise description of it. Turning that into code is the easy bit really.

[goldbug9999]

Also everyone loves to jump on the "all you smug coder will be made obsolete by technology xyz" bandwagon, its been going on for decades. The reality is we are way down the pecking order of jobs that are realistically automatable out of existence. Probably 70% - 80% of all office jobs will have been dispensed with before its our turn.

So they have made this AI thing act like a glorified macro generator for a bit of HTML well woopie fucking doo.

[Frank Hovis]

23 hours ago, goldbug9999 said:

Also everyone loves to jump on the "all you smug coder will be made obsolete by technology xyz" bandwagon, its been going on for decades. The reality is we are way down the pecking order of jobs that are realistically automatable out of existence. Probably 70% - 80% of all office jobs will have been dispensed with before its our turn.

So they have made this AI thing act like a glorified macro generator for a bit of HTML well woopie fucking doo.

 

I often got this about accounting jobs and had to patiently explain each time that pretty much everything that could be automated, and was of sufficient volume to make it worth automating, had been steadily automated since computer systems started to become available.  Those jobs had already gone with the big savings made by 2000 and the focus then being upon analysis rather than historic reporting.

I worked closely enough with IT, and did for a short time work in IT, to know that it was a similar situation and anyone thinking that you just bought an off the shelf piece of software and that was it really didn't understand what people in IT did.

The only department I have seen successfully replaced, and I have related this before, is HR where all the highly paid people in each location were made redundant with managers now completing the HR forms in line with written instructions issued by a small core retained centrally who would also help and advise where required. It was really straightforward stuff to do and took no more, and probably less time, than having local HR do it because they would insist upon meetings upon meetings.  The company must have cut something like 95% of all HR staff in one fell swoop with no negative effects.

I am surprised that I haven't heard of this happening elsewhere; it was a success.  Payroll was something separate but again that was in a single location.

[dgul]

On 23/07/2020 at 18:18, spunko said:

What if I told you all privately via PM that every other poster on here was a bot and you were the only one? 

What do you know about you told us all privately via pm that every one was a bot and I was the only one ?

[JoeDavola]

On 24/07/2020 at 12:36, goldbug9999 said:

Also everyone loves to jump on the "all you smug coder will be made obsolete by technology xyz" bandwagon, its been going on for decades. The reality is we are way down the pecking order of jobs that are realistically automatable out of existence. Probably 70% - 80% of all office jobs will have been dispensed with before its our turn.

So they have made this AI thing act like a glorified macro generator for a bit of HTML well woopie fucking doo.

Ever since I started work in IT 15 years ago I’ve seen one product after another that claims to solved all possible problems in a given business / problem domain that ‘non technical business users’ can create and maintain solutions with it and you don’t need programmers.

And after the sales people have fucked off they’re always proved wrong and you always do need programmers.

As you say a big part of my job is knowing what questions to ask to help people figure out what they actually want ie what the problem is.

[Frank Hovis]

7 minutes ago, JoeDavola said:

Ever since I started work in IT 15 years ago I’ve seen one product after another that claims to solved all possible problems in a given business / problem domain that ‘non technical business users’ can create and maintain solutions with it and you don’t need programmers.

And after the sales people have fucked off they’re always proved wrong and you always do need programmers.

As you say a big part of my job is knowing what questions to ask to help people figure out what they actually want ie what the problem is.

ERP for one is the biggest con I have ever seen. Put all of your different systems with wholly different record keeping and reporting needs into a single system. What could possibly go wrong?

Any organisation that opts for it betrays that their senior staff should not be trusted to run a whelk stall.

[Dave Bloke]

On 25/07/2020 at 17:35, JoeDavola said:

Ever since I started work in IT 15 years ago I’ve seen one product after another that claims to solved all possible problems in a given business / problem domain that ‘non technical business users’ can create and maintain solutions with it and you don’t need programmers.

Don't worry Joe it's been like that since me and Tommy Flowers used to mock Turing with his wild claims that we were only 25 years away from a computer more powerful than a human brain.

[eek]

On 25/07/2020 at 16:35, JoeDavola said:

Ever since I started work in IT 15 years ago I’ve seen one product after another that claims to solved all possible problems in a given business / problem domain that ‘non technical business users’ can create and maintain solutions with it and you don’t need programmers.

And MS's latest idea (Dataflex) won't fix that - the only thing it does is offer a pile of work for the next set of people who wish to do anything beyond basic bits and pieces.

Which I love as I'm going to make sure I'm in the position to fix a lot of those issues (while charging as much as I can get away with).

[JoeDavola]

32 minutes ago, eek said:

And MS's latest idea (Dataflex) won't fix that - the only thing it does is offer a pile of work for the next set of people who wish to do anything beyond basic bits and pieces.

Which I love as I'm going to make sure I'm in the position to fix a lot of those issues (while charging as much as I can get away with).

What you wanna do is be one of the consultants who, in reality knows very little about the new tech but knows just a bit more than the company they're selling it to, and can charge somewhere between 500 and 1500 a day to do the implementation for them, followed by a support contract.

[eek]

1 hour ago, JoeDavola said:

What you wanna do is be one of the consultants who, in reality knows very little about the new tech but knows just a bit more than the company they're selling it to, and can charge somewhere between 500 and 1500 a day to do the implementation for them, followed by a support contract.

I own the company - and that is actually the plan. 

We also offer a pile of change management and usability things not offered by anyone else (as I wrote so own them) which are designed to push people into those £500+ a month support contracts.

[leonardratso]

a month?

 

[JoeDavola]

34 minutes ago, eek said:

I own the company - and that is actually the plan. 

We also offer a pile of change management and usability things not offered by anyone else (as I wrote so own them) which are designed to push people into those £500+ a month support contracts.

Ker-ching!

Are these change-management tools things that you can use as a USP alongside whatever tech you happen to be doing implementations for? Last big consultancy that worked with us had the same sort of thing.....maybe it was you....

(it probably wasn't)

[eek]

10 hours ago, JoeDavola said:

Ker-ching!

Are these change-management tools things that you can use as a USP alongside whatever tech you happen to be doing implementations for? Last big consultancy that worked with us had the same sort of thing.....maybe it was you....

(it probably wasn't)

Yep that's the intention, offer enough additional items to ensure we are a better choice than other options.

And unless it was MS directly it wasn't me, I'm definitely not a big consultancy my aim is to be comfortable large in our specialist niche.

[BoSon]

Intel, boffins invent an AI Clippy for code

If you don't want AI taking your dev job maybe stop using design patterns that are easy to template and replace. Those writing undocumented spaghetti code with no automated testing will be amongst the last survivors of this war.

By following the herd on 'best practices' you're just making it easier for them to replace you. See also bespoke systems where only the original creator(s) really understand how it works under the bonnet. Create a black box but ensure if anyone looks inside they won't have a clue how to change it. Job for life, or as long as you want it.

[CVG]

On 25/07/2020 at 16:35, JoeDavola said:

As you say a big part of my job is knowing what questions to ask to help people figure out what they actually want ie what the problem is.

That's the business analyst role. FGS don't let the programmers try to do that!

[CVG]

4 hours ago, BoSon said:

Create a black box but ensure if anyone looks inside they won't have a clue how to change it.

I had to fix/replicate something shit like that. After three days of finding howling errors we decided that replcement was required - not replication!