Just a word of note, this was the intent all along. The thing that stings is you trained your replacement.
Programmer salaries in the age of LLMs
21–30 of 163 posts
Re: Programmer salaries in the age of LLMs
#22I think it will be more like airline pilots with the addition of autopilot. Maybe you could write whole services, and networks of services with AI, but you need engineers to be the guiding hand. Engineers will always be better at using AI to build systems than non-developers. Also, it’s worth pointing out that AI is using existing data. If a new iOS API comes out, the AI will need code bases with it already implement…
depending on how advanced this AI will be, it could learn from a few samples and the API docs, possibly itself designed to be optimally consumed by AI. If I knew that AI would consume my custom programming language docs then I would make sure that each API is used once in some kind of sample code so it can give answers to everything. Plus, that's a sensible thing to do anyway.
Even better (or worse), tell your AI/LLM to output sample uses of the project to be training data for other AI/LLM. Probably ends up being a knowledge transfer protocol.
Re: Programmer salaries in the age of LLMs
#23[flagged]
Re: Programmer salaries in the age of LLMs
#24I'm going to be the optimist here and instead of AI killing engineering jobs it's going to turn most engineers into much better engineers and what tech company doesn't want a whole bunch of better engineers? Building applications right now is time intensive, it takes years to build products, months to build features, and maybe we change it to be weeks and days instead, respectively. Maybe it's all just upside.
>Building applications right now is time intensive, it takes years to build products, months to build features, and maybe we change it to be weeks and days instead, respectively.
You want to increase churn? Are you insane?
I feel like if you poll computer / phone users (ie., the vast majority of the population) one of the most annoying things users hate about modern devices are mandatory updates, like the infamous meme video where someone screams at their window machine updating. Now, you want to make it easier for middle managers to push new unneeded updates so they can pad their resumes, how absurd.
Re: Programmer salaries in the age of LLMs
#25[flagged]
As much as you’re shitposting, I agree.
I worked my fingers to the bone for years before breaking into cushy software. Shit changes, I can change. We have to, or die.
No LLM is gonna have the upper hand on me and my bag, because I’m gonna have the upper hand on it. Simple as.
Re: Programmer salaries in the age of LLMs
#26[flagged]
Why is your tone harsh?
Re: Programmer salaries in the age of LLMs
#27AI/ML will solve some great problems, many that are critical. Similar to how Wix solves your basic webpage for the average person. Does Wix solve anything for your typical enterprise or SAAS app? Even if it did, would these institutions not manage to add a new layer to the layer cake?
It's kind of been one of my main critiques of companies like Palantir. You really can't just dump a company's data into the big ML tumbler and expect useful/sellable products to just pop out. Take a random use case like, I don't know, Pepsi. Maybe Pepsi can get some insights about their supply chain and customer preferences. Alright? Okay. Did the world end because that happened? Not really.
Shifting gears back to programmers - AI will be a super smart programmer that will write a bunch of your code. I worked with some super smart programmers, and they can manage to write a lot of super smart code that eventually becomes a clusterfuck too.
We'll just go from unwrapping human shit code, to unwrapping AI shit code (or even better, unwrapping a mix of human shit and AI shit). The job prospects here are even greater than you imagine.
Long as you maintain the belief in the fundamental truth, that anything in existence is capable of writing shit code, then the world will never end for programmers.
Re: Programmer salaries in the age of LLMs
#28The author doesn’t understand the reason for the bimodal distribution of attorney compensation. If you look at a distribution of salaries overall, they are not smooth. There will be small peaks at round numbers, $60k, $70k, 80k, etc., rather than a smooth curve from 60->80. People like round numbers.
The top peak in the law is due to human bias just the same.
>Just like how a partner at Cravath likely sketches an outline of how they want to approach a particular case and swarms of largely replaceable lawyers fill in the details…
Except those “replaceable” attorneys at Cravath are the top peak of the distribution. The distribution is caused by social decisions of what firms to compete with. Top salary information is well-publicized and firms who want to be in the category of “BigLaw” basically match each other.
The lower peak of the distribution is more local attorneys. Your local estate law attorney, government workers like district attorneys/public defenders, etc. who are not competing with Cravath for talent or clients.
I would assume this is already what exists in programming with “BigTech” salaries being equivalently publicized and matched across firms concerned with being perceived to be a “FAANG+”. If it doesn’t, I would guess the reason is that not enough positions actually exist in “BigTech” to make a significant blip on a population-wide salary graph. BigLaw attorneys exist in almost every medium-large city in the US, but you can’t say the same about BigTech programmers.
Re: Programmer salaries in the age of LLMs
#29[flagged]
wow, i would dare to say that this is a writing level of GPT-2 :-)
Re: Programmer salaries in the age of LLMs
#30There is research [1] that suggests using GPS navigation could impact your brain function negatively. I wonder how this code generation “assistant” will impact the coding skills of its users in long term.
As for the LLMs, stochastic parroting (hallucination), which is inherent to its design, makes it untrustworthy for precision work. Maybe some other architecture will prove more useful. LLMs can generate BS authoritatively which is easy to detect for toy examples and forgivable by the AI hype train but can be very costly or hard to fix in a complex system with a lot of moving parts.
I’m actually optimistic about the future of AI. At the same time I believe we should know the capabilities and understand the limitations of our tools in order to use them more effectively. Unfortunately people are misunderstanding tools like ChatGPT, etc. for we are human and vulnerable to anthropomorphism.