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

Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 1001 posts

Re: Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs?

#11

Post by finebalance »

Not a clue.

I'm a decent engineer working as a DS in a consulting firm. In my last two projects, I checked in (or corrected) so much more code than the other two junior DS's in my team, that at the end some 80%-90% of the ML-related stuff had been directly built, corrected or optimized by me. And most of the rest that wasn't, was mostly because it was boilerplate. LLMs were pivotal in this.

And I am only a moderately skilled engineer. I can easily see somebody with more experience and skills doing this to me, and making me nearly redundant.

Re: Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs?

#12

Post by nerder92 »

As for every job done well the most important thing is to truly understand the essence of your job, why it exist in the first place and which problem truly solves when done it well.

A good designers is not going to be replaced by Dall-e/Midjourney, becuase the essence of design is to understand the true meaning/purpose of something and be able to express it graphically, not align pixels with the correct HEX colour combination one next to the other.

A good software engineer is not going to be replaced by Cursor/Co-pilot, because the essence of programming is to translate the business requirements of a real world problem that other humans are facing into an ergonomic tool that can be used to solve such problem at scale, not writing characters on an IDE.

Neither Junior nor Seniors Dev will go anywhere, what we'll for sure go away is all the "code-producing" human-machines such as Fiver Freelance/Consultants which completely misunderstand/neglect the true essence of their work. Becuase code (as in a set of meaningful 8-bits symbols) was never the goal, but always the means to an end.

Code is an abstraction, allegedly our best abstraction to date, but it's hard to believe that is the last iteration of it.

I'll argue that software itself will be a completely different concept in 100 years from now, so it's obvious that the way of producing it will change too.

There is a famous quote attributed to Hemingway that goes like this:

"Slowly at first, then all at once"

This is exactly what is happening and and what always happens.

Re: Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs?

#14

Post by hnthrow90348765 »

The simple answer is to use LLMs so you can put it on your resume. Another simple answer is to transition to a job where it's mostly about people.

The complex answer is we don't really know how good things will get and we could be at the peak for the next 10-20 years, or there could be some serious advancements that make the current generation look like finger-painting toddlers by comparison.

I would say the fear of no junior/mid positions is unfounded though since in a generation or two, you'd have no senior engineers.

Re: Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs?

#16

Post by code_for_monkey »

Im hoping I can transition to some kind of product or management role since frankly Im not that good at coding anyways (I dont feel like I can pass a technical interview anymore, tbh.)

I think a lot of engineers are in for some level of rude awakening. I think a lot of engineers havent applied some level of business/humanities thinking in this, and I think a lot of corporations care less about code quality than even our most pessimistic estimates. It wouldnt surprise me if cuts over the next few years get even deeper, and I think a lot of high performing (re: high paying) jobs are going to get cut. Ive seen so many comments like "this will improve engineering overall, as bad engineers get laid off" and I dont think its going to work like that.

Anecdotal, but no one from my network actually recovered from the post covid layoffs and they havent even stopped. I know loads of people who dont feel like theyll ever get a job as good as they had in 2021.

Re: Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs?

#17

Post by busterarm »

finebalance wrote: post #11

Not a clue. I'm a decent engineer working as a DS in a consulting firm. In my last two projects, I checked in (or corrected) so much more code than the other two junior DS's in my team, that at the end some 80%-90% of the ML-related stuff had been directly built, corrected or optimized by me. And most of the rest that wasn't, was mostly because it was boilerplate. LLMs were pivotal in this. And I am only a moderately…

You're making the mistake of overvaluing volume of work output. In engineering, difference of perspective is valuable. You want more skilled eyeballs on the problem. You won't be redundant just as your slower coworkers aren't now.

It's not a race, it's a marathon.

Re: Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs?

#18

Post by hnthrowaway6543 »

nerder92 wrote: post #12

As for every job done well the most important thing is to truly understand the essence of your job, why it exist in the first place and which problem truly solves when done it well. A good designers is not going to be replaced by Dall-e/Midjourney, becuase the essence of design is to understand the true meaning/purpose of something and be able to express it graphically, not align pixels with the correct HEX colour co…

this is the correct answer

i can only assume software developers afraid of LLMs taking their jobs have not been doing this for long. being a software developer is about writing code in the same way that being a CEO is about sending emails. and i haven't seen any CEOs get replaced even thought chatgpt can write better emails than most of them

Re: Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs?

#19

Post by wolvesechoes »

Writing code and making commits is only a part of my work. I also have to know ODEs/DAEs, numerical solvers, symbolic transformations, thermodynamics, fluid dynamics, dynamic systems, controls theory etc. So basically math and physics.

LLMs are rather bad at those right now if you go further than trivialities, and I believe they are not particularly good at code either, so I am not concerned. But overall I think this is somewhat good advice, regardless of the current hype train: do not be just a "programmer", and know something else besides main Docker CLI commands and APIs of your favorite framework. They come and go, but knowledge and understanding stays for much longer.

Re: Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs?

#20

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

LLMs are most capable where they have a lot of good data in their training corpus and not much reasoning is required. Migrate to a part of the software industry where that isn't true, e.g. systems programming.

The day LLMs get smart enough to read a chip datasheet and then realize the hardware doesn't behave the way the datasheet claims it does is the day they're smart enough to send a Terminator to remonstrate with whoever is selling the chip anyway so it's a win-win either way, dohohoho.

Post reply on HN