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

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

#191

Post by throwaway_43793 »

Rotundo wrote: post #84
throwaway_43793 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think the idea of meritocracy has died in me. I wish I could be rewarded for my knowledge and expertise, but it seems that capitalism, as in maximizing profit, has won above everything else.

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

#192

Post by pockmarked19 »

I see this sort of take from a lot of people and I always tell them to do the same exercise. A cure for baseless fears.

Pick an LLM. Any LLM.

Ask it what the goat river crossing puzzle is. With luck, it will tell you about the puzzle involving a boatman, a goat, some vegetable, and some predator. If it doesn’t, it’s disqualified.

Now ask it to do the same puzzle but with two goats and a cabbage (or whatever vegetable it has chosen).

It will start with the goat. Whereupon the other goat eats the cabbage left with it on the shore.

Hopefully this exercise teaches you something important about LLMs.

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

#193

Post by jcranmer »

rybosworld wrote: post #85
simianparrot wrote: post #80

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 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.

This is at least the third time in my life that we've seen a loudly-heralded purported the-end-of-programming technology. The previous two times both ended up being damp squibs that barely mention footnotes in the history of computing.

Why do we expect that LLMs are going to buck this trend? It's not for accuracy--the previous attempts, when demonstrating their proof-of-concepts, actually reliably worked, whereas with "modern LLMs", virtually every demonstration manages to include "well, okay, the output has a bug here."

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

#194

Post by uludag »

Firstly, as many commenters have mentioned, I don't see AI taking jobs en masse. They simply aren't accurate enough and they tend to generate more code faster which ends up needing more maintenance.

Advice #1: do work on your own mind. Try to improve your personal organization. Look into methodologies like GTD. Get into habits of building discipline. Get into the habit of storing information and documentation. From my observations many developers simply can't process many threads at once, making their bottleneck their own minds.

Advice #2: lean into "metis"-heavy tasks. There are many programming tasks which can be easily automated: making a app scaffold, translating a simple algorithm, writing tests, etc. This is the tip of the iceberg when it comes to real SWE work though. The intricate connections between databases and services, the steps you have to go through to debug that one feature, the hack you have to make in the code so the code behaves differently in the testing environment, and so on. LLMs require legibility to function: a clean slate, no tech-debt, low entropy, order, etc. Metis is a term talked about in the book "Seeing Like a State" and it encompasses knowledge and skills gained through experience which is hard to transfer. Master these dark corners, hack your way around the code, create personal scripts for random one-off tasks. Learn how to poke and pry the systems you work on to get out the information you want.

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

#195

Post by pockmarked19 »

thor_molecules wrote: post #179

After reading the comments, the themes I'm seeing are: - AI will provide a big mess for wizards to clean up - AI will replace juniors and then seniors within a short timeframe - AI will soon plateau and the bubble will burst - "Pshaw I'm not paid to code; I'm a problem solver" - AI is useless in the face of true coding mastery It is interesting to me that this forum of expert technical people are so divided on this (…

As soon as you replace the subject of LLMs with nebulous “AI” you have ventured into a la la land where any claim can be reasonably made. That’s why we should try and stick to the topic at hand.

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

#197

Post by rurp »

rybosworld wrote: post #172
hmillison wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

there's a lot more involved in senior dev work beyond producing code that works. if the stakeholders knew how to do what they needed to build and how, then they could use LLMs, but translating complex requirements into code is something that these tools are not even close to cracking.

> there's a lot more involved in senior dev work beyond producing code that works. Completely agree. What I don't agree with is statements like these: > LLM’s never provide code that pass my sniff test To me, these (false) absolutions about chat bot capabilities, are being rehashed so frequently, that it derails every conversation about using LLM's for dev work. You'll find similar statements in nearly every thread a…

> It's provably true that LLM's can produce working code.

You've restated this point several times but the reason it's not more convincing to many people is that simply producing code that works is rarely an actual goal on many projects. On larger projects it's much more about producing code that is consistent with the rest of the project, and is easily extensible, and is readable for your teammates, and is easy to debug when something goes wrong, is testable, and so on.

The code working is a necessary condition, but is insufficient to tell if it's a valuable contribution.

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

#198

Post by sokoloff »

Xophmeister wrote: post #74

My anecdata shows people who have no/limited experience in software engineering are suddenly able to produce “software”. That is, code of limited engineering value. It technically works, but is a ultimately an unmaintainable, intractable Heath Robinson monstrosity. Coding LLMs will likely improve, but what will happen first: a good-at-engineering LLM; or a negative feedback cycle of training data being polluted with…

I can imagine a world, not far from today, where business experts can create working programs similar in complexity to what they do with Excel today, but in domains outside of "just spreadsheets". Excel is the most used no-code/low-code environment by far and I think we could easily see that same level of complexity [mostly low] be accessible to a lot more people.

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

#199

Post by aristofun »

If you fear => you're still in the beginning of your career or your work has very little to do with software engineering. (the engineering part in particular)

The only way to future-proof any creative and complex work - get awesome at it.

It worked before LLM it will work after LLM or any new shiny three-letter gimmick.

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

#200

Post by elcritch »

dkyc wrote: post #185
light_triad wrote: post #183

There's a great Joel Spolsky post about developers starting businesses and realising that there's a bunch of "business stuff" that was abstracted away at big companies. [1] One way to future proof is to look at the larger picture, the same way that coding can't be reduced to algorithm puzzles: "Software is a conversation, between the software developer and the user. But for that conversation to happen requires a lot…

But conversations are exactly LLMs strength?

It looks like it, but LLMs still lack critical reasoning by and large. So if a client tells them or asks for something nonsensical it won’t reason its way out of that.

I’m not worried about software as a profession yet, as first clients will need to know what they want much what they actually need.

Well I am a bit worried that many big businesses seem to think they can lay off most of their software devs because “AI” causing wage suppression and overwork.

It’ll come back to bite them IMHO. I’ve contemplated shorting Intuit stock because they did precisely that, which will almost certainly just end up with crap software, missed deadlines, etc.

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