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Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs?
411–420 of 1001 posts
Re: Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs?
#412Nothing 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 “…
Could you give an example of an AI capability that would change your mind on this, even slightly? "Sniff test" is rather subjective, and job replacement rarely happens with machines doing something better on the exact same axis of performance as humans. E.g., cars wouldn't have passed the coachman's "sniff test". Or to use a current topic - fast food self-order touchscreens don't pass the customer service people sniff test.
Re: Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs?
#413Nothing 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 ou…
One hundred per cent this.
LLM pair programming is unbelievably fun, satisfying, and productive. Why type out the code when you can instead watch it being typed while thinking of and typing out/speaking the next thing you want.
For those who enjoy typing, you could try to get a job dictating letters for lawyers, but something tells me that’s on the way out too.
Re: Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs?
#414Earlier quoted context omitted.
Intellisense style systems were a huge feature leap when they gained wider language support and reliability. LLMs are yet another step forward for intellisense and the effort of comprehending the code you're altering. I don't think I will ever benefit from code generation in a serious setting (it's excellent for prototyping) simply due to the fact that it's solving the easy problem (write some code) while creating a…
> I can already type faster than I can think. But can you write tickets faster than you can implement them? I certainly can.
> But can you write tickets faster than you can implement them? I certainly can.
Personally, I have a tendency at work to delay creating tickets until after I've already written the implementation.
Why? Because tickets in my employer's system are expected to identify which component needs to be changed, and ideally should have some detail about what needs to be changed. But both of those things depend on the design of the change being implemented.
In my experience, any given feature usually has multiple possible designs, and the only way to know if a design is good is to try implementing it and see how clean or messy it ends up. Of course, I can guess in advance which design will turn out well. I have to guess, or else I wouldn't know which design to try implementing first. But often my first attempt runs into unexpected wrinkles and I retreat and try a different design.
Other people will start with a design and brute-force their way to working code, and (in my judgmental opinion) the code often ends up lower-quality because of it.
Sooner or later, perhaps AI will be able to perform that entire process autonomously, better than I can. In the meantime, though, people often talk about using AI like a 'junior engineer', where you think up a design yourself and then delegate the grunt work to the AI. That approach feels flawed to me, because it disconnects the designer from the implementer.
Re: Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs?
#415You’re watching our coworkers hit the gas pedal on turning the entire industry into a blue collar job. Not just the junior positions will dry up but the senior positions will dry up. The average engineer won’t understand coding or even do the review. Salaries won’t lower they’ll stagnate over the next 10-20 years. People don’t actually care about coding, they may enjoy it but are only here for the money. In their short sighted mind, using LLMs are the quickest way to demonstrate superiority by way of efficiency to argue for a promotion.
Re: Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs?
#416I am so not worried about it. This is like, ten years ago: "how do you protect your career as a vim-user when obviously Visual Studio will take over the world." It is a helpful tool for some people but You Don't Really Need It and it isn't why some engineers are super impactful.
Re: Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs?
#417The 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…
Having also worked on desks in the 00s and early 10s I think a big difference here is what trading meant really changed; much of what traders did went away with innovations in speed. Speed and algos became the way to trade neither of which humans can do. While SWE became significantly more important on trading desks, you still have researchers, quants, portfolio analysts, etc. that spend their working days developing new algos, new market opportunities, ways to minimize TCOS, etc.
That being said, there's also a massive low hanging fruit in dev work that we'll automate away, and I feel like that's coming sooner rather than later, yes even though we've been saying that for decades. However, I bet that the incumbents (Senior SWE) have a bit longer of a runway and potentially their economic rent increases as they're able to be more efficient, and companies need not hire as many humans as they needed before. Will be an interesting go these next few decades.
Re: Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs?
#418Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree with you tbh, and it also just misses something huge that doesnt get brought up: its not about your sniff test, its about your bosses sniff test. Are you making 300k a year? Thats 300 thousand reasons to replace you for a short term boost in profit, companies love doing that.
I'm in a leadership role and one of the primary parties responsible for hiring. So code passing my sniff test is kind of important.
To bring it back to the question that spawned the ask: One thing to future proof a career as a SWE is to get into business and leadership/management as well as learning how to program. If you're indispensable to the business for other reasons, they'll keep you around.
Re: Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs?
#419Here’s a question for you, have they automated trains yet? They’re literally on tracks. Until trains are fully automated, then after that cars, then later airplanes, then maybe, just maybe “ai” will come for thought work. Meanwhile, Tesla’s “ai” still can’t stop running into stopped firetrucks[1]… [1] https://www.wired.com/story/tesla-autopilot-why-crash-radar/
They have automated trains..
Re: Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs?
#420Earlier quoted context omitted.
LLMs are not necessarily a waste of time like you mention, as their application isn't limited to generating algorithms like you're used to. When you consider LLMs to be building blocks in bigger, more complex systems, their potential increases dramatically. That's where mid/senior engineers would chip in and add value to a company, in my point of view. There's also different infrastructure paradigms involved that hav…
> When you consider LLMs to be building blocks in bigger, more complex systems, their potential increases dramatically. Do you have any examples of where/how that would work? It has seemed for me like lot of the hype is "they'll be good" with no further explanation.
I pull messy data from a remote source (think OCR-ed invoices for example), and need to clean it up. Every day I get around 1k new rows. The way in which it's messed up changes frequently, and while I don't care about it being 100% correct, any piece of code (relying on rules, regex, heuristics and other such stuff) would break in a couple of weeks. This means I need at least a part time developer on my team, costing me a couple of thousands per month.
Or I can pass each row through an LLM and get structured clean output out for a couple of dollars per month. Sure, it doesn't work 100%, but I don't need that, and neither could the human-written code do it.
Effectively, LLM resulted in one less develper hired on our team.