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A comment on Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs?. Parent comment

Re:Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light... by luddite2309 on Monday December 16, 2024 @04:36PM (#42435728)
This is a fascinating comment, because it shows such a mis-reading of the history and point of technology (on a tech forum). Technological progress always leads to loss of skilled labor like your own, usually resulting in lower quality (but higher profits and often lower prices). Of COURSE an LLM won't be able to do work as well as you, just as industrial textile manufacturing could not, and still does not, produce the quality of work of 19th century cottage industry weavers; that was in fact one of their main complaints.

As an aside, at the top of the front page right now is a sprawling essay titled "Why is it so hard to buy things that work well?"...

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light... by packetlost on Monday December 16, 2024 @04:42PM (#42435774)
This is a take that shows a completely lack of understanding on what software engineering is actually about.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light... by munk-a on Monday December 16, 2024 @04:59PM (#42435923)
The truth is somewhere in the middle. Do you remember the early 2000s boom of web developers that built custom websites for clients ranging from e-commerce sites to pizza restaurants? Those folks have found new work as the pressure from one-size fits all CMS providers (like Squarespace) and much stronger frameworks for simple front-ends (like node) have squeezed that market down to just businesses that actually need complex custom solutions and reduced the number of people required to maintain those.

It's likely we'll see LLMs used to build a lot of the cheap stuff that previously existed as arcane excel macros (I've already seen less technical folks use it to analyze spreadsheets) but there will remain hard problems that developers are needed to solve.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light... by brink on Monday December 16, 2024 @04:59PM (#42435918)
Comparing an LLM to an industrial textile machine is laughable, because one is consistent and reliable while the other is not.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light... by palata on Tuesday December 17, 2024 @06:32AM (#42440517)
It's laughable only if you think that the only reasonable metric is "consistent and reliable".

The parent says "it typically doesn't matter that the product is worse if it's cheap enough". And that seems valid to me: the average quality of software today seems to be worse than 10 years ago. We do worse but cheaper.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light... by brink on Tuesday December 17, 2024 @04:01PM (#42445276)
> And that seems valid to me: the average quality of software today seems to be worse than 10 years ago.

You don't remember Windows Vista? Windows ME?

I think you have that view because of survivor's bias. Only the good old software is still around today. There was plenty of garbage that barely worked being shipped 10 years ago.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light... by palata on Tuesday December 17, 2024 @04:12PM (#42445361)
Let's think about this: smartphones are orders of magnitude faster today than they were 10 years ago, and yet websites load slower on average.
[ Parent | on HN ]