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Programmer salaries in the age of LLMs

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Re: Programmer salaries in the age of LLMs

#71

Post by [deleted] »

sidlls wrote: post #66
testtesttesst wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

Re: Programmer salaries in the age of LLMs

#72

Post by ghaff »

elicksaur wrote: post #28

The 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 out…

Law is extreme because you have people who went to a relative handful of law schools, clerked for federal court justices including SCOTUS, and work at white shoe big city law firms (like Cravath)--and everyone else. Yes, senior partners make more than junior partners make more than associates at those firms but it's also sort of up or out (and the out associates tend to move on to other things).

And then there are the, as you say, local attorneys doing routine real estate transactions or whatever. Which tend to be pretty middling compensation generally.

The story isn't quite that neat of course. Big company in-house counsels tend to be reasonably well compensated professional jobs and there are successful owners/partners of local law practices but there's a pretty good bimodal narrative in general.

You can imagine why there might be a modality for people who can land jobs at specific tech companies that pay outsized salaries because they're so profitable and can afford to be very selective based on (they hope) relevant criteria but it's certainly based on less clear metrics if nothing else.

Re: Programmer salaries in the age of LLMs

#73

Post by btheshoe »

I think this makes assumptions about the demand for software engineers that seem unproven. Law salaries are bimodal because the demand for lawyers is limited, so there's only so many big law firms that can exist. In the near future, at least, it seems like demand for software engineers far outstrips supply and I think this will stay true in the long run because the market for software engineers is just different from the market for lawyers, in that software engineers can work on a multitude of different industries (faang covers personal devices, social media, entertainment, e-commerce, search, and more).

I think the real concern is for when the rate of new startups decreases, because I view startups as basically the tech industry's way for searching for ways to increase the overall size of the pie, and startups slowing down means demand for software engineers will start to stagnate.

Re: Programmer salaries in the age of LLMs

#74

Post by jagtstronaut »

This is very doom and gloom compared to the actual landscape in law. Yeah entry level salaries suck in law, but plenty of decent lawyers who are nothing special end up billing 200 an hour 6 years into their career and taking their 40% of that. While outside of big law is not paying what it used to it is still an upper middle class profession if you stick it out.

Re: Programmer salaries in the age of LLMs

#75

Post by la64710 »

codekansas wrote: post #68
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...

Just ask chatGPT anything you would ask a principal or a manager and you maybe surprised about how coherent the answer is. I don’t think the training data is that exotic and may be already there , the agents are continuously learning.

Re: Programmer salaries in the age of LLMs

#76

Post by tester457 »

sidlls wrote: post #66
testtesttesst wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Software engineers in aggregate think and act like they’re working in a meritocracy (we aren’t)

What is it really? Just an industry plagued by nepotism?

Re: Programmer salaries in the age of LLMs

#77

Post by marcosdumay »

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…

When I read that kinds of comments I always immediately wonder what people are writing that needs so much scaffolding.

And then I remember my workplace's official architecture... that made my team a huge success case by refusing to follow it.

Of those things you listed that you use it on, only test data need to take some non-trivial amount of time.

Re: Programmer salaries in the age of LLMs

#78

Post by chubot »

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 just tried ChatGPT today after weeks of hype on Twitter, and I was surprised to NOT be impressed?

First I tried it on a bunch of programming topics -- it definitely gets in the right ballpark, but then the details are frequently wrong.

I asked which languages have the F# |> operator, and it told me that OCaml, Elixir, Haskell and Scala do. 2 of them are correct, and 2 appeared wrong, so I googled it.

After Googling, then I asked it specifically if Haskell does, and it says no. I ask it if Scala does, and it apologizes for its earlier mistake.

It gave me a good although slightly shallow answer about how PyPy works, but then fell down hard for a prolog type checker, and a few other programming queries. It doesn't understand the question.

---

It is generally very mealy-mouthed and vague. It often doesn't answer the question directly, but just tells you what it happens to know in the ballpark.

I like another framing I saw on Twitter -- it's "mansplaining as a service". If you want someone to confidently explain things you didn't really ask about, and be frequently wrong, that's kinda what it does!!

---

After programming, I asked it about Black Sabbath, UFC, travel and biking, health, and got similarly vague/slightly incorrect answers.

It confabulates A LOT.

The best I can say is that Google is filled with spam now, so chatting with ChatGPT was a relatively fun and focused experience, after I took into account the fact that it is not "honest" and just trying to "please me" with closely related words.

I honestly don't get the hype, and I feel like there must have been some coordinated marketing aimed at me ...

If this chat is representative of what it can do for programming, then I think this article saying that "programmer salaries will be affected by LLM" is very weird.

It is assuming something that simply has NOT happened!

---

I mean even Geoff Hinton (who I respect) said several years ago that "we should stop training radiologists", and that plainly did not happen. Likewise with Elon and the fleet of self-driving taxis.

I'd honestly be surprised if someone wants to argue that a tech company staffed with LLMs + a few smart people is NOT like those predictions. Of course the blog post doesn't give a time frame, so it can't be falsified. But it appears to be nonsense.

(FWIW it doesn't matter to me personally, as I left the industry several years ago. Also FWIW I did work a little bit on deep learning, when the hype was in its upswing.)

I agree that a lot of it is anthropomorphism -- projecting some kind of intelligence, knowledge, or intention on what is really a big, expensive bag of data organized to respond to inputs.

Maybe there are other models that are better, but I was really, honestly not impressed with ChatGPT. Maybe people were hyping it too much for the last several weeks, and inflated my expectations.

Re: Programmer salaries in the age of LLMs

#79

Post by pdntspa »

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…

> for we are human and vulnerable to anthropomorphism.

Stop anthropomorphizing computers, they hate that!

Re: Programmer salaries in the age of LLMs

#80

Post by tester457 »

sbrother wrote: post #61
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.

Using the api is better.
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