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Career Advice in 2025

lethain.com

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Re: Career Advice in 2025

#181

Post by only-one1701 »

tasuki wrote: post #177
bluefirebrand wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

LLMs are good enough to solve my problems with flexbox. I gave a LLM a small self-contained flexbox-puzzle which I couldn't solve, and it solved it. The CSS it produced did the thing I asked. > If you aren't good at something you are not qualified to say that LLMs are good at it Hard disagree: Even if you aren't good at writing a function like `List (Maybe a) -> List a`, you can easily say whether the LLM suggestion…

I think the person above was alluding to the idea that the determination of whether or not LLMs are good at frontend development is the idea that frontend development is flexbox. That's like me saying "LLMs will replace all developers who work with databases because Claude was able to spit out a really complex SQL query."

Re: Career Advice in 2025

#182

Post by only-one1701 »

itake wrote: post #178
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.

Frontend (IMHO) tends to be simpler than BE systems, because FE is literally a single device, and often a single git repo. BE requires a lot more context around microservices, database, reverse-proxy, api-design, etc. A signal that makes me correct is the number of BE vs FE at a big company.

The question isn't "is frontend simpler than backend?" (which I don't think is as simple as you make it out to be). The question is "can LLMs replace frontend developers?"

I think it's a bit like Squarespace. The lowest possible tiers of developers will be replaced. Anything complex enough to be beyond the scope of a hobbyist isn't able to be replaced with an LLM.

Re: Career Advice in 2025

#183

Post by bluefirebrand »

tasuki wrote: post #177
bluefirebrand wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

LLMs are good enough to solve my problems with flexbox. I gave a LLM a small self-contained flexbox-puzzle which I couldn't solve, and it solved it. The CSS it produced did the thing I asked. > If you aren't good at something you are not qualified to say that LLMs are good at it Hard disagree: Even if you aren't good at writing a function like `List (Maybe a) -> List a`, you can easily say whether the LLM suggestion…

> If you aren't good at playing the game of go and a program beats you giving you nine handicap stones, probably the program is good at it. Many similar examples

This doesn't follow at all, maybe you just really suck.

It is entirely possible that a game AI that you find impossible to beat is trivial to beat for almost anyone with more experience than you have

Yes, there are chess engines that can beat the best chess players

However, most people couldn't possibly tell the difference between playing against the best chess engine in the world or a novice difficulty chess AI, because most people suck at chess

"It is better than I am" is a terrible metric to use to judge when you suck at that thing

Re: Career Advice in 2025

#185

Post by yolovoe »

margalabargala wrote: post #164
yolovoe wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Leetcode is a standardized test that shows your ability to write code, grind and pattern match in a very complicated space. It is not possible to memorize solutions to all problems. There are way too many problems in this space. All the people complaining about leetcode are a prime example of this. It takes a lot of time and background knowledge to learn all the algorithms, data-structures, and problem-solving patterns... to get good to the level where you can ace FAANG and trading interviews with a high probability. It's a more useful metric than memorizing specific APIs which is not standardized, has basically no/simple pattern matching, and does not really test coding skills. There are also too many frameworks, and this just doesn't stand the test of time. People would need to constantly re-learn frameworks for interviews.

Most companies have been using leetcode and system design for dozens of years for a reason. It's not changing anytime soon.

Also, leetcode can be really fun :) if you remind yourself to be truly curious about the problem.

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