[deadbabe]

The proliferation of AI and LLMs has completely obliterated leverage.

Don’t want the job for the salary offered? Too bad. Hire a cheaper person armed to the teeth with the best LLM coding tools and move on.

Unless you’re coming in with significant clout that will move revenue and relations to bridge partnerships across other companies, you will not be worth the extra $250k on skills alone.

[Magmalgebra]

This is situational - as a strong engineer I have more leverage than ever to demand ever more eye watering compensation.

Weaker engineers and junior engineers are in more the situation you describe. This is tough and I feel for these folks but it is possible for many people to become stronger engineers if they choose to put in the work.

I'd encourage you to not take on a feeling of hopelessness here.

[justrudd]

I agree with you to an extent. I was recently laid off (start up out of money) along with the rest of the engineering team. So I’m going through loops. The hardest part of the process for me is getting past the initial recruiter. Once I get past whatever “wall” they’ve put in place, I do pretty well. So I wonder how many recruiters now are using AI to screen applicants? Given the hundreds (thousands?) of applications, probably some of them.

Anecdotally - I’ve been through 2 technical screens where they asked me to use an AI prompt to solve a problem. For one, it was a pretty trivial problem (running an hmac over some values) so I just solved it directly. They asked why I didn’t use AI, and I told them honestly that I’ve done something like this hundreds of times, why would I use a prompt for it? Didn’t make it to the next round. Now it’s totally possible that I didn’t make it because of something else. And maybe those were outliers, but it seems like I’ll need to brush up on prompting…

[systemf_omega]

That's what bottom-tier companies always tell me. Last decade it used to be outsourcing. I was getting low balled left and right with phrases like "I can pay a guy from Asia a lot less for the same work".

Now it's LLMs. Same old.

[deadbabe]

Except now it’s for real.

[lazide]

Outsourcing was and is real too. It had and still does have tradeoffs.

LLM’s have similar if not worse trade offs imo.

[sokoloff]

LLMs have the massive advantage of low latency. If you have a team on the other side of the clock, you get one cycle a day.

With an LLM, you get a cycle every 2-15 minutes. And LLMs are improving faster than outsourcing companies’ employees.

[lazide]

Latency - yes

LLM’s are also much better at faking it in remarkably unpredictable ways, and are hitting diminishing returns (or even backsliding) on improvements.

And LLM’s can’t actually do anything without humans structuring everything and doing stuff on it’s behalf.