Genuinely wondering what value I bring to my employer right now. What value I will bring in a few months when this gets cheaper.
I think we're screwed. I may only be an SDE 2 at FAANG but I don't think I have promotion opportunities in my future anymore.
People underestimate how people hate looking at terminals and "weird looking combination of characters" even if they didn't have to write them. If anything, you will likely have more career opportunities in the future, than ever.
And if you get a chance to wet your fingers in cybersecurity - I would take it.
AI is really incredible but in my personal projects it can one-shot things.
I'm trying to figure out how I can get to the point where I have hard problems that AI can't solve, at least not yet.
If you're working at a place where this is true about the the organization, then sure, that job will likely be gone. But that was never a good place for your career regardless.
I have 4 concurrent personal projects that are quite complex, but low stakes. I can have SOTA models go wild on them (because low stakes), but they can't one shot anything there. And I can't really work on more than one at a time, even if AI is doing coding - it still requires supervision.
I also frequently nuke these projects and start over because they made a mess there, but I collected necessary knowledge on how to guide them better. You can't do this on a production project, not when there are deadlines and stakeholders.
But just in case some organizations decide to embrace the "trust it blindly" model anyway - cybersecurity specialization will ensure you always have a job.
Could you explain more? Did some ethical hacking at hackthebox.eu (one insane box, one hard box and a few mediums). But I do not see how I will give additional value to a model.
Just a SWE and data analyst at work, so maybe I am missing something.
For example, I'm a privacy nerd, so I like reverse engineering proprietary software to figure out how it works and what data it collects.
I also like getting full access to the hardware I own - like a robot vacuum (bonus point: you'll also learn soldering, probably, which might come in handy if robots take over). Or my Mac studio that imposes some limitations on me on how many active user sessions I can have.
These kinds of things have put me on a path where I've learned how hardware or networking works on deepest levels, what goes through these pipes, how I can place myself in the middle, how I can enter places someone didn't want me to enter.
And once you know how to do these things, you know how to apply this knowledge in defence.
Essentially: always be curious and always try to say "but I want to" when something that doesn't cross the boundary of your physical property says no to you (legally).
Yes, models like Mythos may find vulnerabilities, but your knowledge will make it possible to point it in the right direction, and understand where it's mistaken, or to understand the output when it's right, and what is the right course of action.
Yea, I don’t know if it will hold up. I hope so. It could. I don’t know if it would or wouldn’t.
Or alternatively, have fable write some complex code. Then ask it to do an adversarial review of that code in a clean session. You'll find that it will find issues in the code that it just wrote.
Now imagine you're a layperson who doesn't know which one is true.
Human expertise is never going to become irrelevant.
I can architect things but the issue is that Claude can architect things too.
I'll believe it when I see it.