Software Development and Programming Careers (Official Discussion Thread)

[null]

I did computer engineering in university, I was better at the software part than the electrical, lol.

i did com sci and then computation.

I'm not really following the AGI portion, I'm more focused on the application of LLM to coding. I don't understand what the goal is with AGI at the moment, as I'm not really into AI from a theoretical stand point.

the theory is the part that means i am not too worried about machines taking over yet.

I just know the pain points I had and have when doing development or outsourcing it, vs what I'm able to do today with cursor. And then thinking about having this at work, my day would go by so much faster, lol.

But yea, I think the bubble is there. But I think there is still substance here.

As far as the it only takes weeks why haven't... I dunno, maybe I'll run into the problem when I do, but I feel like the Agentic AI integration with IDEs is relatively new.

ok. the spend is only really justified by a quantum leap in capability.

Edit: also, sorry if your already replying, what are some other technologies that came by that was successfully and correctly kept out by IT? I know crypto, for example, is nowhere near adopted as what people were saying. Same with VR

yeah crypto/blockchain hype plus:

self-driving hype



symbolic logic AI hype 1950's

"In the 1950s, Symbolic AI, based on manipulating symbols and logic to mimic human thought, fueled immense hype, with pioneers like Newell, Simon, and McCarthy believing human-level AI was just decades away, demonstrated by early successes in theorem proving and games, leading to massive funding and high expectations for solving complex problems, despite hardware limitations"

formal systems in software development hype

Z, CSP, formal systems, theorem provers.

human brain project hype

"According to a 2019 article, "In 2013, the European Commission awarded his initiative—the Human Brain Project (HBP)—a staggering 1 billion euro grant (worth about $1.42 billion at the time)...the people I contacted struggled to name a major contribution that the HBP has made in the past decade"

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open questions incl quantum (algorithms)

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industry wildly wrong steps incl. mainframe->client/server->cloud (my opinion), weak+dynamic typing, DDMMYY Y2K, SS7 telecoms, ASCII ...

 

[Regular Developer]

i did com sci and then computation.



the theory is the part that means i am not too worried about machines taking over yet.



ok. the spend is only really justified by a quantum leap in capability.



yeah crypto/blockchain hype plus:

self-driving hype



symbolic logic AI hype 1950's

"In the 1950s, Symbolic AI, based on manipulating symbols and logic to mimic human thought, fueled immense hype, with pioneers like Newell, Simon, and McCarthy believing human-level AI was just decades away, demonstrated by early successes in theorem proving and games, leading to massive funding and high expectations for solving complex problems, despite hardware limitations"

formal systems in software development hype

Z, CSP, formal systems, theorem provers.

human brain project hype

"According to a 2019 article, "In 2013, the European Commission awarded his initiative—the Human Brain Project (HBP)—a staggering 1 billion euro grant (worth about $1.42 billion at the time)...the people I contacted struggled to name a major contribution that the HBP has made in the past decade"

-

open questions incl quantum (algorithms)

-

industry wildly wrong steps incl. mainframe->client/server->cloud (my opinion), weak+dynamic typing, DDMMYY Y2K, SS7 telecoms, ASCII ...

O nice. Thanks for this. More research to do. Lol. I started reading "the innovator's dilemma". So far their talking about the progress of disk drives in the 19 somethings. And how each leading company wound up becoming pushed out the market by the new technology, even though the helped usher in the disruptive previous generation.

 

[Cynic]

The ROI is the speed at which business gets their answers. Things that take IT months to develop and fix that now take weeks is definitely something the business will push IT to accept. And what's going to happen, they're going to start doing things like developing 80% apps with security flaws that they give access to other people and that's going to be a headache. Much like how when iPhone couldn't integrate with business Microsoft exchange, users started ccing their work emails to their personal.

I think that the bubble here is these magical statements/numbers everyone is coming up with for Gen AI in general. "Software departments are going away", "Anybody can make a movie now" or the 1 billion dollars of investment they're coming up with. But the part that's going to stick is people are using this to complete their day to day tasks much more efficiently. Only thing is, I don't know what the pricing model looks like for cursor/antigravity or whatever else comes on the market

But this sort of gatekeeping has happened in other industries to. With music, Napster came out, and the music industry just tried suing the shyt out of everyone. Now look, Spotify and apple music have a big say in how music is distributed now, when the music industry could have created their own tools that did this

Spoiler: Some interesting reads

• How the iPhone begat shadow IT and enterprise mobility

• https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB118221943189139997
• Cloud computing (2010) - Sneaking around IT to get to the cloud.

Spotify had to accept what the music industry says - they can't create their own label with their artists hence the podcast push.