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izzylanyesterday at 6:57 PM7 repliesview on HN

I've been testing this out and I think my SWE career is dead in the water.

Genuinely wondering what value I bring to my employer right now. What value I will bring in a few months when this gets cheaper.

I think we're screwed. I may only be an SDE 2 at FAANG but I don't think I have promotion opportunities in my future anymore.


Replies

gck1yesterday at 9:18 PM

Your job is just going to change. You may or may not appreciate/enjoy what it becomes necessarily, but it doesn't mean that you are going to not have a job.

People underestimate how people hate looking at terminals and "weird looking combination of characters" even if they didn't have to write them. If anything, you will likely have more career opportunities in the future, than ever.

And if you get a chance to wet your fingers in cybersecurity - I would take it.

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cleaningyesterday at 9:36 PM

If you think the job is just writing code then yes you are screwed, just like if you thought your job was just making punch cards. In most roles you have more responsibilities than plainly converting words into text. You're probably not being paid to simply be a human calculator (otherwise you'd be paid a lot less!).

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cyberpunkyesterday at 7:42 PM

Yeah. I’m not looking forward to years of retraining to earn half the salary either. Us old timers at least got a good 15-20 years out of it. Bananas.

dannypovolotskiyesterday at 10:18 PM

You do realize that this is likely a 10 trillion parameter model that takes something like 20 terabytes of RAM to run inference? Calculate the price for all this VRAM .... It's not getting cheaper in the next few "months".

aerhardtyesterday at 7:31 PM

So this is the one, huh?

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imafishyesterday at 7:50 PM

I agree. Software engineering as we know it is dead. Wonder what it'll evolve into.

brcmthrowawayyesterday at 11:51 PM

I'd say you're cooked if you don't have multi-agent harnesses burning tokens right now. That's going to be a pre-requisite very soon