Ask HN: How to Keep the Edge as an Engineer? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How to Keep the Edge as an Engineer?

11 pointsspacebuffer8 comments

Hi, for the past few months I've been thinking a lot about my work as a software engineer and how I'll be able to provide benefits to companies I work for in the coming years, given the fast pace of progress of LLMs

Every time I think I found an edge that will help me stay I relevant, AIs seem to get really good at it in a few weeks/months. I'll give a few examples.

When gpt-4 was really popular we saw an increase of badly written vibe-coded apps, I thought cybersecurity was a good career path to persue since sometime will eventually need to secure these apps if they start being used in production. but now we're seeing new models find security vulnerabilities at an insane rate.

More recently I had to deal with a few difficult problems at work where I had to cross-reference different logs in the DB and the server to pinpoint the issue quickly so production wouldn't be impacted for very long. I really enjoyed that challenge and found it to be rewarding both for me and for my employer. but I recently came across someone who gave opus read only access to his AWS company and it diagnosed faster than he ever could have (according to the guy himself)

Sure I cannot give AI agents access to my server yet given that its hosted on platforms without a read-only access but I don't foresee this lasting much longer.

I wanted to know what your thoughts are on this situation.

As you mention in your post its more about keeping up with the moving bleeding edge rather than keeping what you have. The most important point/habit is to be invested in lifelong learning.

The moment you stop learning, only doing rote work, is when you stagnate. Thankfully I don't know almost anyone in software who can do even a days worth of work without something unexpected happening. As we all know, execution of a plan is never as simple as the plan. Each unexpected moment is an opportunity to learn, make sure to squeeze those moments for learning and knowledge as much as you (and your employer) will allow.

If your job doesn't present many opportunities for learning then the answer would be to look for another job or hobby-projects if you have the time and energy available.

I believe this is a good time for going from Engineer -> Architect mindset. You don’t need to wait for a formal career progression.

When I got into tech, as an engineer, I enjoyed learning as much as I could about building systems.

Systems are comprised of technology, people, and business needs.

How can we help our customers in the best way possible given some constraints (usually $$).

For example, perhaps at the current scale, the customer needs search but the company cannot afford deploying ElasticSearch. You are already using postgres, and you have 80 million candidate records. How can you make this system work until you have a billion records and need ES?

Honestly, I have no idea what the future holds but this is how I view things.

I think for the meantime you are right, and its been the philosophy i had been applying to my work. However recently I'd been reconsidering this, as AI gets increasingly capable of designing the architecture better than me, ofcourse not yet perfect, but scarily good. I find myself just reading over and approving the architecture it proposed based on the initial idea i gave it. Funnier thing is i had been building a tool that attempts to replace me in my work, maybe it's to blame.

Become a product engineer. Figure out what your company should build next.

Second this. Having a product / consultant mindset is most sought after. In other words - that's what is FDE ( Forward Deployed Engineer ) today. - half technical / half consultant!

Realistically you can't. People trying to compete with AIs at processing or manipulating data are going to fall short both in capability and in speed.

We've seen a lot of these posts in recent years:

- "Sure, AI can create a basic prototype, but you need real engineers to build something production ready"

- "Maybe we don't need to write code by hand anymore, but the real skill is in good prompt engineering"

- "AI is good at grunt work, but it can't replace the creativity of humans to solve novel coding and math problems"

All of it is cope, or comes from people with bad mental models for AI.

For some time there will be niches where people will find areas that AI can't compete well with human labour for various reasons. The obvious examples for now are where human communication is valued, or where the AI needs to interface physically with the world – especially in complex environments.

So I'd argue the question you are asking is wrong. It should be – "given we humans can't keep our edge to AI, what do we do?"

There are near-term and long-term ways to approach answering this.

Near-term you find the best work you can't which requires minimal reskilling (because whatever you reskill into will likely start to be disrupted in 1-10 years too). People who think jobs which involve physical labour are safe are vastly underestimating how much intelligence is a bottleneck to robotics currently.

Then longer term you should be asking how you prepare for what's coming to the best of your ability - specifially in a world where human labour is worthless and cyber weapons are disrupting basic infrastructure, will you be okay?

I've been saying for years now that people should be prepping for their current job in tech to be their last. This sounded unreasonably doomer and unhinged a couple of years back, but I thought it was the right message to be sending. Similarly now in good faith I cannot tell you to look into some niche that I believe probably won't exist in a few years.

Don't position yourself for the world today, but look 10 years out and ask how the world will be and how you can position yourself well for that. People who make bad career and lifestyle choices tend to be too concerned with optimising for the immediate problems and choices they face.

100% agree. A lot of people are coping and just in denial about where we are and what is coming. Humans are good at adapting, but there will be a time where we are no longer needed. For me a good skill to learn for now is public speaking and trying more soft skills. This can give you an edge when competing with other engineers.

Wow!! This is great to hear as a Toastmaster ( public speaking platform ) and couldn't agree more on soft skills. I built a soft skills simulator for engineers in Jan and I hope you will like it. - https://getsimul.com/season1/2am-call

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