If you work in Tech or IT what's something you want everyone to know?

[Trollsandsqueakforbreakfast]

.

Pretty sure you need people’s permission and to make it clear you’re recording them…

“Why can’t you just make it do x,y,z thing that I want it to do?”

Because we’re not bloody wizards. Things take time and lots of people to make, we also often have thousands/millions of other users and we need to prioritise them instead of you when you want a specific thing or refuse to update your 10 year old random Android version.

The reason you can't open your PDF document that you downloaded is because you are trying to use Word to open it.

What browser are you using isn't asking if you are on the internet. It's asking about the way you are on the internet - is it on Chrome, Firefox, Edge...

And if you are going to use spreadsheets for clients, please can you use a unique reference for the client such as a client number. It makes working out who Jane Doe really is.

That 'working in IT' can mean many, many things and doesn't necessarily mean that your mate down the pub has the skills needed to fill a vacancy.

@DataPup AI very prone to hallucinations 😁🧐

AI also writes crappy convoluted code and you need to be extremely good at writing prompts and assessing AI written code to be able to use AI in a meaningful way in software

I am a project manager in software (a non-developer though, yes that exists) so I don't know much really 😁😁😁

I got AI to write some code for me last week, saw it was faulty, fed the code back to AI and told it to tell me what was wrong with the code. It apologised and fixed the mistake but then randomly made the code more convoluted. Then I had to tell it to simplify the code. Then it was usable)

In my opinion AI will change the world on a comparable scale as computes did in the 70s/80s and in Internet in the 90s/2000s. It will change everything and it will change people's jobs, but cannot see it actually taking people's jobs as such. Like computers and the internet people will just have to learn how to work WITH it. It is a tool.

So my advice is to not fear it but learn to use it.

@MySweetGeorgina AI very prone to hallucinations

It's so damn convincing with it too!

Agile - where you do a quick, shit job of something and hope you have time to make it better in the future - but know you almost certainly won't.

That logging/web filtering doesn’t mean you are being spied on - you aren’t that interesting.
That if you leave your device alone in a major airport it will probably get nicked and you can’t just buy a replacement from a local shop and expect it to be set up remotely on a Sunday!

This. Try the reboot first, please. It's surprising how often it will fix your issue.

I don't work in IT but have a question if you don't mind?

I need to do some digging on our home computer where the search history is deleted every day.
Is there a way I can do this please?

I have IT questions too. Perhaps someone could do a Xmas Eve AMA and we could get all our IT questions answered!

1. You need to leave enough time to fully test your software FFS.

1. Women can be successful in Tech.

1. You don't have to have the brain of Stephen Hawking to get paid WELL.

Don't get me started. See my post about testing fully!

I use ChatGPT at work and it's actually quite rubbish for things you don't know. For things you do, then it's good because it's faster than googling the docs for syntax. It's autocomplete turbo charged.

Two recent examples I struggled with ChatGPT to create anything sensible are configuring AWS MSK and adding a secondary CIDR. The former only worked after I spent two days reading up on Kafka and the framework we are using. It's not giving me any acceptable configuration including exception handling and backoffs. For the second one I'm still no closer to getting EKS updated with the new IPs. I'm sure I'll end up having to google AWS blogs on EKS and VPC and terraform.

Basically it's good until it's not good.

When deep focusing writing complex programs sometimes you go into a trance-like state (often called flow) where huge amounts of code just comes out without even consciously thinking - the hours just go by without noticing, you can visualize all the dependencies between different blocks of code. It's a wonderful feeling, similar to deep meditation or runners high.

Other days it's painful and every single line of code has to be dragged out of you.

And for what it's worth, I've been prompting ChatGPT with phrases I've found googling and from the Terraform docs already. I also know I needed to update the CNI plugin in EKS. Even with this, ChatGPT isn't able to generate anything usable.

Did you solve what you needed?

No, I've still not got it expanded. In fact, one of the ChatGPT solutions dropped our direct connect route so the VPC is no longer reacheable. Luckily I know enough to know how to fix it manually. If you know nothing, then you'd no longer be able to change anything from the pipeline.

Sounds fun!

I think it's pointless to say "ChatGPT is good for this and not good for that". Yes that might be the case right now but we've no idea what AI will be able to do in two years let alone ten years. There's no logical reason why computers won't, in theory, be able to write better code than humans.

Don't just employ programmers and project managers. You need someone to work out the business needs and explain to the programmers what is required as many will resist any understanding of the business and write weird stuff.

@mantaraya but writing code is a very minor part of being a developer. I don't think we'll need as many devs as now. You'll be able to automate more of the boilerplate work. But that's been the case for a very long time with more and more powerful framework. Compared today's languages and frameworks vs those of the 90s. I have no doubt that the dev toolkit will include prompt engineering, and it's already the case now.

The majority of the work is in designing solution to business problems. The annoying part of the work is finding out what's wrong in production and attempting to fix it. The stuff they can teach in bootcamp can usually be learned in a day or two looking at docs.

AI is just another tool. Using another example I'm seeing in the last 5 years (before AI). There used to be a lot more sys admins before who looked after our on premise infrastructure. I didn't need to know about networking, database maintance, backups etc. It's now very common to be the job of full stack devs to maintain cloud infrastruture. Many companies have outsourced the management to public cloud providers like AWS. This is currently the ticket in my stack because we ran out of IPs in our EKS cluster. I don't have a sys admin we can call now.

I can't see what the industry will be like in 5 or 10 years. We'll just have to adapt to it.

I agree with this as I've seen the same challenges.

I can't see what the industry will be like in 5 or 10 years. We'll just have to adapt to it

I agree. I'm also a full stack dev btw. I'm not worried because I've spent my life picking up new things and am enjoying the AI learning curve but I think it's arrogant to assume a computer couldn't be better at writing software than me.

Oooh please tell us how you did it.