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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?

#241

Post by packetlost »

luddite2309 wrote: post #234
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 “…

This is a fascinating comment, because it shows such a mis-reading of the history and point of technology (on a tech forum). Technological progress always leads to loss of skilled labor like your own, usually resulting in lower quality (but higher profits and often lower prices). Of COURSE an LLM won't be able to do work as well as you, just as industrial textile manufacturing could not, and still does not, produce t…

This is a take that shows a completely lack of understanding on what software engineering is actually about.

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

#242

Post by latentsea »

TZubiri wrote: post #142
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" That's why the question is future proof. Models get better with time, not worse.

If the last-mile problems of things like autonomous vehicles have been anything to go by, it seems the last mile problems of entrusting your entire business operations to complete black box software, or software written by a novices talking to complete black box, will be infinitely worse.

There's plenty of low-code, no-code solutions around, and yet still lots of software. The slice of the pie will change, but it's very hard to see it being eliminated entirely.

Ultimately it's going to come down to "do I feel like I can trust this?" and with little to no way to be certain you can completely trust it, that's going to be a harder and harder sell as risk increases with the size, complexity, and value of the business processes being managed.

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

#243

Post by markerdmann »

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 “…

isn't "delve" a classic tell of gpt-generated output? i'm pretty sure simianparrot is just trolling us. :-)

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

#244

Post by PeterisP »

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…

If a LLM (or any other tool) makes so that team of 8 can get the same results in the same time as it used to take a team of 10 to do, then I would count that as "replaced 2 programmers" - even if there's no particular person for which the whole job has been replaced, that's not a meaningful practical difference, replacing a significant fraction of every programmer's job has the same outcomes and impacts as replacing a significant fraction of programmers.

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

#245

Post by fzeroracer »

throwaway_43793 wrote: post #214
gspencley wrote: post #178

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. 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 archite…

Code quality absolutely does matter, because when everything is on fire and your service is down and no one is able to fix it customers WILL notice.

I've seen plenty of companies implode because they fired the one guy that knew their shitty codebase.

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

#247

Post by layer8 »

sokoloff wrote: post #198
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.

I don’t quite buy the Excel analogy, because the business experts do understand the Excel formulas that they write, and thus can maintain them and reason about them. The same wouldn’t be the case with programs written by LLMs.

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

#248

Post by jensensbutton »

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 “…

The question isn't about what you'll do when you're replaced by an LLM, it's what you're doing to future proof your job. There is a difference. The risk to hedge against is the productivity boost brought by LLMs resulting in a drop in the needs for new software engineers. This will put pressure on jobs (simply don't need as many as we used to so we're cutting 15%) AND wages (more engineers looking for fewer jobs with a larger part of their utility being commoditized).

Regardless of how sharp you keep yourself you're still at subject to the macro environment.

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

#249

Post by mrbungie »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #207
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…

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

Oof, the times I've heard something like that with X tech.

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

#250

Post by munk-a »

rqtwteye wrote: post #111
dimgl wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> most of the actual systems we work on will simply start disappearing. What systems do you think are going to start disappearing? I'm unclear how LLMs are contributing to systems becoming redundant.

I think a lot of CRUD apps will disappear. A lot of the infrastructure may also be done by AI instead of some dude writing tons of YAML code.

CRUD apps should already be disappearing. You should be using a framework that auto-generates the boilerplate stuff.
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