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Comment by cdfalcon | Hacker News Reader

Completely fair - but at least my PoV comes from having actually worked as a SWE, you know? I feel like the best understanding this fellow can have is purely secondhand from watching the success / failures of his students.

I also think I get doubly upset from advice like this because it’s given and marketed to impressionable young students. Even agreeing with all the moral points he’s made, I truly think this advice would set up a new grad for failure and have them focusing on the wrong skills for this market.

The bit about ignoring trends feels too head in the sand for my liking :/

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Fads come and go in industry. This version of LLMs will come and go as well, as will the coding languages and paradigms we used before (and, presuming you want your code to actually run, still do with some decent frequency).

Will LLMs in their current ergonomics have staying power? Perhaps. Nobody can predict the future. But I don’t think it’s a given in the least

Automatic coding systems have way too much economic value to be considered a "fad". I don't think you need to be Nostradamus to predict that we're never going back to manual coding. Sure, the systems will evolve and improve, but they're certainly not going anywhere.

> Automatic coding systems have way too much economic value to be considered a "fad".

Which is why they very carefully worded it more as 'LLMs in their current form', twice.

Yes, if you stake out an argument carefully enough, you can make its perimeter infinite and its area zero.

How do you know they didn't? My college professor was formerly at NASA, where this stuff is important.

I recognize not everyone's work is [as] important, but we should still strive for excellence (and safety.)

One check of their LinkedIn.

When I started studying CS, the "industry" thought students should be taught COBOL, and maybe some PL/I and Fortran, because obviously that was what the market wanted.

I worked at a FAANG in a senior role for around 6 years and I completely agree with the article. (I left before LLM/agent use became widespread, but I would have flamed out anyway if it was forced upon me.)

It's scary just how quickly the past has been buried: Decades of accumulated insight on best practices, all discarded in service of the new electric Christ.

The blacksmith's lament.

This hit very close home. I'm a 44 year old developer, with Software Engineering Bachellors and CompSci MPhil and PhD. All my life I spearheaded "best practices" and code quality (from Fred Brooks, Joel Sposky, Martin Fowler, etc...).

But since LLMs arrived... things have become crazy. The layer of "obscurity" that permeates code writing seems to make a lot of those "standards" moot or just not really pragmatically possible to follow.

Buddy... The whole point of the post is that he wants his students to question whether "succeeding in this market" is really the right choice.

The right choice is rather to strive for perfect - and be unemployed?

To me it was actually not clear what his point was.

"Above all, be motivated by love instead of fear."

Sounds great. But not that practical.

Why isn't it practical? In my life, I've encountered many SWEs that have changed careers. I've met them in national parks working as rangers. In real estate, grocery store butchers, and yak ranchers. Yet I've never once encountered a SWE that was once doing something non-technical and decided to switch.

Purely anecdotal, I know. But still, I prefer to think that all those people discovered this practical advice and are far happier for it. I've never met one that regretted their decision.

Oh, I would consider becoming a park ranger as well, but as a european, I also did not had to go deep in dept, to become a SWE.

And a professor should take that into account and give practical advice. In the real world, solving haskell challenes (of which the prof is fan of) is unfortunately not that useful. People have real needs for working software to solve their real pain points. Not to worship code quality.

Some projects need obviously better code quality (airplanes, medical equipment..) - but not all of them. And if you want to have sacred code when coding a crude throw away app .. you won't get enough money for that. And positions for academics are limited.

i was writing a bit of a lengthy reply, but yeah this is the whole point really.

making that money, getting that job title, being at that company, working on that project -- are these success?

or is success simply doing the best job possible when writing code?

The irony is that writing the best code possible is now a recipe for unemployment.

It's really not though.

The point is to decide what success is for yourself. Learn everything you can about the thing you might decide to automate. But think before you automate and how you do so because it could cause more harm then good.

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