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Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs?

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Re: Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs?

#421

Post by hadlock »

ConspiracyFact wrote: post #325
hnthrowaway6543 wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yes, this. the backlog of software that needs to be built is fucking enormous . you know what i'd do if AI made it so i could replace 10 devs with 8? use the 2 newly-freed up developers to work on some of the other 100000 things i need done

I'm casting about for project ideas. What are some things that you think need to be built but haven't?

A consumer-friendly front end to NOAA/NWS website, and adequate documentation for their APIs would be a nice start. Weather.com, accuweather and wunderground exist, but they're all buggy and choked with ads. If I want to track daily rainfall in my area vs local water reservoir levels vs local water table readings, I can do that, all the information exists but I can't conveniently link it together. The fed has a great website where you can build all sorts of tables and graphs about current and historical economic market data, but environmental/weather data is left out in the cold right now.

Re: Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs?

#422

Post by _heimdall »

layer8 wrote: post #240
themanmaran wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The biggest surprise to me (generally across HN) is that people expect LLMs to develop on a really slow timeframe. In the last two years LLM capabilities have gone from "produces a plausible sentence" to "can generate a functioning web app". Sure it's not as masterful as one produced by a team of senior engineers, but a year ago it was impossible. But everyone seems to evaluate LLMs like they're fixed at today's capa…

You can’t extrapolate the future trajectory of progress from the past. It comes in pushes and phases. We had long phases of AI stagnation in the past, we might see them again. The past five years or so might turn out to be a phase transition from pre-LLM to post-LLM, rather than the beginning of endless dramatic improvements.

> It comes in pushes and phases. We had long phases of AI stagnation in the past

Isn't that still extrapolating the future from the past? You see a pattern if pushes and phases and are assuming that's what we will see again.

Re: Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs?

#423

Post by tonyarkles »

a_bonobo wrote: post #403
ConspiracyFact wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm casting about for project ideas. What are some things that you think need to be built but haven't?

some ideas from my own work: - a good LIMS (Laboratory Information Management System) that incorporates bioinformatics results. LIMS come from a pure lab, benchwork background, and rarely support the inclusion of bioinformatics analyses on samples included in the system. I have yet to see a lab that uses an off-the-shelf LIMS unmodified - they never do what they say they do. (And the amount of labs running on somethi…

> A thing that lets you catalogue Jupyter notebooks and Rstudio projects. I'm drowning in various projects from various data scientists and there's no nice way to centrally catalogue all those file lumps - 'there was this one function in this one project.... let's grep a bit' can be replaced by a central findable, searchable, taggable repository of data science projects.

Oh... oh my. This extends so far beyond data science for me and I am aching for this. I work in this weird intersection of agriculture/high-performance imaging/ML/aerospace. Among my colleagues we've got this huge volume of Excel sheets, Jupyter notebooks, random Python scripts and C++ micro-tools, and more I'm sure. The ones that "officially" became part of a project were assigned document numbers and archived appropriately (although they're still hard to find). The ones that were one-off analyses for all kinds of things are scattered among OneDrive folders, Zip files in OneDrive folders, random Git repos, and some, I'm sure, only exist on certain peoples' laptops.

Re: Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs?

#424

Post by defrost »

curl-up wrote: post #420
NorthTheRock wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When you consider LLMs to be building blocks in bigger, more complex systems, their potential increases dramatically. Do you have any examples of where/how that would work? It has seemed for me like lot of the hype is "they'll be good" with no further explanation.

I pull messy data from a remote source (think OCR-ed invoices for example), and need to clean it up. Every day I get around 1k new rows. The way in which it's messed up changes frequently, and while I don't care about it being 100% correct, any piece of code (relying on rules, regex, heuristics and other such stuff) would break in a couple of weeks. This means I need at least a part time developer on my team, costing…

Human or LLM the trick with messy inputs from scanned sources is having robust sanity combs that look for obvious fubar's and a means by which end data users can review the asserted values and the original raw image sources (and flag for review | alteration).

At least in my past experience with volumes of transcribed data for applications that are picky about accuracy.

Re: Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs?

#425

Post by tonyarkles »

mrbungie wrote: post #249
JKCalhoun wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I imagine though they might replace 3 out of 4 senior programmers (keep one around to sanity check the AI).

