Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Programmer salaries in the age of LLMs

milkyeggs.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 163 posts

Re: Programmer salaries in the age of LLMs

#131

Post by Dave3of5 »

aetherson wrote: post #35

Comment 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…

If that's what it's saying then it's just like every other blog post or Tik Tok video from someone clueless person who's never worked in tech.

10 to 1 juniors to "senior" would have any "senior" quitting on day 1. Even 2 juniors will takes up > 50% of a seniors time to corral. 10 of them would be like a mob of people all screaming at you.

Add into that mix an AI chatbot spitting out partially incorrect stuff to all 10 of these juniors that is completely unworkable.

Re: Programmer salaries in the age of LLMs

#132

Post by mprovost »

bitL wrote: post #57
RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #11

There 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.

I feel like this is something that people said when they started using compilers instead of manually writing assembly.

Re: Programmer salaries in the age of LLMs

#133

Post by mprovost »

aetherson wrote: post #35

Comment 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…

It's missing a third group: the ML researchers developing the LLM. I'm not sure what the best analogy in the legal world is - the politicians writing the laws?

Re: Programmer salaries in the age of LLMs

#134

Post by geraneum »

fexecve wrote: post #89
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…

> There is research [1] that suggests using GPS navigation could impact your brain function negatively. Wrong, that research only shows that when you use a GPS, you don't learn routes as quickly. That is only equal to "impacts brain function negatively" in a narrow sense, which you should specify rather than use such a broad and scary-sounding phrase!

> … could impact your brain function negatively.

Brain function being negatively impacted is not scary on its own and not necessarily permanent.

I didn’t mean to scare you. It’s likely you are confusing the above phrase with “your brain will be altered forever” which is not what it means.

Re: Programmer salaries in the age of LLMs

#135

Post by Dave3of5 »

I wanted to see if what all these influencers were saying was true and so I tried to use ChatGPT to create a webapp the other day.

The first problem is that it's totally overloaded at the moment if you use the app and so even just logging in is almost impossible. After 20 minutes I managed to get in.

I first asked it to come up with 5 different ideas for the app. All of them were generic rubbish like a blog or suchlike so I asked it to be more niche and specific and it managed to throw up things like:

* A Project management webapp * Farm management software * Todo List

I picked the farm management software which I actually now interpreted as crop management software. This is a very competitive market lots of big software companies doing this already but I thought ok I'll give it a try.

I asked it to build a basic landing page which is initially refused to do. When I did prompt it correctly it built a basic HTML only page with no styling and basically no content other than a header and a couple of fake testimonials.

It then refused to style the thing at all and closed the chat. I then managed to prompt it correctly and it updated the font and stuck some stuff in boxes.

During this process it told me several times that it will not create a landing page.

I then gave up on the landing page and tried to get it to be able to help me write the code on the frontend to allow the user to define the crop areas on google maps. It spat out just the JS (no html) and which showed how to draw a polygon on the map basically the code you would get by looking up the google maps documentation.

During this process the text reply was very slow like character by character and it kicked me out several times.

I think your jobs are safe at the moment...

Re: Programmer salaries in the age of LLMs

#136

Post by ResearchCode »

noobermin wrote: post #21

Just a word of note, this was the intent all along. The thing that stings is you trained your replacement.

What replacement? When "AI" can code decently, it will already have replaced Excel and Powerpoint workers, and middle managers sitting in pointless meetings.

Re: Programmer salaries in the age of LLMs

#137

Post by pjc50 »

ghaff wrote: post #72
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 th…

> went to a relative handful of law schools, clerked for federal court justices including SCOTUS, and work at white shoe big city law firms

This is the "not what you know, it's WHO you know" pattern. I imagine it's likely to accelerate. It'll still be important to go to the right university and pay expensive tuition - probably even MORE important - but you'll be able to have AI do most of the tedious, irrelevant academic side while you focus on the very important business of going to parties with the right people.

Re: Programmer salaries in the age of LLMs

#138

Post by flir »

nonethewiser wrote: post #126
imtringued wrote: post #119

"Note that querying LLMs and making the outputted code conform to specifications is probably a lot easier than writing the code yourself" This overestimates the time developers spend typing text and underestimates the time spent thinking about problems, verification and locating bugs/code, etc. Just because the output of a model is text doesn't mean it is a replacement. You would need extraordinary "single shot" func…

The smaller the problem the easier it is to use AI. Which makes the window where it's useful very small. Its easier to understand and test code that you wrote than code you just read. If you ask it to write a 100k line program you're going to have to trace through everything and read it countless times over to fix any issues. If you ask it to write a small 10 line snippet that you need to test you might as well do it…

It can write a ten line function faster than I can, and my code has a lot of ten line functions in it. Even for trivial code, it's a force multiplier (moreso when plumbed into an IDE)

Re: Programmer salaries in the age of LLMs

#139

Post by geraneum »

pdntspa wrote: post #79
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!

Cupcakes and clouds feel them same. Stop excluding them!

Re: Programmer salaries in the age of LLMs

#140

Post by FeepingCreature »

geraneum wrote: post #129
kirse wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pa…

I didn’t mean just any negative impact like getting tired from context switching or feeling exhausted because the workload is high. What I meant was: Will you lose it if you don’t use it? Maybe you won’t, I am not certain. Or maybe you will and you don’t see it now because the “net win for syntax recall just by giving it gentle nudges towards intent” relies on your hard earned ability to understand the code which is…

But losing it may free up resources to gain other things. Like how "losing" assembly skills allowed people to dedicate more capability to higher-level approaches.
Post reply on HN