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Ask HN: Anyone still coding like 2021? Where do you work?

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Re: Ask HN: Anyone still coding like 2021? Where do you work?

#71

Post by nater5000 »

vermilingua wrote: post #19

I don't touch LLMs for any purpose (when I can help it, they are frequently shoved in your face regardless); and up until recently was doing just fine. I was fired for this stance, not for performance reasons (officially stated that there was no concern with my output), only for political reasons (insubordination, refusing to use LLMs to do my work for me). I have been seeing fewer and fewer job ads that ask for/requ…

I mean, even outside the context, you ought to be fired for not doing what your employer is telling you to do. Being fired for insubordination is not really "political"; it's the epitome of a performance reason. You're literally refusing to do your job. Your performance in this regard is as bad as it can get.

A political reason would be something like, your manager was threatened by your capabilities and set you up for unfair evaluations, etc. But you just straight up told the people paying you that you won't do what they're paying you to do lol. DEFINITELY make sure you work on your spin on this for future interviews, because knowing you were confidentially disobeying direct instructions is an immediate "pass" for me and anyone with any sense who may be interviewing you.

>This is the first time I have considered that I might have been "wrong" taking an absolutist stance against LLMs, though I think that's just the unemployment wearing me down.

If you think LLMs are a fad that will just go away if you wait long enough, then you need to just remove yourself from this industry. They're not going away, for better or worse, and this kind of work is fundamentally changing. To be direct: you ARE wrong in taking this absolutist stance. It's profoundly naive to have done what you've done, and I hope, for your own sake, that you plan for your future accordingly.

If you have some moral issue with LLMs, then you probably need to just plan on pivoting your career. But if you're just stuck on some weird sense of pride for your "craft," then you need to take a step back and really try to appreciate what the reality of your career means to the people willing to pay you for work.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone still coding like 2021? Where do you work?

#72

Post by nater5000 »

vermilingua wrote: post #56
csbrooks wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems to me you at least have to try using them, so you can make a coherent case why you work just as well or better without them.

I believe that "have to" is a little strong, no? I think my case was made just as well by remaining one of the only people in my team able to critically analyse changes and plan complex work after three years of the rest of my company diving headlong into the vibe-pit.

>I believe that "have to" is a little strong, no?

Yeah, you don't HAVE TO do anything your employer tells you to do. And they don't HAVE TO keep you employed. That's the deal.

>by remaining one of the only people in my team able to critically analyse changes and plan complex work

Your employer doesn't actually care about this. They care about whether or not you make them more money than you cost them. Obviously that's hard to accurately measure, but it's not hard for an employer to recognize that an employee being unwilling to do what they're being directed to do is probably not the best bet for someone to keep around.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone still coding like 2021? Where do you work?

#73

Post by matthiasrsl »

I kind of do. Not by will, but because as a consultant i'm most of the time constrained by the tooling and environment i can use at my client's. It's hard enough to build a reliable unit test pipeline or ci/cd, so even if i can use the agents built into databricks, i don't control the harness and i cannot build the necessary guardrails needed to use agents in a mature way. It sucks and i think it will hold me back on future projects.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone still coding like 2021? Where do you work?

#74

Post by QuadmasterXLII »

QuadmasterXLII wrote: post #31

Every four months or so we try getting hyped on agents for ~ a week. Up to this point the answer has always been a pretty solid "nope this sucks back to manual code." The agentically coded parts of the codebase that came from these trials are palpably more annoying than the rest. However, the current trial is going better than the last ones have (Fable 5.1 really is astonishing). On the other hand, each other trial s…

It is actually pretty nice that now we can spin up an isolated copy of our whole system with one command line call- this was mandatory for letting agents run wild trying things, but mostly now it makes manual development and onboarding easier.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone still coding like 2021? Where do you work?

#75

Post by stronglikedan »

vermilingua wrote: post #19

I don't touch LLMs for any purpose (when I can help it, they are frequently shoved in your face regardless); and up until recently was doing just fine. I was fired for this stance, not for performance reasons (officially stated that there was no concern with my output), only for political reasons (insubordination, refusing to use LLMs to do my work for me). I have been seeing fewer and fewer job ads that ask for/requ…

Seeing as how LLMs objectively increase performance when used correctly, I'd support the company's decision to let you go for specifically performance reasons. I'm not saying you should be all in on LLMs end to end, but there are individual processes in every workflow that can be enhanced by the tool. If you find those, you will perform better than you could without LLMs, no question.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone still coding like 2021? Where do you work?

#76

Post by Aachen »

sgbeal wrote: post #51
Aachen wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's 2026. It hasn't been 10+ years

> It hasn't been 10+ years :-? My "10+ years" was not referring to any specific milestone. It was referring to the general flow of time. It's been 10 years since 2016, twenty since 2006, and more than 40 since writing my first program. Lots has changed every 10 years in that period, both in my skills and the environments i program in, but shell/emacs/makefile remains a staple of that process.

