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Comment by cjbgkagh | Hacker News Reader

I had hired 3 junior/mid lvl devs and paid them to do nothing but study to improve their skills, it was my investment in their future, I had a big project on the horizon that I needed help with. After 6 months I let them go, the improvement was far too slow. Books that should have taken a week to get through were taking 6 weeks. Since then LLM have completely surpassed them. I think it’s reasonable to think that some day, maybe soon, LLMs will surpass me. Like everyone else, I have to the best I can while I can.

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But this is an issue of worker you're hiring. I've worked with senior engineers who a) did nothing (as - really not write any thing within the sprint, nor do any other work) b) worked on things they wanted to work on c) did ONLY things that they were assigned in the sprint (= if there were 10 tickets in the sprint and they were assigned 1 of these tickets then they would finish that ticket and not pick up anything else, staying quiet) d) worked only on tickets that have requirements explicitly stated step by step (open file a, change line 89 to be `checkBar` instead of `checkFoo`... - having to write this would take longer than doing the changes yourself as I was really writing in Jira ticket what I wanted the engineer to code, otherwise they would come back with "not enough spec, can't proceed"). All of these cases - senior people!

Sure - LLMs will do what they're told (to a specific value of "do" and "what they're told")

If you are a “senior” engineer who is doing nothing but pulling well defined Jira tickets off the board, you’re horribly mis titled.

Sure there is a wide spectrum of skills, having worked in FANG and top tier research I have a pretty good idea of the capability at the top of the spectrum. I know I wasn't hiring at that level. I was paying 2x the local market rate (non-US) and pulling from the functional programming talent pool. These were not the top 1% but I think they were easily top 10% and probably in the top 5%.

I use LLMs to build isolated components and I do the work needed to specialize them for my tasks and integrate them together. The LLMs take fewer instructions to do this and handle ambiguity far better. Additionally because of the immediate feedback look on the specs I can try first with a minimally defined spec and interactively refine as needed. It takes me far less work to write specs for LLMs than it does for other devs.

> But this is an issue of worker you're hiring.

You're (unwittingly?) making an argument for using an LLM: you know what you're going to get. It does not take six months to evaluate one; six minutes suffice.

The argument I'm trying to make is that hiring a real person or using LLMs has upsides and downsides. People have their own agendas, can leave, can affect your business in many ways, unrelated to code etc, but also can learn, can be creative and address problems that you've not even surfaced. LLM will not and will not be capable of that.

With LLMs you know what you're going to get to a certain value. Will it not listen to you? No. Will it not follow your instructions? Maybe. Will it produce unmaintainable garbage? Most certainly. Does that matter for nondevs? Sometimes

> After 6 months I let them go, the improvement was far too slow.

The bit that's missing from this story is the "why" the improvement was far too slow. Was it primarily a failure to hire the right people, a failure to teach them what you wanted them to learn, a failure to understand what you needed to teach, or a deliberate lie on the part of all three of them to steal from you?

And even if their progress had been faster, now they are a capable developer who can command higher compensation that statistically your company won’t give them and they are going to jump ship anyway.

One didn't even wait, they immediately tried to sub-contract the work out to a third party and make a transition from a consultant to a consultancy company. I had to be clear that they are hired as named person and I very much do care about who does the work.While not FANG comp it was ~2x the market rates, statistically I think they'd have a hard time matching that somewhere else. I think in part because I was offering these rates they got rather excited about the perceived opportunity in being a consultancy company, i.e. the appetite grows with the eating. I'm not sure if it's something that could be solved with more money, I guess in theory with FANG money but it's not like those companies are without their dysfunctions. With LLMs I can solve the same problem with far less money.

I think I see the problem: you're running a consulting company, and complaining that your mercenaries aren't very good or loyal.

I've not run a consultancy firm, I've previously worked as a consultant, but these people were hired to work on product.

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