In an earlier thread, I wondered [1] if "concentrating around AI-native talent" in a round of layoffs was code for "we're firing all the old people", if "AI-native talent" meant people who had never learned how to do things without AI. Many folks said no, of course not. Well, in this case digital ocean has removed all doubt; "AI-native" means exactly that:
> Most of the engineers in this cohort are early in their careers. That was intentional. ... Engineers entering the field today don’t think of AI as a tool they’ve had to adopt. It’s simply how they build. That fluency isn’t something you retrofit into someone; it’s something you hire for directly.
Gosh, that seems like a conclusion someone came to using AI lol.
I agree that intuition is important, and that it's sometimes easier to develop correct intuition without a conflicting bias/habit, BUT... I don't think traditional engineering skills conflict with using AI tools. If anything it's more important, but maybe that's just the recently sprouted gay hair on my head talking
Totally agree. They even vibe-wrote the paragraph I quoted.
I'd go so far as to say people who prompt AI to do something they can't do themselves are essentially non-technical management. I'm not a fan of non-technical managers of humans and similarly not a fan of this approach to AI either when quality really matters. (IMHO it's actually great for prototyping.)
The idea you can only learn to prompt well if you learned prompting before learning how to do the work yourself is strange, maybe even completely backwards. I've never heard teachers say to learn how to do math with a calculator then memorize multiplication facts later. Or anyone say the best managers are ones who first started in management and then developed technical expertise. Why are they so committed to the idea that this skill is so different than all the others?
It's probably a very convenient fantasy though for management types to think these expensive later-career people are useless or even harmful. And maybe they are non-technical management themselves and don't understand why employees prefer technical managers.
In an earlier thread, I wondered [1] if "concentrating around AI-native talent" in a round of layoffs was code for "we're firing all the old people", if "AI-native talent" meant people who had never learned how to do things without AI. Many folks said no, of course not. Well, in this case digital ocean has removed all doubt; "AI-native" means exactly that:
> Most of the engineers in this cohort are early in their careers. That was intentional. ... Engineers entering the field today don’t think of AI as a tool they’ve had to adopt. It’s simply how they build. That fluency isn’t something you retrofit into someone; it’s something you hire for directly.
Ugh.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48029631
Gosh, that seems like a conclusion someone came to using AI lol.
I agree that intuition is important, and that it's sometimes easier to develop correct intuition without a conflicting bias/habit, BUT... I don't think traditional engineering skills conflict with using AI tools. If anything it's more important, but maybe that's just the recently sprouted gay hair on my head talking
Totally agree. They even vibe-wrote the paragraph I quoted.
I'd go so far as to say people who prompt AI to do something they can't do themselves are essentially non-technical management. I'm not a fan of non-technical managers of humans and similarly not a fan of this approach to AI either when quality really matters. (IMHO it's actually great for prototyping.)
The idea you can only learn to prompt well if you learned prompting before learning how to do the work yourself is strange, maybe even completely backwards. I've never heard teachers say to learn how to do math with a calculator then memorize multiplication facts later. Or anyone say the best managers are ones who first started in management and then developed technical expertise. Why are they so committed to the idea that this skill is so different than all the others?
It's probably a very convenient fantasy though for management types to think these expensive later-career people are useless or even harmful. And maybe they are non-technical management themselves and don't understand why employees prefer technical managers.