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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?

#391

Post by fragmede »

hnthrowaway6543 wrote: post #317
karaterobot wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

430 million people currently work in textiles[0]; how big was the industry before mechanical looms? [0] https://www.uniformmarket.com/statistics/global-apparel-indu...

How many worked in America and Western Europe and were paid a living wage in their respective countries, and how many of those 430 million people currently work making textiles in America and Western Europe today, and how many are lower paid positions in poorer countries, under worse living conditions? (Like being locked into the sweatshop, and bathroom breaks being regulated?)

Computers aren't going anywhere, so the whole field of programming will continue to grow, but will there still be FAANG salaries to be had?

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

#393

Post by fragmede »

IshKebab wrote: post #270
PeterisP wrote: post #244

Earlier 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…

> then I would count that as "replaced 2 programmers" Well then you can count IDEs, static typing, debuggers, version control etc. as replacing programmers too. But I don't think any of those performance enhancers have really reduced the number of programmers needed. In fact it's a well known paradox that making a job more efficient can increase the number of people doing that job. It's called the Jevons paradox (tha…

I know it's popular to hate on Google, but a link to the Wikipedia is the first result I get for a Google search of "efficiency paradox".

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

#394

Post by bigstrat2003 »

This has never, ever been an industry where you will retire doing the same kind of work as you did when you started. There is nothing you can do to future proof your career - all you can do is be adaptable, and learn new things as you go.

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

#395

Post by throwing_away »

globnomulous wrote: post #379
rybosworld wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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. It isn't odd at all. In the early 21st century there were expectations of ever, exponentially increasing processing power. This misconception partially gave us the game Crysis, which, if I'm not…

> because we'd have seen the writing on the wall and invested in Nvidia before the AI craze reached its current fever pitch.

I did this when I saw the first stable diffusion AI titties. So far up over 10x.

If I had a nickel for every tech that takes off once porn finds its way to it, I wouldn't be counting in nickels.

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

#396

Post by shadowerm »

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…

I am not a software engineer and I made working stock charting software with react/python/typescript in April 2023 when chatGPT4 came out, without really knowing typescript almost at all. Of course, after awhile it was impossible to update/add anything and basically fell apart because I don't know what I am doing.

That is going to be 2 years ago before you know it. Sonnet is a better at using more obscure python libraries but beyond that the improvement over chatgpt4 is not that much.

I never tried chatGPT4 with Julia or R but the current models are pretty bad with both.

Personally, I think OpenAI made a brilliant move to release 3.5 and then 4 a few months later. It made it feel like AGI was just around the corner at that pace.

Imagine what people would have thought in April 2023 if you told them that in December 2024 there would be a $200 a month model.

I waited forever for Sora and it is complete garbage. OpenAI was crafting this narrative about putting Hollywood out of business when in reality these video models are nearly useless for anything much more than social media posts about how great the models are.

It is all besides the point anyway. The way to future proof yourself is to be intellectually curious and constantly learning, no matter what field you are in or what you are doing. Probably have to reinvent your career a few times if you want to or not too.

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

#397

Post by NorthTheRock »

arisAlexis wrote: post #265
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 “…

So your argument is: There is some tech that is getting progressively better. I am high on the linear scale Therefore I don't worry about it cathing up to me ever And this is the top voted argument.

> is getting progressively better

Is it still getting better? My understanding is that we're already training them on all of the publicly available code in existence, and we're running in to scaling walls with bigger models.

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

#398

Post by jvanderbot »

dogman144 wrote: post #378

The last fairly technical career to get surprisingly and fully automated in the way this post displays concern about - trading. I spent a lot of time with traders in early '00's and then '10's when the automation was going full tilt. Common feedback I heard from these highly paid, highly technical, highly professional traders in a niche indusry running the world in its way was: - How complex the job was - How high a…

They most insightful thing here would have been to learn how those traders survived, adapted, or moved on.

It's possible everyone just stops hiring new folks and lets the incumbents automate it. Or it's possible they all washed cars the rest of their careers.

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

#399

Post by bigstrat2003 »

margalabargala wrote: post #190
dingnuts wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> LLMs are useful for coding now *sort of, sometimes, with simple enough problems with sufficiently little context, for code that can be easily tested, and for which sufficient examples exist in the training data. I mean hey, two years after being promised AGI was literally here, LLMs are almost as useful as traditional static analysis tools! I guess you could have them generate comments for you based on the code as…

Firstly, GPT-2 was released in 2019. Five years is not "almost ten years". Secondly, LLMs are objectively useful for coding now. That's not the same thing as saying they are replacements for SWEs. They're a tool, like syntax highlighting or real-time compiler error visibility or even context-aware keyword autocompletion. Some individuals don't find those things useful, and prefer to develop in a plain text editor tha…

> Secondly, LLMs are objectively useful for coding now.

No, they're subjectively useful for coding in the view of some people. I find them useless for coding. If they were objectively useful, it would be impossible for me to find them useless because that is what objectivity means.

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

#400

Post by fragmede »

IshKebab wrote: post #277
rybosworld wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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".

> It's provably true that LLM's can generate working code. Yeah for simple examples, especially in web dev. As soon as you step outside those bounds they make mistakes all the time. As I said, they're still useful because roughly correct but buggy code is often quite helpful when you're programming. But there's zero chance you can just say "write me an driver for the nRF905 using Embassy and embedded-hal" and get som…

The question is, how long would it take you to get as far as this chat does when starting from scratch?

https://chatgpt.com/share/6760c3b3-bae8-8009-8744-c25d5602bf...

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