But programmer salaries already are bimodal, or even trimodal [1]. [1] https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/software-engineering-sala...
Right! This was my first thought. I think the author missed that software is already quite like law in this way.
Programmer salaries in the age of LLMs
91–100 of 163 posts
Re: Programmer salaries in the age of LLMs
#92There 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…
expectations are interesting things... i was impressed with chatgpt, though not blown away as it's simply the latest in a chain of increasingly impressive research demos. substantially though my experience was the same as yours, though perhaps i'm more forgiving (haskell does have a reverse function application operator, just using a different symbol, and you can get |> in scala via a commonly-used library).
i guess one difference might be that i also tried a variety of tasks where confabulation was called for, like making up games and getting it to play them with me.
all of this certainly does seem farther from productizability than the optimists admit... it tantalizingly 'almost works' in so many domains, but despite the rate of progress, its not obvious at all to me that it will soon converging on the reliability which is necessary for robust application.
playing with the tech in more creative areas has certainly expanded my mind as to what is and what may become possible, and i think this is true of the general reaction as well... it's the flashes of strangeness and potential, the weird use cases like simulated command lines and ascii art games, the cat-and-mouse of prompt injection... not hard to let your imagination run wild... depending on how much disbelief you're willing to suspend.
Re: Programmer salaries in the age of LLMs
#93Chatgpt 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…
I would love to see a screencast of this kind of workflow. Honestly I can't quite imagine what it looks like.
Re: Programmer salaries in the age of LLMs
#94Earlier 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.
Well, if that works, then it works! But if it doesn't (and I'm in the "I don't think it will" camp), then we'll know in less than a year or so.
I actually don't relate to this "bosses don't know what software engineering is" thing at all. All my bosses are older-school engineers-turned-management who are more skeptical of this than the young'uns.
Re: Programmer salaries in the age of LLMs
#95There 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…
That vibes with the images from what I saw with Dall-E. The rendering/styling was superb, however, the logic and scene understanding were toddler-like.
Still impressive, but if you had a picture with dogs sometimes a dog head would be pasted on top at the wrong angle. Confabulation is a great term for it IMHO.
Re: Programmer salaries in the age of LLMs
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
This is correct. This also excludes contractors, which there are tons of in the Bay Area, and they make a lot less than a regular employee, even at places like Google.
Re: Programmer salaries in the age of LLMs
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
There's an API for ChatGPT? Or are you using the GPT-3 / Codex API?
Re: Programmer salaries in the age of LLMs
#98There 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…
What if it works in the opposite way? You write the drudgery, the AI can handle everything else?
Lots of assumptions all around.
Re: Programmer salaries in the age of LLMs
#99There 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…
> As for the LLMs, stochastic parroting (hallucination), which is inherent to its design, makes it untrustworthy for precision work.
To be fair, this could be said of a surprising number of the developers I've interviewed too, and I checked -- they were hired by someone.
Re: Programmer salaries in the age of LLMs
#100AI/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 stuf…
> I am worried then that like stackoverflow, AI will make a generation of developers who are extremely lazy and not critically thinking
If you take someone already hard working and able to think critically, with enough time and practice they can grow into being a decent developer. The learning resources they have available don't determine their long term work ethic or bar for quality.