[dead]
LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do
251–260 of 1001 posts
Re: LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do
#252My job as a staff engineer has turned into just reviewing slop farm vomit from offshore devs in Pakistan making pennies on the dollar given a slop code subscription and going wild. I’ve lately just turned to having Claude do a quick /review, spot checking it, doing my own review and the. firing up some web agents to make the needed changes and just ignoring the back and forth because they don’t give a fuck anyway. Ju…
I will be happy if Claude lets me eliminate my offshore Genpact team. I don’t need slop from slop.
Re: LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do
#253> 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.
look at layoffs.fyi. chances are he will be laid off pretty soon. and if not tomorrow, give it couple extra years until AI gets even better. it is one-way road, down the hill. not woodworking. farming. get a pot of land and grow your own food. do not participate in economy at all. that's the only survival.
> get a pot of land and grow your own food
Rejecting industrialized society is actually very expensive
Re: LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do
#254Wut? 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…
> I pilot LLMs all day
Love the metaphor. Planes are sophisticated machines capable of auto-piloting, but humans are still needed to ultimately pilot the beast.
Re: LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do
#255There are lots of positives that have resulted from using AI in software engineering. (1) No more long repetitive text editing sessions. I.e. changing namespaces or replacing deprecated APIs with the "correct" ones. AI will make nearly perfect text modifications with ease. (2) No more bike-shedding code reviewers nitpicking over every tiny coding decision. I.e, "you should use std::format instead of std::stringstream". AI will match the existing set of nitpicks so you don't have to. (3) Average Joe's and Jane's can craft applications by just talking to the computer. This might inject a freshness to the current state of software. Currently, we are all forced to use the same bloated applications like Word, Excel, Jira, and Photoshop. We are currently forced to deal with the same set of monopolistic SW companies. Now average folk can solve problems and avoid dealing with Microsoft for a spreadsheet program.
Re: LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do
#256Even if the model can replace a domain expert on the software side, you still need a human who can decide if the technical solution actually meets the business needs and that would require a human with domain expertise.
Re: LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do
#257Think of it like this
You’ve already faced this the entire time with… libraries on github.
If employers knew how much you can just use a new standard library, or ask you to “use React”, that’s a lot like asking you to use an LLM to speed things up. You also benefit from the collective wisdom of a lot of people. Do you write assembly or pixel shaders by hand?
Re: LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do
#258Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I've worked on projects in the airline and health industry which are highly regulated too. The regulations can be incredibly difficult to process and implement, and make sure you adhere to everything correctly. I've been involved in multiple scenarios where people have made false assertions about compliance or lack of. I'd still place a bet that the SOA models make _far_ less mistakes than humans.
[flagged]
Re: LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do
#259I always remember of the infamous Steve Jobs quote "Ideas are cheap". If execution is everything, and frontier LLMs solve execution, then ideas are the gateway to abundance now, but abundance alone does not guarantee "stickiness".
What I think is often overlooked is the human "Willingness" and "Care" of staying with the thing for the lack of a better term. What I mean by that is that a lot of people just don't care enough, or don't want to, build, maintain, and own things. Sure you can ship V1 faster, but will you remain on the grind?
I think a great example of what probably will happen is found in Suno, the AI Music thing. I don't know if y'all have tried it, but it now produces really good stuff. What's happening there? A lot of people play with their own little universe and get tired quickly, move away from it, and only a few prolific creators stay and turn it into a "job like" environment.
We may have shifted the scale and the economics of "delegation" and "execution" but I think there are still a lot of other factors to consider.
Re: LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do
#260> 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.
look at layoffs.fyi. chances are he will be laid off pretty soon. and if not tomorrow, give it couple extra years until AI gets even better. it is one-way road, down the hill. not woodworking. farming. get a pot of land and grow your own food. do not participate in economy at all. that's the only survival.
My comment was about the fact that even if you're laid off, you're more likely to find success in artisanal software than artisanal woodworking. That statement is not an assertion that you're guaranteed success, just that it's more likely to sustain yourself than woodworking is.
Layoffs also don't really tell you anything. Is it actually LLMs that are causing layoffs or is it deteroriating economic conditions and uncertainty amidst war, oil shocks, etc.? Is it junior employees being laid off, or seniors? If it's the former, someone with 10+ years of professional experience might not have reason to be concerned. I happen to believe that, LLMs or not, the software development field already had far too many jobs, employing a large number of clueless people who contributed somewhere between zero and negative value to their organizations, and that it was overdue for a correction anyways.