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LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do

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Re: LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do

#761

Post by stuxnet79 »

nsxwolf wrote: post #499

I started feeling like a factory worker well before LLMs. My reputation and network stopped mattering and it all came down to take this assessment and do this Leetcode to prove you are a good enough replaceable cog. I have about 15 more years before retirement and I doubt there is anything left to look forward to in my career.

I echo this. Software development stopped being a dignified profession a long time ago once we fully coopted the metrics / performance theatre that the MBAs brought in. I'm talking agile / SAFe / leetcode / mandatory "side projects" as a filtering mechanism etc.

Now that clankers are generating full end-to-end products with an easy to understand dollar per token cost outlay the MBAs have finally gotten what they've always wanted. Good for them! But it also gives us ICs an opportunity to switch to (hopefully) more fulfilling career paths. For me personally working with computers was always more of a hobby anyway. Ideally I'd like for it to stay that way but we will have to see how the next 5-10 years shake out.

Re: LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do

#762

Post by darkerside »

jvanderbot wrote: post #747
mrandish wrote: post #679

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the models are improving at a rapid rate. If asked ~3 years ago where the state of the models are today, it would sound like sci-fi Absolutely true, many things will continue to improve in significant ways. However, if we look at the modern history of rapid disruptions driven by technology (a side interest of mine), persistent patterns emerge. Similar to avalanches or flash floods, such periods of very rapid disrup…

This is of course true in general. But the question is not "how with this evolve" but how will we deal with the rapid changes in the industry? I suspect a long term k-shape salary curve, even worse than today, with the lower 80-90pctile salaries bottoming out such that many have to exit the industry to make ends meet. You can laugh and blame them for not saving as much as they should, but that's still a fairly horrif…

And it was the dumbest and least valuable stock traders that exited the industry. The industry is alive and well today.

Re: LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do

#763

Post by Chu4eeno »

rfgplk wrote: post #700
Aeolun wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Opus 4.8 and gpt constantly hallucinate stuff as well. If you haven’t encountered or caught it that’s something different. Of course these days it’s mostly confidently asserting a wrong thing.

I primarily use Opus for a Lisp-like DSL codebase (non public, closed source) and it genuinely has _never_ hallucinated. All it pulls from is BNF, language spec + examples. So I have no idea how people are getting it to hallucinate on _popular_ languages.

I think you forget that they really are stochastic (I'd wager it has hallucinated things to you that wasn't important so you missed it, or you've just been very lucky), and the people you're arguing with are forgetting that there is significant difference in when and how often even frontier LLMs hallucinate. I catch claude every now and then, but isn't the measured hallucination rates down in low single digit percent for claude now?

Re: LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do

#764

Post by thewebguyd »

antonvs wrote: post #584
thewebguyd wrote: post #471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> IT. They tend to over-interpret regulation, and super-restrict beyond what is needed for actual de-facto compliance. IME this is less the fault of IT and more so bad auditors that won't consider, or just don't understand, what compensating controls are. If it doesn't meet their little checklist exactly, they fail the audit.

> IT. They tend to over-interpret regulation, and super-restrict beyond what is needed for actual de-facto compliance. This is such a nonsensical claim. If a company is asking someone from IT to read the regulations and implement them, then obviously you’re going to get something that conforms to the written specification they were provided. But a company that does that is basically delegating both compliance and leg…

> But a company that does that is basically delegating both compliance and legal functions to IT

This actually happens scarily often, especially in smaller companies. No F500 is doing this, but there are tons of "mid market" sized non-tech companies (think 80 to 150 employees in size) that basically rely on the IT department of 1 or 2 people, or an MSSP for pretty much everything. No legal team, maybe an attorney they consult with once or twice a year if you're lucky.

Re: LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do

#765

Post by esafak »

HDBaseT wrote: post #759
esafak wrote: post #591

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the manual professions are not far behind. It's just that the development is being done in China, so most readers here are not aware of it.

There is no robot electricians in China jumping up into ceiling crawlspaces running cable with proper adherence to the plethora of law and regulation.

If that's kind of job left for us humans, I weep...

