alt Hacker NewsThis thread doesn't resonate with me whatsoever. It's not that I don't get where these people are coming from. LLMs have allowed people to churn out projects (especially small, personal projects) faster than ever, skipping what a lot of people view as the boring or tedious parts. But these discussions feel like a kid playing with toys, while a nuclear explosion is going off in the background.
Until I realized that no one here is going to be in the blast radius. So many people who agree with this admit to being in their 40s, 50s, 60s. All of them have already had the time to learn without LLMs, get industry experience, network, climb their career ladders as high as they could. These people are now sitting on piles of assets, and they know that if LLMs start pushing out people from the industry, it'll be us juniors and new grads. They will either remain relevant in the industry due to seniority/experience/pivoting to managerial duty, use their money and connections to easily learn new skills and pivot, or punch out and coast through retirement before it affects them.
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This is a propaganda/marketing post.
1) What 60 year old in tech his entire life only makes a HN account in the last 17 hours?
2) Assuming he wasn't aware of it. What brought the site to his attention and why now?
3) Did not engage with the thread at all after his initial post. Has not engaged with anything else since. You'd think someone introduced to a tech community would be eager to look around and contribute??
I completely understand your sentiment though and it's exactly what makes the OG post so tone deaf.
You’re right that LLMs are going to push out jobs at the low end of the market. “Code monkey” type jobs are going to be displaced the same way computers displaced a lot of basic clerical and computational jobs.
But that doesn’t mean there won’t be entry level jobs, they will just have a different set of qualifications and expectations. Just like it’s hard to get a job doing arithmetic today without some other knowledge of the application, future jobs in computing are going to require people to understand things outside of the realm of programming alone. They are going to need to know more about the application of the code they write. It’ll be bad for developers who “just close Jira tickets” but problem solvers in a specific field will be okay.