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Career Advice in 2025

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Re: Career Advice in 2025

#21

Post by klodolph »

jes5199 wrote: post #15
faizshah wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same is true for remote work. All the engineers know the return to work policies are dumb but all the decision makers have decided we’re all wrong.

then why don’t they co-locate teams when they get RTO’d? I keep hearing about people who have to go sit in a mandatory hot desk but are still stuck on Zoom all day. Seems like the worst of both worlds

It’s ordinary corporate dysfunction. The mandates come top-down. People in management don’t think too hard about exceptions. The people making decisions are far-removed from the consequences of their decisions.

Re: Career Advice in 2025

#22

Post by bayarearefugee »

__loam wrote: post #11
Zee2 wrote: post #6

The statement >The current market doesn’t value those skills particularly highly, but instead prioritizes a different set of skills: working in the details, pushing pace, and navigating the technology transition to foundational models / LLMs. depends on the assumption that technology must "transition" to "foundational models / LLMs". The author doesn't seem to interrogate this assumption. In fact, most of the career…

Think about what you're asking when you tell these people to interrogate the assumption that LLM based AIs are going to be the dominant technology going forward. Hundreds of billions, the growth of the technology industry, the entire US stock market, and the global economy has been wagered on this technology. Imagine the turmoil when those in power realize the reality of what they're betting the farm on.

The next time I am angrily typing to claude 3.7 in all caps because he overengineered a bunch of code I didn't even ask him to write in the first place, I'll be sure to let him know his continued failures are risking the entire world economy.

Re: Career Advice in 2025

#23

Post by nextts »

rakejake wrote: post #2

"decision-makers can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent" - Very correct. Whether or not AI actually comes for your job, the fact that enough people at the top think so is enough to cause trouble.

We are still doing scrum-like stuff after all. And they are dragging people back to the office. Decision makers have billions at their disposal to be inefficient with.

Re: Career Advice in 2025

#24

Post by tibbar »

scarface_74 wrote: post #19
tibbar wrote: post #7

Some more free advice, in no particular order: * Try to get at least one job offer every year, even if you don't accept it. * Look at the requirements for your dream job and figure out what you need to learn to qualify. * Pick one skill and get very good at it. Spend an hour a day on it for a year. * Steer away from skills like web development that are clearly getting eaten by LLMs. * Look for work in major U.S. tech…

Amazingly enough, I and millions of other developers have managed to find jobs outside of the Bay Area. Personally, I’ve been finding jobs quite easily 10x since 1996 - the last 2 in 2023 and last year. > Look at the requirements for your dream job and figure out what you need to learn to qualify. Those jobs in the Bay Area mostly require you to “grind leetCode” and system design. They really don’t require you to kno…

Hey, as I said in another thread, I did not start out working in the Bay, and ended up here somewhat by accident. It shocked me how much easier it was to find good jobs here, and I'll stand by that. With that said, of course I say this with no judgment to anyone not in the Bay or other tech hubs, it's friendly advice from personal experience.

> Those jobs in the Bay Area mostly require you to “grind leetCode” and system design. They really don’t require you to know the latest frameworks, databases, Kubernetes, etc

Hmm, it sounds like you have a negative opinion of Bay Area jobs in general. I'm asking people to first figure out what work sounds interesting to them, and then learn the relevant skills. If you have the skills, the Bay Area probably has the right job, too. Of course these jobs also exist elsewhere, I'm not sure why I'm triggering this reaction...

Re: Career Advice in 2025

#25

Post by breput »

tibbar wrote: post #12
breput wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Look for work in major U.S. tech hubs like the Bay Area. Pay is better and network effects are strong, so your next job will be easier to get. Jobs and the network effects happen all across the country. As you get older and maybe don't want the grind, or have a family, or just want a better work/life balance, this will become apparent. Basically, always have at least two people who will support you for your next jo…

There are plenty of tech hubs besides the Bay Area, that's for sure. But I can tell you that when I moved from a small company in a small economy to a moderately-well known startup in the Bay, the rate at which recruiters contacted me jumped from maybe a few times a year to multiple times per week. And after a few years, many of my coworkers started their own companies and invited me to join them. By contrast, I have…

I didn't mean to nullify your experience.

