Comment by mgraczyk
6 days ago
We are beyond the point of trying to convince naysayers.
I will simply not hire anybody who is not good at using LLMs, and I don't think I would ever work with anybody who thinks they aren't very useful. It's like working with somebody who things compilers are useless. Obviously wrong, not worth spending time trying to convince.
To anyone who reads this article and disagrees with the central point: You are missing the most important thing that will happen in your career. You should reevaluate because you will be unemployable in a few years.
I don't think most people with mixed feelings in LLMs (or heretic naysayers as you put it) would want to work in a place like that, so perhaps you are doing everyone a favour!
I think this is a reasonable response. But I also think it's worth taking the parent's compiler analogy seriously as a thought experiment.
Back when I was in college in the 00s, if I had developed a preference for not using compilers in my work, I might have been able to build a career that way, but my options would have been significantly limited. And that's not because people were just jerks who were biased against compiler skeptics, or evil executives squeezing the bottom line, or whatever. It's because the kind of software most people were making at that period of time would have been untenable to create without higher level languages.
In my view, we clearly aren't at this point yet with llm-based tooling, and maybe we never will be. But it seems a lot more plausible to me that we will than it did a year or even six months ago.
It reminds me of many of the people I worked with early in my career.
They were opposed to C++ (they thought C was all you need), opposed to git (they used IBM clearcase or subversion), opposed to putting internal tools in a web browser (why not use Qt and install the tool), opposed to using python or javascript for web services (it's just a script kiddie language), opposed to sublime text/pycharm/vscode (IDEs are for people who don't know how to use a CLI).
I have encountered it over and over, and each time these people get stuck in late career jobs making less than 1/3 of what most 23 year old SWEs I know are making.
At some point, folks just want stability. I don't think you're at that point in your career, but the technology treadmill eventually burns everyone. Ironically, you're most likely going to use GenAI to counteract what is the same scenario (learning GenAI means I never have to learn again).
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They were probably also opposed to some other things that failed.
But then hindsight is 20/20.
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> You should reevaluate because you will be unemployable in a few years.
When this happens, then I'll figure out how to get good at prompting.
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