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Career Advice in 2025

lethain.com

151–160 of 185 posts

Re: Career Advice in 2025

#151
post #83
post #45

I get why someone would want to tell people this, but I think it fails to be advice, as it describes the current state of affairs without much actual guidance for how to do better in it Which, to be fair, no one really seems to be able to answer that meaningfully

The real answer is, leaders chase trends, so to keep them satisfied you need to also chase trends. Some advises can be: * learn prompt engineering to impress your boss and next employer * adapt AI IDE at work, of course don’t go for cline or freemium ones, go for max expensive tier of Cursor/Windsurf/v0 etc * Take some expensive(more the better) courses and workshops on Agentic topics, build some small projects. Just…

Watch your boss file you for training a model on internal documents without permission

Re: Career Advice in 2025

#152
> managers were generally evaluated in that period based on their ability to hire, retain and motivate teams. The current market doesn’t value those skills particularly highly, but instead prioritizes a different set of skills: working in the details, pushing pace, and navigating the technology transition to foundational models / LLMs. This means many members of the current crop of senior leaders are either worse at the skills they currently need to succeed, or are less motivated by those activities. Either way, they’re having less fun.

Don't geeks enjoy playing with LLMs much more than hiring or any other admin/people/meeting type interaction? They should find dealing with the new wave of AI success a lot of fun, and a lot MORE fun that governance stuff, IMHO.

Re: Career Advice in 2025

#153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Honestly I think the mistake we made was calling it “work from home” instead of “telecommuting”. I am curious. Why do you think calling it telecommuting would have made any significant difference? And what difference would it have made? Where do you imagine we would be today if more people referred to it with that word?

My drive-by opinion: "telecommuting" has an advantage in optics/marketing and flexibility over "work from home" for both business leaders and employees. If I tell a board of directors or shareholders that "80% of our workforce performs some fraction of their weekly tasks ______", I imagine the following: - "from home" elicits images of relaxation and lost productivity, while "via telecommuting" sounds like a commute…

The only problem is that telecommuting is not a new buzzword, it was all the hype in 90s/00s, which is probably reason enough to pick a new word.

Re: Career Advice in 2025

#154
post #142
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one knows what the "current market" thing really is, people are making wild guesses looking at the hands of other people who also make wild guesses.

Is it statistically possible that one guess will approximate reality?

How statistically probable is it you’ll come across that correct guess?

Re: Career Advice in 2025

#155
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s important to understand how AI will affect your field and recalibrate your position or contribution accordingly It is a big enough change for this to be a valid question for anyone in the world today Leaving what you’re doing and going into “AI” will likely set you up for a crypto level disaster Vibe coding is a thing but vibe business building or job hunting isn’t! So beware of hype and know that in the end mon…

>It’s important to understand how AI will affect your field and recalibrate your position or contribution accordingly In the case of my industry (middling cybersecurity) we're seeing the following "advances" - When you ask someone a question, they vomit your question into co-pilot, paste the result, and presume that they have helped somehow. - All meetings now have not-useful meeting notes and no one reads these. - P…

>- When you ask someone a question, they vomit your question into co-pilot, paste the result, and presume that they have helped somehow.

We have been dealing with this at my job also. It's really concerning how this is becoming normalized and how often we've had to deal with it. Somehow there are people that have "Engineer" in their title that think this is acceptable workplace behavior and work product for a professional making $XXX,XXX/year.

We had a person join our team recently who doesn't know our stack at all (which is fine, we were happy to teach them). When another engineer reviewed their pull request and asked a question, they pasted the question into Copilot and responded to the pull request with the answer (which was wrong!), even going so far as to say "Copilot thinks it's this: ...". I almost lost it. Your job is to learn, understand, and apply that knowledge, not paste incorrect model responses back and forth between web forms!

It's baffling and enraging. Are people _trying_ to demonstrate to management and their teammates that they're actually worthless? Are our expectations as a profession really this low, that we don't expect people to understand the code that they push?

Re: Career Advice in 2025

#156
post #89
post #6

The statement >The current market doesn’t value those skills particularly highly, but instead prioritizes a different set of skills: working in the details, pushing pace, and navigating the technology transition to foundational models / LLMs. depends on the assumption that technology must "transition" to "foundational models / LLMs". The author doesn't seem to interrogate this assumption. In fact, most of the career…

> The author doesn't seem to interrogate this assumption. Neither do my senior leaders, so it might as well be true.

Our senior leaders have also been completely captured by this crap. Recently our CTO (public company in the US you've heard of) announced in chat that engineers with an aversion to relying on LLMs have an attitude problem that is incompatible with our company direction. I was blown away.

Re: Career Advice in 2025

#157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My drive-by opinion: "telecommuting" has an advantage in optics/marketing and flexibility over "work from home" for both business leaders and employees. If I tell a board of directors or shareholders that "80% of our workforce performs some fraction of their weekly tasks ______", I imagine the following: - "from home" elicits images of relaxation and lost productivity, while "via telecommuting" sounds like a commute…

The only problem is that telecommuting is not a new buzzword, it was all the hype in 90s/00s, which is probably reason enough to pick a new word.

[deleted]

Re: Career Advice in 2025

#158
post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It’s important to understand how AI will affect your field and recalibrate your position or contribution accordingly In the case of my industry (middling cybersecurity) we're seeing the following "advances" - When you ask someone a question, they vomit your question into co-pilot, paste the result, and presume that they have helped somehow. - All meetings now have not-useful meeting notes and no one reads these. - P…

>- When you ask someone a question, they vomit your question into co-pilot, paste the result, and presume that they have helped somehow. We have been dealing with this at my job also. It's really concerning how this is becoming normalized and how often we've had to deal with it. Somehow there are people that have "Engineer" in their title that think this is acceptable workplace behavior and work product for a profess…

This is basically what happened when you can 'Google' something. Thus is like that on steroid.

Re: Career Advice in 2025

#159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My drive-by opinion: "telecommuting" has an advantage in optics/marketing and flexibility over "work from home" for both business leaders and employees. If I tell a board of directors or shareholders that "80% of our workforce performs some fraction of their weekly tasks ______", I imagine the following: - "from home" elicits images of relaxation and lost productivity, while "via telecommuting" sounds like a commute…

The only problem is that telecommuting is not a new buzzword, it was all the hype in 90s/00s, which is probably reason enough to pick a new word.

Yes and business leaders ate it up. They only pushed back when it was rebranded as “work from home”.

Re: Career Advice in 2025

#160
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Web element feel similar to PHP or wordpress development in 2010. There are millions of small businesses that demand wordpress websites, but the barrier to entry to support and build systems got very low very quickly. Professional developers were competing with high school students and offshore devs for work. As a backend Developer, I can now build websites easily with Claude and react. I think web development, espec…

Genuine question: why do you think LLMs will be able to handle frontend development in a way they won’t be able to handle backend development? I assume you’re talking about real companies, not toy projects or websites for restaurants or whatever.

Well, "frontend development" means a million different things, but LLMs are very good at flexbox and grid (and I'm not).

With backend I find they're good at the really high level (give me the options for architecture and their pros and cons) and doing something small and precise (gimme a function `List (Maybe a) -> List a`). The stuff in-between I have to handle myself.

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