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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?

#771

Post by palata »

throwawayffffas wrote: post #763
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…

The main takeaway is that llms can't code to a professional level yet. But with improvement they probably will. It doesn't even have to be LLMs the coding part of our job will eventually be automated to a much larger degree than it is.

Or not. The point is that we don't know.

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

#772

Post by tumetab1 »

aprilthird2021 wrote: post #533
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.

My personal estimation is that this will be noticeable in the first six months of 2025 in the USA big tech organizations.

I think this is actually already in motion in board meetings, I'm pretty sure executives are discussing something like "if we spend Z$ on AI tools, can we avoid hiring how many engineers?"

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

#773

Post by Zababa »

lubujackson wrote: post #554
taylodl wrote: post #25

Back in the late 80s and early 90s there was a craze called CASE - Computer-Aided Software Engineering. The idea was humans really suck at writing code, but we're really good at modeling and creating specifications. Tools like Rational Rose arose during this era, as did Booch notation which eventually became part of UML. The problem was it never worked. When generating the code, the best the tools could do was create…

This is more or less my take. I came in on Web 1.0 when "real" programmers were coding in C++ and I was mucking around with Perl and PHP. This just seems like just the next level of abstraction. I don't forsee a "traders all disappeared" situation like the top comment, because at the end of the day someone needs to know WHAT they want to build. So yes, less junior developers and development looking more like manageme…

Here's to Yudkowsky's 84th law.

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

#774

Post by palata »

Aeolun wrote: post #629
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…

Very defensive. I love it anyhow. Sure, it generates shit code, but if you ask it it’ll gladly tell you all the ways it can be improved. And then actually do so. It’s not perfect. I spent a few hours yesterday pulling it’s massive blobby component apart by hand. But on the plus side, I didn’t have to write the whole thing. Just do a bunch of copy paste operations. I kinda like having a junior dev to do all the typing…

> I spent a few hours yesterday pulling it’s massive blobby component apart by hand. But on the plus side, I didn’t have to write the whole thing.

The question, really, is: are you confident that this was better than actually writing the whole thing yourself? Not only in terms of how long it took this one time, but also in terms of how much you learned while doing it.

You accumulate experience when you write code, which is an investment. It makes you better for later. Now if the LLM makes you slightly faster in the short term, but prevents you from acquiring experience, then I would say that it's not a good deal, is it?

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

#775

Post by atemerev »

sureglymop wrote: post #719

As a junior dev, I do two conscious things to make sure I'll still be relevant for the workforce in the future. 1. I try to stay somewhat up to date with ML and how the latest things work. I can throw together some python, let it rip through a dataset from kaggle, let models run locally etc. Have my linalg and stats down and practiced. Basically if I had to make the switch to be an ML/AI engineer it would be easier t…

You are the smart one; I hope everything will work for you!

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

#776

Post by lordnacho »

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…

We're gonna get mini-milled.

People with the attitude that real programmers are producing the high level product are going to get eaten slowly, from below, in the most embarrassing way possible.

Embarrassing because they'll actually be right. LLMs aren't making the high quality products, it's true.

But the low quality CRUD websites (think restaurant menus) will get swallowed by LLMs. You no longer need a guy to code up a model, run a migration, and throw it on AWS. You also don't need a guy to make the art.

Advances in LLMs will feed on the money made from sweeping up all these crap jobs, which will legitimately vanish. That guy who can barely glue together a couple of pages, he is indeed finished.

But the money will make better LLMs. They will swallow up the field from below.

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

#777

Post by patrulek »

sleazebreeze wrote: post #617
w-hn wrote: post #408

I have been unemployed for almost a year now (it started with a full division layoff and then no willingness or motivation to look for work at the time). Seeing the way AI can do most of the native app development (which is what I did) code I wrote I am losing almost any motivation to even try now. But I have been sleeping the best after college (where I slept awesome) and I have been working out, watching lots of th…

I don't quite get this. How can you be relaxed when you have no plan and are just waiting for your savings to run out?

Maybe he has enough savings to live few years on it?

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

#778

Post by nickd2001 »

simianparrot wrote: post #224
jcranmer wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is at least the third time in my life that we've seen a loudly-heralded purported the-end-of-programming technology. The previous two times both ended up being damp squibs that barely mention footnotes in the history of computing. Why do we expect that LLMs are going to buck this trend? It's not for accuracy--the previous attempts, when demonstrating their proof-of-concepts, actually reliably worked, whereas wit…

I do seem to vaguely remember a time when there was a fair amount of noise proclaiming "visual programming is making dedicated programmers obsolete." I think the implication was that now everybody's boss could just make the software themselves or something. LLM's as a product feel practically similar, because _even if_ they could write code that worked in large enough quantities to constitute any decently complex app…

This is a feeling I have too. However, compared to Visual Programming it's perhaps harder to dismiss? Visual programming - its pretty obvious you can't effectively or even at all step through a UML diagram with a debugger to find a problem. The code that gets generated from diagrams, with visual programming, is obviously cr*p. So the illusion doesn't last long. Whereas AI - it kind of looks OK, you can indeed debug it, its not necessarily more complex or worse than the hideously over-complex systems human teams create. Especially if the human team is mismanaged e:g original devs left, some got burnt out and became unproductive, others had to cut corners and make tech debt to hit unrealistic deadlines, other bits get outsourced to another country where the devs themselves are great but perhaps there's a language barrier or simply geographical distance means requirements and domain understanding got lost somewhere in the mix. So, I suppose I sit on the fence, AI-generated code may be terrible but is it worse than what we were making anyway? ;). In the future there are probably going to be companies run by "unwise people" that generate massive amounts of their codebase then find themselves in a hole when no-one working at the company understands the code at all. (whereas in the past perhaps they could hire back a dev they laid off on large contractor rates of pay to save the day). Seems inevitable one day the news will be of some high profile company failure and/or tanking of stock caused by a company basically not knowing what it was doing due to AI generated code.

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

#779

Post by palata »

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.

> Is there some expectation that these things won't improve?

Most of the noise I hear about LLMs is about expectations that things will improve. It's always like that: people extrapolate and get money from VCs for that.

The thing is: nobody can know. So when someone extrapolates and says it's likely to happen as they predict, they shouldn't be surprised to get answers that say "I don't have the same beliefs".

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

#780

Post by atemerev »

bertylicious wrote: post #717

Disclaimer: I wholeheartedly hate all the systems they call AI these days and I hate the culture around it for technological, ecological, political, and philosophical reasons. I won't future-proof my career against LLMs at all. If I ever see myself in the position that I must use them to produce or adjust code, or that I mostly read and fix LLM-generated code, then I'll leave the industry and do something else. I see…

It might be a dystopian nightmare, but the transition to it is inevitable, and closing one’s eyes and doing nothing might not be the most optimal strategy. Delaying or fighting it will also not work.

What “something else” do you have in mind?

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