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LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do

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Re: LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do

#131

Post by photochemsyn »

If corporations really thought LLMs were a great cost-savings tool, then the obvious target for replacement are not the lower-paid staff, but the higher-paid staff - the ‘product managers and stakeholders’. That justifies token burn, replacing the 7- and 8-figure people, right?

But that’s not the real goal, is it? The goal is to inflate the stock value, take the cream off the top, and dump the whole business on the pension funds, maybe creating a too-big-to-fail scenario where the government steps in an bails out the industry as with the airlines during Covid.

This is why all the testimonials and narratives are so suspect - nobody knows what fraction of online posts were created simply to sell the narrative that LLMs are this incredible disruptive tool that will change the world, solely in order to create FOMO in the investor class.

In this particular case, I’d like to see links to samples of LLM created codebases for “PCI compliance, double-entry ledgers, escrows, reconciliation, payment lifecycles, bank transfer idempotency”. It should be easy to put an open-source LLM-generated version up on github, right? And if not, why not?

Re: LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do

#132

Post by 9dev »

hliyan wrote: post #30
cassianoleal wrote: post #15

> The company is now hiring again for a few roles and domain familiarity is not a strong differentiator anymore. We used to list "Software Engineer - Area". Now it's just "Software Engineer" and the team assignment comes after the offer is accepted. > Of course, this is good for brilliant engineers that never had the chance to get deep into the domain and now have better chances at getting a job, but it's also sad to…

> Domain knowledge can be learnt much quicker than how to apply good engineering principles. There was an entire thread a week ago about how domain expertise has always been the real moat: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48340411

And I'd still question it. The experience of just… knowing how a good architecture looks like without being able to really put it in words is what makes a good engineer to me. These people can pick up relevant regulations or industry terms and deliver value quickly enough.

Re: LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do

#133

Post by [deleted] »

discreteevent wrote: post #26

This anonymous article is likely more FUD from the AI industry. "Just give up,you can't beat the machine. Please go quietly, we want to take your place and it's easier for everybody if you don't resist because you believe it's pointless" 'Maybe I should consider woodworking' - Fuck off.

[deleted]

Re: LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do

#134

Post by bob1029 »

> Of course, I'm still employable because someone has to review the code and steer the robot. But I'm just another off-the-shelf engineer now. I have no domain expertise that another Sr. engineer steering an LLM cannot match. All my finance and payment domain expertise, all the debugging intuition and distributed system knowledge earned through hours of sweat and tears, is now promptable.

Ownership and responsibility are the new currency for the engineering staff. Willingness to implement these tools and then own the consequences of their use is what leadership is looking for. They want their cake while they eat cake, and they will keep those around who enable something approaching that experience. Owning the side effects of LLM use is more challenging than our own natural output because of the radical volume increase and unfamiliarity with low level details. However, I argue it is still possible. It has always been significantly more expedient to poke holes in someone (something) else's work than it is to perform that same work. And, the executives know this. They leverage this capability too.

The relationship between the business and the development team has been tenuous at best. I've rarely seen a technology team that was properly subservient to the business that ultimately signed their paychecks. I every case I have personally experienced, it is was like a hostage situation where the business owners are in constant terror of the technology people screwing them over in some infinitely nuanced way they or their lawyers could never understand. Many business owners are looking at this technology as a way out of the hostage situation. They noticed a window that was left unlocked. They are going for it right now. Whether or not they will succeed in their escape is a separate matter. Whether or not them being held hostage was justified is also a separate matter. It really helps to keep these things in their own lanes.

Re: LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do

#135

Post by throwaway63467 »

runamuck wrote: post #97
applfanboysbgon wrote: post #4

> Maybe I should consider transforming my woodworking hobby into a profession... Whatever your feelings on the future of the industry are, it's hard to imagine you'll find more professional success in artisan woodworking than artisan software.

I have a historic house with a hand carved/ uniquely shaped door. The jamb rotted and we paid a woodworker $4k to create a replacement. The door itself would easily cost $25k to replace. So, move to a major historic area with hand carved doors and you could make some decent money.

