Assist me - yes
Make the decision - no
Autonomously handle my finance - hell no
Sometimes feels like its just generating really specific and personalised articles/blogPosts for me rather than handling any decisions or taking any load off me.
It doesn't matter what you're doing, there's always a trade off to taking a shortcut and rarely does the price not need paying.
We're seeing lots of code being ~written~ generated, deployed, checked (tested manually), then shipping it as done. Fine for the simplist of things, but in a complex system unintended side effects are far more common.
I feel like the system analyst role is going to make a resurgence in the coming years. Once the domain knowledge is lost, there's going to be a need to re-discover it and understand what should be happening and what is happening.
Going against the grain - i don't think all but the most expensive (and non critical) SaaS products are going to be replaced by an in-house system. If you're company of 100 people is spending $12k a year on HR software. Building and running it yourself isn't going to save you 12k and in reality it's going to cost you headcount for someone to manage and maintain it. Mattermost exists and people still pay Slack $200 per year per user when they could just roll out Mattermost "for free".
I've 'vibe coded' some internal tooling apps and it feels like i've joined a new company and been given a legacy codebase to work on, despite it being a week old.
I just assume all the posts that claim they've got a 20k line project in a single weekend is just marketing spam.
We’ve managed to put quite a dent in the feature backlog we had for our admin tooling. We knew what features we wanted, they didn’t require marketing or comms but did require time to spend doing them.
I did want it to improve our e2e testing but it didn’t make it as easy as I expected.
I'm so torn with verification on social media. But i'm surprised companies whose main source of revenue is ads and original content aren't putting something akin to 'verified human' tags on users for all to see. Not just to show authenticity but also to be able to say to ad buyers: your ads have been seen by x real users.
I mean sure, the next step will probably be "your ads have been seen by x real users and here are their names, emails, and mobile numbers" :(
As well as verification there must be teams at Reddit/LinkedIn/Whereever working ways to identify ai content so it can be de-ranked.
It's not just their flagship products. It extends to nearly _everything_ they release.
I have a relatively small workforce and office management platform. When MS Places was announced, we thought it was the end. We had a good run, but now one of the big players has entered the market and will wipe out all competition with a single swipe.
Anyway, it sucks. Potential customers who had waited for months tried to use it and immediately sought alternatives. Existing customers who told us they tried to use it and for one reason or another, gave up.
But it seems Microsoft's MO has been 'customer driven testing' for as long as i can remember.
Use it to get a primer in a new area
If i'm debugging i'll feed it what i know and see what it gives me. If nothing else gives me some ideas to get started.
Generate test data
I've tried it to generate html/css for an email and it kind of works but depsite asking it to doesn't work across all versions of outlook and gmail.
I'm overly cautious about what I paste in. Just like how you can find PII data in logs I think the amount of PII data that's being pasted into AIs will be crazy.
Total over saturation of that end of the market, and given it seems CompSci and SoftEng degrees are still in vogue it seems the trend will continue. Coupled with companies cutting back and wanting to maximize value they end up focusing on the upper end of the market (experience-wise).
Anecdotally, and from the companies I know that do have a graduate program, they've reduced the number of available positions, so there are still positions, but it's just much more competitive.
My advice would be to find any role roughly related to your target job and then pivot to what you really want. The difference in interviewing a candidate with no experience vs 12 months is night and day.
the office culture / remote workers don't collaborate always makes me laugh. It reminds me of a time when I worked in an office and a PR spent over a week waiting to be reviewed because one team didn't tell another team. They were literally sat two benches apart and the requesting team had to walk past them to go to the toilet, to the exit or each time they went for a coffee.
There are so many directions it could go in. I imagine we'll be revisiting trends from the past
- LLM generated apps will be everywhere and behind the curtain, they'll be a lot like a VB6 app from the 90s
- System Analysts will be back in vogue because you've got to feed the LLMs something.
10 years after that will be interesting. Can you imagine a $100m business running on dozens of apps generated by various LLMs. Are management going to sign off a rebuild from an LLM or are they going to get a team in to do it from scratch and consolidate the systems.
