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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?

#861

Post by dyauspitr »

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 “…

This is denial. LLMs already write code at a senior level. Couple that with solid tests and a human code reviewer and we’re already at 5x the story points per sprint at the startup I work at.

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

#862

Post by munificent »

atemerev wrote: post #795
munificent wrote: post #504

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Looking at the code you’ve been paid to write over the past few years, how much of that can you honestly say is truly novel? While the code I write is rarely novel, one of the primary intrinsic motivators that keeps being a software engineer is the satisfaction of understanding my code . If I just wanted software problems to be solved and was content to wave my hands and have minions do the work, I'd be in manageme…

And that is exactly what we won’t have anymore, at least on the job. They are not paying us for our satisfaction and our understanding.

I think that's an oversimplification.

Intrinsic reward is always part of the compensation package for a job. That's why jobs that are more intrinsically rewarding tend to pay less. It's not because they are exploiting workers, it's because workers add up all of the rewards of the job, including the intrinsic ones, when deciding whether to accept it.

If I have to choose between a job where I'm obligated to pump out code as fast as possible having an LLM churn out as much as it can versus a job that is slower and more deliberate, I'll take the latter even if it pays less.

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

#863

Post by og2023 »

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 “…

Seems like nobody noticed the "delve" part, which is a very dark irony here.

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

#865

Post by whiplash451 »

throwaway_43793 wrote: post #726
whiplash451 wrote: post #725

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Moving from an engineering role to a product role is a massive career change. I don't think this is reasonable advice, even with the current technological revolution, unless you have a deep, personal interest in product management.

Not necessarily product. You can become a manager, or a technical lead.

Same. You don't move to a management role unless you have a real calling for it.

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

#866

Post by waffletower »

I think there are easy answers to this question that will most likely be effective: adapt as you have with any emerging software technology that impacts your work, embrace LLMs in your workflow where feasible and efficient, learn about the emerging modelops technologies that are employed to utilize LLMs.

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

#867

Post by mplanchard »

sigmarule wrote: post #273
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 “…

My perspective is that if you are unable to find ways to improve your own workflows, productivity, output quality, or any other meaningful metric using the current SOTA LLM models, you should consider the possibility that it is a personal failure at least as much as you consider the possibility that it is a failure of the models. A more tangible pitfall I see people falling into is testing LLM code generation using s…

This sounds nice, but it also sounds like a ton of work to set up we don't have time for. Local models that don't require us to send our codebase to Microsoft or OpenAI would be something I'm sure we'd be willing to try out.

I'd love it if more companies were actually considering real engineering needs to provide products in this space. Until then, I have yet to see any compelling evidence that the current chatbot models can consistently produce anything useful for my particular work other than the occasional SQL query.

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

#868

Post by shenbomo »

pdimitar wrote: post #805
shenbomo wrote: post #742

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you think computers and ARPANET came out for commercial-grade applications and not "good for playing with stuff" ?

Of course they came from playing. But did you have people claiming we have a general AI while basic programming building blocks were still on the operating table?

Then what was dot com bubble?

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

#869

Post by nicksergeant »

Macha wrote: post #833
dukeyukey wrote: post #784

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

And even Facebook. I think the last time bespoke restaurant menu websites were a viable business was around 2010.

Have you personally tried? I have a business doing exactly that and have three restaurants paying between $300-400/month for a restaurant website -- and we don't even integrate directly with their POS / menu providers (Heartland).

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

#870

Post by marssaxman »

I will do the same thing I did on all of the previous occasions when new automation ate my job: move up the ladder of abstraction and keep on working.

I haven't written any actual code for a couple of decades, after all: I just waffle around stitching together vague, high-level descriptions of what I want the machine to do, and robots write the code for me! I don't even have to manage memory anymore; the robots do it all. The robots are even getting pretty good at finding certain kinds of bugs now. A wondrous world of miracles, it is... but somehow there are still plenty of jobs for us computer-manipulating humans.

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