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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?

#451

Post by aristofun »

throwaway_43793 wrote: post #203
aristofun wrote: post #199

If you fear => you're still in the beginning of your career or your work has very little to do with software engineering. (the engineering part in particular) The only way to future-proof any creative and complex work - get awesome at it. It worked before LLM it will work after LLM or any new shiny three-letter gimmick.

Maybe I'm a lousy developer, true. But I do know now that your code does not matter. Unlike any other creative profession, what matters is the final output, and code is not the final output. If companies can get the final output with less people, and less money, why would they pass on this opportunity? And please don't tell me that it's because people produce maintainable code and LLMs don't.

Exactly because lines pf code is not the ultimate result but rather a mean to an end - software _engineering_ profession is not at risk in any way.

If you don’t get it - you are not lousy, just not experienced enough or as I say - not doing engineering. Which is fine. Then your fear is grounded.

Because only the non creative professions like devops, sre, qa to some extent, data engineering to some extent are at _some_ risk of being transformed noticeably.

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

#452

Post by simplyluke »

janalsncm wrote: post #263
thegrim33 wrote: post #71

I don't worry about it, because: 1) I believe we need true AGI to replace developers. 2) I don't believe LLMs are currently AGI or that if we just feed them more compute during training that they'll magically become AGI. 3) Even if we did invent AGI soon and replace developers, I wouldn't even really care, because the invention of AGI would be such an insanely impactful, world changing, event that who knows what the…

To replace all developers, we need AGI yes. To replace many developers? No. If one developer can do the same work as 5 could previously, unless the amount of work expands then 4 developers are going to be looking for a job. Therefore, unless you for some reason believe you will be in the shrinking portion that cannot be replaced I think the question deserves more attention than “nothing”.

Frameworks, compilers, and countless other developments in computing massively expanded the efficiency of programmers and that only expanded the field.

Short of genuine AGI I’ve yet to see a compelling argument why productivity eliminates jobs, when the opposite has been true in every modern economy.

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

#453

Post by dustingetz »

richardw wrote: post #364
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 ou…

quantum computers still can’t factor any number larger than 21

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

#454

Post by datavirtue »

I would love to swim in code all day. My problems are always people and process. Down in trenches it is really messy and we often need five or ten people working in concert on the same problem that already has implicit context established for everyone, each contributing their unique viewpoint (hopefully).

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

#455

Post by cweld510 »

from-nibly wrote: post #141
m_ke wrote: post #23

I've been thinking about this a bunch and here's what I think will happen as cost of writing software approaches 0: 1. There will be way more software 2. Most people / companies will be able to opt out of predatory VC funded software and just spin up their own custom versions that do exactly what they want without having to worry about being spied on or rug pulled. I already do this with chrome extensions, with the h…

> that do exactly what they want This presumes that they know exactly what they want. My brother works for a company and they just ran into this issue. They target customer retention as a metric. The result is that all of their customers are the WORST, don't make them any money, but they stay around a long time. The company is about to run out of money and crash into the ground. If people knew exactly what they wante…

Sure, but without an LLM, measuring customer retention might require sending a request over to your data scientist because they know how to make dashboards, then they have to balance it with their other work, so who knows when it gets done. You can do this sort of thing faster with an LLM, and the communication cost will be less. So even if you choose the wrong statistic, you can get it built sooner, and find out sooner that it's wrong, and hopefully course-correct sooner as well.

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

#456

Post by jayd16 »

richardw wrote: post #364
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 ou…

"Other people were wrong about something else so that invalidates your argument"

Why are half the replies like this?

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

#457

Post by datavirtue »

oangemangut wrote: post #417
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…

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…

We need that reduction in demand for workers, though. Backfilling is not going to be a thing for a population in decline.

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

#458

Post by pdimitar »

richardw wrote: post #364
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 ou…

In other words, you have built exactly zero commercial-grade applications that us the working programmers work on building every day.

LLMs are good for playing with stuff, yes, and that has been implied by your parent commenter as well I think. But when you have to scale the work, then the code has to be easy to read, easy to extend, easy to test, have extensive test coverage, have proper dependency injection / be easy to mock the 3rd party dependencies, be easy to configure so it can be deployed in every cloud provider (i.e. by using env vars and config files for modifying its behavior)... and even more important traits.

LLMs don't write code like that. Many people have tried with many prompts. It's mostly good for just generating stuff once and maybe do little modifications while convincingly arguing the code has no bugs (and it has).

You seem to confuse one-off projects that have zero to little need for maintenance for actual commercial programming, perhaps?

Your analogy with the automakers seems puzzlingly irrelevant to the discussion at hand, and very far from transferable to it. Also I am 100% convinced nobody is going to protect the programmers; business people trying to replace one guy like myself with 3 Indians has been a reality for 10 years at this point, and amusingly they keep failing and never learning their lesson. /off-topic

Like your parent commenter, if LLMs get on my level, I'd be _happy_ to retire. I don't have a super vested interest in commercial programming, in fact I became as good at it in the last several years because I started hating it and wanted to get all my tasks done with minimal time expended; so I am quite confident in my assessment that LLMs are barely at the level of a diligent but not very good junior dev at the moment, and have been for the last at least 6 months.

Your take is rather romantic.

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

#459

Post by pdimitar »

jayd16 wrote: post #456
richardw wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

"Other people were wrong about something else so that invalidates your argument" Why are half the replies like this?

The cognitive dissonance of seemingly educated people defending the LLMs when it comes to writing code is my top mystery for the entirety of 2024.

Call me if you find a good reason. I still have not.

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

#460

Post by lifeisstillgood »

comex wrote: post #414
tlarkworthy wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 o…

>>> 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,

abso-frigging-lutely

To me this is n example of software being a form Of literacy - creative work. And yet process is designed by software illiterates who think novels can be written by pre-planning all the paragraphs

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