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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?

#931

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) Maybe. 2) I do see this, given the money poured into this cycle, as a potential possibility. It may not just be LLM's. To another comment you are betting against the whole capitalist systems, human ingenuity and billions/trillions? of dollars targeted at making SWE's redundant. 3) I think it can disrupt only knowledge jobs, and be some large time before it disrupts physical jobs. For SWE's this is the worst outcom…

> I think it can disrupt only knowledge jobs What happens when a huge chunk of knowledge workers lose their job? Who is going to buy houses, roofs, cars, cabinets, furniture, amazon packages, etc. from all the the blue-collar workers? What happens when all those former knowledge workers start flooding the job markets for cashiers and factory workers, or applying en masse to the limited spots in nursing schools or tra…

- The people that are left and the people that it doesn't happen straight away on: i.e. the people who still have something "scarce". That's what capitialism and/or any system that rations resources based on price/supply/demand does. This includes people in things slower to automate (i.e. think trades, licensed work, etc) and other economic resources (landowners, capital owners, general ownership of assets). Inequality will widen and those people winning will buy the houses, cars, etc. The businesses pitching to the poor/middle classes might disappear. Even if you are disrupted eventually being slower to disrupt gives you relatively more command of income/rent/etc than the ones disrupted before you giving you a chance to transition that income into capital/land/real assets which will remain scarce. Time is money. AI is a real asset holder's dream.

- Unskilled work will become even more diminished: A lot of people in power are counting on this to solve things like aging population care, etc. Move from coding software to doing the hard work in a nursing home for example is a deflationary force and makes the older generations (who typically have more wealth) even more wealthier as the effect would be deflationary overall and amplify their wealth. The industries that will benefit (at the expense of ones that don't) will be the ones that can appeal to the winners - resources will be redirected at them.

- Uneven disruption rates: I disagree that the AU disruption force will be even - I think the academic types will be disrupted much more than the average person. My personal opinion is that anything in the digital world can be disrupted much quicker than the physical realm for a number of reasons (cost of change/failure, energy, rules of physics limitations, etc). This means that as a society there will be no revolution (i.e. it was your fault for doing that; why should the rest of society bear the cost? be adaptable...). This has massive implications for what society values long term and the type of people valued in the new world as well socially, in personal relationships, etc.

i.e. Software dev's/ML researchers/any other white collar job/etc in the long run have shot themselves in the foot IMO. The best they can hope for is that LLM's do have a limit to progres, that there is an element of risk to the job that still requires some employment, and time is given to adjust. I hope I'm wrong since I would be affected too. No one will feel sorry for them - after all other professions know better than to do this to themselves on average and they have also caused a lot of disruption themselves (taste of their own medicine as they say).

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

#932
post #612

My view is that the point at which LLMs could cause the death of SWE as a profession is also the point at which practically all knowledge professions could be killed. To fully replace SWEs still requires the LLM to have enough external context that it could replace a huge range of jobs, and it'd probably be best to deal with the consequences of that as and when they happen.

So to take that a step further couldn't all businesses be killed as well?

Sure. What's the point in worrying about that now? That circumstance is so far removed from current experience I'm not sure there's anything useful we could do to prepare before it happens.

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

#933

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The saddle, the stirrup, the horseshoe, the wagon, the plough, and the drawbar all enhanced the productivity of horses and we only ended up employing more of them. Then the steam engine and internal combustion engine came around and work horses all but disappeared. There's no economic law that says a new productivity-enhancing programming tool is always a stirrup and never a steam engine.

I think you raise an excellent point, and can use your point to figure out how it could apply in this case. All the tools that are stirrups were used "by the horse" (you get what I mean); that implies to me that so long as the AI tools are used by the programmers (what we've currently got), they're stirrups. The steam engines were used by the people "employing the horse" - ala, "people don't buy drills they buy holes…

Thanks for the warm feedback!

Maybe another interesting case would be secretaries. It used to be very common that even middle management positions at small to medium companies would have personal human secretaries and assistants, but now they're very rare. Maybe some senior executives at large corporations and government agencies still have them, but I have never met one in North America who does.

Below that level it's become the standard that people do their own typing, manage their own appointments and answer their own emails. I think that's mainly because computers made it easy and automated enough that it doesn't take a full time staffer, and computer literacy got widespread enough that anyone could do it themselves without specialized skills.

So if programming got easy enough that you don't need programmers to do the work, then perhaps we could see the profession hollow out. Alternatively we could run out of demand for software but that seems less likely!

(a related article: https://archive.is/cAKmu )

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

#934

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even since ChatGPT 3.5 AI coding has been astoundingly good. Like you, I'm totally baffled by developers who say it's not. And I'm not just unskilled and unable to judge. I have 35yrs experience! I've been shocked and impressed from day one, how good AI is. I've even seen Github Copilot do thing that almost resemble mind-reading insofar as predicting what I'm about to type next. It predicts some things it should NOT…

This just shows that time spent is not the same as wisdom.

[deleted]

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

#935
post #912
post #653

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If developers become more productive (both juniors and seniors), there will be more demand for all of them.

Or few will be productive enough to cover everything. Compare amount of bobcat operators vs ditch diggers.

There's an almost unlimited amount of demand for people who can write software or automate things, if you can lower buck-per-bang enough.

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

#936

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…

There are some very narrow minded, snarky people here,

“doesn’t pass my sniff test”

okay Einstein, you do you

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

#937

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even since ChatGPT 3.5 AI coding has been astoundingly good. Like you, I'm totally baffled by developers who say it's not. And I'm not just unskilled and unable to judge. I have 35yrs experience! I've been shocked and impressed from day one, how good AI is. I've even seen Github Copilot do thing that almost resemble mind-reading insofar as predicting what I'm about to type next. It predicts some things it should NOT…

This just shows that time spent is not the same as wisdom.

Even ChatGPT 3.5 had "wisdom", so you're definitely wrong.

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

#938
post #774
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…

> 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, wh…

Asking questions and thinking critically about the answers is how I learn. The information is better structured with LLMs.

Everyone isn't "generating and moving on". There's still a review and iteration part of the process. That's where the learning happens.

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

#940
It's lowering the bar for developers to enter the marketplace, in a space that is wildly under saturated. We'll all be fine. There's tons of software to be built.

More small businesses will be able to punch-up with LLMs tearing down walled gardens that were reserved for those with capital to spend on lawyers, consultants and software engineering excellence.

It's doing the same thing as StackOverflow -- hard problems aren't going away, they're becoming more esoteric.

If you're at the edge, you're not going anywhere.

If you're in the middle, you're going to have a lot more opportunities because your throughput should jump significantly so your ROI for mom and pop shops finally pencils.

Just be sure you actually ship and you'll be fine.

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