You've undeniably right about how there have been spheres of influence where people and capital come together. Every area of the United States has some kind of forced name of "Silicon *" for a reason.

I just don't think this will be true in the future. Move where you want to, maybe have to work harder to break through, but that was also true in the Valley.

Re: Career Advice in 2025

#26

Post by krishnakanna18 »

tibbar wrote: post #18
DeathArrow wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Steer away from skills like web development that are clearly getting eaten by LLMs. What do you mean by web development? Would backend qualify? Would microservices qualify? A complex application is much more than coding.

I'm mostly thinking of frontend dev work, but also some types of light backend work that you might see in a CRUD app. And listen, I've done that work, I've done a lot of it, and I saw that it's mostly a career dead-end, becoming more and more automated/copiloted away. It's not a career moat to be a mid-level React developer. By contrast, some things I think are worth pivoting into include infrastructure, databases, d…

> infrastructure, databases, data engineering

I work as a backend dev, without an opportunity to work on these at my current company. How do I learn and showcase these skills effectively. Thanks!

Re: Career Advice in 2025

#27

Post by __loam »

bayarearefugee wrote: post #22
__loam wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Think about what you're asking when you tell these people to interrogate the assumption that LLM based AIs are going to be the dominant technology going forward. Hundreds of billions, the growth of the technology industry, the entire US stock market, and the global economy has been wagered on this technology. Imagine the turmoil when those in power realize the reality of what they're betting the farm on.

The next time I am angrily typing to claude 3.7 in all caps because he overengineered a bunch of code I didn't even ask him to write in the first place, I'll be sure to let him know his continued failures are risking the entire world economy.

You can be as snarky as you want but the reality is we're years deep into a market cycle that has seen a tremendous amount of capex with very little visible return.

How much more productive do you think claude makes you as compared to Google or Stack Overflow? 15%? 50%? 200? Do you think that's enough to satisfy the market or are we all trading on unrealistic expectations? Do you think shareholders are going to like it that they're losing billions a quarter so Anthropic can run a service that helps you write web dev projects marginally faster? Do you even understand the amount of value that's tied up in these questions having a good answer right now?

Re: Career Advice in 2025

#28

Post by tibbar »

krishnakanna18 wrote: post #26
tibbar wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm mostly thinking of frontend dev work, but also some types of light backend work that you might see in a CRUD app. And listen, I've done that work, I've done a lot of it, and I saw that it's mostly a career dead-end, becoming more and more automated/copiloted away. It's not a career moat to be a mid-level React developer. By contrast, some things I think are worth pivoting into include infrastructure, databases, d…

> infrastructure, databases, data engineering I work as a backend dev, without an opportunity to work on these at my current company. How do I learn and showcase these skills effectively. Thanks!

Realistically, you need to bootstrap your experience in these areas. Pick an area to focus on and put your own time into learning it. My rule of thumb is that you need about 100 hours of personal study to get to "smart intern" level in a particular tech skill, given that you're already a professional developer. I typically bootstrap a skill by picking a textbook to work through and combining it with personal projects and adjacent reading as it comes up. Usually after ~100 hours or so you will be able to arrange an internal transfer to work on that stuff in your day job.

Re: Career Advice in 2025

#29

Post by tibbar »

breput wrote: post #25
tibbar wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are plenty of tech hubs besides the Bay Area, that's for sure. But I can tell you that when I moved from a small company in a small economy to a moderately-well known startup in the Bay, the rate at which recruiters contacted me jumped from maybe a few times a year to multiple times per week. And after a few years, many of my coworkers started their own companies and invited me to join them. By contrast, I have…

I didn't mean to nullify your experience. You've undeniably right about how there have been spheres of influence where people and capital come together. Every area of the United States has some kind of forced name of "Silicon *" for a reason. I just don't think this will be true in the future. Move where you want to, maybe have to work harder to break through, but that was also true in the Valley.

I would love for this to be the case!
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