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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?

#491

Post by frontfor »

peab wrote: post #483
pdimitar wrote: post #458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ea…

"In other words, you have built exactly zero commercial-grade applications that us the working programmers work on building every day." The majority of programmers getting paid a good salary are implementing other people's ideas. You're getting paid to be some PMs chatGPT

You’re completely missing the point. The point being made isn’t about “are we implementing someone else’s idea”. It’s about the complexity and trade-offs and tough calls we have to make in a production system.

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

#492

Post by pdimitar »

shiveenp wrote: post #487
pdimitar wrote: post #459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In my opinion people that harp on about how LLMs have been game changer for them are the people that put themselves as never actually having built anything sophisticated enough that a team of engineers can work and extend on for years.

Yep, as cynical and demeaning that must sound to them, I am arriving at the same conclusion.

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

#493

Post by codery »

"The use of FORTRAN, like the earlier symbolic programming, was very slow to be taken up by the professionals. And this is typical of almost all professional groups. Doctors clearly do not follow the advice they give to others, and they also have a high proportion of drug addicts. Lawyers often do not leave decent wills when they die. Almost all professionals are slow to use their own expertise for their own work. The situation is nicely summarized by the old saying, “The shoe maker’s children go without shoes”. Consider how in the future, when you are a great expert, you will avoid this typical error!"

Richard W. Hamming, “The Art of Doing Science and Engineering”

Today, lawyers delegate many paralegal tasks like document discovery to computers and doctors routinely use machine learning models to help diagnose patients.

So why aren’t we — ostensibly the people writing software — doing more with LLM in our day-to-day?

If you take seriously the idea that LLM will fundamentally change the nature of many occupations in the coming decade, what reason do you have to believe that you’ll be immune from that because you work in software? Looking at the code you’ve been paid to write over the past few years, how much of that can you honestly say is truly novel?

We’re really not as clever as we think we are.

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

#494

Post by jprete »

pdimitar wrote: post #470
jayd16 wrote: post #465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The short answer is they're trying to sell it.

Agreed, but I can't imagine that everybody here on HN that's defending LLMs so... misguidedly and obviously ignoring observable reality... are financially interested in LLMs' success, can they?

It's a message board frequented by extremely tech-involved people. I'd expect the vast majority of people here to have some financial interest in LLMs - big-tech equity, direct employment, AI startup, AI influencer, or whatever.

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

#495

Post by bashfulpup »

Long horizon problems are a completely unsolved problem in AI.

See the GAIA benchmark. While this surely will be beat soon enough, the point is that we do exponentially longer horizon tasks than that benchmark every single day.

It's very possible we will move away from raw code implementation, but the core concepts of solving long horizon problems via multiple interconnected steps are exponentially far away. If AI can achieve that, then we are all out of a job, not just some of us.

Take 2 competing companies that have a duopoly on a market.

Company 1 uses AI and fires 80% their workforce.

Company 2 uses ai and keeps their workforce.

AI in its current form is a multiplier, we will see company two massively outcompete the first as each employee now performs 3-10 people's tasks. Therefore, Company two's output is exponentially increased per person. As a result, it significantly weakens the first company. Standard market forces haven't changed.

The reality, as I see it, is that interns will now be performing at Senior SWE, senior SWE engineers will now be performing at VP of engineering levels, and VP's of engineering will now be performing at nation state levels of output.

We will enter an age where goliath companies will be common place. Hundreds or even thousands of mega trillion dollar companies. Billion dollar startups will be expected almost at launch.

Again, unless we magically find a solution to long horizon problems (which we haven't even slightly found). That technology could be 1 year or 100 years away. We're waiting on our generation's Einstein to discover it.

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

#496

Post by irunmyownemail »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #394

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.

"This has never, ever been an industry where you will retire doing the same kind of work as you did when you started."

Seriously? It actually is an industry where people started coding in C and have retired recently, still working in C.

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

#497

Post by grugagag »

epolanski wrote: post #432
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…

I don't see it. Trading is about doing very specific math in a very specific scenario with known expectations. Software engineering is anything but like that.

Yes, software engineering is different in many areas but today a lot of it is CRUD and plumbing. While SW engineering will not die it will certainly transform a lot, quite possibly there will be fewer generalists than today and more specialized branches will pop out - or maybe being a generalist will require one to be familiar many new areas. Likely the code we write today will go the same way writing assembly code went and sure, it will not completely disappear but...

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

#498

Post by wyclif »

cadamsau wrote: post #413
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…

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.

What do you prefer to use for LLM pair programming?

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

#499

Post by cruffle_duffle »

rvz wrote: post #30
nerder92 wrote: post #12

As for every job done well the most important thing is to truly understand the essence of your job, why it exist in the first place and which problem truly solves when done it well. A good designers is not going to be replaced by Dall-e/Midjourney, becuase the essence of design is to understand the true meaning/purpose of something and be able to express it graphically, not align pixels with the correct HEX colour co…

> A good software engineer is not going to be replaced by Cursor/Co-pilot, because the essence of programming is to translate the business requirements of a real world problem that other humans are facing into an ergonomic tool that can be used to solve such problem at scale, not writing characters on an IDE. Managers and executives only see engineers and customer service as an additional cost and will find an opport…

Only dodgy dinosaur companies with shitty ancient crusty management see engineers as cost centers. Any actual modern tech company sees engineers as the engine that drives the entire business. This has been true for decades.

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

#500

Post by pdimitar »

jprete wrote: post #494
pdimitar wrote: post #470

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, but I can't imagine that everybody here on HN that's defending LLMs so... misguidedly and obviously ignoring observable reality... are financially interested in LLMs' success, can they?

It's a message board frequented by extremely tech-involved people. I'd expect the vast majority of people here to have some financial interest in LLMs - big-tech equity, direct employment, AI startup, AI influencer, or whatever.

Yeah, very likely. It's the new gold rush, and they are commanding wages that make me drool (and also make me want to howl in pain and agony and envy but hey, let's not mention the obvious, shall we?).

I always forget the name of that law but... it's hard to make somebody understand something if their salary depends on them not understanding it.

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