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Career Advice in 2025

lethain.com

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Re: Career Advice in 2025

#121

Post by simonw »

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.

Will wrote one of my all-time favorite essays about software engineering: https://lethain.com/migrations/

He's worth paying attention to IMO.

Re: Career Advice in 2025

#122

Post by bayarearefugee »

__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…

I'm entirely in agreement with you, I just have a dark sense of humor.

I do actually use claude quite a bit recently and I suspect (completely anecdotal, so take it with a boatload of salt) it speeds up my development time by about 25% on average. But its a very lumpy sort of speed up that is sometimes a slow down depending upon how wacky the LLM's answers are. And I find claude 3.7 to be worse than claude 3.5 in many ways which makes me confused about how hyped up it is and further disillusioned about the "common sense" idea people around these parts have that the technology is just going to keep improving significantly year over year.

I use it entirely through the web interface and using the lowest price basic monthly subscription fee. I am probably a cost center for Anthropic rather than a profit center, but I don't really see that as my problem to worry about. I'll enjoy the thing while it lasts and then not cry too hard when the house of cards collapses.

Re: Career Advice in 2025

#123

Post by acheron »

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

Is this supposed to be an endorsement or an indictment?

Re: Career Advice in 2025

#124

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

schnable wrote: post #107
coffeefirst wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah... unfortunately that might be where we are. I have no analogy for this except the railroads of the Gilded Age. Did railroads become a pretty big deal? Yeah. They were also a giant vortex that slurped up endless investment, far more than the real demand could possibly justify. And it ends, well, we know how it ends.

Fiber optic and data center build out in the nineties is similar. Overinvestment led to a bust for a period, but the infrastructure was useful and provided the foundation for the next wave of Internet growth. LLMs could be similar.

At the very least, lots of software will end up running on GPUs.

Re: Career Advice in 2025

#125

Post by dalyons »

simonw wrote: post #121
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.

Will wrote one of my all-time favorite essays about software engineering: https://lethain.com/migrations/ He's worth paying attention to IMO.

This was excellent and rings very true, thank you

Re: Career Advice in 2025

#126

Post by 0hijinks »

hosteur wrote: post #105
mulmen wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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”.

> Honestly I think the mistake we made was calling it “work from home” instead of “telecommuting”. I am curious. Why do you think calling it telecommuting would have made any significant difference? And what difference would it have made? Where do you imagine we would be today if more people referred to it with that word?

My drive-by opinion: "telecommuting" has an advantage in optics/marketing and flexibility over "work from home" for both business leaders and employees. If I tell a board of directors or shareholders that "80% of our workforce performs some fraction of their weekly tasks ______", I imagine the following:

- "from home" elicits images of relaxation and lost productivity, while "via telecommuting" sounds like a commute still takes place and work is just as productive

- "from home" sounds like retreating to a comfort zone, while "via telecommuting" sounds like embracing a new technology or skill

- "from home" sounds like remote workers ought to be performing their tasks from their domicile only, while "via telecommuting" sounds like remote workers can do their work wherever they are

If businesses had adopted "telecommuting" terminology, I believe business leaders would not feel obligated to push back in order to regain productivity. I think it's easier to attack the trend of WFH given the points above. I actually agree with the proposal that WFH is a weak terminology, but had never sat down and thought about it before.

From the perspective of initial adoption, I think it would have happened just as fast. Workers were thrust into remote work arrangements during COVID, and everyone would have quickly gotten the gist of what "telecommuting" means, so it would have been the new buzzword to attract talent in job listings just as "remote" or "work from home" have been. Just without the downsides in CEO perception.

Re: Career Advice in 2025

#127

Post by Apocryphon »

simonw wrote: post #121
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.

Will wrote one of my all-time favorite essays about software engineering: https://lethain.com/migrations/ He's worth paying attention to IMO.

Is he going to update it with how AI will assist in migrations? Or get an LLM to ghostwrite it?

Re: Career Advice in 2025

#128

Post by roland35 »

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 in general. I would add - try to pick a skill which gives you a deep understanding in something fundamental which will always be relevant, rather than a particular shiny tech.

I would love the bay area, but unfortunately it is extremely inaccessible for me and others once you have a family. Trying to find a place to live in a good school district seems like it takes minimum $2M for a house. Renting is less long term secure when trying to maintain consistency for kids. That's not even get into earthquakes and wildfires!

Re: Career Advice in 2025

#129

Post by titanomachy »

roland35 wrote: post #128
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 in general. I would add - try to pick a skill which gives you a deep understanding in something fundamental which will always be relevant, rather than a particular shiny tech. I would love the bay area, but unfortunately it is extremely inaccessible for me and others once you have a family. Trying to find a place to live in a good school district seems like it takes minimum $2M for a house. Renting is les…

If you’re usual child-raising age then you probably have 6-10 years of experience, and there should be lots of jobs that pay $500k in the Bay Area. Buying a $2m house on that salary is pretty doable.

Re: Career Advice in 2025

#130

Post by dingnuts »

randomNumber7 wrote: post #58
SwtCyber wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

I can barely think of any real application where they would help. I have a weekend project that's already too much context -- I asked Claude to change some Tailwind styles for me and it just shat up the whole file. and that was a toy!

even if allowed, how is Claude going to help my at work where a single file in a large project, one of many, is tens of thousands of lines long?

guess I'm a dinosaur

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