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Programmer salaries in the age of LLMs

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Re: Programmer salaries in the age of LLMs

#61

Post by sbrother »

larve wrote: post #53

Chatgpt 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 wo…

May I ask how you're getting ChatGPT to be reliable enough as a service to get these results? I had a similar experience the first week, but now most times I try it is overloaded and inaccessible, and when it's not the hourly rate limiter makes it difficult to be very productive.

Re: Programmer salaries in the age of LLMs

#63

Post by tracerbulletx »

rajin444 wrote: post #32

Engineers create value - making them more efficient at their work generally creates more opportunity for work. Lawyers are an unfortunate necessity that extract value from society. Making them more efficient at their work (hopefully) creates less opportunity for work.

This type of attitude displays a common blind spot of many engineers. Manipulating human social systems to achieve a specific result is harder, and at the end of the day probably more important than manipulating computer systems. Software engineers have a tendency to think "well if only everyone would just act exactly so and so none of this would be a problem! So it's obviously everyone elses fault for acting wrongly.", and they refuse to accept that politics, law, sales, management, and all the rest are completely 100% necessary and that not a single complex dynamic human interactive system is ever going to just do whatever they think it should do as a matter of moral obviousness.

Re: Programmer salaries in the age of LLMs

#64

Post by Kostchei »

geraneum wrote: post #30

There 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 mean "generate BS authoritatively" seems fairly similar to "fake it till you make it".. Some people writing code now generate BS authoritatively, some don't.

Re: Programmer salaries in the age of LLMs

#65

Post by codekansas »

epicureanideal wrote: post #58

It's possible making coding easier will make salaries go up. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

I suspect we're about to enter a world where AI supercharges the average engineer's productivity, which is going to make it so that so much more stuff can be built. Using Copilot, the time to build a prototype for a simple app or API drops by a big multiple. Things that would take a week of work can be tried out in a weekend. Super cool future.

Re: Programmer salaries in the age of LLMs

#66

Post by sidlls »

testtesttesst wrote: post #55
AnimalMuppet wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.…

Theoretically rarely beats ignorance in practice though. Software engineers in aggregate think and act like they’re working in a meritocracy (we aren’t) and this gives even more leverage to management and owners. It’s one of the big reasons engineer salaries right now aren’t as high as they otherwise would be.

Re: Programmer salaries in the age of LLMs

#67

Post by testtesttesst »

noobermin wrote: post #48
testtesttesst wrote: post #34

Earlier 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…

>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.

Then those projects will fail and they won't do that anymore. Or they'll succeed and engineers will have to find harder problems to solve.

If a new grad + LLM can do task X about as well as an experienced engineer can, then the experienced engineer will have to find other harder problems to solve. Personally I think labor efficiency is good; why waste your labor on easy/solved problems?

Re: Programmer salaries in the age of LLMs

#68

Post by codekansas »

la64710 wrote: post #51

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…

This sounds more like a sci-fi AI bot than the current route that AI research is going. How do you even get the training data or build a simulation for an agent like this...

Re: Programmer salaries in the age of LLMs

#69

Post by codekansas »

tracerbulletx wrote: post #63
rajin444 wrote: post #32

Engineers create value - making them more efficient at their work generally creates more opportunity for work. Lawyers are an unfortunate necessity that extract value from society. Making them more efficient at their work (hopefully) creates less opportunity for work.

This type of attitude displays a common blind spot of many engineers. Manipulating human social systems to achieve a specific result is harder, and at the end of the day probably more important than manipulating computer systems. Software engineers have a tendency to think "well if only everyone would just act exactly so and so none of this would be a problem! So it's obviously everyone elses fault for acting wrongly…

This seems tangential? Engineering and law aren't the only exemplars of these categories, there are lots of fields where the marginal problems to solve are interesting verses uninteresting, they were just contrasting the two in the article. For example, more productive artists usually leads to more experimentation and weirder artwork; more doctors usually leads to more specialization and advanced knowledge; more VC money for crypto projects usually leads to more Ponzi schemes; etc, etc

Re: Programmer salaries in the age of LLMs

#70

Post by suzzer99 »

herpderperator wrote: post #9

What does LLM mean?

Yeah I'd never heard LLM, and I know what ChatGPT is and read hacker news pretty much every day.

Just as an example for future writers – one line at the beginning of the piece explaining the acronym and using the ChatGPT example would go a long way.

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