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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?

#361

Post by tokioyoyo »

pockmarked19 wrote: post #299
hviniciusg wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

emmmmm... i think your argument is not valid any more: https://chatgpt.com/c/6760a0a0-fa34-800c-9ef4-78c76c71e03b

Seems like they caught up because I have posted this before including in chatGPT. All that means is you have to change it up slightly. Unfortunately “change it up slightly” is not good enough for people to do anything with, and anything more specific just trains the LLM eventually so it stops proving the point. I cannot load this link though.

I don't want to sound like a prick, but this is generally what people mean when they say "things are moving very fast due to amount of investments". 6 months old beliefs can be scrapped due to new models, research and etc.

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

#362

Post by tobyhinloopen »

themanmaran wrote: post #218
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 capa…

Even o1 just floored me. I can put in heaps of c++ code and some segfault stacktraces and it gave me an actual cause and fix.

I gave it 1000s lines of C++ and it did point the problem.

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

#363

Post by JamesLeonis »

bdangubic wrote: post #306
JamesLeonis wrote: post #300

I'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…

> there are amazing companies which have fully outsourced all of their development.

I completely agree...

> this trend is on the rise and might hit $1T market cap in this decade…

It's this thinking that got everybody in trouble last time. A trend doesn't write your program. There was a certain "you get what you pay for" reflected on the quality of code many businesses received from outsourcing. Putting in the work and developing relationships with your remote contractors, and paying them well, makes for great partners that deliver high quality software. It's the penny-wise-pound-foolish manager that drank too much of the hype koolaid that found themselves with piles of terrible barely working code.

Outsourcing, like LLMs, are a relationship and not a shortcut. Keep your expectations realistic and grounded, and it can work just fine.

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

#364

Post by richardw »

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 “…

For those less confident:

U.S. (and German) automakers were absolutely sure that the Japanese would never be able to touch them. Then Koreans. Now Chinese. Now there are tariffs and more coming to save jobs.

Betting against AI (or increasing automation, really) is a bet against not against robots, but against human ingenuity. Humans are the ones making progress, and we can work with toothpicks as levers. LLM's are our current building blocks, and people are doing crazy things with them.

I've got almost 30 years experience but I'm a bit rusty in e.g. web. But I've used LLM's to build maybe 10 apps that I had no business building, from one-off kids games to learn math, to building a soccer team generator that uses Google's OR tools to optimise across various axes, to spinning up four different test apps with Replit's agent to try multiple approaches to a task I'm working on. All the while skilling up in React and friends.

I don't really have time for those side-quests but LLM's make them possible. Easy, even. The amount of time and energy I'd need pre-LLM's to do this makes this a million miles away from "a waste of time".

And even if LLM's get no better, we're good at finding the parts that work well and using that as leverage. I'm using it to build and check datasets, because it's really good at extraction. I can throw a human in the loop, but in a startup setting this is 80/20 and that's enough. When I need enterprise level code, I brainstorm 10 approaches with it and then take the reins. How is this not valuable?

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

#365

Post by altairprime »

You can retire from tech and select another profession that’s more proof against bubbles than tech eng. In five years I’ll be able to seek work as a forensic auditor with decades of tech experience to help me uncover the truth, which is worth my weight in gold to the compliance and enforcement professions.

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

#366

Post by perrygeo »

koliber wrote: post #358
perrygeo wrote: post #354

> My prediction is that junior to mid level software engineering will disappear mostly, while senior engineers will transition to be more of a guiding hand to LLMs output This. Programming will become easier for everyone. But the emergent effect will be that senior engineers become more valuable, juniors much less. Why? It's an idea multiplier. 10x of near-zero is still almost zero. And 10x of someone who's a 10 alre…

All senior engineers were junior engineers at one point. I worry where we will get the next generation of senior engineers.

Exactly. It's already bad, with seniors being pushed to 100% with 0% slack to train up the next generation. No time for that. LLMs will make this worse.

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

#368

Post by kbelder »

karaterobot wrote: post #286
RangerScience wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fav anecdote from ages ago: When hand-held power tools became a thing, the Hollywood set builder’s union was afraid of this exact same thing - people would be replaced by the tools. Instead, productions built bigger sets (the ceiling was raised) and smaller productions could get in on things (the floor was lowered). I always took that to mean “people aren’t going to spend less to do the job - they’ll just do a bigger…

Another anecdote: when mechanical looms became a thing, textile workers were afraid that the new tools would replace them, and they were right.

And that was good. Workers being replaced by tools is good for society, although temporarily disruptive.

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

#369

Post by elforce002 »

asdev wrote: post #121
ricardobeat wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s short term thinking in my opinion. LLMs will not replace developers by writing better code: it’s the systems we work on that will start disappearing. Every SaaS, marketplace is at risk of extinction, superseded by AI agents communicating ad-hoc. Management and business software replaced by custom, one-off programs built by AI. The era of large teams painstakingly building specialized software for niche use cas…

you do realize that these so called "one-off" AI programs would need to be maintained? Most people paying for Saas are paying for the support/maintenance rather than features, which AI can't handle. No one will want to replace any Saas they depend on with a poorly generated variant that they want to maintain

You can go further: Which business will bet its entire existence, let alone finances, to an "AI" (Companies are literally writing "don't rely on X LLM outputs as medical, legal, financial, or other professional advice"?

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

#370

Post by mukunda_johnson »

Who knows what the future holds? As a SWE you are expected to adapt and use modern technology. Always learning is a part of the job. Look at all the new things to build with, frameworks being updated/changes, etc. Making things easier.

LLMs will make things easier, but it's easy to disagree that they will threaten a developer's future with these reasons in mind:

* Developers should not be reinventing the wheel constantly. LLMs can't work very well on subjects they have no info on (proprietary work).

* The quality is going to get worse over time with the internet being slopped up with the mass disregard for quality content. We are at a peak right now. Adding more parameters isn't going to make the models better. It's just going to make them better at plagiarism.

* Consistency - a good codebase has a lot of consistency to avoid errors. LLMs can produce good coding examples, but they will not have much regard for your how -your- project is currently written. Introducing inconsistency makes maintenance more difficult, let alone the bugs that might slip in and wreak havoc later.

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