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The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: New Jobs

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Re: The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: New Jobs

#131

Post by TheGRS »

xienze wrote: post #82
bwestergard wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think these arguments tend to reach impasse because one gravitates to one of two views: 1) My experiences with LLMs are so impressive that I consider their output to generally be better than what the typical developer would produce. People who can't see this have not gotten enough experience with the models I find so impressive, or are in denial about the devaluation of their skills. 2) My experiences with LLMs hav…

Not sure that's what I was getting at. People in camp 2 don't think an LLM can take over the job of a real software engineer. It's people in camp 1 that I wonder about. They're convinced that LLMs can accomplish anything and understand a codebase better than anyone (and that may be the case!). However, they're simultaneously convinced that they'll still be needed to do the prompting because ???reasons???.

One explanation is that some think we might be getting to the limits of what an LLM can reasonably do. There's a lot of functions of any job that are not easily translated to an LLM and are much more about interacting with people or critical thinking in a way LLMs can't do. I'm not sure if that's everyone's rationale but that's my personal view of the situation. Like the jobs will change but we likely won't be losing them to AI outright.

Re: The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: New Jobs

#132

Post by torben-friis »

mrdependable wrote: post #90

I think the reason AI isn't going to replace CEOs, or anyone in the C suite, is pretty obvious. They see themselves as the company. Everyone else is a resource. AI is here to replace resources, just like investing in a brand new lawn mower. For them, replacing an executive with AI is like saying you're going to marry a broom.

Most companies contain several layers worth of business context that the higher ups have no idea of, as well.

Everything from "unpaid bills are handled this way" through "the website has a certificate that needs yearly renewal" to "we need to report our earnings biweekly in Indonesia, and we need to retry the form several times before it works".

This is not fundamentally doable by LLMs because the higher ups wouldn't know what to ask for, and if they did it would not be feasible to keep everything in single persons head, no matter how AI-assisted.

So that alone I think guarantees a good amount of unreplaced jobs.

Re: The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: New Jobs

#133

Post by Terr_ »

> I think a part of the reason is that these roles are not just about sending emails and looking at graphs, but also about dangling a warm body over the maws of the legal system and public opinion.

Spoilers for "How I Met Your Mother" ... but there's a character who has that kind of job, as a legal meat-shield. Now, ~10 years after airing, this funny clip feels like it would only need slight adjustments.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8u62HptZ6TE

Re: The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: New Jobs

#134

Post by rootusrootus »

simplyluke wrote: post #125
xienze wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Hence why I've been quite bullish on software engineering (but not coding). You can easy set up 1) and 2) on contrived or sandboxed coding tasks but then 3) expands and dominates the rest of the role. Why can't LLMs and agents progress further to do this software engineering job better than an actual software engineer? I've never seen anyone give a satisfactory answer to this. Especially the part about making mista…

Who is better positioned to pilot the LLM than a domain expert? "Software engineer" as a job title has included a lot of people who write near-zero-code, at least at the higher levels of the career ladder, for years prior to LLMs. People assuming the only, or even primary, function of the job is outputting code reveal a profound lack of understanding of the industry in my opinion. Beyond the first year or two it has…

> has included a lot of people who write near-zero-code, at least at the higher levels of the career ladder

This is something that I would have thought HN readers were pretty familiar with. LLMs can make my code work faster or more prolific, but with 30yoe I spend a fairly significant chunk of my work time doing anything but code.

Re: The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: New Jobs

#135

Post by rdevilla »

ej88 wrote: post #130
rdevilla wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By this definition, pre-LLM "business leaders" circa 2008 with not even an understanding of Excel were already "software engineers" this whole time - just prompting out software through their meatspace agents, instead of their silicon ones. Dismissal of arguments as "just semantics" is high school level argumentation.

clearly not the same when they were abstracted from the realities of building software and.. directly taking accountability for it! by semantics, i mean the definition and pool of tasks, responsibilities, and outcomes a job is comprised of is shifting so fast that the borders of what is a 'software engineer' and 'business person' are melding together. software engineers are business people in their own way

I don't understand why humans abstract a business leader away from the realities of building software, while LLMs do not.

If the rhetoric is to be believed, the set of responsibilities falling to the role of "software engineer" is shrinking to zero, and all engineers are being forcibly "promoted" to the managerial class of shepherding around agents.

