9 ms·

Even taking this as completely true, what does it mean for the field? How can one become a professional, experienced engineer if one has not put in multiple ye

by lukev 2y ago

Even taking this as completely true, what does it mean for the field? How can one become a professional, experienced engineer if one has not put in multiple years being a productive junior engineer? And what happens if those jobs are no longer available?

engfan 2y ago
The same thing that has happened forever. People practice and gain skills on their own time before being welcomed into the professional community. Skilled new college graduate programmers have often put in a decade or more of learning before they graduate because they start young. They may have taught themselves many programming languages, studied many open source libraries, learned about profiling and efficiency tradeoffs, etc. Companies with serious engineering needs simply don’t want and haven’t wanted those who lack this natural desire to build and iterate. The only change is that the bar continues to rise a bit and all people are now competing at one level or another with machines.
lumost 2y ago
My bet is that LLM tools will do for tech what cloud, SaaS, and other productivity tools did before. Make productive users better and faster. My first job in 2010 required 12 operations personnel to manage a simple app server + database. The db had a dba oncall of 3 people, along with oracle support contracts. These days that job would be done using cloud tools, and that team of 12 people wouldn’t exist. The same story has been true throughout the infrastructure space for 15+ years, with current practices foisting the remaining work on software teams. I suspect junior engineers who can make effective use of LLM tools will be in high demand. LLMs also minimize the benefit of experience provided you can still sift BS vs truth. A firm ultimately only cares about who delivers the most impact.

9 ms·

Even taking this as completely true, what does it mean for the field? How can one become a professional, experienced engineer if one has not put in multiple ye

by lukev 2y ago

engfan 2y ago
The same thing that has happened forever. People practice and gain skills on their own time before being welcomed into the professional community. Skilled new college graduate programmers have often put in a decade or more of learning before they graduate because they start young. They may have taught themselves many programming languages, studied many open source libraries, learned about profiling and efficiency tradeoffs, etc. Companies with serious engineering needs simply don’t want and haven’t wanted those who lack this natural desire to build and iterate. The only change is that the bar continues to rise a bit and all people are now competing at one level or another with machines.
lumost 2y ago
My bet is that LLM tools will do for tech what cloud, SaaS, and other productivity tools did before. Make productive users better and faster. My first job in 2010 required 12 operations personnel to manage a simple app server + database. The db had a dba oncall of 3 people, along with oracle support contracts. These days that job would be done using cloud tools, and that team of 12 people wouldn’t exist. The same story has been true throughout the infrastructure space for 15+ years, with current practices foisting the remaining work on software teams. I suspect junior engineers who can make effective use of LLM tools will be in high demand. LLMs also minimize the benefit of experience provided you can still sift BS vs truth. A firm ultimately only cares about who delivers the most impact.