Grappling with this hard right now. Anyone who is still of the "these things are stupid and will never replace me" mindset needs to sober up real quick. AGI level agentic systems are coming, and fast. A solid 90% of what we thought of as software engineering for the last 30 years will be completely automated by them in the next couple years. The only solution I see so far is to be the one building them.
Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs?
81–90 of 1001 posts
Re: Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs?
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, I agree. Let me take a stab at a statement that I'd bet against: There will publicly-announced layoffs of 10 or more senior software engineers at a tech company sometime between now and December 31st, 2025. As part of the announcement of these layoffs, the company will state that the reason for the layoffs is the increasing use of LLMs replacing the work of these engineers. I would bet 5k USD of my own money, m…
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/klarna-ceo-says-th...
This article:
1) Does not describe a layoff, which is an active action the company has to take to release some number of current employees, and instead describes a recent policy of "not hiring." This is a passive action that could be undertaken for any number of reasons, including those that might not sound so great for the CEO to say (e.g. poor performance of the company);
2) Cites no sources other than the CEO himself, who has a history of questionable actions when talking to the press [0];
3) Specifically mentions at the end of the article that they are still hiring for engineering positions, which, you know, kind of refutes any sort of claim that AI is replacing engineers.
Though, this does make me realize a flaw in the language of my proposed bet, which is that any CEO who claims to be laying off engineers due to advancement of LLMs could be lying, and CEOs are in fact incentivized to scapegoat LLMs if the real reason would make the company look worse in the eyes of investors.
[0] https://fortune.com/2022/06/01/klarna-ceo-sebastian-siemiatk...
Re: Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs?
#83you dont become an SWE
Re: Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs?
#84I remember John Carmack talking about this last year. Seems like it's still pretty good advice more than a year later: "From a DM, just in case anyone else needs to hear this." https://x.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1637087219591659520
It's a good advice indeed. But there is a slight problem with it. Young people can learn and fight for their place in the workforce, but what is left for older people like myself? I'm in this industry already, I might have missed the train of "learn to talk with people" and been sold on the "coding is a means to an end" koolaid. My employability is already damaged due to my age and experience. What is left for people…
The 20-year-old is, maybe, just like you at that age: eager and smart, but lacking experience. Making bad decisions, bad designs, bad implementations left and right. Just like you did, way back when.
But you have made all those mistakes already. You've learned, you've earned your experience. You are much more valuable than you think.
Source: Me, I'm almost 60, been programming since I was 12.
Re: Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs?
#85Nothing because I’m a senior and LLM’s never provide code that pass my sniff test, and it remains a waste of time. I have a job at a place I love and get more people in my direct network and extended contacting me about work than ever before in my 20 year career. And finally I keep myself sharp by always making sure I challenge myself creatively. I’m not afraid to delve into areas to understand them that might look “…
> Nothing because I’m a senior and LLM’s never provide code that pass my sniff test, and it remains a waste of time.
I am constantly surprised how prevalent this attitude is. ChatGPT was only just released in 2022. Is there some expectation that these things won't improve?
> LLM’s never provide code that pass my sniff test
This is ego speaking.
Re: Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs?
#86As 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…
> 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.
Yes, but Dall-e, etc. output will be good enough for most people and small companies if it's cheap or free even.
Big companies with deep pockets will still employ talented designers, because they can afford it and for prestige, but in general many average designer jobs are going to disappear and get replaced with AI output instead, because it's good enough for the less demanding customers.
Re: Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs?
#87Nothing because I’m a senior and LLM’s never provide code that pass my sniff test, and it remains a waste of time. I have a job at a place I love and get more people in my direct network and extended contacting me about work than ever before in my 20 year career. And finally I keep myself sharp by always making sure I challenge myself creatively. I’m not afraid to delve into areas to understand them that might look “…
> Nothing because I’m a senior and LLM’s never provide code that pass my sniff test, and it remains a waste of time. I am constantly surprised how prevalent this attitude is. ChatGPT was only just released in 2022. Is there some expectation that these things won't improve? > LLM’s never provide code that pass my sniff test This is ego speaking.
They shouldn’t be expected to improve in accuracy because of what they are and how they work. Contrary to what the average HackerNews seems to believe, LLMs don’t “think,” they just predict. And there’s nothing in them that will constrain their token prediction in a way that improves accuracy.
Re: Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs?
#88I try to go to the lowest level I could. During my recent research into PowerPC 32-bit assembly language I have found 1) Not many material online, and what available are usually PDF with pictures which could be difficult for LLMs to pick up, and 2) Indeed ChatGPT didn't give good answer even for a Hello, World example. I think hardware manufacturers, including ones that produce chips, are way less encouraged to put t…
I've been noticing similar patterns as well.
One instructive example was when I was implementing a terraform provider for an in-house application. This thing can template the boilerplate for a terraform resource implementation in about 3-4 auto completes and only gets confused a bit by the plugin-sdk vs the older implementation way. But once it deals with our in-house application, it can guess some things, but it's not good. Here it's ok.
In my private gaming projects on Godot... I tried using CoPilot and it's just terrible to the point of turning it off. There is Godot code out there how an entity handles a collision with another entitiy, and there are hundreds of variations out there, and it wildly hallucinates between all of them. It's just so distracting and bad. ChatGPT is OK at navigating the documentation, but that's about it.
If I'm thinking about my last job, which -- don't ask why -- was writing Java Code with low-level concurrency primitives like thread pools, raw synchronized statements and atomic primitives... if I think about my experience with CoPilot about code like this, I'm honestly feeling strength leaving my body because that would be so horrible. I've spend literal months chasing a once-in-a-billion concurrency bug in that code once.
IMO, the most simple framework-fill-in code segment will suffer from LLMs. But a well-coached junior can move past that stage quite quickly.
Re: Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs?
#89Nothing because I’m a senior and LLM’s never provide code that pass my sniff test, and it remains a waste of time. I have a job at a place I love and get more people in my direct network and extended contacting me about work than ever before in my 20 year career. And finally I keep myself sharp by always making sure I challenge myself creatively. I’m not afraid to delve into areas to understand them that might look “…
> Nothing because I’m a senior and LLM’s never provide code that pass my sniff test, and it remains a waste of time. I am constantly surprised how prevalent this attitude is. ChatGPT was only just released in 2022. Is there some expectation that these things won't improve? > LLM’s never provide code that pass my sniff test This is ego speaking.
ego? LLMs goof on basic math and cant even generate code for many non public things. theyre not useful to me whatsoever
Re: Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs?
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Nothing because I’m a senior and LLM’s never provide code that pass my sniff test, and it remains a waste of time. I am constantly surprised how prevalent this attitude is. ChatGPT was only just released in 2022. Is there some expectation that these things won't improve? > LLM’s never provide code that pass my sniff test This is ego speaking.
They shouldn’t be expected to improve in accuracy because of what they are and how they work. Contrary to what the average HackerNews seems to believe, LLMs don’t “think,” they just predict. And there’s nothing in them that will constrain their token prediction in a way that improves accuracy.
> Contrary to what the average HackerNews seems to believe, LLMs don’t “think,” they just predict.
Anecdotally, I can't recall ever seeing someone on HackerNews accuse LLM's of thinking. This site is probably one of the most educated corners of the internet on the topic.
> They shouldn’t be expected to improve in accuracy because of what they are and how they work.
> And there’s nothing in them that will constrain their token prediction in a way that improves accuracy.
These are both incorrect. LLM's are already quite better today than they were in 2022.