Re: The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: New Jobs

#136

Post by rootusrootus »

simonw wrote: post #45
rootusrootus wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My implementation speed and bug fixing my typed code to be the bottleneck I remember those days fondly and often wish I could return to them. These days it's not uncommon to go a couple days without writing a meaningful amount of code. The cost of becoming too senior I suppose.

Anecdotally I've been observing a significant uptick in the amount of code being produced by my peers who are in senior engineer, leadership and engineering management positions. They can take their 20+ years of experience and use it to build working systems in the gaps between meetings now. Previously they would have to carve out at least half a day of uninterrupted time to get something meaningful done.

> build working systems in the gaps between meetings now

Agreed, I've actually done this. Sitting in a meeting where someone was asking about what tooling we could build, what it might be capable of, what their options were. So while we were chatting I was having Claude build a working demo.

In the end it still needs to be turned into an enterprise app with all the annoying accoutrements that go with that, but for demo work it was phenomenal.

Re: The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: New Jobs

#137

Post by icedchai »

the_af wrote: post #52
hombre_fatal wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mostly agree with you. Though something I half-miss is using my own software as I build it to get a visceral feel for the abstractions so far. I've found that testability is a good enough proxy for "nice to use" since I think "nice to use" tends to mean that a subsystem is decoupled enough to cover unexpected usage patterns, and that's an incidental side-effect of testability. One concern I have is that it's gettin…

> But now that signal is even more rubbish. Even readmes and blog posts are becoming worse signals since they don't necessarily showcase your own communication skills anymore nor how you think about problems. Yup. I've spotted former coworkers who I know for a fact can barely write in their native language, let alone in English, working for AWS and writing English-language technical blog posts in full AI-ese. Full of…

The "dead Internet" theory has become more real. It's especially bad on LinkedIn. Everyone is now an "AI expert", posting generated slop and updating their profiles with AI enhanced head shots.

Re: The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: New Jobs

#138

Post by pixl97 »

torben-friis wrote: post #132
mrdependable wrote: post #90

I think the reason AI isn't going to replace CEOs, or anyone in the C suite, is pretty obvious. They see themselves as the company. Everyone else is a resource. AI is here to replace resources, just like investing in a brand new lawn mower. For them, replacing an executive with AI is like saying you're going to marry a broom.

Most companies contain several layers worth of business context that the higher ups have no idea of, as well. Everything from "unpaid bills are handled this way" through "the website has a certificate that needs yearly renewal" to "we need to report our earnings biweekly in Indonesia, and we need to retry the form several times before it works". This is not fundamentally doable by LLMs because the higher ups wouldn't…

Eh, this sounds like the people that have been replaced at a lot of companies already.

>"the website has a certificate that needs yearly renewal"

For example, why modern certificates are being dropped down to very short times. The push to automate everything.

>"unpaid bills are handled this way"

Any company that has things like this will start changing their process.

You have this idea (and maybe the AI company CEOs do too) that this will be like a container drop in. No, instead these things will be part of a gradual process change and human parts will eventually disappear.

>So that alone I think guarantees a good amount of unreplaced jobs.

What percent. This is what matters at the end of the day. Once unemployment reaches high rates over all age groups in a society that is used to low unemployment things go bad. It can take longer to go bad where you have social safety nets and jobs programs, but in places like the US that is communism, so expect the haves to shoot at the have nots.

Re: The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: New Jobs

#139

Post by pixl97 »

paulnpace wrote: post #122
mrdependable wrote: post #90

I think the reason AI isn't going to replace CEOs, or anyone in the C suite, is pretty obvious. They see themselves as the company. Everyone else is a resource. AI is here to replace resources, just like investing in a brand new lawn mower. For them, replacing an executive with AI is like saying you're going to marry a broom.

In the U.S., most or all states require all corporations to have a president, secretary, and treasurer.

Heh, how long before someones agent starts looking for these 3 so it can run the business in the background and feeding them all the reports they need to sign.

Re: The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: New Jobs

#140

Post by elcapitan »

crote wrote: post #42
elcapitan wrote: post #2

Is there a way back to calling human beings human beings and not "meat"? Or is the sociopathic Jeffrey Dahmer undertone now the new normal?

That is exactly why the term is being used. A company like Amazon doesn't treat its warehouse workers as human beings. Workers are seen as disposable: forced to piss in bottles, forced to work around the corpses of their collapsed coworkers, paid the absolute minimum possible, and replaced the second they don't operate like a perfect unfailing machine. You aren't viewed like a human, you are a tool. Cattle. A piece o…

That's hilarious given that this entire site here is using the term unironically to refer to people in general, good stuff
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