Comment by birdsongs | Hacker News Reader

Comment by birdsongs | Hacker News Reader

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I work on my code this way, but I have no idea what my colleagues are doing, and it's impossible to review thousands of new/changed lines a week.

I just approve PRs, because I have to. I don't know what else to do. I can barely keep an eye on all my code.

Actively looking, but job market is rough in Northern Europe. I quit caring about quality in any capacity here, the company has clearly chosen its direction, against my very vocal complaints.

My last interview, with what I thought was a great company, failed when I didn't understand what NLP was when they asked me about it.

> NLP? > Natural Language Programming, it's the future. Claude, GPT, etc.

I laughed, he didn't, looked offended and said it was a serious question. I had thought it was a joke, said "oh you mean LLMs". I tried to answer seriously, of course, but that was my third round technical interview and I didn't get a call back.

Just getting a paycheck and producing mediocre work until I get something new. (Senior engineer, 10 YOE, patents, 3 years at a unicorn).

Also considering becoming an electrician.

I will be unhappy if they steal the meaning of NLP. NLP means Natural Language Processing and LLMs are only a subset of NLP. I would have concerns about anyone who claims to have technical knowledge and asserts NLP means "natural language programming." Those are the same kind of people who might suggest Lisp should add mutable objects.

You may be surprised and annoyed that NLP is also "Neuro linguistic programming", I've met technical people talking of NLP and meaning that...

Yes, but that's in psychology. Different fields have their own terms without causing too many issues. Communication breaks down when we reuse terms for different things within the same field.

More like parapsychology...

They're not unrelated, though.

Without massive scale weapon-grade NLP coming out of AI PR depts and targeting unwitting programmers, the LLM psychosis wouldn't happen.

They may not be related, but having a good understanding of the psychological NLP actually lends it self really well to NLP and prompt engineering. As much as a lot of people 'claim' it to be parapsychology (even within this thread), check out books like Strategies of Genius and how it breaks down a lot of the main concepts. It's very 'meta-cognition' if you will, but, the parallels are eye opening given how long the concepts have been around. If someone has never done serious mind mapping or brain storming and entity-node relationship type work with databases, it would be quite a leg up helping them understand and mentally map out concepts like that.

>Communication breaks down when we reuse terms for different things within the same field.

Ahem Maybe you should write a shim for the stack you're using to broker domains.

you mean like cons cells lol

Same for "AI". LLM is about the only kind of AI we talk about now, so the two blended. Nothing dramatic I guess, but it bothers me when tech people, who are supposed to know the difference, confuse the two.

I'm in what I think will be my last tech job before retraining into something else. The aspects I like about the work are gone, I'm coasting at a small company that's not a great fit, has a visa cliff, and is poorly paid, and the steps it would take to become competitive in an LLM driven tech job market are less appealing to me than the steps it would take to switch over to a different career (likely in healthcare).

Good luck! I took the plunge last year and am just finishing up med school pre-requisites. I'd say at least 6/30 of my O Chem II class are former software engineers.

Thank you! I'm still in a very exploratory phase about what exactly I mean by switching into healthcare. I don't have prereqs done at all, and my current plan is to enroll in a second bachelor's next year and start working through bio and chem courses. I'm looking at a bunch of different options from nursing to PA school to medical physics, and I think I really need to start shadowing people in different professions.

Med school interests me, but I'm a woman in my late 20s who would like to have children, and if I started down the med school road now I wouldn't be done with training until my late 30s, where PA and nursing school don't have that problem. Medical physics is kind of in the middle.

Oh interesting. I was looking at bio-informatics briefly but never even considered medical physics. It's crazy just how big healthcare is and how ignorant I was to it prior to making the transition. Would agree that shadowing has a huge impact on determining what you want to do in the future. My cousin went the PA route over med school and honestly I think it's the best from an ROI and free-time perspective. In her early 30's now and every other weekend she's in a different country.

Understand completely. I'm a little older than you but the high chance of giving up a family was the first thing on the negative column when I was deciding paths.

Awesome! I'm taking prerequisite classes (probably for Physician's Assistant school) while picking up a few shifts at the local EMS station. Good luck on your journey!

Cheers! Best of luck to you as well!

literally in the same boat, gonna see if i can't use ai to build some products to make money and help people, or else i'll go into healthcare and make (significantly less) money and help people.

Yeah, I imagine it's something that needs to be enforced at the organizational level. I sympathize with anyone who takes pride in their work and needs to deal with mindless coworkers pushing slop without any accountability. I left corporate software development (before LLMs were a thing) over frustration with the general culture and I can only imagine it's gotten worse since then.

It's really bad now, yeah. :( It just really hurts that I spent well over a decade of my life learning and honing skills to engineer safe, quality software and now it's just, useless.

No one cares at best, or I'm callously told "keep up or fall behind" at worst. When that's not even the problem, it just, sucks now. There's no joy in anything I do professionally.

Can I ask where you went? I'm seriously looking for an exit, I just don't know what yet. Maybe a trade, in Scandinavia the pay is actually comparable, I just don't want to go back to school.

