IT/Software career thread: Invert binary trees for dollars.

ShakyJake

ShakyJake

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AI has helped me solve issues I've encountered. It provided ideas and highlighted features I wasn't aware of or hadn't considered. However, as others have noted, you must understand what it's telling you and apply it to your problem. You can't blindly plug in code and expect it to work magically. at the very least, some tweaking is required and that requires a reasonably deep understanding of the problem you're trying to solve.
 
TJT

TJT

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I get a lot of use from AI writing unit tests, associated documentation, and lately more complex data problems with the use of MCPs. The deeper you go in terms of complexity and dependencies the less useful AI is and will likely continue to be. As to mitigate this you will need to give your AI agents all seeing access to your infrastructure. Which will be heavily resisted in any organization because nothing about that is a good idea. It would probably work poorly even if you did.

The more in a vacuum the problem is the more AI will work. For this reason it absolutely destroys things like student projects. Hence why the crowd learning computers today is dumbing down because they never had to actually invert a binary tree. They just had the AI do it.

If your company has decades of bad design and tech debt that is too expensive to fix, as many companies do, AI simply cannot help you there. Just watch when some exec goes "the AI says do X, Y, and Z and it will be 100X more efficient!" The AI could even be RIGHT but the whole reason the tech debt has been around for as long as it has is because it is too expensive to fix or there are simply always other priorities.

I have YEARS of tech debt to resolve. I have like 5% of my time to work on it while more just keeps getting built and compounded upon. Every organization deals with this.
 
TomServo

TomServo

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TJT said:
I get a lot of use from AI writing unit tests, associated documentation, and lately more complex data problems with the use of MCPs. The deeper you go in terms of complexity and dependencies the less useful AI is and will likely continue to be. As to mitigate this you will need to give your AI agents all seeing access to your infrastructure. Which will be heavily resisted in any organization because nothing about that is a good idea. It would probably work poorly even if you did.

The more in a vacuum the problem is the more AI will work. For this reason it absolutely destroys things like student projects. Hence why the crowd learning computers today is dumbing down because they never had to actually invert a binary tree. They just had the AI do it.

If your company has decades of bad design and tech debt that is too expensive to fix, as many companies do, AI simply cannot help you there. Just watch when some exec goes "the AI says do X, Y, and Z and it will be 100X more efficient!" The AI could even be RIGHT but the whole reason the tech debt has been around for as long as it has is because it is too expensive to fix or there are simply always other priorities.

I have YEARS of tech debt to resolve. I have like 5% of my time to work on it while more just keeps getting built and compounded upon. Every organization deals with this.
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Example. I need to federate a IDP outside our org to ours but we have two. And the idp the platform team chose for a SaaS app is now one we are depracating for a new idp.

But the other idp we need to federate with doesn't work well with the new one and the idiots were cheap and didn't buy a Lower environment to test in. And the risk of doing it in prod, duh.

So we get to use shitty local vendor accounts that give up our visibility with logging and uses non standard mfa and on and on. People are retarded
 
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Siliconemelons

Siliconemelons

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Can this be IT rustled jimmy old man yelling at cloud threads for a moment?

Random things that still miff me thinking about them.

HP / Leo Apothiker (euro SAP) killing WebOS

Datrium being bought by VMWare and being stripped down to a prem to cloud backup solution

Teradichi (or whatever) PCoIP being awesome but the cuck Canadians building a super awesome thing then just…”someone buy us please!” And doing jack crap

Okay, I think I am done for now.

Happy Tuesday!
 
Control

Control

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Siliconemelons said:
Can this be IT rustled jimmy old man yelling at cloud threads for a moment?
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Sure, and I'll help!
Does anyone else get told constantly "that isn't/won't be possible" about things that are very clearly possible?

Also this exchange I just had:
Them: "We have the new thing set up!"
Me: "Great, is the automation working yet?"
Them: "We'll test that next week"
Me: "Great!"
Them: "Also, we won't bother updating the old thing that it's replacing"
Me: "Wait, it would be great if you could so things don't stop working"
Them: "We can't since we deleted the old thing"
Me: "..."
 
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Kharzette

Kharzette

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When I updated VS code the other day I noticed the copilot stuff in the bottom right (which I have ignored for months) is now coloured red to make sure to annoy you as much as possible.

ctrl shift p -> hide copilot gets rid of it
 
Haus

Haus

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Kriptini said:
My previous career has been eliminated due to outsourcing/AI so I'm pivoting to IT. Starting with support and hoping to move into databases as fast as I can.

It sounds like I picked the wrong field if I'm trying to avoid getting replaced by outsourcing/AI again.
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I would say you got dumped out of one frying pan, and have decided to hop into the fire.....

mobilegamer.biz

Laid off King staff set to be replaced by the AI tools they helped build, say sources

Insiders paint a grim picture at King with half the Farm Heroes Saga team set to depart and morale “in the gutter”.
mobilegamer.biz mobilegamer.biz
 
Neranja

Neranja

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Siliconemelons said:
Teradichi (or whatever) PCoIP being awesome but the cuck Canadians building a super awesome thing then just…”someone buy us please!” And doing jack crap
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HP bought Teradici and now calls it "HP Anywhere"

It's a yearly subscription, though. Probably because they see how much money VMware/Omnissa + Nvidia make with Horizon.
 
