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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

#281

Post by Aurornis »

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…

This same complaint comes up on the topic of generic coding interviews, although shadowed behind the bigger complaints about simply disliking them. When people develop domain expertise they want to use that as a moat around their job. They want interviews to focus on stories about the things they’ve been exposed to on their past jobs, not test their abilities.

If you’ve been lucky enough to get jobs that expose you to the right things then you have a big advantage when the interviewers are looking for those specific things instead of your generic abilities or potential. It feels nice because you’re competing against a much smaller pool of people.

Unless you are not lucky enough to have been exposed to those specific domains yet. You can be a great engineer and even someone who learns quickly, but if you can’t point to the lines on your resume that match the job description then nothing else matters when the interviewers are playing experience bingo with your resume.

The move to generic coding interviews changed that. It was no longer enough to say that you had exposure to a topic at a past job. You had to show your coding skills, too. It wasn’t enough to ride on your credentials any more, which was highly frustrating to the well-credentialed.

However if you didn’t have the exact experience then the world of job opportunities becomes much larger. The people I know who like coding interviews the most (other than the rare competitive programming enjoyer) are people who are highly talented but came from less credentialed backgrounds: They don’t have an amazing university on their resume, they had to work at some company you’ve never heard of in their small town, but they are great at programming and just want a chance to prove that so they can move up to better companies. They’re never going to be picked by a company that’s looking for exact domain experience, but as companies open up job listings to people without that exact experience they have a chance to prove themselves.

The other people who relied on that domain experience to lock other candidates out of the hiring process don’t like it at all, though.

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

#282

Post by oceanplexian »

rvz wrote: post #176
t34t34r43 wrote: post #113

Earlier 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…

100%. Unfortunately those not in the depths of mission critical systems or regulated products will continue to believe that producing tons of code quickly using LLMs without humans in these systems is acceptable. Here's an example of what we will continue to see with folks fully immersed in gen AI psychosis: "The creator of claude code said that he no longer writes code for about 6 months and now has Claude doing all…

Why is it such a dramatic statement for Boris to claim that he no longer writes code?

Are people on HN still typing out functions by hand one character at a time?

It would be like a developer in 2020 claiming that he only writes assembly because compilers can’t be trusted. No one is taking that person seriously. If you chose a career in tech you made a decision to work in one of the fastest moving fields in human history. Now it’s time to get over it, learn the new tools and adapt.

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

#283

Post by dasil003 »

It's odd to me how quickly the author devalues their own experience just because AI can do certain things well. There's a huge chasm between what AI can do when prompted by an expert software engineer vs a non-technical person. Sure the models and the tooling will get better, but it still needs to be driven by someone with an intuition for how software works and able to dig in when necessary to unpack and correct the hallucinations, misplaced assumptions, or straight up borked code that will come from the gap between what a human wants and what they can express in words.

I have no idea how things will play out, but so far I am not worried because the amount of software continues to increase, and AI only accelerates that trend. This will require the same mental modeling, first principles thinking, and relentless curiosity that already formed the foundation of the software engineer skillset.

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

#284

Post by trumpdong »

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…

No lelanthran, software engineering and plumbing are not the same job. No lelanthran, LLMs can't be plumbers.

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

#285

Post by xpct »

hmokiguess wrote: post #259

I 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 e…

Could you elaborate on the AI Music tool? My impression was that it's used as a one-shot generation tool. I don't know much about music but I imagine artists need intermediary steps, track separation, instrument customization and other stuff I'm oblivious about. Without these, it's hard for me to imagine it being used for professional work.

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

#286

Post by trumpdong »

darkstarsys wrote: post #29
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…

Owners of capital, yes, but also owners of the means of production (which now means AI companies). See https://blog.oberbrunner.com/blog/ai-risks-taxonomy/#economi...

That's what capital means.

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

#287

Post by saghm »

trumpdong wrote: post #221
t34t34r43 wrote: post #113

Earlier 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…

It was my impression that a whole lot of products are only pretending to be compliant, and that it's much more profitable to operate like that.

Even if that's the case, I feel like accurately knowing which regulations you're in compliance with and not is would be kind of important from a risk management perspective. From a "maximize profits" perspective (which I'm not saying is good but what you're saying you thought they operated with), you'd want to know the potential gain from ignoring a given regulation and the likelihood of getting caught (along with the cost of the punishment if that's happens). This is the kind of math that I'd expect a finance company to be pretty familiar with, and giving that up for a fuzzy "idk if we're in compliance or not" check seems like a pretty huge liability (unless there's confidence in not being liable for blindly trusting the LLM, which I hope is not the future we're headed for but I guess I can never be totally confident in us not somehow ending up with rules that defy common sense).

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

#288

Post by hmokiguess »

xpct wrote: post #285
hmokiguess wrote: post #259

I 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 e…

Could you elaborate on the AI Music tool? My impression was that it's used as a one-shot generation tool. I don't know much about music but I imagine artists need intermediary steps, track separation, instrument customization and other stuff I'm oblivious about. Without these, it's hard for me to imagine it being used for professional work.

The frontier music models, the paid/pro Opus 4.8 equivalent ones, are more capable now, and Suno has a "harness" like Claude Code on their Studio tool that lets you iterate on the generation by doing stem splitting, track separation, edits that stay within the tempo, rhythmic structure, etc.

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

#289

Post by loloquwowndueo »

galactushonor wrote: post #261
t34t34r43 wrote: post #113

Earlier 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…

> it had of course hallucinated what the regulation actually required Did it do the correct job once you put the regulations doc(s) in the context?

What I usually do when in doubt is challenge the AI. “Please quote the section of regulation the product is non compliant with”. It usually admits it hallucinated the whole thing.

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

#290

Post by mannanj »

Isn't the solution to learn business skills?

My challenge is seeking good resources for the business skills. I'm doing sales for a passion project for the first time, and it's teaching me a lot. I'm just confused still on why it feels so hard and why I can't find an easier way.

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