Readit Newsthrowaway_43793 commented on Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs? · Posted by u/throwaway_43793
Moving from an engineering role to a product role is a massive career change. I don't think this is reasonable advice, even with the current technological revolution, unless you have a deep, personal interest in product management.
Not necessarily product. You can become a manager, or a technical lead.
throwaway_43793 commented on Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs? · Posted by u/throwaway_43793
This blew up way more than I expected. Thanks everyone for the comments, I read almost all of them.
For the sake of not repeating myself, I would like to clarify/state some things.
1. I did not intend to signal that SWE will disappear as a profession, but would rather undergo transformation, as well as shrinking in terms of the needed workforce.
2. Some people seem to be hanging up to the idea that they are doing unimaginably complicated things. And sure, some people do, but I doubt they are the majority of the SWE workforce. Can LLM replace a cobol developer in financial industry? No, I don't think so. Can it replace the absurd amount of people whose job description can be distilled to "reading/writing data to a database"? Absolutely.
3. There seems to be a conflicting opinion. Some people say that code quality matters a lot and LLMs are not there yet, while other people seems to focus more on "SWE is more than writing code".
Personally, based on some thinking and reading the comments, I think the best way to future-proof a SWE career is to move to position that requires more people skills. In my opinion, good product managers that are eager to learn coding and combine LLMs for code writing, will be the biggest beneficiaries of the upcoming trend. As for SWEs, it's best to start acquiring people skills.
throwaway_43793 commented on Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs? · Posted by u/throwaway_43793
> Your customers don't care how your code smells, as long as it solves their problem and doesn't cost an arm and a leg.
Software is interesting because if you buy a refrigerator, even an inexpensive one, you have certain expectations as to its basic functions. If the compressor were to cut out periodically in unexpected ways, affecting your food safety, you would return it.
But in software customers seem to be conditioned to just accept bugs and poor performance as a fact of life.
You're correct that customers don't care about "code quality", because they don't understand code or how to evaluate it.
But you're assuming that customers don't care about the quality of the product they are paying for, and you're divorcing that quality from the quality of the code as if the code doesn't represent THE implementation of the final product. The hardware matters too, but to assume that code quality doesn't directly affect product quality is to pretend that food quality is not directly impacted by its ingredients.
Code quality does not affect final product quality IMHO.
I worked in companies with terrible code, that deployed on an over-engineered cloud provider using custom containers hacked with a nail and a screwdriver, but the product was excellent. Had bugs here and there, but worked and delivered what needs to be delivered.
SWEs need to realize that code doesn't really matter. For 70 years we are debating the best architecture patterns and yet the biggest fear of every developer is working on legacy code, as it's an unmaintainable piece of ... written by humans.
throwaway_43793 commented on Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs? · Posted by u/throwaway_43793
If you fear => you're still in the beginning of your career or your work has very little to do with software engineering. (the engineering part in particular)
The only way to future-proof any creative and complex work - get awesome at it.
It worked before LLM it will work after LLM or any new shiny three-letter gimmick.
Maybe I'm a lousy developer, true. But I do know now that your code does not matter. Unlike any other creative profession, what matters is the final output, and code is not the final output.
If companies can get the final output with less people, and less money, why would they pass on this opportunity? And please don't tell me that it's because people produce maintainable code and LLMs don't.
throwaway_43793 commented on Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs? · Posted by u/throwaway_43793
The 20-year-old is, maybe, just like you at that age: eager and smart, but lacking experience. Making bad decisions, bad designs, bad implementations left and right. Just like you did, way back when.
But you have made all those mistakes already. You've learned, you've earned your experience. You are much more valuable than you think.
Source: Me, I'm almost 60, been programming since I was 12.
I think the idea of meritocracy has died in me. I wish I could be rewarded for my knowledge and expertise, but it seems that capitalism, as in maximizing profit, has won above everything else.
throwaway_43793 commented on Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs? · Posted by u/throwaway_43793
Create a SaaS and charge people $20/month, time-consuming but more possible with LLMs. Subscriptions are such a good business model for the reasons people hate subscriptions.
Are you doing it? What business are you running? How do you find customers?
throwaway_43793 commented on Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs? · Posted by u/throwaway_43793
Im hoping I can transition to some kind of product or management role since frankly Im not that good at coding anyways (I dont feel like I can pass a technical interview anymore, tbh.)
I think a lot of engineers are in for some level of rude awakening. I think a lot of engineers havent applied some level of business/humanities thinking in this, and I think a lot of corporations care less about code quality than even our most pessimistic estimates. It wouldnt surprise me if cuts over the next few years get even deeper, and I think a lot of high performing (re: high paying) jobs are going to get cut. Ive seen so many comments like "this will improve engineering overall, as bad engineers get laid off" and I dont think its going to work like that.
Anecdotal, but no one from my network actually recovered from the post covid layoffs and they havent even stopped. I know loads of people who dont feel like theyll ever get a job as good as they had in 2021.
What's your plan to transition into product/management?
throwaway_43793 commented on Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs? · Posted by u/throwaway_43793
I remember John Carmack talking about this last year. Seems like it's still pretty good advice more than a year later:
"From a DM, just in case anyone else needs to hear this."
It's a good advice indeed. But there is a slight problem with it.
Young people can learn and fight for their place in the workforce, but what is left for older people like myself? I'm in this industry already, I might have missed the train of "learn to talk with people" and been sold on the "coding is a means to an end" koolaid.
My employability is already damaged due to my age and experience. What is left for people like myself? How can I compete with a 20 something years old who has sharper memory, more free time (due to lack of obligations like family/relationships), who got the right advice from Carmack in the beginning of his career?
throwaway_43793 commented on Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs? · Posted by u/throwaway_43793
>junior to mid level software engineering will disappear mostly, while senior engineers will transition
It's more likely the number of jobs at all level of seniority will decrease, but none will disappear.
What I'm interested to see is how the general availability of LLM will impact the "willingness" of people to learn coding. Will people still "value" coding as an activity worth their time?
For me as an already "senior" engineer, using LLMs feel like a superpower, when I think of a solution to a problem, I can test and explore some of my ideas faster by interacting with it.
For a beginner, I feel that having all of this available can be super powerful too, but also truly demotivating. Why bother to learn coding when the LLM can already do better than you? It takes years to become "good" at coding, and motivation is key.
As a low-dan Go player, I remember feeling a bit that way when AlphaGo was released. I'm still playing Go but I've lost the willingness to play competitively, now it's just for fun.
I think coding will stay as a hobby. You know, like there are people who still build physical stuff with wires and diodes. None of them are doing it for commercial reasons, but the ability to produces billions of transistors on a silicon die did not stop people from taking electrical engineering as a hobby.