The Stack Overflow Podcast

In this episode: Why developers need to upskill faster than ever, the relationship between stock prices and layoffs, how the job market for developers has changed, and the evolution of engineering roles post-GenAI. Listen to the full versions: * The half-life of developer skills is shrinking rapidly - Stack Overflow [https://stackoverflow.blog/2024/01/16/Kian-Katanforoosh-standford-deep-learning-ai-skills/] * AI isn't putting tech workers out of jobs, the stock price is - Stack Overflow [https://stackoverflow.blog/2024/02/06/ai-isn-t-putting-tech-workers-out-of-jobs-the-stock-price-is/] * The reverse mullet model of software engineering - Stack Overflow [https://stackoverflow.blog/2024/05/03/the-reverse-mullett-model-of-software-engineering/] * Say goodbye to "junior" engineering roles - Stack Overflow [https://stackoverflow.blog/2024/06/21/kirimgeray-kirimli-flatiron-software-snapshot-reviews/] * The evolution of fullstack engineers - Stack Overflow [https://stackoverflow.blog/2024/09/10/evolution-full-stack-engineers-mrina-sugosh/]

Adora is the author of Cloud Engineering for Beginners [https://adorahack.selar.co/cloud-engineering-book], Beginning Azure DevOps [https://www.wiley.com/en-us/Beginning+Azure+DevOps%3A+Planning%2C+Building%2C+Testing+and+Releasing+Software+Applications+on+Azure-p-9781394165889], and Confident Cloud [https://www.koganpage.com/risk-compliance/confident-cloud-9781398615670]. She’s also the founder and executive director of NexaScale [https://nexascale.org/], an ed-tech non profit that offers educational support and simulated work experiences for entry-level software engineers, designers, and product managers. Check out their programs [https://nexascale.org/programs]. Find Adora on LinkedIn [https://www.linkedin.com/in/adoranwodo/] or through her website [https://adoranwodo.com/].

Alexi [https://www.alexi.com/] leverages AI to streamline litigation workflows and speed up research, with an eye to giving lawyers more time and energy to devote to client strategy and support.  Find Mark on LinkedIn [https://www.linkedin.com/in/mark-doble/?originalSubdomain=ca].  Shoutout to Stack Overflow user ycr [https://stackoverflow.com/users/2627018/ycr] for dropping some knowledge in our CI/CD Collective [https://stackoverflow.com/collectives/ci-cd]: How to get the BUILD_USER in Jenkins when a human rebuilds a job triggered by timer? [https://stackoverflow.com/questions/74369207/how-to-get-the-build-user-in-jenkins-when-a-human-rebuilds-a-job-triggered-by-ti]. Here’s a quick preview of the episode: “The founding thesis was, let’s try and build an AI that knows the law. And if we do that, there'll be lots of applications throughout the legal field. We knew that these foundational models, the underlying technology, were going to continue to improve and allow us to do more and more.”  “I mean, law is one of the fields where it seems like these large language models could have the most utility, because often what you're doing is taking on a case with potentially an enormous amount of case law that you need to search through to find the needle in a haystack that will help you and/or enormous amount of documents that you need to search through. And so a system that's capable of understanding, synthesizing, and annotating and pointing you to the ground truth is incredibly valuable.” “ It's not supposed to give legal advice if it doesn't have the licensure and the insurance.” “Part of the problem is we have these laws that are just not being enforced at all. And so either the laws have to change or they need to start getting enforced.” “ We realized that if we have almost 100% recall in the top 5,000 documents, why don't we just apply some sort of agentic flow to filter down from these 5,000 to the 10 documents that were really needed?"

Thoughtful AI [https://www.thoughtful.ai/] provides AI agents that help revenue cycle management (RCM) teams get providers their money from insurance companies.  Does AI have a better bedside manner than doctors? One study [https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37115527/] suggest they do.  Connect with Dan on X [https://x.com/DanByDay] and LinkedIn [https://www.linkedin.com/in/danieleparsons/].  Congrats to Populist badge winner Marcio Mazzucato [https://stackoverflow.com/users/999820/marcio-mazzucato] for doing the accepted answer one better on How do I emulate a 403 error page [https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5061675/emulate-a-403-error-page/43613887#43613887]?. Want a preview? Here are some great quotes from this episode:  “ The human transformation of getting off of this computer platform and back out into the world and back out into trying to advance, some of the existential, whether it's risks or opportunities or threats, but get away from this huge workforce sitting in front of computers. We also have this fundamental belief that humans actually aren't great at operating computers, but other computers are really good at it.” “ We find the average RCM team has attrition rates of 10 to 40%, which is three to 10X other industries. So they already have a leaky bucket. They are actually understaffed. They are having trouble keeping up. So for us, it's more about adding abundance of capacity at a much more lower cost that a higher quality that will allow them to be more financially sound organizations. I know there's a lot of conversation about replacing the actual human. Yeah, of course. There are folks out there who organizations will look and say, Hey, if you're just sitting there moving data around and you're not very good at it and you hate that job and like it's hard to staff and train, it's going to make a lot of sense to replace with an AI solution.” “ We think our mission is to fix the healthcare system, not to duct tape the current environment. And we have multiple acts in our mission to achieve that. And I completely align. It is the broken down institutions. That is actually what's driving a lot of the problem. We do have to get closer to the metal or we do have to get closer to the systematic changes. And, that's likely going to require some big movement as it relates to how the money moves.”

NightVision [https://www.nightvision.net/] offers web and API security testing tools built to integrate with developers’ established workflows. NightVision identifies issues by precise area(s) of code, so devs don’t have to chase down and validate vulnerability reports, a process that eats up precious engineering resources. Get started with their docs [https://docs.nightvision.net/docs/getting-started]. Connect with Kinnaird on LinkedIn [https://www.linkedin.com/in/kinnairdmcquade/].  Stack Overflow user Cecil Curry [https://stackoverflow.com/users/2809027/cecil-curry] earned a Populist badge [https://stackoverflow.com/help/badges/62/populist] with their exceptionally thoughtful answer to In Python how can one tell if a module comes from a C extension? [https://stackoverflow.com/questions/20339053/in-python-how-can-one-tell-if-a-module-comes-from-a-c-extension]. Some great excerpts from this episode: “From the program side, I would say if you're running a security program or you're starting from day one, there's a danger with security people and being the security person who's out of touch or doesn't know what the life of a developer is like. And you don't want to be that person. And that's not how you have actual business impact, right? So you got to embed with teams, threat model, and then do some preventative security testing, right? Testing things before it gets into production, not just relying on having a bug bounty program.” “With code scanning, you're looking for potentially insecure patterns in the code, but with dynamic testing, you're actually testing the live application. So we're sending HTTP traffic to the application, sending malicious payloads in forms or in query parameters, et cetera, to try to elicit a response or to send something to an attacker controlled server. And so using this, we're able to. Not just have theoretical vulnerabilities, but exploitable vulnerabilities. I mean, how many times have you looked at something in GitHub security alerts and thought, yeah, that's not real. That's not exploitable. Right. So we're trying to avoid that and have higher quality touch points with developers. So when they look at something, they say, okay, that's exploitable. You showed me how. And you traced it back to code.”