Hot gptchat take of the minute: programmers are less threatened than middle management
Imagine replacing middle managers with basically dictation and tracking personnel and delegatingdecisions and report to chatgpt.
Imagine replacing middle managers with basically dictation and tracking personnel and delegatingdecisions and report to chatgpt.
His conclusion was: programmers are getting replaced, and he will replace them.
In reality, he will get replaced because all he is doing copy-pasting snippets. To actually build a full system that will slough away staff requires domain knowledge that a chatbot doesn't have. ChatGPT will come first for the people using it most now.
I often think about starting a business-process outsourcing company in the UK. I know there are companies in Japan (also a country known for overhiring). But then you talk to managers about their processes, and you realise they genuinely do not understand anything about technology...it is just pointless, like trying to teach German to a chimp.
The stuff you see in local govt/healthcare would bring people on here to tears. The local govt was trying to hire people to improve processes...their listed tech contained no programming languages and just included managed services. You see tech roles, and it is all the same: just managed services, no actual coding...it is incredible.
I often have an imposter syndrome,but it looks like the bar is really really low.
Complaining about govt is eternal though. My local council offers unskilled, internal-only jobs at pay levels similar to dev jobs in the private sector at the same level of seniority...and the council has twenty people to the job of one person...what can you say?
you talk about hiring under-qualified people, but they also hire over-qualified people and don't know what to do with them.
I got hired out of university as a "data scientist" in the govt; but it turned out they actually didn't have any data science to give me. they just slotted me into the same excel clusterfuck workflows they always had. the inefficiency was unimaginable, it was like the spreadsheet dark ages. i tried to clean things up on my own initiative, automate them, have proper version control and data pipelines in code rather than manual steps described in piles of word documents; but I was the only person in my section of the org chart who had the skills or even cared about the problems. I could make things better in my tiny corner, but everyone I had to work with was clueless, so there was only so much I could do. so I just quit out of boredom and frustration.
then I got a SWE job for more than twice the pay.
All our trading was done by computers, with everything written to a database.
I show up at the fund admin's office, and what do I see? There's two young guys my age sitting there with the printed trades, thousands of them... typing them into a computer. One typing, one double checking. They had been at it for days when I arrived.
When you think that OEICs actually have to trade at that number too...scary.
I have seen this in funds too. I knew one place that had school leavers booking their trades on internal system. They weren't high-frequency but I remember the guy showing me round, and he had three of these guys stacked up in this cupboard with Excel.
Where can I find those Type-I organizations that Dominic Cummings keeps banging on about?
They don't exist. Cummings doesn't live on this planet (he hasn't even had enough experience in govt to be called a bureaucrat, he has just had a host of jobs due to family connections...he is the thing he complains so much about).
There are still firms that make things eg Aerospace, and there are orgs that do good work, but you won't get paid anything sensible.
Don't forget you can work remote as well.
People in the UK talk about the skills shortage...your comment is exactly what I say in response: what shortage do we have of universities? What shortage do we have of young people willing to use their skills or learn new things? What shortage do we have of job applicants in these roles? We have all the people but go into almost any company (or govt), and look who is managing. It isn't only old people either, I remember interviewing for a place that has had open roles of years, missed the upturn...I interviewed and said told him I hadn't done a11y front-end before (this was full-stack), it was a deal-breaker...as if I could never learn another thing in my life....this guy was a dev.
The thing with govt really gets under my skin because it is so bad and the country needs better. The upside is massive. It is excruciating.
My monkey, just told you to "vaffanculo", but s/he genuinely does not understand anything about spiecies. Which is where i dodged a bullet...
That is the first thing I can think of where it doesn't need to be particularly connected to reality.
Even fiction needs to have long-term coherence; propaganda can be "arguments as soldiers".
- some developers don’t want to work
- some developers have no social skills and work to ruin the morale of everyone else on their team
- some developers don’t want to interact with the client or the business
- some developers don’t want to do anything that remotely looks like project management or agile or otherwise.
- some developers have no idea what the business does or how to meaningfully contribute as engineers
- some developers don’t want to pair, mob or provide training of any kind to junior engineers
- some developers don’t want to participate in interviewing or recruiting others on the team
- some developers just want to write code and go home
there’s a reason we have middle managers and until devs want to do more than “just write code” than…
…there will always be middle management in engineering.
This is the only good point here. The truth is, middle managers exist because technical work is seen lowly anywhere the management is stupid enough to think that technical competency is easy to acquire.
Also, these developers that never participate are usually the ones that get promoted to middle management.
Managers that do not value technical competence very often think that it is easy to acquire; that it only takes a few years of work, and / or that being able to interface with computers is a rather banal skill. This makes them grossly undervalue people that work with software / computers. Middle Managers are hence elected as buffer between them and the "peasants" (AKA "IT Guys"). Usually, these middle managers are elected right from the peasantry, and often it's the person that sticks out. This is also often the least technically competent member of the team / department.
“Hello individual contributor, this is WorkGPT, you have completed 6 TPS reports, and your minimal quota is 2. Rectify the situation immediately or join the PIP program.
Have a Nice Day!”
It's unclear which jobs with be enabled with more productivity vs replaced completely.