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Career Advice in 2025

lethain.com

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Re: Career Advice in 2025

#51

Post by npodbielski »

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…

Exactly my thoughts reading this article. Luckily if next few years we will have thousands of projects written using 'ai' there will be need for someone to debug and fix all of that broken software.

Or maybe not, maybe it will be cheaper to just slap another ten k8s pods to mitigate poor performance...

Re: Career Advice in 2025

#52

Post by scarface_74 »

tibbar wrote: post #47
scarface_74 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people’s “dreams” have nothing to do with working. Their dream is to have a combination of shit ton of money appear in their bank accounts every pay period and stock to appear in their brokerage account every vesting period. True there are some who want to win the lottery and accept less than their market rate in exchange for “equity” in a non public company that will statistically be worthless. Coding interview…

It seems like you're really focused on the interview process for a small number of very large tech companies. My experience doesn't match yours - I have been recruited to a specific BigTech team based on my background, and the interviews were more focused on specific skills than leetcode. But it seems like most BigTech interviews probably are coding/system design. With that said, I have tended to interview more at sc…

By pay similar to BigTech do you mean the cash you get paid at a startup/scale up is similar to cash + liquid public RSUs?

Equity in private companies especially in today’s climate is statistically meaningless.

And if you look at the companies that pay the most + have the largest number of opportunities, they are the “small number” of BigTech companies

And back to the Bay Area argument. Most of the major public tech companies have offices all over the US that pay the same with a much lower cost of living.

Re: Career Advice in 2025

#53

Post by sangeeth96 »

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…

> Steer away from skills like web development that are clearly getting eaten by LLMs.

You had it going well there but then had to ruin it with a take like that.

If you’re talking about your trivial, github-filled example scenarios of frontend, sure. But then we could say the same for all other roles, including backend logic that’s regurgitated all the time.

Like with everything else, the non-trivial bits need work and skills.

Re: Career Advice in 2025

#54

Post by SwtCyber »

The shift in what's valued (moving from team-building and hiring prowess to sheer execution speed and adaptability) has been stark. It's also unsettling to see so many senior folks feeling -left behind- not because they lack skills, but because the rules of the game have changed so quickly...

Re: Career Advice in 2025

#55

Post by SwtCyber »

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…

I do think some transitions are inevitable and not because AI must be used, but because once enough companies figure out where it genuinely improves efficiency, the competitive pressure to follow suit becomes real

Re: Career Advice in 2025

#56

Post by sangeeth96 »

tibbar wrote: post #35
kristiandupont wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>infrastructure, databases, data engineering, stats Why would those areas be less exposed to the "LLM threat"?

To be brutally honest, LLMs aren't very good at solving novel problems, they aren't very good at integrating business context, and they make many small mistakes. That's why they are a good fit for frontend development! Frontend features are 1. often quite deterministic (well-defined specs and mockups from product managers) and 2. repetitive (95% of all frontend features have already been built many times in the train…

This is an extremely dumb take, I’ve worked on both areas before and I could say that infra work is mostly repeated and needlessly complex config sprayed into git. LLMs have seen enough of that to make head or tails of it by the way you’re characterizing frontend dev.

Re: Career Advice in 2025

#57

Post by SwtCyber »

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…

On avoiding web dev: I get the concern, but I wouldn't write it off completely. LLMs are changing the game, but they're not replacing deep expertise in architecture, scalability, or understanding real-world business constraints

Re: Career Advice in 2025

#58

Post by randomNumber7 »

SwtCyber wrote: post #55
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…

I do think some transitions are inevitable and not because AI must be used, but because once enough companies figure out where it genuinely improves efficiency, the competitive pressure to follow suit becomes real

The same holds true for software developers imo. If you can't figure out how to use LLMs to improve efficiency, your likely a dinosaur of the past soon (unless you work on somethink __very__ specific where LLMs dont help much).

Re: Career Advice in 2025

#59

Post by r_singh »

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…

It’s important to understand how AI will affect your field and recalibrate your position or contribution accordingly

It is a big enough change for this to be a valid question for anyone in the world today

Leaving what you’re doing and going into “AI” will likely set you up for a crypto level disaster

Vibe coding is a thing but vibe business building or job hunting isn’t! So beware of hype and know that in the end money is made by serving people and it will be equally hard with vibe coding too because the bar is higher

AI will create newer opportunities for sure but follow the opportunity, not the AI is what the sentiment here is I guess

Re: Career Advice in 2025

#60

Post by SwtCyber »

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.

Exactly. It’s less about whether AI can replace certain jobs and more about the fact that companies are making decisions as if it will. That alone reshapes hiring, budgets, and job security
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