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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?

#991

Post by throw09890989 »

dogman144 wrote: post #378

The last fairly technical career to get surprisingly and fully automated in the way this post displays concern about - trading. I spent a lot of time with traders in early '00's and then '10's when the automation was going full tilt. Common feedback I heard from these highly paid, highly technical, highly professional traders in a niche indusry running the world in its way was: - How complex the job was - How high a…

Actually the profession is already taking big hit. Expecting at least partial replacement by LLMs is _already_ one of the reasons for the reduction of new jobs. Actually _replacing_ developers is one of the killer apps investors see in AI.

I'd be impressed if the profession survived unscathed. It will mutate to some form or another. And it will probably shrink. Wages will go down to the levels that OpenAI will sell their monthly pro. And maybe 3rd world devs will stay competitive enough. But that depends a lot on whether AI companies will get abundant and cheap energy. IIUC that's their choke point atm.

If it happens it will be quite ironic and karmic TBH. Ironic as it is its our profession very own R&D that will kill it. Karmic because it's exactly what it did to numerous other fields and industries (remember Polaroid killed by instagram, etc).

OTOH there's no riskier thing than predicting the future. Who knows. Maybe AI will fall on it's own face due to insane energy economics, internet rot (attributed to itself) and what not.

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

#992

Post by jarsin »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #445
dogman144 wrote: post #378

The last fairly technical career to get surprisingly and fully automated in the way this post displays concern about - trading. I spent a lot of time with traders in early '00's and then '10's when the automation was going full tilt. Common feedback I heard from these highly paid, highly technical, highly professional traders in a niche indusry running the world in its way was: - How complex the job was - How high a…

I like this comment, it is exceptionally insightful. Any interesting question is "How is programming like trading securities?" I believe an argument can be made that the bulk of what goes for "programming" today is simply hooking up existing pieces in ways that achieve a specific goal. When the goal can be adequately specified[1] the task of hooking up the pieces to achieve that goal is fairly mechanical. Just like t…

> LLMs let people generate marginal code quickly.

What's weird to me is why people think this is some kind of great benefit. Not once have I ever worked on a project where the big problem was that everyone was already maxed out coding 8 hours a day.

Figuring out what to actually code and how to do it the right way seemed to always be the real time sink.

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

#993

Post by simianparrot »

NikkiA wrote: post #986
tptacek wrote: post #563

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder how programmers of the time felt when spreadsheets got popular.

We used spreadsheets too, and found them useful, but not very threatening

I use spreadsheets a lot, and often they end up serving as an MVP «prototype» until it’s obvious I need a proper database and custom UI, then build an application for the task instead.

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

#994

Post by dogman144 »

throw09890989 wrote: post #991
dogman144 wrote: post #378

The last fairly technical career to get surprisingly and fully automated in the way this post displays concern about - trading. I spent a lot of time with traders in early '00's and then '10's when the automation was going full tilt. Common feedback I heard from these highly paid, highly technical, highly professional traders in a niche indusry running the world in its way was: - How complex the job was - How high a…

Actually the profession is already taking big hit. Expecting at least partial replacement by LLMs is _already_ one of the reasons for the reduction of new jobs. Actually _replacing_ developers is one of the killer apps investors see in AI. I'd be impressed if the profession survived unscathed. It will mutate to some form or another. And it will probably shrink. Wages will go down to the levels that OpenAI will sell t…

Good comment! I see all these arguments in this post, and then think of the most talented journeyman engineer I know who just walked away from Google because he knew both AI was coming for his and coworkers jobs and he wasn’t good enough to be past the line where that wouldn’t matter. Everyone might be the next 10x engineer and be ok… but a lot aren’t.

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

#995

Post by throw09890989 »

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…

Feeling exactly the same way. And TBH this comes from a feeling that we never respected our profession and our fellow engineers. I mean I know no other engineering discipline where best practices and tools were changing every 3 years. I also know no other engineering discipline where getting older is anathema instead of a badge of expertise. We behave like we were in fashion business rather than engineering.

So. Yes. On one hand I'm shiting my pants because that's the only way I know of making some money. On the other hand I'm saying to myself, to hell with it all.

PS: There should be a sister thread to this with alternative careers for former SW engs.

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

#996

Post by fuzztester »

rob74 wrote: post #762
nyarlathotep_ wrote: post #551

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 easy to mock the 3rd party dependencies, be easy to configure so it can be deployed in every cloud provider (i.e. by using env vars an…

If there is one job I don't want to do, it's being responsible for a big heap of enterprise CRUD slop generated and glued together by LLMs. If they can write it, they should learn to maintain it too!

Insightful.

Whadja say, sama and backers?

IOW: maintain your own dog food, etc.

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

#997

Post by fuzztester »

Aeolun wrote: post #634
nyarlathotep_ wrote: post #551

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 easy to mock the 3rd party dependencies, be easy to configure so it can be deployed in every cloud provider (i.e. by using env vars an…

LLM’s are good at things a lot of people do, because a lot of people do them, and there’s tons of examples. It’s the very definition of a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Good to the power of one by infinity.

Fixed that for you.

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

#998

Post by fuzztester »

pdimitar wrote: post #810
nyarlathotep_ wrote: post #551

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 easy to mock the 3rd party dependencies, be easy to configure so it can be deployed in every cloud provider (i.e. by using env vars an…

Absolutely. I agree with your take. It's just that I prefer to work in places where products are iterated on and not made once, tweaked twice, and then thrown out. There LLMs are for the moment not very interesting because you have to correct like 50% of the code they generate, ultimately wasting more time and brain energy than writing the thing yourself in the first place.

And wasting more money too, of highly paid devs.

A wake-up call for the bean counters.

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

#999

Post by pdimitar »

fuzztester wrote: post #998
pdimitar wrote: post #810

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely. I agree with your take. It's just that I prefer to work in places where products are iterated on and not made once, tweaked twice, and then thrown out. There LLMs are for the moment not very interesting because you have to correct like 50% of the code they generate, ultimately wasting more time and brain energy than writing the thing yourself in the first place.

And wasting more money too, of highly paid devs. A wake-up call for the bean counters.

I wish. But many of them only get as far as "this tool will replace your expensive programmer". Thinking stops there for them.

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

#1000

Post by fuzztester »

pdimitar wrote: post #999
fuzztester wrote: post #998

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And wasting more money too, of highly paid devs. A wake-up call for the bean counters.

I wish. But many of them only get as far as "this tool will replace your expensive programmer". Thinking stops there for them.

Lets replace them.
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