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

> Now I mostly JSX / tailwind, which is way faster than prompting,

Not saying that is not true, but did you measure that actually or is it a feeling or you didn't spend very much time on getting a prompt you can plop your requests in? jsx and tailwind are very verbose ; frontend is mostly very verbose, and, unless you are building LoB apps, you will have to try things a few times. Cerebras and groq with a predefined copy paste prompt will generate all that miserable useless slob (yes, I vehemently hate frontend work; I do hope it will be replaced very soon by llms completely; it's close but not quite there yet) in milliseconds so you can just tweak it a bit. I am fluent at building web frontends since the mid 90s; before I did DOS, windows and motif ones (which was vastly nicer; there you could actually write terse frontend code); I see many companies inside and I have not seen anyone faster at frontend than current llms, so I would like to see a demo. In logic I see many people faster as the llm can often simply not even figure it out even remotely.

> Frameworks, compilers, and countless other developments in computing

How would those have plausibly eliminated jobs? Neither frameworks nor compilers were the totality of the tasks a single person previously was assigned. If there was a person whose job it was to convert C code to assembly by hand, yes, a compiler would have eliminated most of those jobs.

If you need an example of automation eliminating jobs, look at automated switchboard operators. The job of human switchboard operator (mostly women btw) was eliminated in a matter of years.

Except here, instead of a low-paid industry we are talking about a relatively high-paid one, so the returns would be much higher.

A good analogy can be made to outsourcing for manufacturing. For a long time Chinese products were universally of worse quality. Then they caught up. Now, in many advanced manufacturing sectors the Chinese are unmatched. It was only hubris that drove arguments that Chinese manufacturing could never match America’s.

Personally I hope it will take a lot of eng work, especially the menial work.

If it could also help management understand their own issues and how to integrate solutions into their software, then it would be great!

The core here is, that if engineering is going, then law is going, marketing is going and a lot of other professions are also going.

This means that we have structural issues we need to solve then.

And in that case it is about something else than my own employability.

"But when you have to scale the work, then the code has to be easy to read, easy to extend, easy to test, have extensive test coverage, have proper dependency injection / be easy to mock the 3rd party dependencies, be easy to configure so it can be deployed in every cloud provider (i.e. by using env vars and config files for modifying its behavior).."

Interestingly I do not find that the stuff you mentioned are the things that LLLMs are bad at. It can generate easy to read code. It can document its code extensively. It can write tests. It can use dependency injection especially if you ask it to. What I noticed where I am currently am much better than an LLM is that I can still have a very nuanced very complicated problem space in my head and create a solution based on that. The LLM currently cannot solve a problem which is so nuanced and complicated that even I cannot fully describe and work partially from insincts. It is the 'engineering taste' or 'engineering instincts' and our ability to absorb complicated nuanced design problems in our head that separates experienced developers from LLMs.

Unless LLMs get significantly better and just replace humans in every task, I predict that LLMs effect on industry will be that much less developers will be needed but those who will be needed will be relatively 'well paid' as it will be harder to become a professional software developer. (more experience and engineering talent will be needed to work professionally).

I started diversifying this year for this very reason. Firstly I’ve been engineering for over a decade and purposefully avoiding leadership roles, so I’ve stepped into a head of engineering role. Secondly I’ve taken up a specific wood working niche, it will provide me with a side hustle to begin with and help diversify our income.

I don’t think LLMs are taking jobs today, but I now clearly see a principal that has fully emerged, non tech people now have a lust for achieving and deploying various technology solutions, and the tech sector will fulfill it in the next decade.

Get ahead early.