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Career Advice in 2025

lethain.com

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Re: Career Advice in 2025

#61

Post by nextts »

kristiandupont wrote: post #32
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, stats Why would those areas be less exposed to the "LLM threat"?

Because LLMs are dog shit. There I said it.

LLMs are not the threat right now. Mismanagement of the United States and a 2008 style recession (but without the TOGA power of the SaaS/cloud boom. AI is swimming naked financially) are the biggest threat for your career and employment in 2025.

Re: Career Advice in 2025

#62

Post by tibbar »

sangeeth96 wrote: post #56
tibbar wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> This is an extremely dumb take

...ouch! ;)

The important part is NOT auto-generating repetitive configs; it's about the effort and skill required to verify that output. On the frontend, we have an easy feedback loop to preview the effects before deploying. That also helps us produce lots of training data for frontend LLM output.

On the backend, there is substantial risk with infra changes - you could drop the database, block production traffic, etc. etc. You can't just vibe code the infra configs and hope for the best, you need someone who understands the output well enough that they could have written it themselves. That means that LLMs are at best a modest productivity boost for infra engineers right now. It's also much harder to simulate the output of LLM infra changes compared to running a browser, so it's more expensive to get training data to boost the next version of the model's performance.

Re: Career Advice in 2025

#63

Post by mulmen »

klodolph wrote: post #21
jes5199 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It’s not really an exception though. These are the same people who spent the last 20 years singing the praises of offshoring and follow-the-sun. It’s just trend chasing.

Honestly I think the mistake we made was calling it “work from home” instead of “telecommuting”.

Re: Career Advice in 2025

#64

Post by weatherlite »

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…

> By contrast, some things I think are worth pivoting into include infrastructure, databases, data engineering, stats, etc

I can't imagine why if LLMs can magically solve web development (which can be complex as hell depending on the app) they wouldn't be able to solve infrastructure, database or data engineering. I somewhat agree that our career moats were hurt (though not as much as you seem to believe in my opnion) but that's happening across the board.

Re: Career Advice in 2025

#65

Post by n_ary »

npodbielski wrote: post #51
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...

I believe, we are beyond the point of “bad software written, bad software deployed, business as usual” point long ago when AWS/GCP/Azure became an important requirement in job description.

A bad piece of software can be decently hidden by burning more money in cloud bills, which gives the inflated sense to the leadership that their products are doing global scale ground breaking.

With AI, I would not be surprised if the quality actually improves and the cost comes down(or stays same). Of course, more bad software will be written by now many aspiring entrepreneurs to realize their dream idea of spotify clone, then sacrificing their life saving on complex cloud bills and ever so profitable rise of revenue of all cloud services citing this as benefit of AI while doing some more layoffs to jack up the stock prices.

The real revelations will come(it always does, nature and economy works in cycles), when excessive layoff caused damage will come due and now everyone will scramble to rehire people in few years. Unlike the Ford innovation of replacing horse carts, software is more prevalent in our every aspects of life, same as doctors and lawyers and civil service, hence we need to honestly play the game until the wave turns and then cash in by making in 200x killing just like the businesses are cashing in on right now.

Re: Career Advice in 2025

#66

Post by csomar »

__loam wrote: post #27
bayarearefugee wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You don't stop the car but speed up faster toward the wall. That has been the strategy in the last decade or so. In other words, you invent a new AI-BLOCK-WEB-4.X thing and move the bubble one stage further.

Re: Career Advice in 2025

#67

Post by tibbar »

scarface_74 wrote: post #52
tibbar wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Let me try to state your overall point, as I understand it:

"The primary goal of a tech career is generally to get a high-paying, low-risk job. Many of those jobs are in Big Tech. You should optimize for getting one of those jobs (but ideally not in the Bay Area, because it has a high cost of living.) To do that, you should primarily focus on grinding Leetcode and system design, because those are what Big Tech will evaluate you on. There are no loopholes worth speaking of, and you will be competing with many other engineers for the same positions."

Feel free to correct me if I'm not getting it right. I have no particular issue with someone whose career strategy is the one above. It's actually important information for someone to learn, especially if they come from a small town, like I did, where Google et al. never darken your door.

However, that approach is not a common one in my community. Instead, I see people who exited startups as founders or early employees, people who had particular skills directly recruited by BigTech and others, people who worked at private companies with regular internal liquidity events. People who worked on stuff, by and large, that was interesting to them. People who have plenty of job opportunities, and don't feel like they're one of a thousand people competing for each position. By and large, I prefer this approach.

Re: Career Advice in 2025

#68

Post by csomar »

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…

Front-End interfaces can be as complex (or more complex) than Back-End/infra/analytics/etc... At the end of the day, it is all about data and the front-end needs to maintain state. If your interface is complex, your state will also be complex.

Re: Career Advice in 2025

#69

Post by weatherlite »

tibbar wrote: post #62
sangeeth96 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> This is an extremely dumb take ...ouch! ;) The important part is NOT auto-generating repetitive configs; it's about the effort and skill required to verify that output. On the frontend, we have an easy feedback loop to preview the effects before deploying. That also helps us produce lots of training data for frontend LLM output. On the backend, there is substantial risk with infra changes - you could drop the datab…

> On the frontend, we have an easy feedback loop to preview the effects before deploying

There are many ways to introduce subtle bugs into your system, I don't think the risk is that low in the front end. I'd agree with your take if LLMs were reliable, but they're not - especially on big codebases. A broken form is downtime just like a broken API endpoint, the damage is the same.

I understand where you're coming from, there's the sense that front end work is "less important" than backend work in some places, but honestly every company that cares about its product shouldn't really adopt this philosophy.

Re: Career Advice in 2025

#70

Post by fragmede »

nextts wrote: post #20
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.

A good signal is you get pissed off with LLMs because they hinder your job. Even if you tried in earnest to use them.

that sounds more like someone needs anger management classes than a problem with technology or LLMs
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