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Career Advice in 2025

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Re: Career Advice in 2025

#161

Post by __loam »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #147
bayarearefugee wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The next time I am angrily typing to claude 3.7 in all caps because he overengineered a bunch of code I didn't even ask him to write in the first place, I'll be sure to let him know his continued failures are risking the entire world economy.

I think SWE's have a serious blind spot here. I use the (rough) analogy of bowling to help illustrate this. People need to knock over pins in the bowling lane. SWE's are the pro bowlers who can (usually) throw pretty cleans shots to knock over pins. Now bumpers have been invented (LLMs) and regular folks who only have the faintest idea of how to roll a ball are knocking over pins. To the pro's these bumpers are all m…

You're just describing programming without realizing that having a stochastic and imprecise programming language is a leaky abstraction.

The problem isn't that a "pro bowler" could come in and do something irrelevant for more money. Professional programmers understand that you shouldn't prematurely optimize things like memory or performance in contexts where that doesn't matter. You're ignoring the most important metric which is correctness. When we write a program, we make it correct then we can optimize it if that's actually important.

What's going to happen when you have your non-expert write a program using these tools and it inevitably gets something wrong? Are you prepared to build business process on top of a program whose author can't tell you how it works which might contain bugs? Do you even realize that this is just a recipe for producing mountains and mountains of technical debt?

You seem to believe this is going to put programmers out of a job but you're just explaining why they'll need even more of us in the future when these piles of garbage inevitably cost the company money.

Re: Career Advice in 2025

#162

Post by gopher_space »

csomar wrote: post #68
tibbar wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm mostly thinking of frontend dev work, but also some types of light backend work that you might see in a CRUD app. And listen, I've done that work, I've done a lot of it, and I saw that it's mostly a career dead-end, becoming more and more automated/copiloted away. It's not a career moat to be a mid-level React developer. By contrast, some things I think are worth pivoting into include infrastructure, databases, d…

Front-End interfaces can be as complex (or more complex) than Back-End/infra/analytics/etc... At the end of the day, it is all about data and the front-end needs to maintain state. If your interface is complex, your state will also be complex.

I'm not a fan of the "front vs back" dichotomy. Chrome is just another box as far as my responsibilities and goals are concerned, but it always feels like there's a mental handoff switching to this one context.

Re: Career Advice in 2025

#163

Post by c0redump »

only-one1701 wrote: post #110
itake wrote: 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.

Developing, managing, and operating distributed systems infrastructure has way less training data available than webdev. And it doesn’t translate in to pithy interpreted language one-liners.

Re: Career Advice in 2025

#164

Post by margalabargala »

yolovoe wrote: post #141
margalabargala wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

System design yes, leetcode no. Leetcode is only a useful problem to ask if the candidate has not encountered that problem before and has not practiced leetcode. Otherwise it is exactly as good a signal as knowing some arbitrary framework or database.

Leetcode shows candidates willingness to grind.

"Grind" just means "memorize a bunch of stuff for later regurgitation", which is the same thing as is demonstrated by memorizing the API for some arbitrary database or javascript framework.

Willingness to "grind" is a positive signal for people hiring developers in the same way that low critical thinking skills is a positive signal for people hiring law enforcement officers, and results in a team of similar quality.

Re: Career Advice in 2025

#165

Post by roland35 »

titanomachy wrote: post #129
roland35 wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good advice in general. I would add - try to pick a skill which gives you a deep understanding in something fundamental which will always be relevant, rather than a particular shiny tech. I would love the bay area, but unfortunately it is extremely inaccessible for me and others once you have a family. Trying to find a place to live in a good school district seems like it takes minimum $2M for a house. Renting is les…

If you’re usual child-raising age then you probably have 6-10 years of experience, and there should be lots of jobs that pay $500k in the Bay Area. Buying a $2m house on that salary is pretty doable.

$500k would likely be a staff level salary offer. I think a senior role around $350-400k is probably more likely as a new hire coming in which is definitely great money, but still hard to take a $20k+ monthly mortgage with! Especially since a lot of that salary is variable equity income which can go down (ask me how I know!!)

Re: Career Advice in 2025

#166

Post by Aeolun »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #144
Aeolun wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Only in the short term. In the medium to long term, false assumptions will kill a company. As an employee, you would be better off recognizing it before the crunch hits.

Nah, we have enough captured business that I doubt it’d make a difference. It’s also not actively terrible for the customer, it just doesn’t bring anything to the table for the use cases we’ve used it for.

Then again, maybe it’s good to give people some experience with it even if there’s no real reason to use it right at this moment.

Re: Career Advice in 2025

#167

Post by nyarlathotep_ »

__loam wrote: post #27
bayarearefugee wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The next time I am angrily typing to claude 3.7 in all caps because he overengineered a bunch of code I didn't even ask him to write in the first place, I'll be sure to let him know his continued failures are risking the entire world economy.

You can be as snarky as you want but the reality is we're years deep into a market cycle that has seen a tremendous amount of capex with very little visible return. How much more productive do you think claude makes you as compared to Google or Stack Overflow? 15%? 50%? 200? Do you think that's enough to satisfy the market or are we all trading on unrealistic expectations? Do you think shareholders are going to like…

Goodness this is such a perfect response.

Seeing more and more of this now, where even in "these parts" anything short of "AGI IS HERE" even a few months ago would have you labelled as "Luddite" "skeptic" and "left behind".

When is the general public going to start asking questions? It's really not a game--people's 401ks have been propped up by the "Magnificent Seven" (disproportionately by one company) for some time now.

What happens "if" these proclamations fail to manifest? How is this all supposed to work out?

Re: Career Advice in 2025

#168

Post by bluefirebrand »

tasuki wrote: post #160
only-one1701 wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

This is my #1 complaint about how people talk about LLM productivity

If you aren't good at something you are not qualified to say that LLMs are good at it

Re: Career Advice in 2025

#170

Post by npodbielski »

n_ary wrote: post #65
npodbielski wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly my thoughts reading this article. Luckily if next few years we will have thousands of projects written using 'ai' there will be need for someone to debug and fix all of that broken software. Or maybe not, maybe it will be cheaper to just slap another ten k8s pods to mitigate poor performance...

I believe, we are beyond the point of “bad software written, bad software deployed, business as usual” point long ago when AWS/GCP/Azure became an important requirement in job description. A bad piece of software can be decently hidden by burning more money in cloud bills, which gives the inflated sense to the leadership that their products are doing global scale ground breaking. With AI, I would not be surprised if…

> With AI, I would not be surprised if the quality actually improves and the cost comes down(or stays same). Of course, more bad software will be written by now many aspiring entrepreneurs to realize their dream idea of spotify clone, then sacrificing their life saving on complex cloud bills and ever so profitable rise of revenue of all cloud services citing this as benefit of AI while doing some more layoffs to jack up the stock prices.

At this point we all speculating really. But from logical point of view, LLMs are trained on code written by humans. When more and more code will be written by LLMs instead, models will be trained on content written by other models. It will be very hard to distinguish which code on Github was wrote by human or some model (unless the quality will differ substantially). If this will be the case I would say that quality of code written by them will drop. Or the quality of models will drop. Or code written by model will be still using the pre-LLM patterns, because model-written code will not be part of training data. It may be that LLM written code will be working but hardly comprehensible for human. For now models does not have negative feedback loop that humans have ('oh code does not compile' or 'code does compile but throws an exception' or 'code compile and works but perform poorly').

Anyway, I am sure that there will be impact to the whole industry, but I doubt models will be primary source of source code. Helpful tool for sure but not a drop-in replacement for developers.

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