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Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs?
301–310 of 1001 posts
Re: Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs?
#302Nothing 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.
Very much so. These things are moving so quickly and agentic systems are already writing complete codebases. Give it a few years. No matter how 1337 you think you are, they are very likely to surpass you in 5-10 years.
Re: Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs?
#303Nothing 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.
Have you ever used LLMs to generate code? It's not good enough yet.
In addition to this, most companies aren't willing to give away all off their proprietary IP and knowledge through 3rd party servers.
It will be awhile before engineering jobs are at risk.
Re: Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs?
#304My 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…
Something similar happened when Rails showed up. Lots of people were able to build somewhat complex websites than ever before.
But there are still specialized people being paid for doing websites today.
Re: Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs?
#305Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
> Is there any expectations that things will? Seems like an odd question. The answer is obviously yes: There is a very pervasive expectation that LLM's will continue to improve, and it seems odd to suggest otherwise. There is hundreds of billions of dollars being spent on AI training and that number is increasing each year. > Is there more untapped great quality data that LLMs can ingest? Why wouldn't there be? AI's…
> The answer is obviously yes: There is a very pervasive expectation that LLM's will continue to improve, and it seems odd to suggest otherwise. There is hundreds of billions of dollars being spent on AI training and that number is increasing each year.
That makes an assumption that throwing dollars on AI training is a surefire way to solve the many shortcomings of LLMs. It is a very optimistic assumption.
> Why wouldn't there be? AI's are currently trained on the internet but that's obviously not the only source of data.
"The Internet" basically encompasses all meaningful sources of data available, especially if we are talking specifically about software development. But even beyond that, it is very unclear what other high quality data it would consume that would improve the things.
> The answer to this, is also yes. It is well established that, all else being equal, a bigger model is better than a smaller model, assuming that the smaller model hasn't already captured all of the available information.
I love how you conveniently sidestepped the part where I ask if it would improve the pervasive issue of generating plausibly sounding bullshit.
The assumption that generative AI will improve is as valid as the assumption that it will plateau. It is quite possible that what we are seeing is "as good as it gets", and some major breakthrough, that may or may not happen on our lifetime, is needed.
Re: Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs?
#306I'm 15 years in, so a little behind you, but this is also some observations from the perspective of a student during the Post-Dot-Com bust. A great parallel of today's LLMs was the Outsourcing mania from 20 years ago. It was worse than AGI because actual living breathing thinking people would write your code. After the Dot-Bomb implosion, a bunch of companies turned to outsourcing as a way to skirt costs for expensiv…
> Like most things in life, a little outsourcing never hurt anybody but a lot can kill your company.
there are amazing companies which have fully outsourced all of their development. this trend is on the rise and might hit $1T market cap in this decade…
Re: Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs?
#307i'm not worried, because as a solid senior engineer my "training data" largely is not digitized or consumable by a model yet. I don't think we will have enough data in the near future to threaten my entire job, only support me in the easier parts of it.
Re: Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs?
#308I’ve carved out a niche of very low level systems programming and optimization. I think it’ll be awhile before LLMs can do what I do. I also moved to to staff so I think a lot of what I do now will still exist with junior/mid level devs being reduce by AI.
But I am focusing on maximizing my total comp so I can retire in 10-15 years if I need to. I think most devs are underestimating where this is eventually going to go.
Re: Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs?
#309Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
That's actually not accurate. See Jevons paradox, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox . In the short term, LLMs should have the effect of making programmers more productive, which means more customers will end up demanding software that was previously uneconomic to build (this is not theoretical - e.g. I work with some non-profits who would love a comprehensive software solution, they simply can't afford i…
yes, this. the backlog of software that needs to be built is fucking enormous.
you know what i'd do if AI made it so i could replace 10 devs with 8? use the 2 newly-freed up developers to work on some of the other 100000 things i need done
Re: Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs?
#310(10+ years of experience here) I will be starting training for commercial pilot license next year. The pay is much less than one of a software engineer but I think this job is already done for most of us, only the top 5% will survive. I don’t think I’m part of that top and don’t want to go to management or PO roles so I am done with tech
What makes you believe that commercial pilot is safer from AI than software engineering?