Comment by paulluuk

6 days ago

This is a pretty wild take. What percentage of human engineers are creating novel solutions for hard problems, you think? I work in R&D and even my work is 90% doing things that other people already solved. If you are really doing cutting edge SOTA work that has never been done by another human in some form or another, then kudos to you and I want your job.

> What percentage of human engineers are creating novel solutions for hard problems, you think?

IMO Every engineer should try spending his time in a company that tries to solve new problems.

Otherwise we will be stuck, as we are now, with big tech paying you mountains of money for doing nothing, incentivizing you to embark on useless activities for letting other managers have a career, fear layoffs and when that happen complaining about it because "it's a year i'm looking for a new job" pretending same compensation and environment. Web development jobs are particularly affected by that.

In the game industry, for example, if you don't do something interesting your game won't sell a copy.

Let me stress this out again, if LLMs get you 97% there, maybe you should try another idea.

  • > IMO Every engineer should try spending his time in a company that tries to solve new problems.

    Yet typically 95% of software developers mainly work on CRUD-type apps. Coding agents are not perfect there either but they’re really a lot more reliable than they were a few months ago.

  • Please you don’t need to stress anything. I think you are conflating ideas.

    Unique game loops ideas make a good game, it has very little to do with the engineering. This is true for most software engineering products. Most engineering work is just reinventing or reimplementing existing ideas, what you describe rarely exists. It may exist in that the people learning the new ideas think it’s novel but very little is truly unique.