Re: LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do

#766

Post by lqstuart »

hmokiguess wrote: post #259

I always remember of the infamous Steve Jobs quote "Ideas are cheap". If execution is everything, and frontier LLMs solve execution, then ideas are the gateway to abundance now, but abundance alone does not guarantee "stickiness". What I think is often overlooked is the human "Willingness" and "Care" of staying with the thing for the lack of a better term. What I mean by that is that a lot of people just don't care e…

I really like your core point. I don't know anything about Suno and that's what people are picking at, but I'll offer a supporting example from pre-LLM days: the number of people who were actually willing to dig through source code was nonexistent. I've worked in ML/AI since forever and I would say roughly 1 in 5 to 1 in 20 developers I've worked alongside were actually willing to just go to Github and look up why code might be failing and get to the bottom of it.

The same is true for LLMs. You can get Claude to spew 2,000 lines of garbage in 15 minutes, but the number of developers actually willing to sit there and reason over the output and make the tweaks--often very minimal tweaks--that make it go from 90% correct to 100% correct are vanishingly few. And it's typically just laziness and a lack of any kind of genuine interest in the field.

Re: LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do

#767

Post by willempienaar »

darkerside wrote: post #762
jvanderbot wrote: post #747

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is of course true in general. But the question is not "how with this evolve" but how will we deal with the rapid changes in the industry? I suspect a long term k-shape salary curve, even worse than today, with the lower 80-90pctile salaries bottoming out such that many have to exit the industry to make ends meet. You can laugh and blame them for not saving as much as they should, but that's still a fairly horrif…

And it was the dumbest and least valuable stock traders that exited the industry. The industry is alive and well today.

Phew, for a second there I felt bad for them!

Re: LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do

#768

Post by chasd00 »

theshrike79 wrote: post #665
alexpotato wrote: post #391

I've posted this before but worth posting again: I work in DevOps at a firm that has been very enthusiastic about using LLMs (in the good sense). The phases were basically: - try out having the LLM do "a lot" - now even more - now run multiple agents - back to single agents but have the agents build tools - tools that are deterministic AND usable by both the humans (EDIT: and the LLMs) The reasons: 1. Deterministic t…

This is the way to do it. You can have the Big Boy LLM do _everything_. It can and it will do it. It will also cost fucktons of money and take a long time. But if you build tools (with AI) that do as many tasks in the process deterministically as possible and let the AI use those, it'll be a lot faster and cheaper to run it. As a bonus you can eventually drop the expensive cloud AI and run a small/medium sized local…

You know, i think harnesses and tools are the next "webapps" for the industry. Everyone is going to be making their own. Some will be great some will be meh but i think that's where things are headed.

Re: LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do

#769

Post by chasd00 »

ddingus wrote: post #726
zkmon wrote: post #269

> I don't know what to do. Ride the wave. You rode it when websites/webapps were the wave. I came into software industry before internet, kept changing my horse. You are never too old to learn new tricks. The new wave create new kind of work and workers. Be one of them. Ride the beast, master the tools. It's the same game again.

Seconded. If there is any skill in consistent demand it is the ability to wrap your head around the new work, new processes, new people, whatever it all may be. For me, understanding and development of this skill into a keen tool happened while I worked as a prototype mechamic. For those unfamiliar, a prototype mechanic does what it takes to make often demanding parts on consistently short timelines week after week.…

I tell my boys ( age 16 and 14 ), get good at learning and you don't have to get good at anything else!

Re: LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do

#770

Post by _heimdall »

darkerside wrote: post #762
jvanderbot wrote: post #747

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is of course true in general. But the question is not "how with this evolve" but how will we deal with the rapid changes in the industry? I suspect a long term k-shape salary curve, even worse than today, with the lower 80-90pctile salaries bottoming out such that many have to exit the industry to make ends meet. You can laugh and blame them for not saving as much as they should, but that's still a fairly horrif…

And it was the dumbest and least valuable stock traders that exited the industry. The industry is alive and well today.

That really depends on how you define alive and well. There are still stocks and there are still traders, but the market valuations are obscene and it sure appears that there must be collusion or corruption driving the industry to jam massive IPOs into every index and 401k they can find as fast as possible to fasciliste and exit.
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