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

201–210 of 1001 posts

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

#201

Post by ElevenLathe »

I spent approximately a decade trying to get the experience and schooling necessary to move out of being a "linux monkey" (read: responding to shared webhosting tickets, mostly opened by people who had broken their Wordpress sites) to being an SRE.

Along the way I was an "incident manager" at a couple different places, meaning I was basically a full-time Incident Commander under the Google SRE model. This work was always fun, but the hours weren't great (these kind of jobs are always "coverage" jobs where you need to line up a replacement when you want to take leave, somebody has to work holidays, etc.). Essentially I'd show up at work and paint the factory by making sure our documentation was up to date, work on some light automation to help us in the heat of the moment, and wait for other teams to break something. Then I'd fire up a bridge and start troubleshooting, bringing in other people as necessary.

This didn't seem like something to retire from, but I can imagine it being something that comes back, and I may have to return to it to keep food on the table. It is exactly the kind of thing that needs a "human touch".

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

#202

Post by oops »

rybosworld wrote: post #164
IshKebab wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is there some expectation that these things won't improve? I definitely expect them to improve. But I also think the point at which they can actually replace a senior programmer is pretty much the exact point at which they can replace any knowledge worker, at which point western society (possibly all society) is in way deeper shit than just me being out of a job. > This is ego speaking. It definitely isn't. LLMs ar…

> LLM’s never provide code that pass my sniff test If that statement isn't coming from ego, then where is it coming from? It's provably true that LLM's can generate working code. They've been trained on billions of examples. Developers seem to focus on the set of cases that LLM's produce code that doesn't work, and use that as evidence that these tools are "useless".

My experience so far has been: if I know what I want well enough to explain it to an LLM then it’s been easier for me to just write the code. Iterating on prompts, reading and understanding the LLM’s code, validating that it works and fixing bugs is still time consuming.

It has been interesting as a rubber duck, exploring a new topic or language, some code golf, but so far not for production code for me.

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

#203

Post by throwaway_43793 »

aristofun wrote: post #199

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.

Maybe I'm a lousy developer, true. But I do know now that your code does not matter. Unlike any other creative profession, what matters is the final output, and code is not the final output.

If companies can get the final output with less people, and less money, why would they pass on this opportunity? And please don't tell me that it's because people produce maintainable code and LLMs don't.

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

#205

Post by gt0 »

I use Copilot a bit, and it can be really, really good.

It helps me out, but in terms on increasing productivity, it pales in comparison to simple auto-complete. In fact it pales in comparison to just having a good, big screen vs. battling away on a 13" laptop.

LLMs are useful and provide not insignificant assistance, but probably less assistance than the tools we've had for a long time. LLMs are not a game changer like some other thing have been since I've been programming (since late 1980s). Just going to Operating Systems with protected memory was a game changer, I could make mistakes and the whole computer didn't crash!

I don't see LLMs as something we have to protect our careers from, I see LLMs as an increasingly useful tool that will become a normal part of programming same as auto-complete, or protected memory, or syntax-highlighting. Useful stuff we'll make use of, but it's to help us, not replace us.

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

#206

Post by deathanatos »

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 ego speaking.

No, it really isn't. Repeatedly, the case is that people are trying to pass off GPT's work as good without actually verifying the output. I keep seeing "look at this wonderful script GPT made for me to do X", and it does not pass code review, and is generally extremely low quality.

In one example, a bash script was generated to count number SLoC changed by author; it was extremely convoluted, and after I simplified it, I noticed that the output of the simplified version differed, because the original was omitted changes that were only a single line.

In another example it took several back & forths during a review to ask "where are you getting this code? / why do you think this code works, when nothing in the docs supports that?" and after several back and forths, it was admitted that GPT wrote it. The dev who wrote it would have been far better served RTFM, than a several cycle long review that ended up with most of GPT's hallucinations being stripped from the PR.

Those who think LLM's output is good have not reviewed the output strenuously enough.

> Is there some expectation that these things won't improve?

Because randomized token generation inherently lacks actual reasoning about the behavior of the code. My code generator does not.

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

#207

Post by JKCalhoun »

IshKebab wrote: post #98
rybosworld wrote: post #85

Earlier 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.

> Is there some expectation that these things won't improve? I definitely expect them to improve. But I also think the point at which they can actually replace a senior programmer is pretty much the exact point at which they can replace any knowledge worker, at which point western society (possibly all society) is in way deeper shit than just me being out of a job. > This is ego speaking. It definitely isn't. LLMs ar…

I imagine though they might replace 3 out of 4 senior programmers (keep one around to sanity check the AI).

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

#208

Post by munk-a »

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.

This is correct - but it's also true that LLMs can produce flawed code. To me the cost of telling whether code is correct or flawed is larger than the cost of me just writing correct code. This may be an AuDHD thing but I can better comprehend the correctness of a solution if I'm watching (and doing) the making of that solution than if I'm reading it after the fact.

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

#210

Post by agilob »

simianparrot wrote: post #159
agilob wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLMs aren't supposed to do basic math, but be chat agents. Wolfram Alpha can't do chat.

Math is a major part of programming. In fact programming without math is impossible. And if you go all the way down to bare metal it’s all math. We are shifting bits through incredibly complex abstractions.

No, math is major part of writing good code, but when was the last time you've seen somebody put effort into writing O(n) algorithm? 99% of programming is "import sort from sort; sort.sortThisReallyQuick". Programming is mostly writing code that just compiles and eventually gives correct results (and has bugs). You can do a lot of programming just buy copy-pasting results from stackoverflow.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Npm_left-pad_incident

https://old.reddit.com/r/web_design/comments/35prfv/designer...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GC-0tCy4P1U

Post reply on HN