alt Hacker News> It's the expertise of engineers on the team that push it back on track.
But how are you so sure your colleagues are not more "expert" than you? Prior LLMs there was room for very good engineers and mediocre engineers to work together in 99% of the companies out there. With LLMs, only the "best" engineers will survive, because nobody needs mediocre engineers anymore.
This being HN, I imagine every engineer reading this thinks they are in top the 10-5% of their company/city/country, and therefore they think they are not "mediocre" engineers that can get affected by the introduction of LLMs. Statistically, they are probably wrong. So, it's all about ego. Chances are you are not a rockstar and LLMs will eventually take over your job.
As usual, the only winners here are corporations and executives. Most of us are the last monkeys in the chain, and so we'll get screwed.
Replies
> because nobody needs mediocre engineers anymore.
This is giving too much credit to LLM. I think LLMs are great and it is incredibly useful both in personal and professional settings. However, it exist on a separate plane than human workers in the tools category.
Sooner or later, people will find out that LLMs only overlaps with existing human hierarchy (e.g. junior dev X%, senior dev Y%, etc), but almost never 100%. If it was 100% to a certain position, you are probably using the humans wrong to begin with there - since humans have one of the most priced thing that I don't see an single ounce out of LLMs: initiative
> With LLMs, only the "best" engineers will survive, because nobody needs mediocre engineers anymore.
LLMs are going to show that there's a huge divide in "engineers" between people who love "coding" and people who like "engineering".
The group of people kicking and screaming the most are the people who love code and don't want to see their coding go away.
These are typically the build vs buy folks. "We can't use anything anyone else wrote, I can do it better..."
What do you think Staff level engineers do? They don't sit around coding all day.
Writing the code is just something you had to do in the past to get the job done.
What you get paid to do is "engineer". The two are related, but they are separate. Coding is a very small part of the average engineer's job (and almost none at staff level and above).
And yet the vast majority of engineers think that the world is going to end if they aren't spending most of their time "coding".
> With LLMs, only the "best" engineers will survive, because nobody needs mediocre engineers anymore.
I don't think this is true.
A good engineer doesn't have infinite throughput. In my opinion the best engineers should be constantly bottlenecked because they solve difficult problems. They don't have time for grunt work. Every company needs less than perfect engineers, AI assisted or not.
Exactly. Same with tractors. Once they arrived, nobody benefited except Big Tractor.
Famously a net loss for humanity.
Well almost 70% of the developers in the industry can't write a fizz buzz.
But, besides coding skills (which some possess), the engineering, social, and business ones are close to non existent.
The corporations and executives are already winning if you swallowed the concept of 'rockstar' engineer. Sure there are more and less experienced engineers, but even interns can and often do provide good input and spot mistakes made by seniors. The 'rockstar' engineer at most tech companies simply equates to the somewhat autistic guy with a brown nose who's working 15 hour days for a pat on the head from management (and making many mistakes in the process).