I beg to differ with the author’s perception ..in all it’s glory I don’t think L7 or principals or even software managers will have a reasonable chance of surviving. Because it is quite possible that agents built on LLM and AGI will be perfectly capable of not only arguing with each other and weigh on the pros and cons of any given option and arrive at a consensus just like the current Principals or managers do their negotiation, it is also quite possible they will be able to assign task and track the progress as well as take remediation action when needed. All these can be handled by advanced agents to a very large part. It is also possible to see teams of these AI agents working together in a cooperative way and surprising us with the outcome. Good luck !!
Programmer salaries in the age of LLMs
51–60 of 163 posts
Re: Programmer salaries in the age of LLMs
#52There 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 authorita…
>people misunderstand
and anthropomorphize LLMs
I agree but there is a certain "god of the gaps" process that's happening here.
To me what's been achieved so far is encoding text into natural (and programming) languages. These models can't reason and e.g., can't pass a Turing test. For example, if you play with GPT-3 or ChatGPT enough you can definitely get it to fail on a task a human would succeed at.
When models so far have achieved "reasoning" behavior, usually it's in conjunction with a classical algorithm -- for example AlphaZero used a model to evaluate chess positions but then ran a tree search algorithm to decide what move to play.
I think if LLMs can be combined effectively with some kind of computation process like in AlphaZero or some kind of "chains of thought" [1], then we might see them do things we'd truly call "reasoning".
Some "gaps" have been (1) "(encoding into) images is hard" (2) "(encoding into) natural language is hard" and now (3) "'reasoning' is hard" and afterwards (4) "subjective experience is hard".
Whether to be optimistic or pessimistic about AI depends on the final "gap" -- whether there is an irreplicable/noncomputable/etc. property of human consciousness other than qualia. That is, if "understanding" is hard (e.g., via some voodoo like [2]). If not humans will become obsolete, so I hope the answer is yes.
[1]: https://ai.googleblog.com/2022/05/language-models-perform-re...
[2]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orchestrated_objective_reduc...
Re: Programmer salaries in the age of LLMs
#53Chatgpt has been pretty transformative to my programming, probably surpassing the only other thing coming close of really leveraging powerful ides like IntelliJ. It can generate all the scaffolding I need by just inputting a couple of sketches of Plantuml or even just markdown lists. I can build tools, unit tests, test data, fuzz harnesses, admin uis, dashboards, all within a few hours. I can transform a couple of words into very legible documentation. If you seed it with just a couple of lines of your own code and setup, it’s able to usually build stuff that matches the style of the codebase. It’s broken and wrong 80% of the time, but in a way that I can fix within a few minutes.
This leaves me with 4h of high quality thinking and programming time instead of 1. It means I can try out 3 different approaches with full tooling instead of 1. It means I can build a whole terraform for aws and gcp and bare iron in 30 minutes.
The fact that I can build solid tools and a full slurry of unit tests and end up with 4x time in my day is just blowing my mind. The quality of my software has tremendously gone up despite using something that mostly outputs broken code.
Re: Programmer salaries in the age of LLMs
#54Re: Programmer salaries in the age of LLMs
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
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...
That's capitalism. After you get fired, if you can still produce useful labor there will ideally be more employers waiting; you can freelance if your visa situation allows it; or you can start your own business and outcompete.
The cause of the inefficiency and "great filter" you're describing is the labor protectionism currently in the U.S.
Theoretically a good programmer has arbitrage via their skills and expertise. If you can get things done people will pay you for it, assuming you're allowed to work (in the U.S., EU, etc.).
Re: Programmer salaries in the age of LLMs
#56There 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 authorita…
I wonder how this code generation “assistant” will impact the coding skills of its users in long term.
My brain is already negatively impacted having to juggle 3 separate package managers, know the syntax and inputs for 17+ different dotfiles in a repo and then actively context switch between at least 3-4 languages on a daily basis. I counted it up recently and I've built products in at least 20 languages over the past two+ decades. At some point you really just can't effectively compartmentalize it all and context switch perfectly. I try by using different fonts+colors per lang etc but it still is hard. AI has been a net win for syntax recall just by giving it gentle nudges towards intent.
Re: Programmer salaries in the age of LLMs
#57There 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 think it will be the opposite - it will take all fun out of programming and leave just the mess around connecting different interfaces and making them work reliably in a single product, i.e. debugging with nobody having the internal knowledge how the system actually works.
Re: Programmer salaries in the age of LLMs
#58It's possible making coding easier will make salaries go up.
Re: Programmer salaries in the age of LLMs
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
Indeed, programmer salaries even in the Bay Area are bimodal.
Bay Area, no: https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/san-fra...
I can't believe this needs to be said, but the salary data that you're linking to excludes the thousands of Bay Area employers who aren't part of levels.fyi's dataset. Most of the employers in their dataset compete with each other, and pay in the second/higher bimodal curve.
Re: Programmer salaries in the age of LLMs
#60There 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 authorita…
Interesting research but I don't really see any reflections on "GPS navigation could impact your brain function negatively" there