151–160 of 203 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Startups need more than just junior software developers, and AI opened many new opportunities for startups.
What kinds of people are they hiring? 1 BR that used to be $2750 last year is now $3400, clearly they are getting paid a lot.
We don’t need to rebuild the ladder, and we don’t need juniors. By the time the seniors leave the job market, the software engineer profession as we know it simply won’t exist. I very much doubt that there will be the higher level architect position either. If Fable 5 is anything to go by, we’re all replaceable within 12 to 24 months. The rest is social inertia.
How will AIs train on new tech without new data to train on? On the bright side, maybe that means the end of new javascript frameworks every 6 months :)
> We are watching programming stop being a job title and become a capability, the same way "typist" stopped being a job title when it became a thing everyone was expected to know. Casually pretending that decades of software engineers comparing programming to typing and saying "you are not a programmer, that is not a job" long before chatbots, didn't exist. The job was always "software architect", "software engineer"…
> the same way "typist" stopped being a job title when it became a thing everyone was expected to know The same way "computer" and "calculator" stopped being a job title when they became devices might be a better way to reason about what is happening.
1, "software engineer" or even "programmer" is not becoming a device is it?
2, those are devices that operate for specific purposes. This is a general purpose autocomplete, and therefore if you support his logic you should also say now with LLMs "writer stopped being a job title", "assistant stopped being a job title", "teacher stopped being a job title", "manager stopped being a job title", ......
3, result of their calculation is deterministic and only depends on their wiring, not original work of humans. Imagine if calculators started to degrade when humans completely stopped doing maths by hand;)
We don’t need to rebuild the ladder, and we don’t need juniors. By the time the seniors leave the job market, the software engineer profession as we know it simply won’t exist. I very much doubt that there will be the higher level architect position either. If Fable 5 is anything to go by, we’re all replaceable within 12 to 24 months. The rest is social inertia.
I think it’s 24 to 36 until businesses really trust an autonomous developer. But I agree otherwise
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Stop the moral grandstanding. This is a legitimate observation. We're also not hiring juniors. Only seniors who can use LLMs and evaluate the outputs.
> Only seniors who can use LLMs and evaluate the outputs. I'm just a hobbyist but I've gotten pretty good at using LLMs and evaluating and refining their outputs. Think there's still space in this industry or is it hopeless?
While I would expect someone to know algorithms, data structures, distributed systems, and have good taste and pragmatism for both eng design and office politics, that doesn't mean you can't learn those things. You absorb them the deeper you go and the more frequently you encounter them.
There are no real rules of the universe, and you're only here for an infinitesimally short time. As long as you're not hurting anyone, break the rules.
We don’t need to rebuild the ladder, and we don’t need juniors. By the time the seniors leave the job market, the software engineer profession as we know it simply won’t exist. I very much doubt that there will be the higher level architect position either. If Fable 5 is anything to go by, we’re all replaceable within 12 to 24 months. The rest is social inertia.
How will AIs train on new tech without new data to train on? On the bright side, maybe that means the end of new javascript frameworks every 6 months :)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
just the other week I asked Fable 5 to diagnose the cause of some intermittent latency spikes on an API that queries an OpenSearch cluster at work. I encouraged it to look at the datadog metrics, splunk, the whole works. I let it loose to look at whatever it wanted. End result - 2 hours later it produced a convincing theory with lots of references, and burned a bunch of tokens too of course. just for fun we tried its…
By any chance, is the following true: you had no empirics in the loop. It couldn’t validate any of its theories by experimentation. If the solution requires being able to make actual changes in order to gather more information and it is not allowed to, and this is the only way to solve the problem, by definition it couldn’t do it, nor could you. Or was it something that could be worked out entirely on an a priori bas…
Yes, the solution is to just burn more tokens.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fable 5 will be genuinely weak compared to what's coming, I mean, we need to remember this is kinda the beginning still, we will genuinely reach a point where all benchmarks will score 99.9%. Think Opus 10, GPT-10... :) Also Fable 5 isn't "that impressive" as a lot of people have that kind of intelligence since 6 months+ by using combo of models and loops (I scored better on HLE than gpt-5.5 xhigh last January with s…
What makes you think that models will improve with the same pace that they have been improving in the past few years?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
By any chance, is the following true: you had no empirics in the loop. It couldn’t validate any of its theories by experimentation. If the solution requires being able to make actual changes in order to gather more information and it is not allowed to, and this is the only way to solve the problem, by definition it couldn’t do it, nor could you. Or was it something that could be worked out entirely on an a priori bas…
> in the loop Yes, the solution is to just burn more tokens.
> These are marketers, founders, teachers, analysts, and product managers, and they are writing software, which in my book makes them developers. They just don't identify that way, and more importantly it's not their job title, and job titles are what labor statistics count. This makes perfect sense and is a net good. There were a ton of awful bloodsucking SaaS startups destroying progress for these niches. People wh…
> If you want to get hired as a dev, you need to at least show off some projects that pass scrutiny. I have several hobby projects. Is that really all it takes to get hired? By "project" do you mean "product"?
What changed is tolerance of failing to meet that standard. That's how layoffs after overhiring happened. The bar was not raised, but moved back to where it was prior to the mid-2010s.
Anyway, it also depends on who is doing the interviews. If your "hobby" projects are built similar enough to what they have at that workplace, then the interview should feel like you're already working there for both you and them. Having absolutely no professional experience is going to automatically put you at a disadvantage. If you know of any startups, even if they're awful places to work, I'd much rather have a couple years of that on my resume than any internship.
What I was really saying is that someone who has been a teacher for a while and then learned to code with AI is now far more likely to get hired at an education software company than someone fresh out of college with a degree in CS. That's the way it should be! That's genuine progress. They may not end up in a coding role, but they'd absolutely crush it as a project manager.