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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?

#501

Post by shiveenp »

holografix wrote: post #439

Beware of the miopia and gate keeping displayed on this thread. There will be less SWE and DevOps and related jobs available in the next 24 months. Period. Become hyper-aware of how a business measure your value as a SWE. How? Ask pointed, uncomfortable questions that force the people paying you to think and be transparent. Stay on the cutting edge of how to increase your output and quality using AI. Ie: how long doe…

Explain to me how you think a sophisticated random text generator will take all jobs. Especially since it’s trained on existing corpus of data on the internet created by? Guess who, existing engineers. I’m genuinely curious on the backing of these “trust me bro” style statements.

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

#502

Post by richardw »

pdimitar wrote: post #458
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…

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…

The analogy is that Japanese cars were initially utterly uncompetitive, and the arrogance of those who benefited from the status quo meant they were unable to adapt when change came. Humans improved those cars, humans are currently improving models and their use. Cheap toys move up the food chain. Find the direction of change and align yourself with it.

> 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.

Good good, so you're the software equivalent of a 1990's era German auto engineer who currently has no equal, and maybe your career can finish quietly without any impact whatsoever. There are a lot of people on HN who are not you, and could use some real world advice on what to do as the world changes around them.

If you've read "crossing the chasm", in at least that view of the world there are different phases to innovation, with different roles. Innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, laggards. Each has a different motivation and requirement for robustness. The laggards won't be caught dead using your new thing until IBM gives it to them running on an AS400. Your job might be equivalent to that, where your skills are rare enough that you'll be fine for a while. However, we're past the "innovators" phase at this point and a lot of startups are tearing business models apart right now, and they are moving along that innovation curve. They may not get to you, but everyone is not you.

The choices for a developer include: "I'm safe", "I'm going to get so good that I'll be safe", "I'm going to leverage AI and be better", and "I'm out". Their decisions should not be based on your unique perspective, but on the changing landscape and how likely it is to affect them.

Good sense-check on where things are in the startup universe: https://youtu.be/z0wt2pe_LZM

I can't find it now, but there's at least one company that is doing enterprise-scale refactoring with LLM's, AST's, rules etc. Obviously it won't handle all edge cases, but...that's not your grandad's Cursor.

Might be this one, but don't recognise the name: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/multi-repo-ai-assisted-refact...

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

#503

Post by charlescurt123 »

bashfulpup wrote: post #495

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 ca…

Companies that have no interest in growth and are already heavily entrenched have no purpose for increasing output though. They will fire everyone and behave the same?

On the other hand that means they are weaker if competition comes along as it's expected that consumers and business would demand significantly more due to comparisons.

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

#504

Post by munificent »

codery wrote: post #493

"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. Th…

> 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?

While the code I write is rarely novel, one of the primary intrinsic motivators that keeps being a software engineer is the satisfaction of understanding my code.

If I just wanted software problems to be solved and was content to wave my hands and have minions do the work, I'd be in management. I program because I like actually understanding the problem in detail and then understanding how the code solves it. And I've never found a more effective way to understand code than writing it myself. Everyone thinks they understand code they only read, but when you dig in, it's almost always flawed and surface level.

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

#505

Post by shiveenp »

Xophmeister wrote: post #74

My anecdata shows people who have no/limited experience in software engineering are suddenly able to produce “software”. That is, code of limited engineering value. It technically works, but is a ultimately an unmaintainable, intractable Heath Robinson monstrosity. Coding LLMs will likely improve, but what will happen first: a good-at-engineering LLM; or a negative feedback cycle of training data being polluted with…

LLMs will have the same effect that outsourcing had on tech jobs i.e. some effect but not meaningful for people that truly know what they’re doing and can demand the money for quality to distinguish themselves from random text generator (AI) slop.

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

#506

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

pdimitar wrote: post #488
peab wrote: post #483

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." The majority of programmers getting paid a good salary are implementing other people's ideas. You're getting paid to be some PMs chatGPT

I never said we are working on new ideas only -- that's impossible. I even gave several examples of the traits that a commercial code must have and that LLMs fail to generate such code. Not sure why you ignored that.

> LLMs fail to generate such code

As another oldster, yes, yes absolutely.

But the deeper question is: can this change? They can't do the job now, will they be able to in the future?

My understanding of what LLM's do/how they work suggests a strong "no". I'm not confident about my confidence, however.

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

#507

Post by danenania »

sigmarule wrote: post #268
RangerScience wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fav anecdote from ages ago: When hand-held power tools became a thing, the Hollywood set builder’s union was afraid of this exact same thing - people would be replaced by the tools. Instead, productions built bigger sets (the ceiling was raised) and smaller productions could get in on things (the floor was lowered). I always took that to mean “people aren’t going to spend less to do the job - they’ll just do a bigger…

This could very well prove to be the case in software engineering, but also could very well not; what is the equivalent of "larger sets" in our domain, and is that something that is even preferable to begin with? Should we build larger codebases just because we _can_? I'd say likely not, while it does make sense to build larger/more elaborate movie sets because they could. Also, a piece missing from this comparison i…

Have you ever worked on a product in production use without a long backlog of features/improvements/tests/refactors/optimizations desired by users, managers, engineers, and everyone else involved in any way with the project?

The demand for software improvements is effectively inexhaustible. It’s not a zero sum game.

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

#508

Post by robwwilliams »

throw234234234 wrote: post #438
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.

It solely depends on whether more software being built is being constrained by feasibility/cost or a lack of commercial opportunities. Software is typically not a cost constrained activity due to its typically higher ROI/scale. Its all about fixed costs and scaling profits mostly. Unfortunately given this my current belief is that on balance AI will destroy many jobs in this industry if it gets to the point where it…

Is there a good reason to assume inelastic demand? In my field —- biomedical research —-I see huge untapped areas in need of much more and better core programming services. Instead we “rely” way too much on grad students (not even junior SWEs) who know a bit of Python.

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

#509

Post by ImaCake »

bashfulpup wrote: post #495

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 ca…

AI doesn't have institutional knowledge and culture. Company 2 would be leveraging the use of LLMs while retaining it's culture and knowledge. I imagine the lack of culture is appealing to some managers but that is also one of it's biggest weaknesses.

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

#510

Post by [deleted] »

rybosworld wrote: post #164
IshKebab wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is there some expectation that these things won't improve? I definitely expect them to improve. But I also think the point at which they can actually replace a senior programmer is pretty much the exact point at which they can replace any knowledge worker, at which point western society (possibly all society) is in way deeper shit than just me being out of a job. > This is ego speaking. It definitely isn't. LLMs ar…

> 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".

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