I'm a principal engineer at Microsoft. I barely program anymore
1–10 of 33 posts
Re: I'm a principal engineer at Microsoft. I barely program anymore
#2This feels like a LinkedIn article ...
Anyway does a Principal Engineer at Microsoft typically code a lot?
Re: I'm a principal engineer at Microsoft. I barely program anymore
#3I think we're going to see a negative impact on the software industry thanks to the LLM hype. There is a metric of LLMs which is hard to measure, and that is something like the quality of the solution, which includes how well the problem is abstracted, and how well the solution is decomposed in such a way that it becomes easily scalable, resilient, etc.
The article shows how this is happening. The examples given are translating code from one programming language to another, explaining a codebase, and generating small solutions to common problems (interview questions). At the end the author jumps to the conclusion that literally anything will be possible via prompting an LLM. This does not necessarily follow, and we could be hitting a wall, if we haven't already.
What LLMs lack is creativity and novel seeking functions. Without this you cannot have an intelligent system. LLMs are effectively smart (like 'smart' in smart phone) knowledge bases. They have a lot encoded knowledge and you can retrieve that knowledge with natural language. Very useful, with many great use cases like learning or even some prototyping (emphasis on some) capabilities.
If LLMs could actually write code as well as a human, even prompting would not be necessary. You could just give it an app, and tell it to improve it, fix bugs, add new features based on usage metrics. I'm sure the industry has tried this, and if it had been successful, we would have already replaced ALL programmers, not just senior programmers at large companies that already have hundreds or thousands of other engineers already.
Re: I'm a principal engineer at Microsoft. I barely program anymore
#4This feels like a LinkedIn article ... Anyway does a Principal Engineer at Microsoft typically code a lot?
This place is becoming as much of a dumping ground for vanity blogging as LinkedIn already is. There's no discouragement of accounts like this that have no activity here but self promotion.
Re: I'm a principal engineer at Microsoft. I barely program anymore
#5This feels like a LinkedIn article ... Anyway does a Principal Engineer at Microsoft typically code a lot?
This place is becoming as much of a dumping ground for vanity blogging as LinkedIn already is. There's no discouragement of accounts like this that have no activity here but self promotion.
Agreed.
Re: I'm a principal engineer at Microsoft. I barely program anymore
#6This feels like a LinkedIn article ... Anyway does a Principal Engineer at Microsoft typically code a lot?
L6+ (google scale) are mostly doc engineers who work on architecture and leading the team. I don't think this is anything new
Re: I'm a principal engineer at Microsoft. I barely program anymore
#7This ends up being an advert for a new Microsoft tool
Re: I'm a principal engineer at Microsoft. I barely program anymore
#8Is it just me or do these people simply lose their grip on reality with all the organizational abstractions?
Re: I'm a principal engineer at Microsoft. I barely program anymore
#9"Barely programs." Pffft. Read his previous article: "Wild Cloud" where he fixes society with a local cloud implementation.
https://payne.io/posts/wild-cloud/
It's not abundantly clear what makes a "wild cloud" different than say, "some computers networked together," but I'm eagerly awaiting an update!
Re: I'm a principal engineer at Microsoft. I barely program anymore
#10This feels like a LinkedIn article ... Anyway does a Principal Engineer at Microsoft typically code a lot?
Yes, I code a lot. My GitHub is public as are many of the projects I work on.