Oof, the times I've heard something like that with X tech.

Heh, UML is going to save us! The business people can just write the requirements and the code will write itself! /s

Given the growth-oriented capitalist society we live in in the west, I'm not all that worried about senior and super-senior engineers being fired. I think a much more likely outcome is that if a business does figure out a good way to turn an LLM into a force-multiplier for senior engineers, they're going to use that to grow faster.

There is a large untapped niche too that this could potentially unlock: projects that aren't currently economically viable due to the current cost of development. I've done a few of these on a volunteer basis for non-profits but can't do it all the time due to time/financial constraints. If LLM tech actually makes me 5x more productive on simple stuff (most of these projects are simple) then it could get viable to start knocking those out more often.

Re: Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs?

#426

Post by Havoc »

Nobody has a crystal ball but I do find the confidence approx half the devs have that it’ll never happen short of near-AGI alarming.

Alarming in the same way as a company announcing that their tech is unhackable. We all know what happens next in the plot

Re: Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs?

#427

Post by antegamisou »

throwaway_43793 wrote: post #49
indigoabstract wrote: post #35

I remember John Carmack talking about this last year. Seems like it's still pretty good advice more than a year later: "From a DM, just in case anyone else needs to hear this." https://x.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1637087219591659520

It's a good advice indeed. But there is a slight problem with it. Young people can learn and fight for their place in the workforce, but what is left for older people like myself? I'm in this industry already, I might have missed the train of "learn to talk with people" and been sold on the "coding is a means to an end" koolaid. My employability is already damaged due to my age and experience. What is left for people…

> How can I compete with a 20 something years old who has sharper memory, more free time (due to lack of obligations like family/relationships),

Is it a USA/Silicon Valley thing to miss the arrogance and insufferability most fresh grads have when entering the workforce?

It's kind of tone-deaf to attempt to self-victimize as someone with significant work experience being concerned of being replaced by a demographic that is notoriously challenged to build experience.

Re: Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs?

#428

Post by janalsncm »

tqi wrote: post #322
janalsncm wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To replace all developers, we need AGI yes. To replace many developers? No. If one developer can do the same work as 5 could previously, unless the amount of work expands then 4 developers are going to be looking for a job. Therefore, unless you for some reason believe you will be in the shrinking portion that cannot be replaced I think the question deserves more attention than “nothing”.

I'm not sure it is as simple as that - Induced Demand might be enough to keep the pool of human-hours steady. What that does to wages though, who can say...

Well it certainly depends on how much induced demand there is, and how much automation can multiply developer productivity.

If we are talking an 80% reduction in developers needed per project, then we would need 5x the amount of software demand in the future to avoid a workforce reduction.

Re: Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs?

#429

Post by tucnak »

rybosworld wrote: post #85
simianparrot wrote: post #80

Nothing because I’m a senior and LLM’s never provide code that pass my sniff test, and it remains a waste of time. I have a job at a place I love and get more people in my direct network and extended contacting me about work than ever before in my 20 year career. And finally I keep myself sharp by always making sure I challenge myself creatively. I’m not afraid to delve into areas to understand them that might look “…

> Nothing because I’m a senior and LLM’s never provide code that pass my sniff test, and it remains a waste of time. I am constantly surprised how prevalent this attitude is. ChatGPT was only just released in 2022. Is there some expectation that these things won't improve? > LLM’s never provide code that pass my sniff test This is ego speaking.

[flagged]

Re: Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs?

#430

Post by mindok »

a_bonobo wrote: post #403
ConspiracyFact wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm casting about for project ideas. What are some things that you think need to be built but haven't?

some ideas from my own work: - a good LIMS (Laboratory Information Management System) that incorporates bioinformatics results. LIMS come from a pure lab, benchwork background, and rarely support the inclusion of bioinformatics analyses on samples included in the system. I have yet to see a lab that uses an off-the-shelf LIMS unmodified - they never do what they say they do. (And the amount of labs running on somethi…

Ha - I’m on the other side of the grant application process and used an LLM to make a tool to describe the project, track milestones, sub-contractors, generate a costed project plan and all generate the other responses that need to be self-consistent in the grant application process.
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