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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?

#531

Post by zahlman »

holografix wrote: post #439

Beware of the miopia and gate keeping displayed on this thread. There will be less SWE and DevOps and related jobs available in the next 24 months. Period. Become hyper-aware of how a business measure your value as a SWE. How? Ask pointed, uncomfortable questions that force the people paying you to think and be transparent. Stay on the cutting edge of how to increase your output and quality using AI. Ie: how long doe…

>Become hyper-aware of how a business measure your value as a SWE. How? Ask pointed, uncomfortable questions that force the people paying you to think and be transparent.

Why would you want to increase the odds of them noticing your job is no longer necessary?

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

#532

Post by aprilthird2021 »

uludag wrote: post #194

Firstly, as many commenters have mentioned, I don't see AI taking jobs en masse. They simply aren't accurate enough and they tend to generate more code faster which ends up needing more maintenance. Advice #1: do work on your own mind. Try to improve your personal organization. Look into methodologies like GTD. Get into habits of building discipline. Get into the habit of storing information and documentation. From m…

Yep, massive LOC means massive maintenance. Maybe the LLMs can maintain their own code? I'm skeptical. I feel like they can easily code themselves into an unmaintainable corner.

But maybe the times that happens is so rare and low that you just hire a human to unstuck the whole thing and get it running again. Maybe we'll become more like mechanics you visit every now and then for an expensive, quick job, vs an annual retainer.

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

#533

Post by aprilthird2021 »

holografix wrote: post #439

Beware of the miopia and gate keeping displayed on this thread. There will be less SWE and DevOps and related jobs available in the next 24 months. Period. Become hyper-aware of how a business measure your value as a SWE. How? Ask pointed, uncomfortable questions that force the people paying you to think and be transparent. Stay on the cutting edge of how to increase your output and quality using AI. Ie: how long doe…

> There will be less SWE and DevOps and related jobs available in the next 24 months. Period.

I wish an AI could revisit this comment 2 years later and post the stats to see if you're right.

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

#534

Post by zahlman »

themanmaran wrote: post #356
unclad5968 wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably because we see stuff like this every decade. Ten years ago no one was ever going to drive again because self-driving cars were imminent. Turns out a lot of problems can be partially solved very quickly, but as anyone with experience knows, solving the last 10% takes at least as much time as solving the first 90.

> Ten years ago no one was ever going to drive again because self-driving cars were imminent Right.. but self driving cars are here. And if you've taken Waymo anywhere it's pretty amazing. Of course just because the technology is available doesn't mean distribution is solved. The production of corn has been technically solved for a long time, but doesn't mean starvation was eliminated.

>And if you've taken Waymo anywhere it's pretty amazing.

Yeah, about that: https://ca.news.yahoo.com/hilarious-video-shows-waymo-self-1...

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

#535

Post by 9cb14c1ec0 »

dogman144 wrote: post #378

The last fairly technical career to get surprisingly and fully automated in the way this post displays concern about - trading. I spent a lot of time with traders in early '00's and then '10's when the automation was going full tilt. Common feedback I heard from these highly paid, highly technical, highly professional traders in a niche indusry running the world in its way was: - How complex the job was - How high a…

> LLMs don't have to be "great," they just have to be "good enough."

NO NO NO NO NO NO NO!!!! It may be that some random script you run on your PC can be "good enough", but the software the my business sells can't be produced by "good enough" LLMs. I'm tired of my junior dev turning in garbage code that the latest and greatest "good enough" LLM created. I'm about to tell him he can't use AI tools anymore. I'm so thankful I actually learned how to code in pre-LLM days, because I know more than just how to copy and paste.

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

#536

Post by Me001 »

pdimitar wrote: post #492
shiveenp wrote: post #487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my opinion people that harp on about how LLMs have been game changer for them are the people that put themselves as never actually having built anything sophisticated enough that a team of engineers can work and extend on for years.

Yep, as cynical and demeaning that must sound to them, I am arriving at the same conclusion.

All the programming for the Apollo Program took less then a year and Microsoft Teams is decades in development obviously they are better than NASA programmers.

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

#537

Post by manesioz »

shiveenp wrote: post #501
holografix wrote: post #439

Beware of the miopia and gate keeping displayed on this thread. There will be less SWE and DevOps and related jobs available in the next 24 months. Period. Become hyper-aware of how a business measure your value as a SWE. How? Ask pointed, uncomfortable questions that force the people paying you to think and be transparent. Stay on the cutting edge of how to increase your output and quality using AI. Ie: how long doe…

Explain to me how you think a sophisticated random text generator will take all jobs. Especially since it’s trained on existing corpus of data on the internet created by? Guess who, existing engineers. I’m genuinely curious on the backing of these “trust me bro” style statements.

If you think that state-of-the-art LLMs are "random text generators" I don't know what to say to you.

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

#538

Post by aprilthird2021 »

light_triad wrote: post #183

There's a great Joel Spolsky post about developers starting businesses and realising that there's a bunch of "business stuff" that was abstracted away at big companies. [1] One way to future proof is to look at the larger picture, the same way that coding can't be reduced to algorithm puzzles: "Software is a conversation, between the software developer and the user. But for that conversation to happen requires a lot…

Yep, I learned this the hard way. I thought meeting customers, selling them on an automated, cheaper version of their current crufty manual system would be so easy I'd barely need to try.

I'd never been more wrong.

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

#539

Post by Philadelphia »

pdimitar wrote: post #500
jprete wrote: post #494

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a message board frequented by extremely tech-involved people. I'd expect the vast majority of people here to have some financial interest in LLMs - big-tech equity, direct employment, AI startup, AI influencer, or whatever.

Yeah, very likely. It's the new gold rush, and they are commanding wages that make me drool (and also make me want to howl in pain and agony and envy but hey, let's not mention the obvious, shall we?). I always forget the name of that law but... it's hard to make somebody understand something if their salary depends on them not understanding it.

It’s a line by Upton Sinclair: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

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

#540

Post by traverseda »

wyclif wrote: post #498
cadamsau wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One hundred per cent this. LLM pair programming is unbelievably fun, satisfying, and productive. Why type out the code when you can instead watch it being typed while thinking of and typing out/speaking the next thing you want. For those who enjoy typing, you could try to get a job dictating letters for lawyers, but something tells me that’s on the way out too.

What do you prefer to use for LLM pair programming?

Copilot and aider-chat
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