Agile principles will be back, "Individuals and interactions over processes and tools" will be a popular line.
Very broadly speaking, I think it's going to have the same impact as search engines had where productivity increases but understanding decreases.
I very much doubt we're going to see a massive shift where everyone becomes a system analyst or service designer and we just punch in business requirements out comes a ready-to-release system.
I can see automated ui testing tools becoming truly amazing if AI Agents are even half of what they're hyped up to be. At the moment they kind of work, but also a bit of a headache.
If you could filter out everything except the automated 'new job' and 'new skill' posts and mix in some company press releases it would be so much better.
For some time Twitter seems to have been the defacto real time announcement tool for companies. Now Twitter has been made private seems ripe to be replaced by a startup.
You've worked at and founded startups and so you must have done sales and marketing. This is no different, you're just pitching yourself. Understand who your audience is and what they're looking for and don't forget, presentation is everything.
Positioning yourself correctly, too low and you'll never get past the sea of grads.
Distill your history down so it appears you've had a more stable career history. A random HR bod is going to review your CV and they do not care how many startups you've founded or accelerators you got accepted into. If you've got loads of entries in your career history they're going to stick you on the no pile.
Regardless of how it is internally, corporations don't like lone wolves or individual contributors. They have 'company values' and want someone who works well in a team, has done some mentoring, works well with others, understands the processes, etc etc etc (that is until you start then it's all about delivery). I'd try positioning your CV to appeal to those values with the technical skills to back it up.
In summary
- lose the fluff from cv/applications
- present a more stable career history
- emphasis on teamwork, working with other departments, mentoring
And, I wouldn't worry about AI, offshoring - yes, AI - no. I'm still waiting to be shown an AI-generated SaaS app with real users, or even a functioning tool that's not just a clone of Flappy Bird.
Something along the lines of LinkedIn and the company announcement part of twitter.
I, and im sure many others, can do without the stream of BS that comes out of LinkedIn. But as far as an online job history and to search for companies, it's quite useful.
You've laid out the dream for a lot of developers around the world.
Agency life is probably 80% sales and 20% delivery. The agency pattern you've mentioned is common because it consistently works and everyone (myself included) fawns over the basecamp model but they're about the only ones who've made it work.
AI-generated SaaS tools just remind me of white-label SaaS products that were the hot thing however many years ago. They do about 50% of what the customer wants and a PITA to customize.
Having said that if I started again I'd still build one or more AI-centric B2B products with a focus on closed AI systems and look for agency work (ad-hoc development) as an offshoot.
You'd be able to build up a client base with your B2B products and have tangible examples to demonstrate what you're capable of while playing on the fact that the client's data is secure and never shared with third parties.
All systems should have an upper limit harder to them, it's not that hard to implement and it's just an ultimate safeguard.
In the backend, limit image size to say 50mb, the number of images a user can upload to 1k and the amount of users that can be signed up to 10k. Then you have some numbers which will let you say "regardless of what happens, I've got a hard cap of 1 TB of stored data".
You don't have to show the user their usage and you can always lift the caps with a deployment. What you don't want to happen is a side-project costs you tens of thousands because one fool thought it was funny to upload a million hi-res pictures of Rick Astley while you were asleep.
Slightly more work would be to limit the number of images that a user can upload in 15 minutes. Or depending on what your signup flow is making a user confirm their email but putting a short delay in sending the email out.
I think this is the way forward, their answer wouldn't turn an offer into a rejection but it would strengthen their offer.
I must admit I also ask this question but have never been told not to and I find that every so often you come across a very senior candidate who nonchalantly says 'yeah, I built a plugin for abc that helps me xyz'. Then you look it up and they've got 500k installs.
This aligns with my own experience, though it seems to be one extreme or the other. Either the interviewer is fascinated and wants to know how it was done (rather than anything to do with implementation), or they don't care.
Sometimes feels like its just generating really specific and personalised articles/blogPosts for me rather than handling any decisions or taking any load off me.