The scenario laid out is pretty dated. Most scrum shops would not permit this level of backstory anymore. Admittedly I have seen this happen in the old days but it wasnt usually very impactful. It was in places where people had too much time on their hands and not much supervision.
Also there isnt much above senior/lead engineer these days, there is no straight line career progression above that. You can try to get into architecture but thats mostly paperwork, or management which is mostly dealing with people.
If you want to call your own shots as an engineer the world is your oyster, start your own company and build it. There is not much worth "being in charge of" in corporate dev shops that I can see or would want to be a part of. Most of it is retread, make work including FAANG.
I think this is true. Positions beyond senior, if a company is large and technical enough to have them at all (Google, Netflix, etc.) are mostly about paying you more and putting more pressure on you to churn out more code, and more polished code, which adheres to the needs of 25 different stakeholders. You're just a senior plus more stress.
After the initial prototype, starting your own company is mostly marketing, people management and more marketing. This “start your own company if you dont want to answer to anyone” is so romanticized that its comical. Its also completely inaccurate.
You can see the slop through the headline. No need to click. Posts like this are turning the internet into a trash pile. Nobody needs this slop, abandonware.
Heres the template:
"I" <--- prompted some LLM
"built" <--- to generate code for a
"fastest" <-- insert specious claim here
"PHP server" <-- thing
"And I prompted the LLM to build a website" <---- link
Im sorry folks but this just doesnt cut it anymore. I dont think it ever did.
And this one has a working webserver you can run in one command, a graphical user interface and real-time dashboard, tests to prove the claims, and example apps to make it easy to start. Not to mention that you can run your existing PHP apps unmodified with it just like you can with php-fpm.
The grandfather comment is pants-on-fire wrong. “No need to click” while they opine on something you’ve never seen.
As far as the landing page — there are truly many features that this webserver enables. That’s why the website lists 9 categories and links to other pages. It also has expandable sections like “how can it be this fast?”
I do use LLMs in my toolchain, to generate text and code, and compilers to generate code, but I also cover it heavily with automated tests and also battle-test it in my own environments on actual workloads. I mean sheesh, I am literally sharing it so that you can download and run it yourself, and if you run into something obscure on your environment, report any issues and it’ll be fixed.
I think what’s happening is: I spend months iterating and building software, that makes some major breakthroughs over existing software. I am able to do this by using LLMs in my toolchain, as well as automated testing suites, and compilers. I don’t write assembly language by hand.
What happens is that I have the documentation and front facing websites also generated by LLMs. And many people commenting here didn’t even bother to click through and download the actual software or try it. If you did, you would have seen the tests, and example apps. You would have seen the graphicsl UX and dashboard the server itself enables. The fact that no one even mentioned it suggests to me that the people commenting are ones cutting corners. So me using more automation in addition to compiles and test suites isn’t the issue, if you are unwilling so much as to run it before opining publicly about it. Based solely on a README file.
In particular, this server allows people (like the entrepreneurs on HN) to handle 100x as many simultaneous users than current php-fpm, or be as safe as php-fpm while being as fast as Swoole, Roadrunner, FrankenPHP. Try it.
There are no breakthroughs. And your attempt to closely associate LLM’s with compilers is tiresome.
Look, you are allowed to feel excited about using coding agents but understand we don’t have to lower the bar with the purpose of entertaining your LLM induced delusions of grandeur.
Wrong on both points. Yes, there are clearly breakthroughs since it can handle 100x more users at the same time than PHP-FPM, also it handles everything else including websockets, etc.
Furthermore, it's not just me associating LLMs with compilers. Linus Torvalds said this 2 months ago. I'm sure you'll find him to be tiresome too... you're much more knowledgeable than all of us:
https://www.reddit.com/r/theprimeagen/comments/1ucitd0/linus...
Sorry no offense, but you're not very convincing, when you didn't even bother to look at the software or read the actual package documentation to any extent. You're pattern-matching in this case more than a low-weight LLM here.
while the design aspects have been significantly accelerated and modularized, reducing costs and time to market, i am starting to get a "the cool kids all have their own chips" vibe now like maybe this has gotten too easy.
