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Career Advice in 2025

lethain.com

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Re: Career Advice in 2025

#111

Post by everdrive »

r_singh wrote: post #59
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 mon…

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

In the case of my industry (middling cybersecurity) we're seeing the following "advances"

- When you ask someone a question, they vomit your question into co-pilot, paste the result, and presume that they have helped somehow.

- All meetings now have not-useful meeting notes and no one reads these.

- People are considering implementing security co-pilot, which will introduce useful advances such as spending much more time building promptbooks so co-pilot can understand our logs.

- A lot more people think they're engineers, and vomit out scripts which do things the "authors" do not anticipate.

Re: Career Advice in 2025

#112

Post by apwell23 »

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…

This guy probly doesn't doesn't do any actual work just reads ppl like Mario Damadai who are out there claiming 90% of coding will be done by llms in next 3-6 months.

"thought leaders" are a plague on working ppl.

Re: Career Advice in 2025

#113

Post by apwell23 »

> Many companies that were stable, durable market leaders are now in tenuous positions because foundational models threaten to erode their advantage.

uh.. which companies are these ?

Chegg?

Re: Career Advice in 2025

#114

Post by greymalik »

apwell23 wrote: post #112
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…

This guy probly doesn't doesn't do any actual work just reads ppl like Mario Damadai who are out there claiming 90% of coding will be done by llms in next 3-6 months. "thought leaders" are a plague on working ppl.

An excerpt of the author’s bio:

> I’m a software engineering leader and writer, currently serving as Carta’s CTO. I’ve worked at Calm, Stripe, Uber, Digg, a few other places, and cofounded a defunct iOS gaming startup

Re: Career Advice in 2025

#115

Post by scarface_74 »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #102
scarface_74 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Equity in private companies especially in today’s climate is statistically meaningless. Does that include Stripe and SpaceX?

Stripe has given their employees a chance to sell their equity via a tender offer. SpaceX I’m not sure

There has to be a market of people who actually want to buy the equity and the company has to allow it. In the case of “scale up” early startups - the type the original commenter said he works for - usually either there is no one that wants to buy the equity or it’s a steep discount

Re: Career Advice in 2025

#116

Post by scarface_74 »

tibbar wrote: post #67
scarface_74 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 e…

Again, we can look at statistics instead of suffering from survivorship bias. The vast majority of employees in startups will not see outsized gains from exits especially in todays climate where the IPO market is dead and acquisitions are going for much less.

Re: Career Advice in 2025

#117

Post by apwell23 »

greymalik wrote: post #114
apwell23 wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This guy probly doesn't doesn't do any actual work just reads ppl like Mario Damadai who are out there claiming 90% of coding will be done by llms in next 3-6 months. "thought leaders" are a plague on working ppl.

An excerpt of the author’s bio: > I’m a software engineering leader and writer, currently serving as Carta’s CTO. I’ve worked at Calm, Stripe, Uber, Digg, a few other places, and cofounded a defunct iOS gaming startup

oh look another out of touch 'leader' . So sick of these ppl.

His career advice should be how to get your work done while appeasing "leaders" like him at work.

my company now has mandate that 'all coding work must be done by AI' and only manually if its not possible. They bought licenses to all AI coding tools.

Which would've been great if these things actually work. I've never felt more like a stupid cog in my whole career than now.

Re: Career Advice in 2025

#118

Post by ptero »

eastbound wrote: post #88
csomar wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Just like we study the “Crash of 1929”, our kids will study the “bubbles economy”: - Internet bubble 2001, - Blockchain bubble 2021, - AI bubble 2025, (Omitting 2008 and Covid because they’re not startup-related). Am I wrong or are they bubbling faster?

I think bubbles form and pop all the time. I would add (in the US) home price bubble, biotech bubble (of mid 2010s), cybersecurity bubble and more.

Pops are less noticeable when a lot of money is sloshing around so deflating one bubble immediately start inflating something else. Worker bees can switch to the next thing in the same "building next great thing, work is plentiful, money no object" environment.

So the bubbliness, IMO, is a function of the macroeconomic state, specifically the amount of money in the economy. Things get sober (and very ugly) when the money printing cycle ends, as it eventually must to avoid sliding into hyperinflation. My 2c.

Re: Career Advice in 2025

#119

Post by dzonga »

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…

Good advice -> but is an error or blindness > * Steer away from skills like web development that are clearly getting eaten by LLMs.

funny enough all the hyped YC / Bay area startups don't make as much as your typical CRUD webapp. Devs we tend to be attracted to tech. but what makes good tech doesn't mean it's a good business. That's why your typical bay area startup depends on vc funding & will likely spend 10 years without being cash flow positive.

Re: Career Advice in 2025

#120

Post by hatefulmoron »

schnable wrote: post #108
roncesvalles wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We've become so accustomed to the rip-roaring growth that came from widespread Internet adoption and now that it has piped down, we're desperate to find the next big boom. VR, crypto, blockchain, generative AI. And each time, like degenerate gamblers, we're feeling it , this must be it, the next Big 'Un, the bet that redeems all the bets that went wrong, bigger, riskier, bigger, riskier. But it just won't be, nothing…

I agree with the sentiment, but LLMs have already had a lot more adoption than VR and Crypto.

You're right of course, but nobody ever gave me a free VR headset or a few thousand dollars of Monero. OpenAI and Google will both give you, for free, access to an LLM whenever you want. I can do a Google search and help with LLM adoption right now, it will be at the top of the page.
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