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TJT

TJT

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Kharzette said:
When I updated VS code the other day I noticed the copilot stuff in the bottom right (which I have ignored for months) is now coloured red to make sure to annoy you as much as possible.

ctrl shift p -> hide copilot gets rid of it
Click to expand...
I really recommend you get used to using Copilot or similar and move over to Cursor on top of that immediately.
 
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TJT

TJT

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Kharzette said:
Ewww no. I enjoy programming. I don't even allow auto formatting.
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I understand. But if you use these things you are 10x more productive. Especially when it comes to tedious things that simply take more time to write if you do it the traditional way. Failing to do this means you will be left in the dust sooner or later. Just the way it is.
  • JSON statements or parsing JSON. Let dumbass AI make a JSON constructor for you.
  • Writing all of your unit tests in <5 minutes.
  • Adding good comments to your code for you with a brief summary.
  • Maintaining clear formatting with a proofreader agent.
Letting AI agents do this for you just lets you do more of the actual programming on interesting problems and not write gay ass unit tests. I get it and AI causes lots of problems I keep complaining about. But it does excel at letting you not spend your valuable time on tedious, boring work. This is the productivity gain of it if you are already a skilled developer.
 
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Kharzette

Kharzette

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TJT said:
I understand. But if you use these things you are 10x more productive. Especially when it comes to tedious things that simply take more time to write if you do it the traditional way. Failing to do this means you will be left in the dust sooner or later. Just the way it is.
  • JSON statements or parsing JSON. Let dumbass AI make a JSON constructor for you.
  • Writing all of your unit tests in <5 minutes.
  • Adding good comments to your code for you with a brief summary.
  • Maintaining clear formatting with a proofreader agent.
Letting AI agents do this for you just lets you do more of the actual programming on interesting problems and not write gay ass unit tests. I get it and AI causes lots of problems I keep complaining about. But it does excel at letting you not spend your valuable time on tedious, boring work. This is the productivity gain of it if you are already a skilled developer.
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My time isn't really valuable. I just make stuff because I enjoy it. WTF is a unit test? (jk but I don't use them. Never saw the point)

Also most people's formatting makes me ill. I do it myself with my own style that is very incompatible with auto formatters. It's why I get very upset when they are on by default and can't be turned off.
 
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TJT

TJT

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My current job (and many) require you to have unit tests in your submissions or they are auto rejected by the team.
 
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Kirun

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TJT said:
The companies can't escape the cost implications they are walking into.
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They can if they are "too big to fail". And as these companies absorb larger and larger portions of a market, relying on "AI" to work, that's exactly how it'll get framed.
 
Ao-

Ao-

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AI has a lot of problems with applied concepts. I see it frequently in my work, where people use an AI to get a high level breakdown of some particular concept, but some particular details are factually incorrect or logically inconsistent. I don't see thay improving much, but maybe I'll be proven wrong. That being said, it's an impressive learning tool once you learn how to use it.
 
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Khane

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Kirun said:
They can if they are "too big to fail". And as these companies absorb larger and larger portions of a market, relying on "AI" to work, that's exactly how it'll get framed.
Click to expand...

That's not what the "too big to fail" rhetoric was about. The government doesn't insure huge portions of other sectors that house private citizens savings. That's not a thing. That was very specific and also true, and fucked.

The AI crash will be like the dotcom bubble, not the housing and banking crisis.
 
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Kirun

Kirun

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Khane said:
That's not what the "too big to fail" rhetoric was about. The government doesn't insure huge portions of other sectors that house private citizens savings. That's not a thing. That was very specific and also true, and fucked.

The AI crash will be like the dotcom bubble, not the housing and banking crisis.
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"Too big to fail" was about GM and Chrysler. Bush, at the time, argued that they were "too big to fail" and allowing the auto industry to "collapse" in the midst of a financial crisis and recession wasn't "responsible". You don't think AI would possibly be framed the same way?

They've already started the narrative about how much we have to allow AI corporations to get away with because, "CHINA DOESN'T CARE! WE HAVE TO WIN THE SPACE RA...AI RACE!!!".
 
TJT

TJT

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It's not about the companies making whatever. What they are walking into is potentially extremely prohibitive price tags added onto their employee cost.

It's normal, today, for a tech company to be paying $5k+ a seat just to have all the necessary software licenses for an engineer to work. This means paying for things like an IDE like IntelliJ or Visual Studio. Open source stuff that does this does exist don't get me wrong. But in general a software engineer or other adjacent worker in a tech company has a relatively fixed cost for all the tools they may need to work.

Just a few I happen to work with at the moment:
  • Cursor IDE
  • Postman
  • Docker
  • AWS - various things.
Each of these has a per user price tag. Microsoft is especially gay about this in that their enterprise license platform literally is like $5k per user. Or it was the last time I had to deal with it.

All of that shit is getting AI piled on it. AI that charges per tokenization credit bullshit to hide your dollar spend. So now your $100k salaried engineer that has $5k in licensing overhead to do anything now has $50k in overhead due to AI prompt costs. Except it doesn't only apply to engineers as all of your adjacent workers are also using it for their emails, docs, and whatever else you can imagine.
 
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Cad

Cad

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Kirun said:
"Too big to fail" was about GM and Chrysler. Bush, at the time, argued that they were "too big to fail" and allowing the auto industry to "collapse" in the midst of a financial crisis and recession wasn't "responsible".
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Don't want to interrupt your little party with facts but too big to fail was about Lehman brothers and how Lehman was invested in subprime mortgages and the housing market, and they didn't want a cascade of housing market failures.

GM and Chrysler didn't get bailed out until well into 2009 and it was Obama.
 
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