Programming

I feel this pain. My last assignment we went through all the process of grooming and story pointing, but the documentation was voluminous and we were all expected to be 100% conversant in each story. Then a story would take hours to groom and the testers weren't exactly sure how to test it, so the developers would have to basically write the end-to-end test cases along with detailed explanations of what could and couldn't be tested (arbitrary xml format, so some things you had to change independently to test, while other things would never be changed independently in prod so they weren't valid to test. Also, sometimes the correct thing to do would be determined by the database schema (is nullable?) which would lead to vastly different behaviors.

And lastly, we had to commit to delivering these features on time and to let everyone know ASAP if a timeline was under threat. Well, sometimes I'd tell them the timeline was under threat before the sprint was even started. That pissed them off something fierce because then it made us look incompetent to the customer - well... if the truth hurts, fix something in leadership. Also we were expected to do "whatever it takes" to deliver stories on time. Whatever it takes means skipping the grooming stories and reading the documentation for the next feature because I have to get this feature out the door.

I've never worked in the game development industry, but stories like this are what has kept me out of it. "Crunch time" that lasted months? Fuck that. I'm fifty years old with 25 years experience. I have kids at home. I work my ass off for about 9 hours a day and every once in a while a little more, but I'm not about that fucking lifestyle over shitty business software to make a shitty business more shitty money.

So needless to say I'm between jobs at the moment... I'm so over terrible leadership.

Do you work with me? My boss refuses to do a market research, refuses to check our website usage, change features that users actually care about, because he doesn't seem value on it.

And good lord, i have to create a dashboard to show our analytics, but he doesn't talk exactly what is needed. I spoke multiple times, said what i needed from him and he still doesn't know

okay, I've finished your software, it meets your zero requirements!

"We shall make solutions to problems people don't even know they have!"

"What people?"

"All people! Including us!"

Ah, yes. The problem commonly known as PM-who's-also-the-BPC-but-also-doesn't-understand-what-either-role-actually-does, or "PMWATBPCBADUWERAD" for short.

I'm almost 40 and very slowly educating myself toward a CS degree outside of work. I feel like I'm so far behind you guys that my only way into the tech industry with decent compensation (>100k) to match my current position will be through my management history, soft skills, and general understanding of people. My current position is very much a diplomat between the people getting the work done and the the people who want it done (then helping to get it done). Your post is very relatable even though I'm in a different industry. It gives me a little hope that some of my skills are transferrable even without a paper on the wall.

https://youtu.be/EZHLkTHuPJs

Yes. But you have to know the requirements before you can pour them in code. You don't start coding and are granted a vision by the god of logic about where your journey will lead you.

I feel like AI would fall down even harder here. A lot of long running applications have "secret" rules in them that developers have as either tribal knowledge or they have to reas the code and see is the case. Will AI be sophisticated enough to read a massive repo probably dependent on several others and have a realistic understanding of the requirements inherent in that code system? Because that's what we pay senior devs to be good at quickly figuring out. I find myself skeptical that AI will be able to do that in a trustworthy way with how it "hallucinates" now and doesn't have the concept that it just doesn't know sometimes. If a developer has to spend time checking the AI's assertions about the rules, is that actually going to be faster than just keeping them in their mind or doing the research themselves?

You’re right, the best part about AI is automating the annoying part of actually implementing what you want to code. Now you have more time to think about requirements and sped up the process to maybe get several iterations to really refine a product. However, ChatGPT is gonna stay as a helper function writer for the next few years I think

I think that's assuming a relatively consistent level of scope, but the scope will just get bigger. How big is your feature backlog? Will you be able to easily get through it even with the help of AI? How big will your feature backlog get if implementation friction is lowered?

Honestly all the claimed use cases of generative AI for coding are much more easily fulfilled with normal tools. You can't perform mass refactorings with them because you need to manually check their output or prove that the code they're generating is correct, they can't generate code that well unless your domain is well documented online, which isnt the case for most companies.

There are places that generative AI will replace workers, especially in art, which makes it all the more important to ensure that whoever has their work used in training data is fairly compensated for their work is generating for the AI company. For programming however, I personally don't see a ton of value in what exists today at least.