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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?

#681

Post by ido »

bee_rider wrote: post #638
ido wrote: post #630

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm only 41 but that's long enough to have also seen this happen a few times (got my first job as a professional developer at age 18). I've also dabbled in using copilot and chatgpt and I find at most they're a boost to an experienced developer- they're not enough to make a novice a replacement for a senior.

I think the concern is that they might become good enough for a senior to not need a novice. At that point where to the seniors come from?

When the market heats up again companies will bite the bullet and hire juniors when they can’t get enough seniors.

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

#682

Post by anonzzzies »

mianos wrote: post #615

I am 61, I have been a full time developer since I was about 19. I have lost count of the number of 'next thing to replace developers' many many times. many of them showed promise. Many of them continue to be developed. Frameworks with higher and higher levels of abstraction. I see LLMs as the next higher level of abstraction. Does this mean it will replace me? At the moment the output is so flawed for anything but t…

I have seen this happening since the 70s. My father made a tool to replace programmers. It did not and it disillusioned him greatly. Sold very well though. But this time is different though; I have often said that I thought chatgpt like AI was at least 50 years out still but it's here; it does replace programmers every day. I see many companies inside (I have a troubleshoot company; we get called to fix very urgent stuff and we only do that so we hop around a lot) and many are starting to replace outsourced teams with, for instance, our product (which was a side project for me to see if it can be done, it can). But also just shrinking teams and give them claude or gpt to replace the bad people.

It is happening just not at scale yet to really scare people; that will happen though. It is just stupidly cheaper; for the price of one junior you can do so many api requests to claude it's not even funny. Large companies are still thinking about privacy of data etc but all of that will simply not matter in the long run.

Good logical thinkers and problemsolvers won't be replaced any time soon, but mediocre or bad programmers are already gone ; a llm is faster, cheaper and doesn't get ill or tired. And there are so many of them, just try someone on upwork or fiverr and you will know.

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

#683

Post by ido »

baq wrote: post #666
bee_rider wrote: post #638

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the concern is that they might become good enough for a senior to not need a novice. At that point where to the seniors come from?

We’re here already. Nobody wants to hire junior devs anymore. Seniors are still a couple phone calls away from new positions.

I got my first job in 2001, it was like that then as well (maybe even worse). It got better when the market picked up again. I’m confident there still won’t be “enough developers” when then happens just like there’s never “enough electricity” despite the fact the power grid keep getting expanded all the time - people fine a use for even more.

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

#684

Post by janalsncm »

amrocha wrote: post #623
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 have a coworker who I suspect has been using LLMs to write most of his code for him. He wrote multiple PRs with thousands of lines of code over a month. Me and the other senior dev spent weeks reviewing these PRs. Here’s what we found: - The feature wasn’t built to spec, so even though it worked in general the details were all wrong - The code was sloppy and didn’t adhere to the repos guidelines - He couldn’t expla…

In the short term, I share your opinion. LLMs have automated the creation of slop that resembles code.

In the long term, we SWEs (like other industries) have to own the fact that there’s a huge target on our backs, and aside from hubris there’s no law of nature or man preventing people smarter than us from building robots that do our jobs faster than us.

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

#685

Post by w10-1 »

pdimitar wrote: post #458
richardw wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For those less confident: U.S. (and German) automakers were absolutely sure that the Japanese would never be able to touch them. Then Koreans. Now Chinese. Now there are tariffs and more coming to save jobs. Betting against AI (or increasing automation, really) is a bet against not against robots, but against human ingenuity. Humans are the ones making progress, and we can work with toothpicks as levers. LLM's are ou…

In other words, you have built exactly zero commercial-grade applications that us the working programmers work on building every day. LLMs are good for playing with stuff, yes, and that has been implied by your parent commenter as well I think. 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 ea…

I think you're talking about the differencing between coding and writing systems, which means you're talking teams, not individuals.

Rarely, systems can be initiated by individuals, but the vast, vast majority are built and maintained by teams.

Those teams get smaller with LLMs, and it might even lead to a kind of stasis, where there are no new leads with deep experience, so we maintain the old systems.

That's actually fine by big iron, selling data, compute, resilience, and now intelligence. It's a way to avoid new entrants with cheaper programming models (cough J2EE).

So, if you're really serious about dragging in "commercial-grade", it's only fair to incorporate the development and business context.

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

#686

Post by selfmodruntime »

rybosworld wrote: post #164
IshKebab wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is there some expectation that these things won't improve? I definitely expect them to improve. But I also think the point at which they can actually replace a senior programmer is pretty much the exact point at which they can replace any knowledge worker, at which point western society (possibly all society) is in way deeper shit than just me being out of a job. > This is ego speaking. It definitely isn't. LLMs ar…

> LLM’s never provide code that pass my sniff test If that statement isn't coming from ego, then where is it coming from? It's provably true that LLM's can generate working code. They've been trained on billions of examples. Developers seem to focus on the set of cases that LLM's produce code that doesn't work, and use that as evidence that these tools are "useless".

> If that statement isn't coming from ego, then where is it coming from? It's provably true that LLM's can generate working code. They've been trained on billions of examples.

I am pro AI and I'm probably even overvaluing the value AI brings. However, for me, this doesn't work in more "esoteric" programming languages or those with stricter rulesets like Rust. LLMS provide fine JS code, since there's no compiler to satisfy, but CPP without undefined behaviour or compiling Rust code is rare.

There's also no chance of LLMS providing compiling code if you're using a library version with a newer API than the one in the training set.

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

#687

Post by tigershark »

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 “…

Yeah.. generations. I really hope that it doesn’t end like the New York Times article saying that human flight was at best hundred of years away a few weeks before the Wright brothers flight..

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

#688

Post by anhner »

peab wrote: post #483
pdimitar wrote: post #458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In other words, you have built exactly zero commercial-grade applications that us the working programmers work on building every day. LLMs are good for playing with stuff, yes, and that has been implied by your parent commenter as well I think. 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 ea…

"In other words, you have built exactly zero commercial-grade applications that us the working programmers work on building every day." The majority of programmers getting paid a good salary are implementing other people's ideas. You're getting paid to be some PMs chatGPT

> You're getting paid to be some PMs chatGPT

yes but one that actually works

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

#689

Post by cies »

achierius wrote: post #447
bigstrat2003 wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For instance: we use SaaS now instead of installing software locally. If anything, I feel like this argument works against you. If people are willing to replace locally installed software with shitty web "apps" that barely compare, why do you think they won't be willing to replace good programmers with LLMs doing a bad job simply because it's trendy?

SaaS has generally been better than the local apps it replaced, particularly when you factor in 'portability'. I love local apps but it's undeniable that developers having to split their attention between platforms lowered quality by a lot. You're probably remembering the exemplars, not the bulk which half-worked and looked bad too

Just look at the job market: how many programmers work in SaaS now compared to 2000?

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

#690

Post by w10-1 »

tossandthrow wrote: post #676

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…

> 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

The difference is reliance costs. We go to a doctor or a lawyer instead of a book because the risk of mistake is too high.

But development work can be factored; the guarantees are in the testing and deployment. At the margins maybe you trust a tech lead's time estimates or judgment calls, but you don't really rely on them as much as prove them out. The reliance costs became digestable when agile reduced scope to tiny steps, and they were digested by testing, cloud scaling, outsourcing, etc. What's left is a fig leaf of design, but ideas are basically free.

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