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Career Advice in 2025

lethain.com

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Re: Career Advice in 2025

#131

Post by ativzzz »

tibbar wrote: post #87
n_ary wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Steer away from skills like web development that are clearly getting eaten by LLMs On the contrary, here in my corner of EU nearly 60% of new jobs are frontend or full stack. Anything else left is mostly SAP consultant or DevOps. I think, the whole WebDev is dead end is just false lies to dissuade new entrants. Literally most successful business with a digital solution is web stuff with some automation that would o…

There's another factor here I forgot to mention - web development, as a specialization, tends to be paid less and has a lower career ceiling in many companies than backend and infra engineering. This is a personal observation on my part but I've seen many other people remark on this. True full stack engineering, I think, is reasonably safe from the robots at the moment. If someone likes building products, I'd basical…

> a lot of frontend code is trivia that you can just ask the LLM for these days

If you're building CRUD yes. If you're doing anything remotely complex or novel, LLMs fall apart, much like they do for complex backend tasks. There's a lot of cool, highly customized stuff you can build with JS, and LLMs don't do a very good job at general problem solving.

They're still helpful for writing small, specific functions, or providing high level guidance

Re: Career Advice in 2025

#132

Post by axpy906 »

The blog confused me. The author opens with senior leaders but does not distinguish between ic and managers. That is a very important difference and the way they are written is somewhat interchangeable at the start but I don’t think that’s necessarily correct.

Managers and senior ics are both facing unique challenges now. However, they are very different and don’t have a lot in common.

For me, as a senior ic, it’s having the right skills and staying afloat in this challenging environment. For the middle managers, from what I can see, it’s not being redundant as Mark Cuban recently pointed out.

Re: Career Advice in 2025

#133

Post by dakiol »

tibbar wrote: post #87
n_ary wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Steer away from skills like web development that are clearly getting eaten by LLMs On the contrary, here in my corner of EU nearly 60% of new jobs are frontend or full stack. Anything else left is mostly SAP consultant or DevOps. I think, the whole WebDev is dead end is just false lies to dissuade new entrants. Literally most successful business with a digital solution is web stuff with some automation that would o…

There's another factor here I forgot to mention - web development, as a specialization, tends to be paid less and has a lower career ceiling in many companies than backend and infra engineering. This is a personal observation on my part but I've seen many other people remark on this. True full stack engineering, I think, is reasonably safe from the robots at the moment. If someone likes building products, I'd basical…

Anecdotally, I work on backend/cloud and my senior frontend engineers do earn not as much as I do, but close… and their environments are always less stressful (major outages are not caused by frontends usually and when so, reverting to the last stable commit is enough since frontends are stateless; their toolset is narrower than mine, so yeah they need to jump between frontend frameworks but that’s fine… me in the meantime need to jump between backend frameworks, dbs, k8s, distributed system knowledge, unix tooling, OS/TCP/IP, etc)

Re: Career Advice in 2025

#134

Post by from-nibly »

faizshah wrote: post #10
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.

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.

RTOs generally have nothing to do with any of the things they say. They are just layoffs.

You can't argue with them about the effectiveness of remote work. They aren't trying to optimize work. They are trying to fire people.

Working from home doesn't fire people, being more productive and happy doesn't fire people. Your mental well being doesn't have any bearing on how many people they need to fire.

Re: Career Advice in 2025

#135

Post by intelVISA »

__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.

Don't be silly, if the entire US stock market really was wagered on this technology then you'd better start learning Mandarin.

Re: Career Advice in 2025

#136

Post by csomar »

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 2008 set the stage that the government will bail out reckless economic activity for the top at the expense of the tax payer. Actions no longer have consequences and you better be big enough to hold the economy hostage to your scheme.

Re: Career Advice in 2025

#137

Post by dingnuts »

bayarearefugee wrote: post #122
__loam wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 man…

comments like this are giving me life lol

I feel like I'm living in an insane asylum but your experience largely matches mine, except I've been reluctant to open my wallet

Re: Career Advice in 2025

#138

Post by KronisLV »

n_ary wrote: post #65
npodbielski wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

Doesn't this apply to almost all software out there nowadays?

Bloated enterprise frameworks (lots of reflection and dynamic class loading on the back end, wasteful memory usage; large bundles and very complicated SPA on the front end), sub optimal DB querying, bad architectures, inefficient desktop and mobile apps built on web technologies because of faster iteration speed, things like messing up OS package management where it's not easy to halt updates and they don't integrate well with the rest of the system (e.g. snap packages), messy situation with operating systems where you get things like ads in the start menu or multiple conflicting UI styles within it (Windows), game engines that are hard to use well to the point where people scoff just hearing UE5 and so on.

Essentially just Wirth's law, taken to the maximum of companies and individuals optimizing for shipping quickly and things that catch attention, instead of having good engineering underneath it all: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law

Not the end of the world, but definitely a lot of churn and I don't see things improving anytime soon. If anything, I fear that our craft will be cheapened a lot due to prevalence of LLMs and possible over-saturation of the field. I do use them as any other tool when it makes sense to do so... but so does everyone else.

Re: Career Advice in 2025

#139

Post by intelVISA »

gitaarik wrote: post #100
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…

Why would web dev be eaten away by LLM's and other fields not?

Why would making a $5 shirt be eaten away by power looms and haute couture not?

Re: Career Advice in 2025

#140

Post by stickfigure »

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.

I just read this for the first time and was totally underwhelmed. What is the takeaway? "Derisk, Enable, Finish"? This is not insightful or even interesting.
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