Ah, well the question you were answering spoke of 2021. It's not about not changing your practices in a decade but about LLMs. Apparently you dodged both questions by neither referring to 2021 nor to the thing that became somewhat usable in 2021 xD

Re: Ask HN: Anyone still coding like 2021? Where do you work?

#77

Post by em-bee »

nater5000 wrote: post #71
vermilingua wrote: post #19

I don't touch LLMs for any purpose (when I can help it, they are frequently shoved in your face regardless); and up until recently was doing just fine. I was fired for this stance, not for performance reasons (officially stated that there was no concern with my output), only for political reasons (insubordination, refusing to use LLMs to do my work for me). I have been seeing fewer and fewer job ads that ask for/requ…

I mean, even outside the context, you ought to be fired for not doing what your employer is telling you to do. Being fired for insubordination is not really "political"; it's the epitome of a performance reason. You're literally refusing to do your job. Your performance in this regard is as bad as it can get. A political reason would be something like, your manager was threatened by your capabilities and set you up f…

that's a bit harsh. the job is to solve a problem, implement a solution. as a developer i should have some leeway on how i accomplish that. be able to choose the tools that i believe are the best for the given task. there may be constraints, but using an LLM as a constraint does not make sense because the LLM affects the process but not the outcome.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone still coding like 2021? Where do you work?

#78

Post by dwb »

em-bee wrote: post #77
nater5000 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, even outside the context, you ought to be fired for not doing what your employer is telling you to do. Being fired for insubordination is not really "political"; it's the epitome of a performance reason. You're literally refusing to do your job. Your performance in this regard is as bad as it can get. A political reason would be something like, your manager was threatened by your capabilities and set you up f…

that's a bit harsh. the job is to solve a problem, implement a solution. as a developer i should have some leeway on how i accomplish that. be able to choose the tools that i believe are the best for the given task. there may be constraints, but using an LLM as a constraint does not make sense because the LLM affects the process but not the outcome.

I would argue the same in most situations, but let’s be honest: what matters most to most employers is their employees falling in line. There is some sense to this: it is easier to manage a bunch of people doing things more-or-less the same way, but I do ultimately agree that professionals should be treated more like professionals.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone still coding like 2021? Where do you work?

#79

Post by chaosharmonic »

nater5000 wrote: post #71
vermilingua wrote: post #19

I don't touch LLMs for any purpose (when I can help it, they are frequently shoved in your face regardless); and up until recently was doing just fine. I was fired for this stance, not for performance reasons (officially stated that there was no concern with my output), only for political reasons (insubordination, refusing to use LLMs to do my work for me). I have been seeing fewer and fewer job ads that ask for/requ…

I mean, even outside the context, you ought to be fired for not doing what your employer is telling you to do. Being fired for insubordination is not really "political"; it's the epitome of a performance reason. You're literally refusing to do your job. Your performance in this regard is as bad as it can get. A political reason would be something like, your manager was threatened by your capabilities and set you up f…

What a company considers to be "performance" or "insubordination" can certainly still be about office politics. Not that I'm saying this is necessarily the case here, but they're not a hard either/or.

For instance: 996 is a form of office politics. Return to office in general a form of office politics. Pay secrecy is a form of office politics. Some of those things become performance metrics, or evaluations of your "attitude."

"Performance" can mean "the quality of your work." It also can mean "theater." Like when you're measuring performance by token usage, or lines of code, or office attendance... or, in a case I once encountered, manual adherence to a style guide, that required two human beings to check every line of code against a set of conventions, instead of just configuring a formatting tool and being done with it.

Regarding LLMs in particular, I don't necessarily think the absolutist stance is it here, but it is a technology worker's job to know when you can and should automate things, as well as to know when it's not an effective use of resources to throw technology at something just because. I don't know parent's company or use case. I don't know if they were doing something with it that actually enhanced productivity, or just tracking tokens. I don't know if it enhanced their product, or just shoehorned AI into it for investor-driven buzzword utilization. So I'm also not an absolutist on what you're saying.

It could be that parent is too rigid, but (as much as I'm not asking for all this context either) I don't think there's enough information here to be certain about that.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone still coding like 2021? Where do you work?

#80

Post by lopsotronic »

Dude, just go look for anything in Defense.

Not only are the frontier models verboten anywhere in the building[1], but any open weight model running on your laptop has to pass a pretty strict approval process. We don't have the GPUs on site to run anything that would be competitive with, say, a Claude, so any dumb crappy 7B models you got locally are not going to be taking over the coding of, say, a complex visual 3d tracking algorithm.

So if you want to code like it's 1998, jump in your Delorean and come on down to the Death Merchants.

[1] Putting anything in them remotely product-related is an insta-fire offense. Security will bring boxes to pack your things before the answer comes back.

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