Comment by layer8
6 days ago
This relates to the analogy that an LLM is like a junior developer that you have to instruct and guide, and whose work you have supervise and review. Working with an LLM is similar to managing people as a tech lead. And once LLM agents get smart enough and reliable enough, the work will be similar to that of a product manager, project leader, CTO, or even CEO.
If you like being an entrepreneur, you’re already different from most professional software developers.
I'm aware of that analogy, and thought that might be what you were alluding to, but I don't think it's a good analogy.
I agree with you that most professional software developers don't like being entrepreneurs, but I think that has more to do with disliking the parts of entrepreneurship that don't fit into "person who makes software", like fundraising and marketing.
But I think many - maybe most, but not all - professional software engineers actually do enjoy "making software", generally, and not just "coding", narrowly.
I agree that they enjoy "making software", but typically not if it involves a lot of instructing LLMs with natural language and reviewing their output. Again, this will become very similar to the job of a project or product manager who doesn't do any coding themselves. Developers tend to not like that kind of role.
Maybe! But I think this is very debatable, or at least, impermanent.
To me, it is very reminiscent of when I was a wee lad and there was a prevalent view that no real developer would want to make web applications, that was for script kiddies. But it turned out to be a useful kind of software to build, so a lot of people who build software started building web applications.
I also think that lots of developers do naturally enjoy increasingly higher levels of work than "just" writing code, as they progress in their careers. The job of "staff+ engineers" has significant overlap with what product managers do, where the "product" they're thinking about is the technical design of a larger system. Lots of developers really do enjoy this kind of work!