Comment by tavavex | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tavavex | Hacker News Reader

This thread doesn't resonate with me whatsoever. It's not that I don't get where these people are coming from. LLMs have allowed people to churn out projects (especially small, personal projects) faster than ever, skipping what a lot of people view as the boring or tedious parts. But these discussions feel like a kid playing with toys, while a nuclear explosion is going off in the background.

Until I realized that no one here is going to be in the blast radius. So many people who agree with this admit to being in their 40s, 50s, 60s. All of them have already had the time to learn without LLMs, get industry experience, network, climb their career ladders as high as they could. These people are now sitting on piles of assets, and they know that if LLMs start pushing out people from the industry, it'll be us juniors and new grads. They will either remain relevant in the industry due to seniority/experience/pivoting to managerial duty, use their money and connections to easily learn new skills and pivot, or punch out and coast through retirement before it affects them.

This is a propaganda/marketing post.

1) What 60 year old in tech his entire life only makes a HN account in the last 17 hours?

2) Assuming he wasn't aware of it. What brought the site to his attention and why now?

3) Did not engage with the thread at all after his initial post. Has not engaged with anything else since. You'd think someone introduced to a tech community would be eager to look around and contribute??

I completely understand your sentiment though and it's exactly what makes the OG post so tone deaf.

I don't doubt that there are some bot comments here and there, but there are tens of people in this comment section echoing the same sentiment. Many of them have post histories going back many years. They can't all be bots.

On every forum, there are a lot of lurkers that never make an account and just read their website of interest to keep up with the news and check on things they're interested in. It's not often that they make the effort to create an account to say something. Usually, that happens when something they feel strongly about is brought up. So, while the account age of this poster makes me very suspicious, it's also not enough for me to rule out completely.

I'm not sure the assumption is that he's coming across HN for the first time rather than making an alt/stop lurking to post this. Or even that someone in tech their entire life must have already had a HN account before today. HN is big, but it's not so big that statement is even remotely reasonable.

You’re right that LLMs are going to push out jobs at the low end of the market. “Code monkey” type jobs are going to be displaced the same way computers displaced a lot of basic clerical and computational jobs.

But that doesn’t mean there won’t be entry level jobs, they will just have a different set of qualifications and expectations. Just like it’s hard to get a job doing arithmetic today without some other knowledge of the application, future jobs in computing are going to require people to understand things outside of the realm of programming alone. They are going to need to know more about the application of the code they write. It’ll be bad for developers who “just close Jira tickets” but problem solvers in a specific field will be okay.

So, what does that leave for the current new grads? The LLM field hasn't even stabilized yet, we're still pretty far from a defined set of qualifications. Yet hiring has already stopped due to economical factors. By the time it swings back, the new grads of tomorrow will already be graduating with these qualifications that we won't get to learn or develop with real jobs.

And what if this results in the overall market size decreasing? If a company can use LLMs effectively, they may need far fewer people to do the job they're doing than they used to. This would result in an exodus of everyone - biased towards the lower end, no doubt, but it would still hit everyone else and greatly worsen working conditions due to an oversupply of desperate people looking for work.

The job of pure “programming” will shrink and become more academic in scope. Jobs in industry will shift towards industry specific applied roles. It won’t be good enough to blindly build CRUD forms anymore.

Before calculators you could just get a job just doing arithmetic. The job was called actually called “computer”. There are still plenty of jobs doing math, but most are now mostly an application of math in a specific field. This trend has already started happening with low-code/no-code tools, and that will accelerate now.

If I were a new grad, I would brush up on my other skills outside of programming and look for jobs that require soft skills, analysis, etc. Or pick a highly regulated industry.

The days of sitting in a cube all day and working Jira tickets stipulated by someone else is coming to an end.

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