Next Uber will have its own chips if they dont already.
The math hasn't changed much, betting on software not changing is a pretty bad bet unless your stinking rich or a fool.
Hi, Im not an H1B but as someone who contracted for decades, it was pretty easy to get hired as a contractor after companies laid off. The entire reason I stayed a contractor was because after being an employee and living under constant threat of layoffs, I decided I couldn't live like that anymore. It was my way of taking control.
Contract labor is not booked as headcount so its not just the cost its also how its budgeted and looks to shareholders.
Obviously our industry hasnt cared a whit about what its employees think since at least 2005 when they thought they were going to send all of it elsewhere.
Indian outsourcing companies such as TCS, Infosys, Wipro, Cognizant, etc., have a negative impact on contracting rates. These companies just underbid for the onsite contractor roles, so it is a race to bottom. Have you noticed all those emails from recruiters for $55 dollars on W2 in California for some contract role through TCS, Infosys, ..
My earnest, non-sarcastic advice to anyone considering learning to code is to find something else that interests you.
While there is possibly some time left before the software industry implodes, hobbyist software will also get steamrolled so I would in the strongest terms possible guide someone to find something that makes them happy and to pursue it.
The software industry as it exists today is a sad bag of regret and disappointment being papered over by opportunists of the worst kind.
I doubt you are addicted to information. I highly suspect like many users of digital technology who are able to consume near infinite streams of said, that you are like a wasteful software program "polling" these data sources hoping that something really important will surface or that some underlying truth will be revealed through identifying patterns in the information.
I dont think you would need someone to publish that your hair was on fire on the web before you would believe it.
The wasteful part is that repeating the behavior (addiction or not) can become self-repeating even in the absence of the fix. Also one has to realize that at least in the case of news there is very little every day and most of what is distributed is rehash, or ancillary, or bloated and repeated to sell ads. You can go without watching or consuming news on the internet and not miss much for a pretty long time.
As far as tech goes, it moves very slow you can take a couple years off a software eng job and come back and not much has changed with very few exceptions. (Yes LLMs were one)
When you are done staring at your phone/computer at the end of the day reflect on whether or not you got anything really worthwhile out of it and put it in perspective. The signal vs noise ratio is not in your favor and getting less so every day.
I personally stare at my phone alot for the same reason as many people do. Im bored. But I dont do it at the expense of anything else Id rather do.
There’s so much more information to consume than news — or worse, tech news. Every day I find new things to learn about physics, history, geology, paleontology, biology… and not just things we discovered today, but decades and centuries worth of findings.
There is so much more to learn than any one person could even skim in their lifetime, even if you ignore absolutely all news. And heck yeah, it’s addictive.
I have been a professional SWE for 30 years, I was also paid to write software when I was in middle school in the early 80s. I quit to do other things before high school.
I am not pro AI nor anti AI. since machine learning is not an interest of mine and is not programming I simply have no interest in it.
im also not interested in being a consumer of machine learning products as it relates to my profession.
If I need solutions coded with automation code generators are much faster and reliable. i write them all the time.
The only benefit I derive as a consumer of machine learning at this time is to avoid using the degraded and near useless google search engine for minor lookups of trivia I dont commit to memory. And I do value this very much given the pathetic state of internet search.
As an engineer I can do everything I need and want to do and dont need help building systems. People who do frequently need help enjoy machine learning consumerism more than I do.
As far as what I want in regards to machine learning in the workplace is to be allowed to do my job and not be bothered to use a bunch of junk I dont need.
and the noise around LLMs is annoying and I am anti building data centers and destroying general purpose computing over some corporate lust for power just because an LLM can string a few sentences together.
I am also vehemently against the massive theft of copyrighted content to train LLMs and view LLM output as a form of obfuscated theft.
Also there isnt much above senior/lead engineer these days, there is no straight line career progression above that. You can try to get into architecture but thats mostly paperwork, or management which is mostly dealing with people.
If you want to call your own shots as an engineer the world is your oyster, start your own company and build it. There is not much worth "being in charge of" in corporate dev shops that I can see or would want to be a part of. Most of it is retread, make work including FAANG.
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