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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?

#211

Post by surgical_fire »

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.

> 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?

Is there any expectations that things will? Is there more untapped great quality data that LLMs can ingest? Will a larger model perform meaningfully better? Will it solve the pervasive issue of generating plausibly sounding bullshit?

I used LLMs for a while, I found them largely useless for my job. They were helpful for things I don't really need help with, and they were mostly damaging for things I actually needed.

> This is ego speaking.

Or maybe it was an accurate assessment for his use case, and your wishful thinking makes you think it was his ego speaking.

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

#212

Post by handzhiev »

modeless wrote: post #139
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 “…

> If there’s ever a day where there’s an AI that can do these things, then I’ll gladly retire. But I think that’s generations away at best. People really believe it will be generations before an AI will approach human level coding abilities? I don't know how a person could seriously consider that likely given the pace of progress in the field. This seems like burying your head in the sand. Even the whole package of t…

I've heard similar statements about human translation - and look where the translators are now

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

#213

Post by JKCalhoun »

I no longer have skin in the game since I retired a few years back.

But I have had over 30 years in a career that has been nothing if not dynamic the whole time. And so I no doubt would keep on keepin' on (as the saying goes).

Future-proof a SWE career though? I think you're just going to have to sit tight and enjoy (or not) the ride. Honestly, I enjoyed the first half of my career much more than where SWE ended up in the latter half. To that end, I have declined to encourage anyone from going into SWE. I know a daughter of a friend that is going into it — but she's going into it because she has a passion for it. (So, 1) no one needed to convince her but 2) passion for coding may be the only valid reason to go into it anyway.)

Imagine the buggy-whip makers gathered around the pub, grousing about how they are going to future-proof their trade as the new-fangled automobiles begin rolling down the street. (They're not.)

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

#214

Post by throwaway_43793 »

gspencley wrote: post #178
m_ke wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your customers don't care how your code smells, as long as it solves their problem and doesn't cost an arm and a leg. A ton of huge business full of Sr Principal Architect SCRUM masters are about to get disrupted by 80 line ChatGPT wrappers hacked together by a few kids in their dorm room.

> Your customers don't care how your code smells, as long as it solves their problem and doesn't cost an arm and a leg. Software is interesting because if you buy a refrigerator, even an inexpensive one, you have certain expectations as to its basic functions. If the compressor were to cut out periodically in unexpected ways, affecting your food safety, you would return it. But in software customers seem to be condit…

Code quality does not affect final product quality IMHO.

I worked in companies with terrible code, that deployed on an over-engineered cloud provider using custom containers hacked with a nail and a screwdriver, but the product was excellent. Had bugs here and there, but worked and delivered what needs to be delivered.

SWEs need to realize that code doesn't really matter. For 70 years we are debating the best architecture patterns and yet the biggest fear of every developer is working on legacy code, as it's an unmaintainable piece of ... written by humans.

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

#215

Post by simianparrot »

code_for_monkey wrote: post #174
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.

I agree with you tbh, and it also just misses something huge that doesnt get brought up: its not about your sniff test, its about your bosses sniff test. Are you making 300k a year? Thats 300 thousand reasons to replace you for a short term boost in profit, companies love doing that.

I'm in a leadership role and one of the primary parties responsible for hiring. So code passing my sniff test is kind of important.

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

#216

Post by indigoabstract »

throwaway_43793 wrote: post #49
indigoabstract wrote: post #35

I 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…

It's good advice, but not easy to follow, since knowing what to do and doing it are very different things.

I think that what he means is that how successful we are in work is closely related to our contributions, or to the perceived "value" we bring to other people.

The current gen AI isn't the end of programmers. What matters is still what people want and are willing to pay for and how can we contribute to fulfill that need.

You are right that young folks have the time and energy to work more than older ones and for less money. And they can soak up knowledge like a sponge. That's their strong point and older folks cannot really compete with that.

You (and everyone else) have to find your own strong point, your "niche" so to speak. We're all different, so I'm pretty sure that what you like and are good at is not what I like and I'm good at and vice-versa.

All the greats, like Steve Jobs and so on said that you've got to love what you do. Follow your intuition. That may even be something that you dreamed about in your childhood. Anything that you really want to do and makes you feel fulfilled.

I don't think you can get to any good place while disliking what you do for a living.

That said, all this advice can seem daunting and unfeasible when you're not in a good place in life. But worrying only makes it worse.

If you can see yourself in a better light and as having something valuable to contribute, things would start looking better.

This is solvable. Have faith!

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

#218

Post by themanmaran »

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 (…

The biggest surprise to me (generally across HN) is that people expect LLMs to develop on a really slow timeframe.

In the last two years LLM capabilities have gone from "produces a plausible sentence" to "can generate a functioning web app". Sure it's not as masterful as one produced by a team of senior engineers, but a year ago it was impossible.

But everyone seems to evaluate LLMs like they're fixed at today's capabilities. I keep seeing "10-20 year" estimates for when "LLMs are smart enough to write code". It's a very head in the sand attitude to the last 2 years trajectory.

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

#219

Post by simianparrot »

agilob wrote: post #210
simianparrot wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/…

In any real-world application you'll sooner than later run into optimization challenges where if you don't understand the foundational challenges, googling "fastly do the thing" won't help you ;)

Much like asking an LLM to solve a problem for you.

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

#220

Post by markus_zhang »

tetha wrote: post #88
markus_zhang wrote: post #69

I 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 n…

Yeah I basically treat LLM as a better Google search. It is indeed a lot better than Google if I want to find some public information, but I need to be careful and double-check.

Other than that it completely depends on luck I guess. I'm pretty sure if companies feed in-house information to it that will make it much more useful, but those agents would be privately owned and maintained.

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