I don't need it to write code. I don't need it to interview customers. I need it yourself attend endless, pointless, weekly zoom meetings where a manager with zero understanding of the task being done, why its being done, and with no idea how to do it, nevertheless is happy to review open tickets and discuss them.
This task will take 2 months. I'm busy working on it. If you want a 5 minute email every week on how its going, then fine. If you want me to throw my toys when i hit a road-block then I'm for with that.
But no, we need weekly status update meetings with all the other developers, testers, product owners, all wasting their and my time, just because a manager is "managing".
Forget code, that's not the hard part. When the AI can just be my doppelganger in the meeting on my behalf THEN I'll worry about AI taking my job.
> I need it yourself attend endless, pointless, weekly zoom meetings where a manager with zero understanding of the task being done.
You don't need AI for that, you need to brush up your resume and find another job - The biggest regret of my career is not having left places early when the organisation/management style sucked the enjoyment/productivity out of what you do, particularly if everyone else there agrees with you.
My point us that (as yet) AI can't replace my job, so I'm safe. (The job is safe whether I do it or someone else does.)
Now since I work remotely, I am much more likely to be replaced by a cheaper offshore worker. Certainly seems to already have happened to some of the managers I report(ed) to.
“as yet” is doing a lot of work in that first sentence. We all have a gpt number. Like some small number of workers have already been replaced by gpt4, some it will not be until gpt7, some may out code the robots till gpt9.5… Having a higher number doesn’t mean you are a better developer, just that you sit in more meetings and have to use “soft skills” like kissing ass and playing stupid, covering your ass, and other human games that will require more advanced gpt’s.
Are you suggesting LLMs will inevitably gain sentience, consciousness, and the ability to reason deductively at some point in the future?
Recall that the problem with programming isn’t generating more code. Completing a fragment of code by analyzing millions of similar examples is a matter of the practical application of statistics and linear algebra. And a crap ton of hardware that depends on a brittle supply chain, hundreds of humans exploited by relaxed labour laws, and access to a large enough source of constant energy.
All of that and LLMs still cannot write an elegant proof or know that what they’re building could be more easily written as a shell script with their time better spent on more important tasks.
In my view it’s not an algorithm that’s coming for my job. It’s capitalists who want more profits without having to pay me to do the work when they could exploit a machine learning model instead. It will take their poor, ill defined specifications without complaint and generate something that is mostly good enough and it won’t ask for a raise or respect? Sold!
> In my view it’s not an algorithm that’s coming for my job. It’s capitalists who want more profits without having to pay me to do the work when they could exploit a machine learning model instead.
Bingo. This is the real threat, and not just in our industry, but in every industry.
In all seriousness I haven't seen the idea of LLMs replacing managerial functions in a while, it would be an interesting inversion of a quasi-post-labor utopia.
The best part of AI management would be that for the first time, the manager would understand what their direct reports are saying.
If I say something like “There may be a compatibility risk due to DNS apex records”, I’ll have to spend hours explaining this to a disinterested non-technical manager. The AI understands the concept and doesn’t need me to explain.
This task will take 2 months. I'm busy working on it. If you want a 5 minute email every week on how its going, then fine. If you want me to throw my toys when i hit a road-block then I'm for with that.
But no, we need weekly status update meetings with all the other developers, testers, product owners, all wasting their and my time, just because a manager is "managing".
Forget code, that's not the hard part. When the AI can just be my doppelganger in the meeting on my behalf THEN I'll worry about AI taking my job.