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Your Career Isn't Eroding - You're Just Holding the Wrong Moat (blog.herlein.com)
submitted 5 months ago by to c/programming@programming.dev
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[–] -3 points 5 months ago (7 children)

So someone who isn't an expert in implementing financial services isn't allowed entry into a discussion about LLMs in software develoment? Weird gate to keep, but sure.

I could see "well this doesn't apply to the financial space" as an argument, though I wouldn't really buy that in this case. But "fuck off you don't have the specific domain knowledge of this other dude" is a weird bar to set.

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  • [–] 7 points 5 months ago* (4 children)

    That's not gatekeeping, but okay. Gatekeeping is about withholding knowledge & information from a group of people for a personal benefit. It's not gatekeeping to stop every clueless idiot from blurting out their opinion and expecting everyone to respect it, because otherwise you're a gatekeeper (I don't want to imply the author of the article is a clueless idiot, this is a generalized statement).

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  • [–] 0 points 5 months ago (3 children)

    Gatekeep (v.):

    to restrict access to (something of value, such as information, knowledge, or resources) in order to exert power or control over a person or group

    The person I was responding to was restricting the author's access to the conversation by publicly refusing to engage with them over a trivial, irrelevant matter. So if that's not gatekeeping, then clearly they're calling the author a clueless idiot, which is just plain rude.

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  • [–] 3 points 5 months ago (2 children)

    You have it plain sight. Refusing to engage with someone is not gatekeeping. Your definition pretty much aligns with what I said.

    And if someone doesn’t have any idea what they’re talking about, then maybe they shouldn’t take part in the talking. You can’t tell me that you‘ll take cybersecurity advice from someone who saw a movie about hacking.

    Which doesn’t mean that clueless people have nothing of value to add, but it’s unlikely (especially in highly factual discussions).

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  • [–] 0 points 5 months ago (1 child)

    From the author's own website, they left AWS to join their current company as VP of Software (whatever that title means but seems obvious that it's software related). My immediate assumption would not be that this person is clueless about software development. Maybe they are, but assuming that from the start is just engaging in bad faith.

    Refusing to engage with someone is not gatekeeping.

    You show up to a party and talk to a group talking about using LLMs to make software to try to make friends. They look at you. You are a developer, but you don't specifically work in financial services so they just ignore you. In fact, they say out loud at the party "hey you don't know jack shit about anything because you don't work in financial services". The whole discussion they're having has nothing to do with financial services.

    You don't consider that gatekeeping?

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago

    By definition, that in itself isn’t gatekeeping. And I personally wouldn’t feel gatekept, just excluded. In the article the author evaluates the usefulness of AI for a field which they admit to have no clue about. And it reads like that AI gives you the knowledge of that field, just 3 seconds away, and everyone is obsolete now, which isn’t true. While it can give you the knowledge, you still need the understanding, and understanding is what makes people good at something, not knowledge in itself. I don’t understand your argument. The situation you described is not what I‘ve been talking about.

    1. It‘s not about making friends
    2. It‘s about factual discussions
    3. It‘s about people trying to contribute to those discussions with arguments they can’t reason about, which normally isn’t particularly helpful, and if someone acts like a knowledgeable dick, then I don’t feel bad excluding them at all
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  • [–] 2 points 5 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 child)

    But it's specific domain knowledge all the way down.

    We have a special term for the few remaining generalist web developers without a domain specialization: "WordPress Admin".

    (Edit: To clarify, I have mad respect for WordPress specialists. That's the joke. Even the people trying hardest to generalize become crazy levels of specialized.)

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