I was fortunate and saved up enough to live frugally and just work on passion/learning projects for a while. I've been considering going back into commercial software development as a solo dev and leveraging AI, but keeping the focus on quality and craftsmanship. In my opinion there's never been a better time to start a new, ambitious project if you're passionate about quality software.

I agree, that's acutally what I'm doing right now: living frugally in a cheap country while building an ambitious high quality pruduct.

I never had a better time "professionally" (albeit no income yet!) so far in my whole life! Apparently it's truly like the best of times and the worst of times to be building software, if you have the luck and the luxury to be able to work only for yourself than it's really a great time to be alive.

It just really hurts that I spent well over a decade of my life learning and honing skills to engineer safe, quality software and now it's just, useless.

It can feel that way with all the hype but I very much doubt that is really true. I see an industry that is rapidly dividing into two camps - "move fast and break things" and "this actually needs to work". Writing everything with agents and merging while barely even checking what is in the PR has become standard practice in the former but it will get you laughed out of the room in the latter.

Even “actually needs to work” has a wide spectrum from “people could die” to “our customers will be pissed”.

For the latter, the product looks nice and polished on the outside but makes “steaming pile of crap” a gross understatement.

If that's what NLP stands for now then I want off.

You will get used to it. Even I accepted cyber eventually and now no one bats an eye.

Sounds like a cushy job. Why would you want to leave?

Some people just can't turn off their brains and play drone for dozens of hours a week for decades. It feels existentially, aesthetically, and sometimes ethically crushing to spend a whole life doing work you can't expect yourself to respect or value, no matter how much you get paid or how little the work overtly demands of you.

Often, the lack of meaningfully challenging demands being put on you is punishing on its own. It can feel like a relief for a week or month or year, but if you catch a glimpse of that being your whole future, you can come to recognize yourself as being in a mind-eroding secular purgatory.

This anguish is especially common among on highly capable people, high achievers, and those used to some kind of ambition. And by accident of its history, there's a lot of those people in this industry and some of them are going nuts now.

> This anguish is especially common among on highly capable people, high achievers, and those used to some kind of ambition. And by accident of its history, there's a lot of those people in this industry and some of them are going nuts now.

I went nuts for years, until I sold off my interest in my dream partnership.

10 years of heaven. All the benefits and none of the downsides of my internal colleagues. Then 14 years of bureaucracy aimed at predictability over progress, which was infinitely more difficult for me to dodge as an external player.

Compensation for my interest was very objectively valued, with the rate of stalled progress priced in. Which made complete sense, while also being its own madness.

I walked away from so much value, but I don't regret it for a minute.

> and some of them are going nuts now.

Pretty much this. I know it sounds melodramatic but it literally feels like rotting.

I don't solve anything anymore. I don't get any spark of fixing bugs. I don't DO ANYTHING, and it's fucking chipping away at me.

Also I'm fairly sure people are going to realise soon that if they're happy with slop, they don't actually need highly trained engineers anymore.

This whole thread actually prompted me to look into electrician work, especially in renewables that we have here in Norway.

I might fix my burnout and go to school to get my 2 year qualification. AI can't rewire a hydro dam.

Man, I have the same feeling. A long time in your life you build the career and now it’s just feeling so empty, like you are not a engineer anymore, now everyone can use AI and without checking code they would have good results.

> now everyone can use AI and without checking code they would have good results

?!!?

No way. Are you sure? What kind of work? Here there’s still a lot of care needed to navigate the LLM work, like knowing when to make it quit, rewrite, refactor, follow your outline.

It feels magic but when I watch people who don’t know what they are doing trying to make something new (not almost a clone of an existing product), they get pretty frustrated.

I once lost out on 3 months severance and a laptop when I quit a place and they shuttered two and a half weeks later. There had been no direction from the top for over a month other than "ehh, do something useful". I was working remotely and slowly going crazy.

This exact mentality is extremely toxic and is why the historical "anti-work" movements (i.e. Anarchists) have been kneecapped, often by their supposed best friends (i.e. Commies). The major disagreement circa the 2nd internationale was "is work good, but bad that you're exploited and not paid well?" (the Marxist view) vs "Work fucking sucks and we should abolish it" (The Anarchist view)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Right_to_Be_Lazy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Praise_of_Idleness_and_Othe...

I can't believe how much mental justification needs to be made by otherwise highly intelligent people (Bertrand Russel wrote In Praise of Idleness) to defend the right to not work.

No, I fully reject any notion of life value coming from work, and those who hold your view are basically jailors to those who don't want our identity defined by work.

That's not how the world works, and I don't need this in a thread where I'm dealing with the grief of a good career. Please shove off.

I would gladly not work and learn cello and physics independently if that were a real possibility, but it's not, and it won't be within my lifetime.

I had a job in a system that required jobs to survive that genuinely didn't bother me. I actually quite enjoyed it most of the time. Now it's permanently dead and I need something else, or I am homeless and starve to death.

> No, I fully reject any notion of life value coming from work, and those who hold your view are basically jailors to those who don't want our identity defined by work.

Fuck off.

I wish society let nihilistic bums like you die of starvation instead of indulging your bullshit.

it sounds soul-destroying

I'd forgotten why I'd stopped commenting here. Thanks for reminding me, everyone.

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