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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?

#781

Post by stefs »

edanm wrote: post #738
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…

> business people trying to replace one guy like myself with 3 Indians has been a reality for 10 years at this point, and amusingly they keep failing and never learning their lesson. /off-topic What is the "lesson" that business people fail to learn? That Indians are worse developers than "someone like yourself"? (I don't mean to bump on this, but it is pretty offensive as currently written.)

not OP, but not necessarily. the general reason is not that indians are worse developers per se. in my opinion it's more about the business structure. the "replacement indian" is usually not a coworker at the same company, but an employee at an outsourcing company.

the outsourcing company's goal is not to ship a good product, but to make the most money from you. so while the "indian developer" might theoretically be able to deliver a better product than you, they wont be incentivized to do so.

in practice, there are also many other factors that play into this - which might arguably play a bigger role like communication barriers, indian career paths (i.e. dev is only a stepstone on the way to manager), employee churn at cheap & terrible outsourcing companies, etc.

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

#782

Post by shafyy »

Quarrel wrote: post #754
shafyy wrote: post #739

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Completely agree. The other day I was trying to find something in the Shopify API docs (an API I'm not familar with), and I decided to try their chat bot assistant thingy. I thought, well, if an LLM is good at something, it's probably at finding information in a very narrow field like this. However, it kept telling me things that were plain wrong, I could compare it to the docs next to it easily. Would have been fast…

> I thought, well, if an LLM is good at something, it's probably at finding information in a very narrow field like this. I feel like of all the things in this thread, this one is on them. It absolutely is something that LLMs are good at. They have the sample size, examples and docs, all the things. LLMs are particularly good at speaking "their" language, the most surprising thing is that they can do so much more bey…

Another perspective is: Given that Shopify should have the capabilities to be good at this and their AI assistant is still sucking ass, it's not possible to make a better product with the current technology.

Maybe it's right 99% of the time and works well for many of their developers. But this is exactly the point. I just can't trust a system that sometimes gives me the wrong answer.

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

#784

Post by dukeyukey »

lordnacho wrote: post #776
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…

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…

> 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.

To be fair those were eaten long ago by Wordpress and site builders.

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

#785

Post by [deleted] »

thor_molecules wrote: post #179

After reading the comments, the themes I'm seeing are: - AI will provide a big mess for wizards to clean up - AI will replace juniors and then seniors within a short timeframe - AI will soon plateau and the bubble will burst - "Pshaw I'm not paid to code; I'm a problem solver" - AI is useless in the face of true coding mastery It is interesting to me that this forum of expert technical people are so divided on this (…

[deleted]

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

#786

Post by atemerev »

throwaway_43793 wrote: post #191
Rotundo wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 20-year-old is, maybe, just like you at that age: eager and smart, but lacking experience. Making bad decisions, bad designs, bad implementations left and right. Just like you did, way back when. But you have made all those mistakes already. You've learned, you've earned your experience. You are much more valuable than you think. Source: Me, I'm almost 60, been programming since I was 12.

I think the idea of meritocracy has died in me. I wish I could be rewarded for my knowledge and expertise, but it seems that capitalism, as in maximizing profit, has won above everything else.

You are rewarded for something that is useful to the market, i.e. to other people (useful enough so they agree to pay you money for it). If something you know is no longer useful, you will not be rewarded.

It was true 100 years ago, it was true 20 years ago, and it is true now.

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

#787

Post by lloeki »

VeejayRampay wrote: post #290
mlboss wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A bird can fly to moon if it keeps on improving every month.

it literally cannot though, unless it becomes some other form of life that doesn't need oxygen, that's the whole thing with this analogy, it's ironically suited to the discourse

Ha I didn't even count oxygen in the mix; it could hold its breath maybe? j/k, what's for sure is that I don't see how a biological entity could ever achieve escape velocity from self-powered flight, because, well, physics.

That, or they "keep improving every month" til they become evolved enough to build rockets, at which point the entire point of them being birds becomes moot.

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

#788

Post by Xelbair »

lordnacho wrote: post #776
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…

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…

>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.

just like you don't need webmasters, if you remember that term. IF you are just writing CRUD apps, then yeah - you're screwed.

If you're a junior, or want to get into the field? same, you're totally screwed.

LLMs are great at soft tasks, or producing code that has been written thousand of times - boilerplate, CRUD stuff, straightforward scripts - but the usual problems aren't limited by typing speed, nor amount of boilerplate but by thinking and evaluating solutions and tradeoffs from business perspective.

Also I'll be brutally honest - by the time the LLMs catch up to my generation's capabilities, we'll be already retired, and that's where the real crisis will start.

No juniors, no capable people, most seniors and principal engineers are retired - and quite probably LLMs won't be able to fully replace them.

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

#789

Post by whoistraitor »

olivermuty wrote: post #718
Aeolun wrote: post #629

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If an LLM can give you feedback on a way to proceed it sounds more like you might be the junior? :P LLMs seems to be ok'ish at solving trivial boilerplate stuff. 20 attempts deep I have not yet seen it able to even remotely solve anything I have been stuck enough on to have to sit down and think hard.

Curious: what kind of problem domain to you work on? I use LLMs every day on pretty hard problems and they are always net positive. But I imagine they’re not well trained on material related to your work if you don’t find them useful.

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

#790

Post by nickd2001 »

To me it seems possible, that seniors will become in even more demand, because learning to become a decent developer is actually harder if you're distracted by leaning on LLMs. Thus, the supply of up-and-coming good new seniors may be throttled. This to me is because LLMs don't abstract code well. Once upon a time electronics engineers had to know a lot about components. Then along came integrated circuits and they had to know about them, and less about components. Once upon a time programmers had to know machine code or assembler. I've never had to know about those for my job. I programmed in C++ for years and had to know plenty about memory. These days I rarely need to as much, but some basic knowledge is needed. Its fine if a student is learning to code mostly in Python, but a short course in C is probably a good idea even today. But as for LLMs, you can't say "now I need to know less about this specific thing that's been black-boxed for me" , because it isn't wrapped conveniently like that. I'm extremely glad that when I was a junior, LLMs weren't around. Really seems like a barrier to learning. Its impossible to understand all the generated code, but also difficult, without significant career experience, to be able to judge what you need to know about, and what you don't. Feel sorry for juniors today to be honest!
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