Comment by ALittleLight | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ALittleLight | Hacker News Reader

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I think this is a huge demonstration of progress. Shrugging it off as "water is blue" ignores the fact that a year ago this wouldn't have been possible. At one end of the "programmer" scale is hacking basic programs together by copying off of stack overflow and similar - call that 0. At the other end is the senior/principal software architect - designing scalable systems to address business needs, documenting the components and assigning them out to other developers as needed - call that 10.

What this shows us is that ChatGPT is on the scale. It's a 1 or a 2 - good enough to pass a junior coding interview. Okay, you're right, that doesn't make it a 10, and it can't really replace a junior dev (right now) - but this is a substantial improvement from where things were a year ago. LLM coding can keep getting better in a way that humans alone can't. Where will it be next year? With GPT-4? In a decade? In two?

I think the writing is on the wall. It would not surprise me if systems like this were good enough to replace junior engineers within 10 years.

We don’t get junior engineers for solving problems we tend to get them because they grow into other roles.

That’s a very unrealistic take.

Here is what usually happens.

You hire a junior dev at $x. Let’s say $75K. They stay for a couple of years and start out doing “negative work”. By the time they get useful and start asking for $100K, your HR department tells you that they can’t give them a 33% raise.

Your former junior dev then looks for another job that will pay them what they are asking for and the next company doesn’t have to waste time or risk getting an unproven dev.

While your company is hiring people with his same skill level at market price - ie “salary compression and inversion”.

Ah, yes, that's why when we read programmer forums every engineer says something like "If you want a promotion and more pay move to another company".

Yes? That is an issue with US laws, not how jobs work. Your employer will still need to fill more senior roles.

And then we hire those juniors as mods from other companies

First, that's not true. You need people to actually write code. If your organization is composed of seniors who are doing architecture planning, cross-team collaboration, etc - you will accomplish approximately nothing. A productive team needs both high level planning and strategy and low level implementation.

Second, the LLM engineer will be able to grow into other roles too. Maybe all of them.

I don't know what type of orgs you have been a part of however in my experience seniors have always been still coding.

really? I just hire them to do the grunt work and tedious shit

Exactly and ChatGPT does that well.

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