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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?

#401

Post by lukan »

"until eventually LLMs will become so good, that senior people won't be needed any more"

You are assuming AGI will come eventually.

I assume eventually the earth will be consumed by the sun, but I am equally less worried as I don't see it as a near future.

I am still regular dissapointed, when I try out the newest hyped model. They usually fail my tasks and require lots of manual labour.

So if that gets significantly better, I can see them replacing junior devs. But without understanding, they cannot replace a programmer for any serious task. But they maybe enable more people to become good enough programmers for their simple task. So less demand for less skilled devs indeed.

My solution - the same as before - improve my skills and understanding.

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

#402

Post by angoragoats »

iLoveOncall wrote: post #348
Terr_ wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not parent poster, but I imagine it will be a bit like the horror stories of companies (ab)using spreadsheets in lieu of a proper program or database: They will use an LLM to get half-working stuff "for free" and consider it a bargain, especially if the detectable failures can be spot-fixed by an intern doing data-entry. I think we'll see it first in internal reporting tools, where the stakeholder tries to explain so…

> Not parent poster, but I imagine it will be a bit like the horror stories of companies (ab)using spreadsheets in lieu of a proper program or database: They will use an LLM to get half-working stuff "for free" and consider it a bargain, especially if the detectable failures can be spot-fixed by an intern doing data-entry. When I read things like this I really wonder if half of the people on HackerNews have ever held…

Are you sure you read the post you’re quoting correctly? They’re talking about companies that don’t have custom software at all, and cobble together half-working buggy spreadsheets and call the problem solved. Then the developers (either FT or contract) have to come in and build the tool that kills the spreadsheeet, once it gets too unwieldy.

I have seen the above story play out literally dozens of times in my career.

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

#403

Post by a_bonobo »

ConspiracyFact wrote: post #325
hnthrowaway6543 wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I'm casting about for project ideas. What are some things that you think need to be built but haven't?

some ideas from my own work:

- a good LIMS (Laboratory Information Management System) that incorporates bioinformatics results. LIMS come from a pure lab, benchwork background, and rarely support the inclusion of bioinformatics analyses on samples included in the system. I have yet to see a lab that uses an off-the-shelf LIMS unmodified - they never do what they say they do. (And the amount of labs running on something built on age-old software still in use is... horrific. I know one US lab running some abomination built on Filemaker Pro)

- Software to manage grants. Who is being owed what, what are the milestones, who's looking after this, who are the contact persons, what are the milestones and when to remind, due diligence on potential partners etc. I worked for a grant-giving body and they came up with a weird mix of PowerBI and a pile of Excel sheets and PDFs.

- A thing that lets you catalogue Jupyter notebooks and Rstudio projects. I'm drowning in various projects from various data scientists and there's no nice way to centrally catalogue all those file lumps - 'there was this one function in this one project.... let's grep a bit' can be replaced by a central findable, searchable, taggable repository of data science projects.

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

#404

Post by bigstrat2003 »

cies wrote: post #187
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.

> ChatGPT was only just released in 2022. Bitcoin was released in what year? I still cannot use it for payments. No-code solutions exist since when? And still programmers work... I dont think all hyped techs are fads. For instance: we use SaaS now instead of installing software locally. This transition took the world by storm. But those tech that needs lots of ads, and lots of zealots, and make incredible promises: t…

> For instance: we use SaaS now instead of installing software locally.

If anything, I feel like this argument works against you. If people are willing to replace locally installed software with shitty web "apps" that barely compare, why do you think they won't be willing to replace good programmers with LLMs doing a bad job simply because it's trendy?

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

#405

Post by neilv »

taylodl wrote: post #292
neilv wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked on CASE, and generally agree with this. I think it's important to note that there were a couple distinct markets for CASE: 1. Military/aerospace/datacomm/medical type technical development. Where you were building very complex things, that integrated into larger systems, that had to work, with teams, and you used higher-level formalisms when appropriate. 2. "MIS" (Management Information Systems) in-house/int…

As I recall, the biggest problem from the last go-around was the models and implementation were two different sets of artifacts and therefore were guaranteed to diverge. If we move to a modern incarnation where the AI is generating the implementation from the models and humans are no longer doing that task, then it may work as the models will now be the only existing set of artifacts. But I was definitely in camp #2…

FWIW, CASE developers knew pretty early on that the separate artifacts diverging was a problem, or even the problem, and a lot of work was on trying to solve exactly that.

Approaches included having single source for any given semantics, and doing various kinds of syncing between the models.

Personally, I went to grad school intending to finally "solve" this, but got more interested in combining AI and HCI for non-software-engineering problems. :)

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

#406

Post by gerash »

Two thoughts:

1. Similar to autonomous driving going from 90-99% reliability can take longer than 0-90%.

2. You can now use LLMs and public clouds to abstract away a lot skills that you don't have (managing compute clusters, building iOS and Android apps, etc.). So you can start your 3 person company and do things that previously required 100s of people.

IMHO LLMs and cloud computing are very similar where you need a lot of money to build an offering so perhaps only a few big players are going to survive.

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

#407

Post by shadowerm »

layer8 wrote: post #240
themanmaran wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You can’t extrapolate the future trajectory of progress from the past. It comes in pushes and phases. We had long phases of AI stagnation in the past, we might see them again. The past five years or so might turn out to be a phase transition from pre-LLM to post-LLM, rather than the beginning of endless dramatic improvements.

It would be different too if we didn't know the secret sauce here is massive amounts of data and the jump process was directly related to a jump in the amount of data.

Some of the logic here is akin to how I have lost 30lbs in 2024 so at this pace I will weigh -120lbs by 2034!

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

#408

Post by w-hn »

I have been unemployed for almost a year now (it started with a full division layoff and then no willingness or motivation to look for work at the time). Seeing the way AI can do most of the native app development (which is what I did) code I wrote I am losing almost any motivation to even try now. But I have been sleeping the best after college (where I slept awesome) and I have been working out, watching lots of theatre and cinema and playing lots of sports (two of them almost daily), reading a lot of literature, lots of podcasts. I guess I will just wait for my savings to run dry and then see what option then I'd have and what I would not if at all. I know the standard thing to do and say is "up-skill", "change with the times" etc and I am sure those have merit but I just feel I am done with the constant catch up, kind of checked out. I don't give a fuck anymore maybe, or I do and I am too demoralised to confront it.

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

#409

Post by m_ke »

raincole wrote: post #318
m_ke wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people don’t want cloud hosted subscription software, we do it that way because VCs love vendor lock in and recurring revenue. Old school desktop software takes very little maintenance. Once you get rid of user tracking, AB testing, monitoring, CICD pipelines, microservices, SOC, multi tenant distributed databases, network calls and all the other crap things get pretty simple.

There was a vulnerability of 7-zip found in Nov, 2024. Yes, 7-zip. https://cert.europa.eu/publications/security-advisories/2024...

1. If everyone is running custom written software that's not shared with anyone else if will be really hard to find vulnerabilities in them

2. I'm sure LLMs are already way better at detecting vulnerabilities than the average engineer. (when asked to do so explicitly)

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

#410

Post by hnthrowaway6543 »

fragmede wrote: post #391
hnthrowaway6543 wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

i heard the same shit when people were talking about outsourcing to India after the dotcom bubble burst. programmer salaries would cap out at $60k because of international competition.

if you're afraid of salaries shrinking due to LLMs, then i implore you, get out of software development. it'll help me a lot!

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