511–520 of 611 posts
Look, folks. I'm an old man and pretty much out of the workforce at this point in my life. But what I see in these comments day, after day is rather pitiful. As your Uncle John, I'm going to give you a lecture: From the article: >I can’t really blame anyone who’s just gone along with things Whst is this supposed to mean "blame"? Do you "blame" people for driving cars instead of riding horses? Do you "blame" software…
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Agreed, there may be people working with their LLM tool to learn something new. In my experience this isn’t the way these tools are marketed, from where I sit it looks like this is being discouraged. If you aren’t really learning anything then all you get at the end is the product. For a certain type of person this is just not enough. I bet people generated solutions end up significantly different from AI generated s…
Someone on Twitter put it well: using an LLM to learn is like using a forklift to lift weights in the gym. Yes, action is happening but the point of going to the gym is not to ensure weights get displaced up and down.
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It will be interesting to see what happens when human developers become cheaper than token maxxing AIs. Interesting because by then codebases might have become so complex that these can no longer be modified, maintained nor understood by humans, so replacing AI with HI (human intelligence) will simply no longer possible. That then represents a certain vendor lock-in or Mafia stand off: either keeping paying or have a…
Will the LLM tools be able to maintain this pile of code either? In my experience there seems to be some complexity maximum to a project that, once reached, the LLM tooling doesn't seem able to manage it either.
Or perhaps AGI is reached and suddenly AI solves this all by itself.
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If I could get paid a Bay Area software engineering salary to clean the bathroom instead, I think I would actually prefer to clean the bathroom. Software engineering requires me to actually use a large part of my mind. Cleaning the bathroom, on the other hand, would leave my mind largely free to think whatever I feel like. The physical movement is probably better for the body, too.
There are offshore oil mining rig that needs workers. They pay big bucks too. You get some months off. The physical movement is better than cleaning the bathroom. No need to thank me. You're welcome.
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Yes, I go to so many because my wife sells her novels at them. There's also the issue that there is limited space at craft fairs with wait lists for vendors. A dishonest vendor is holding a space a different vendor could have instead.
It's difficult territory because at some level asking people to meet a certain standard to have a stall at a craft fair is, essentially, "gatekeeping". But art sales are really the only gatekeeping there is in art, and it has to do with there being a literal gate to a limited space. (It's also usually not artists themselves doing the gatekeeping) People who are engaged in art really ask so little of other people who…
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There are offshore oil mining rig that needs workers. They pay big bucks too. You get some months off. The physical movement is better than cleaning the bathroom. No need to thank me. You're welcome.
Interesting idea. Only problems for me are: it sounds dangerous and physically straining for someone like me who hasn't done manual labor in many years and has no experience relevant to oil rigs. And also, there are almost no women. I guess oil rig workers probably pack in their women time hardcore when they're on their months off.
Look, folks. I'm an old man and pretty much out of the workforce at this point in my life. But what I see in these comments day, after day is rather pitiful. As your Uncle John, I'm going to give you a lecture: From the article: >I can’t really blame anyone who’s just gone along with things Whst is this supposed to mean "blame"? Do you "blame" people for driving cars instead of riding horses? Do you "blame" software…
To offer a perspective from someone in the field: I built my career as a craftsman. Not just my livelihood, but my family’s livelihood depended on this craft. And within a few short months, my value has plummeted. I’ve tried to adapt, but I will never be as good with the newer tools as I was with the old, just like most carriage makers didn’t become mechanics, to use your analogy. At the same time, the value of the work is just less. Weavers could work in fabric mills, but their pay would be less. Now, just like back then, I, my wife, and my two young children face a financial reforming just beyond the horizon. It will be painful for many. There is no amount of adaptation that is within grasp of all those affected.
I think the general problem with your argument is that you assume that, because there was a transition from horses to cars, many people successfully transitioned from one profession to the other. The reality is that they didn’t. Many suffered in anonymity.
Back then, you plugged in a computer and got, typically a C:> prompt, this strange thing nobody had seen before. There was a big hype cycle, and the basic thinking of clients was infused with tremendous FOMO. I was immediately hired mostly because I wasn't afraid of computers. Often the attitude was almost like, "here's a wheelbarrow full of money and blank slate, write me some -- what do you call it -- software for my business so I can participate in this. No, I don't know what it has to do, you figure it out". I mean it was literally low hanging fruit everywhere.
Fast forward 43 years, and relative to THAT, most ordinary mortals are very computer literate, they often feel they have paid too much $$ for too long to people like me, and they think they fully understand the problem space and how to manage devs, while mostly neither of those things are really true.
Still, I have managed to specialize and select the right clients such that I still have tremendous freedom to use my best judgment while being very well compensated. In fact my present client has the attitude, "of course, don't use AI, why would you do that?" although admittedly I'm afraid to fully understand how they came by such a sanguine, hype-proof attitude.
My guess is that I'm one of a half dozen senior people in a pool of about a half dozen industry players in a very specialized fintech field, and I've built whole systems of the type they want twice before, my reputation precedes me, and they want a steady hand to bring those capabilities to them as well -- so whatever I want, is fine by them. Also they play the long game very well.
But even I feel obligated to periodically educate them about LLMs (I refuse to use the term "AIs") and my thinking about them, to sort of inoculate them from the almost inconceivably epic levels of hype around the topic. Fortunately they see the results from my labors that they are looking for, and don't want to disturb that.
And even I have a quantized open weight model hogging RAM on my local hardware where I can figure out if it's useful for anything (I'm looking at unit testing and prototyping mostly). This also gets around my environmental, security / privacy and ethical concerns about using cloud models.
But like many commenters here, I need to be able to substantially "own" / stand behind / understand my code or the meaning just leaches out of it for me.
Ultimately I don't feel the least bit of competition from LLMs in terms of understanding the problem spaces that I have a truly intimate knowledge / experience of, because what I bring to the table is UNDERSTANDING, which is something no LLM has. It only has probabilistic associations and chutzpah.
I think this is true for a lot of us, but it's just going to take a few more months or (dog help us!) a couple of years for the hype cycle to die down and for people to realize there's mostly no real value-added after you pay for all the token costs and data center downsides; rather, we've just been moving the pain points around. The music will quit playing, the investment dollars will dry up, and much (not all) of this will be yet another Cautionary Tale of hubris and overreach.
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I like using my mind too, just usually not on software engineering.
So was your motivation for being a software engineer just money?
I am considering trying to move to some kind of non-coding role in tech. Maybe some kind of management role.
Look, folks. I'm an old man and pretty much out of the workforce at this point in my life. But what I see in these comments day, after day is rather pitiful. As your Uncle John, I'm going to give you a lecture: From the article: >I can’t really blame anyone who’s just gone along with things Whst is this supposed to mean "blame"? Do you "blame" people for driving cars instead of riding horses? Do you "blame" software…
“Just suck it up” coming from a person who doesn’t have to deal with the consequences has to be the least convincing take on the situation I’ve heard by far. So congrats on that. To offer a perspective from someone in the field: I built my career as a craftsman. Not just my livelihood, but my family’s livelihood depended on this craft. And within a few short months, my value has plummeted. I’ve tried to adapt, but I…