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

human-in-the-loop.bearblog.dev

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

#491

Post by trumpdong »

misnome wrote: post #232
aleqs wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The corporations and executives are already winning if you swallowed the concept of 'rockstar' engineer. Sure there are more and less experienced engineers, but even interns can and often do provide good input and spot mistakes made by seniors. The 'rockstar' engineer at most tech companies simply equates to the somewhat autistic guy with a brown nose who's working 15 hour days for a pat on the head from management (…

For the most part there aren’t 10x engineers But there are certainly 0.1x engineers

I've long thought a 10x engineer is one with just the right amount of analysis paralysis - not too much or too little. It's not that they're 10x engineers, it's that everyone else is 0.1x due to a confluence of reasons. And the ones we call 0.1x are 0.01x.

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

#492

Post by hax0ron3 »

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…

>Anything that can replace a deeply experienced s/ware engineer can replace anyone in the employment stack

Well, except for roles where being human is an inherent part of the value for customers: bartender, prostitute, certain kinds of boutique sales, professional athlete, stage actor, etc. And for roles that have to be human for legal reasons.

Of course such roles make up a small part of the entire job market.

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

#493

Post by bobnamob »

diordiderot wrote: post #265
dakiol wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's the expertise of engineers on the team that push it back on track. But how are you so sure your colleagues are not more "expert" than you? Prior LLMs there was room for very good engineers and mediocre engineers to work together in 99% of the companies out there. With LLMs, only the "best" engineers will survive, because nobody needs mediocre engineers anymore. This being HN, I imagine every engineer reading t…

Exactly. Same with tractors. Once they arrived, nobody benefited except Big Tractor. Famously a net loss for humanity.

At the very least _big_ tractor (John Deere) is a net drain on society

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

#494

Post by ilaksh »

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…

3 years max. Maybe 5 if you are lucky.The models will continue to improve. The exponential gains in compute efficiency that have been ongoing for 70+ years will continue and that will result in even smarter models. There are dramatic hardware changes in the pipeline.

But really that particular issue could have been solved by literally just telling it in a markdown file or instructions something like "verify all facts or compliance requirements with web search and include citations in responses".

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

#495

Post by oytis »

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…

How is software engineering not a domain? If other domains can be easily learnt, sure this one can too

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

#496

Post by Havoc »

causal wrote: post #385
yoyohello13 wrote: post #370

I’m just continuing to get paid as long as I can, while also going back to school part time to train in a role that’s insulated from AI. Having a backup plan at least makes me feel better day to day.

> to train in a role that’s insulated from AI Would love to know more about that role

>Would love to know more about that role

Anything that can't be done with a screen and internet connection is a good start

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

#498

Post by Havoc »

hypfer wrote: post #203

This feels fake/engineered but regardless of that also redundant. It's the exact same story that we've heard countless times by now. Hosted on a blog with just a single post. Named in a way that suggests that said blog was created for this very single post. What is there to learn from this other than LLMs seem to be bad for some people's psyches and that AI companies need these very stories to not get their funding s…

>Hosted on a blog with just a single post

Would you put a "Hey i'm feeling a little useless" post on your main blog / linkedin?

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

#499

Post by nsxwolf »

I started feeling like a factory worker well before LLMs. My reputation and network stopped mattering and it all came down to take this assessment and do this Leetcode to prove you are a good enough replaceable cog. I have about 15 more years before retirement and I doubt there is anything left to look forward to in my career.

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

#500

Post by hparadiz »

thewebguyd wrote: post #471
PeterStuer wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have worked on highly regulated areas in finance (risk). Compliance is a highly creative art, often requiring lots of out-of-the-box thinking and non-obvious solutions. The people I found worst at this were IT. They tend to over-interpret regulation, and super-restrict beyond what is needed for actual de-facto compliance. My guess is the model makes the same mistakes as the programmers: taking 'rules' literally, un…

> IT. They tend to over-interpret regulation, and super-restrict beyond what is needed for actual de-facto compliance. IME this is less the fault of IT and more so bad auditors that won't consider, or just don't understand, what compensating controls are. If it doesn't meet their little checklist exactly, they fail the audit.

It's cause IT never has to live with the consequences of their decisions. Who cares if the other department keeps bleeding talent because you twisted the knobs so hard no one wants to work in your system?
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