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Programmer salaries in the age of LLMs

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Re: Programmer salaries in the age of LLMs

#141

Post by geraneum »

FeepingCreature wrote: post #140
geraneum wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sure that could happen. Nothing against that. But I am not fully confident. As a counter example, we have ORMs. They bring value but I have seen enough devs who are too reliant on it and don’t develop a good understanding of how the underlying database behaves. This could be actually detrimental to the work.

Maybe we will have a mixed result similar to ORM example. It can lower the barriers to entry, which is good, but won’t eliminate the need for deep expertise. At least initially.

Re: Programmer salaries in the age of LLMs

#142

Post by meowfly »

pjc50 wrote: post #137
ghaff wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 acad…

It does seem to me a lawyer's pedigree is as important as the types of arguments they bring to the case.

I imagine this bias exists because law schools are a dime a dozen, and lawyers have created another form of gatekeeping to augment their licensing rules.

Re: Programmer salaries in the age of LLMs

#146

Post by bartimus »

> we are perhaps converging to a future where a FAANG L7 can just sketch out architectural details and the programmer equivalent of paralegals will simply query the latest LLM and clean up the output.

This is just proposing waterfall + outsourcing all over again. The author doesn't seem to understand that "sketching out architectural details" is the thing that developers do.

Re: Programmer salaries in the age of LLMs

#147

Post by moonchrome »

kirse wrote: post #56
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 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…

Why are you touching 17 different dotfiles on a regular basis to require knowing their syntax/inputs ?

I've done a similar number of platform jumping but I honestly don't remember when I've used more than 3 or 4 at the same time. Like I was really into Clojure for ~1 year back around ~2010 - if you put me on a clojure project I'd be lost for a month. I wouldn't need to get over LISP and functional programming mindset again but the details are lost.

At this point I rarely see big paradigm shifts and it's just picking up the details + connecting with things I already know. I've outsourced remembering details to Google :)

Re: Programmer salaries in the age of LLMs

#148

Post by [deleted] »

bartimus wrote: post #146

> we are perhaps converging to a future where a FAANG L7 can just sketch out architectural details and the programmer equivalent of paralegals will simply query the latest LLM and clean up the output. This is just proposing waterfall + outsourcing all over again. The author doesn't seem to understand that "sketching out architectural details" is the thing that developers do.

[deleted]

Re: Programmer salaries in the age of LLMs

#149

Post by sjducb »

Societies demand for software is basically infinite. Right now only people who can pay for developers get to have good custom software. As LLMs increase the output of a programmer more people will be able to comission custom software. More software will get made and programmer salaries will remain high.

Re: Programmer salaries in the age of LLMs

#150

Post by maest »

From the article:

> P.S. If your objection is that you played with ChatGPT and wasn’t impressed, you should try projecting trends beyond the t=1 month timescale.

That is a dismissive stance announced in a very obnoxious way. I don't know where and how fast the AI thing will go but I do know they're treating an unknowable outcome as fact.

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