Comment by dabinat
3 days ago
It surprises me how many people have voluntarily relegated their entire job to LLM Prompter. If your work is indistinguishable from that of a machine, what’s to stop your boss cutting out the middleman and using the machine directly? I would have thought that people would be trying their hardest to prove their worth in this new world we’re in.
I actively support “my boss” to run Claude Code. I offered them to help and made jokes it’s so easy these days they might as well just call Claude Code themselves. I’ve shown I could plop in their documents of feedback and Claude fixed the issues.
I have worked with non-tech employees to set up Claude to help them do small tasks. I’ve helped to review and improve completely vibe-coded projects by such employees.
I’m not sure what my role will be, but I fully embrace that my traditional role of writing code is gone.
I, for one, welcome our new AI overlords...
having worked in tech and now running my own company..
the honest truth is that maybe 10-20% of SWE (at best) are “good”. sure it is harsh but i won't lie. if you're good you'll probably relate.
the rest kind of suck.
i’ve never gotten anything lower than Exceeds Expectations in my career so I’ve seen how awful some engineers were. i’ve seen how amazing a tiny minority were and i made them my mentors.
these days i have a simple policy.
if they cannot think, they are fired. why waste resources (time and money) on someone who can’t use their brain? i’d rather give AI credits to someone who uses their brain.
thinking is the humans job. the ai needs to execute on what the human thought of, improved, planned.
Everybody talks about finding that mythical 10X but in my recent hiring experience it's more like there's a whole bunch of 0Xs and the trick is finding the actual 1Xs among them.
This!
All my experience in trying to hire developers has been wading through an endless stream of people who were just useless.
Me: I want to represent a 2d grid, what data structure should we use? Them: A string?
This was someone applying for senior engineer. Others I've had filled their CV with SQL related acronyms. But couldn't explain what a foreign key was and then stubbornly insisted that at their current corp they would never ever use foreign keys in their SQL database!
I've had senior engineer when asked how to check if we had a 2d array with an item at x,y tell me if anything is on the same column or row, they couldn't do it, couldn't even verbalise how to approach it.
"Web Developers" who didn't know the difference between GET and POST. Web Developers that have never heard of PUT or what it would be used for.
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Someone else said it on HN a couple years ago...Something about how there's no such thing as a 10x engineer, but there are a LOT of 0.1x engineers and a few 2x.
The absolute worst is someone that tries to brand themselves as a 10x engineer by constantly using programming terms like "dynamic programming", "polymorphism", "recursion" and the like, but they're really a 0.1x engineer because they don't truly understand what any of those are and when they should actually be using them, and so try to shoehorn them in when they don't need them while also not understanding them, and end up writing low-quality crap.
Took too long for management to get rid of that guy.
Also now is it 1x in individual productivity or >=1x in team productivity. As anyone multiplying teams productivity by less than one is bad. Probably lot worse than actual 0x.
Someone who produces absolutely nothing and have no impact has cost, but is still better than someone who produces net negative. And the people who solely act as interface between LLM and whatever might fall to later category.
It's the Pareto principle of course, as well as the normal distribution. Many firms have been able to succeed in the market just by hiring only good engineers over average ones.
yeah but these days it is even more important to filter out bads
and even at "good" companies you have people who can game the system to get in, and then they struggle to get anything done on time or be responsible for taking on and completing any initiatives bigger than a single task on a bigger scope.
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Well, if everyone is telling you they want you to adapt AI, then it's rational to see just how much of your job you can get it to do for you.
It's even worse when everyone around you is using it. How can you keep up? Companies face the same dilemma: investors, competitors, and users already use AI and have factored it into their expectations.
AI is supposed to make people 100x more productive. We know it doesn't because nobody remade Windows in 6 months or Photoshop in 1 month. It's just memorized more common cases, that's all. You used to not be able to oneshot a three.js game, now you can, but that's only because it's memorized more three.js games, not because it's more intelligent.
Keep up with what?
We've already established that most of it is noise. You don't need to keep up with producing noise.
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