You assume there are enough of these jobs to go around and that you can just show up and do some extremely intricate work. Repairing historic doors and more elaborate woodworking isn’t easy to learn as the knowledge mostly doesn’t exist online anywhere, I also own a historic house and often ask the top tier LLMs for details e.g. about my staircase, they always give wrong answers as this knowledge is simply too exotic and not in their training set. And no one online talks about these things, 99 % of woodworking videos on YouTube are focus on beginners, you can’t replace a professional education watching videos and reading books. That will protect woodworkers with these skills of course but it’s wrong to assume you can just break into this market and be successful, most devs with woodworking hobbies are really shit at their craft and struggle to create even a regular elaborate cabinet, no way they will be able to compete with good craftsmen for these few lucrative projects.

Re: LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do

#136

Post by shreddit »

This doesn’t read to me as someone who is sincerely impressed or rather surprised what ai is capable off.

This reads like someone is trying to convince me, that ai is just this good, and that the author is telling me to use more ai.

To me this sounds like: Trust me, it’s really bad, i know what I’m talking about. Just lean into it, or change profession.

Re: LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do

#137

Post by techblueberry »

juleiie wrote: post #125
lelanthran wrote: post #14

To me looks like, if we're not collectively careful, civilisation will soon be on a path to an evolutionary dead-end. Anything that can replace a deeply experienced s/ware engineer can replace anyone in the employment stack, meaning that only the owners of capital will be left, and they too will soon fade as the economy falls off a cliff and money has no value, because the only value that money has is the value of a…

That sounds more like a problem of close minded narrow focus on economic output instead of culture, virtue and spiritual traditions. AI is fundamentally an equivalent to slave economy . Cheap, plentiful workforce. This time ethically neutral. You either get Greece or Rome. I’d prefer Greece but it will probably be Rome. From the past we can predict the future.

> That sounds more like a problem of close minded narrow focus on economic output instead of culture, virtue and spiritual traditions.

I’m starting to be more sensitive to the argument that without god, people are unable to have a strong moral foundation. Not for the people expressing creativity in how they fuck, but as a check on those in power.

Re: LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do

#138

Post by Lionga »

t34t34r43 wrote: post #113
iandanforth wrote: post #18

Wut? I pilot LLMs all day but there's no way in hell I'd agree to be at the helm of a finance product. That first pillar is still there. Maybe the author isn't aware of the impact they have, but I know, with the evidence of reverted PRs, that when I step outside my area of deep knowledge I can no longer call BS on the agents. Our most capable agent, with access to the same kind of distributed systems the author talks…

Posting this under a burner so I don't dox myself: I work in FinTech on a regulated product. We have access to Mythos. Mythos identified part of our codebase that it confidently asserted was not complaint with a particular regulation and we were at grave risk by allowing it to operate the way it was. Except this was not the case, it had of course hallucinated what the regulation actually required (I know this because…

Have you added "Make no mistakes" to the proompt? Mythos can't go wrong then, must be a skill issue.

Re: LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do

#139

Post by adam_arthur »

misswaterfairy wrote: post #70
jmyeet wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's an extraordinarily rosy view of the future. I'm old enough to remember the dot-com crash, specifically the years afterwards. In 2002-2003, the unemployment rate of software engineers was something like 40%. In fact, the only reason it wasn't higher was because of the number of people who had permanently left the field to become plumbers (or other trades). I think this is going to be worse. In the dot-com crash…

> I think people are being naive here thinking this can't or won't happen in tech. What would this future look like? Software developer salaries burrowing into the ground?

There's quite a large cushion for software salaries to decline before permanent structural unemployment were to set in.

It's not really feasible for "normal" businesses to hire developers at current salaries.

Tech companies will probably shrink in headcount, but all the non-tech kind of businesses can increase developer headcount.

Current Tech salaries are far above other fields while requiring (used to) significantly less training or time investment to get into.

Phase 1 is more likely that software comp will normalize with other professions, and more hiring will happen at the fringes rather than being concentrated in a few big companies.

Re: LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do

#140

Post by jmkni »

mcmcmc wrote: post #36
jmkni wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends what you mean by woodworking I work with a guy who does decking (gardens, caravans, etc) and builds sheds, fences, things like that and he does very well indeed (he's also incredibly good at it to be fair)

Most people would just call that construction

Construction working entirely with wood

If only there was another word for that...?

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