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You really think that it won't be the pampered prima donnas who won't use an AI which is trained on your code but just like chatgpt outputs nonsense to replace you?
Programmer salaries in the age of LLMs
41–50 of 163 posts
Re: Programmer salaries in the age of LLMs
#42I'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.
I think people are more impressed than they should be because of a misconception about what programmers really do. For most big software projects the bottleneck is not writing code and test boilerplate that runs correctly locally. Which of course LLMs can do reasonably well. Most time is spent on design, on integrations with other internal services, scaling concerns, and reasoning about other things that these models…
> But I don't think they've "solved" software engineering; they've only solved "what you boss thinks software engineering is".
That's still bad, though, because your boss makes hiring and salary decisions.
Maybe in the end it's a kind of "great filter" - companies and bosses that can't tell the difference don't survive. But a lot of good programmers can get fired before the clueless bosses die off...
Re: Programmer salaries in the age of LLMs
#43AI/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 tum…
Sometimes though we shouldn't have the AI write the code first.
So many times, I look over things people copy and pasted piece by piece from blogs and stackoverflow, when if they thought about it for 5 minutes, they'd realize a simpler implementation would have worked and been easier to write in the end. AI, if chatgpt is any indication, is moving toward overly flowerly and long prose while telling lies, that is stuff that looks "impressive" at a glance like the large ornate class hiearchies of java and c++ in the 90s looked but are things that could be done in a shell script.
I am worried then that like stackoverflow, AI will make a generation of developers who are extremely lazy and not critically thinking, just like stackoverflow did, and leave more of a mess for us to pick up after. Of course, in the midst of this, management won't know the difference. Just like chatgpt sounding impressive as it tells falsehoods, AI-code will look impressive to fools.
Re: Programmer salaries in the age of LLMs
#44Comment here seem to largely miss the point of the article, which isn't saying that nobody will employ software engineers. It is saying that instead of the current model of: 1 very highly compensated staff+ engineer 4 highly compensated senior engineers 4 pretty well-compensated mid-level engineers 2 decently compensated junior engineers The future might look like: 1 yet-more-highly-compensated staff+ engineer who sp…
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Re: Programmer salaries in the age of LLMs
#45This post is way to bullish on ChatGPT for coding, and underestimates how big the gap is between ChatGPT and a mid level FANG eng. ChatGPT is very impressive in what it can do, but if you deviate problem statements even a little bit from what it's seen before, it completely fails.
Just an example try asking it to write Battleship in Python. It does very well. But then, try changing the rules a bit, and adding some requirements. It spits out code that looks correct if you squint, but has terrible style, and often doesn't even work. Check out the test prompt [1].
Maybe GPT-4 is 1000x better at coding, but barring that, I don't see ChatGPT being useful as a replacement for human coders.
[1] Prompt: Write a version of Battleship with modified rules for sinking a ship. In this version, a ship is sunk when the "head" and "tail" of the ship (its beginning and end parts) are hit. Hits to the center do not matter. Use object oriented programming, with classes for the Board and for Ships. There should be support for multiple ships and two board instances. Write it in Python.
Re: Programmer salaries in the age of LLMs
#46Comment here seem to largely miss the point of the article, which isn't saying that nobody will employ software engineers. It is saying that instead of the current model of: 1 very highly compensated staff+ engineer 4 highly compensated senior engineers 4 pretty well-compensated mid-level engineers 2 decently compensated junior engineers The future might look like: 1 yet-more-highly-compensated staff+ engineer who sp…
How about
10 highly compensated middle managers and their staff who convinced the c suite to fire the senior engineers because of an AI article they read
2 poorly compensated junior developers with an AI bot replacing a 10 person team, who will get canned when SHTF so the 10 middle managers can jump ship to the next company with a padded resume. There are also 10 people because the middle managers got their friends positions from the savings due to the firing of the old engineers.
Re: Programmer salaries in the age of LLMs
#47There is a lot of doom and gloom about programming and AI. However, let me talk about something to be excited for. I am really excited about LLMs taking the drudgery out of programming. There are many times what I have a project in mind that I want to do, but there is a lot of boilerplate (writing configurations, or writing tests, etc) that I have to do and slows me down or for personal projects even keeps me from do…
I share this excitement as well.
Currently, designing or changing systems involves quite a bit of careful thought since you have to keep all the constraints in your mind and reason about how the system would work. If tools existed to create implementations based on these designs, that would be pretty amazing.
Additionally: Being able to quickly iterate on designs that translate quickly into working systems will encourage more experimentation among people who might otherwise have been turned off by the amount of technical skills required to implement designs.
Re: Programmer salaries in the age of LLMs
#48I'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.
I think people are more impressed than they should be because of a misconception about what programmers really do. For most big software projects the bottleneck is not writing code and test boilerplate that runs correctly locally. Which of course LLMs can do reasonably well. Most time is spent on design, on integrations with other internal services, scaling concerns, and reasoning about other things that these models…
>they've only solved "what you boss thinks software engineering is".
Which is why bosses are excited but engineers are not, because subpar LLMs will be used to justify firing actual engineers and replace them with fresh college grads tasked to work with a code bot, because the bosses fundamentally think that is enough.
Re: Programmer salaries in the age of LLMs
#49Comment here seem to largely miss the point of the article, which isn't saying that nobody will employ software engineers. It is saying that instead of the current model of: 1 very highly compensated staff+ engineer 4 highly compensated senior engineers 4 pretty well-compensated mid-level engineers 2 decently compensated junior engineers The future might look like: 1 yet-more-highly-compensated staff+ engineer who sp…
How about 10 highly compensated middle managers and their staff who convinced the c suite to fire the senior engineers because of an AI article they read 2 poorly compensated junior developers with an AI bot replacing a 10 person team, who will get canned when SHTF so the 10 middle managers can jump ship to the next company with a padded resume. There are also 10 people because the middle managers got their friends p…
Not cynical enough.
How about
C suite to fire the senior engineers because a tier-1 consultancy convinces them they can deliver their product utilizing AI tools
Said consultancy knows AI can't deliver it, and uses mostly manual labor for it
All programmers end up at these consultancies
And the world keeps going as it thinks AI is solving everything, but it isn't. It's still Kumar in IT that's ssh'ing into the box.
Re: Programmer salaries in the age of LLMs
#50What I want is an AI that can do static analysis of code and report defects that traditional static analysis couldn't hope to detect. I suspect that detecting errors that way will be a part of training non-terrible code generators. But with the added benefit of being useful to human programmers as well.
The other day I pasted chatgpt some code that I wanted it to add functionality to and it pointed out a bug in that code first (without me asking it to do that)