[lm28469]

> The simplest explanation would be...

The simplest explanation is that most of us are code monkeys reinventing the same CRUD wheel over and over again, gluing things together until they kind of work and calling it a day.

"developers" is such a broad term that it basically is meaningless in this discussion

[mexicocitinluez]

or, and get this, software development is an enormous field with 100s of different kinds of variations and priorities and use cases.

lol.

another option is trying to convince yourself that you have any idea what the other 2,000,000 software devs are doing and think you can make grand, sweeping statements about it.

there is no stronger mark of a junior than the sentiment you're expressing

[theshrike79]

For every coder doing some cutting-edge Computer SCIENCE there are 99 people creating one more CRUD API Glue application or microservice.

I've been doing this for 25 years and everything I do can be boiled down to API Glue.

Stuff comes in, code processes stuff, stuff goes out. Either to another system or to a database. I'm not breaking new ground or inventing new algorithms here.

The basic stuff has been the same for two decades now.

Maybe 5% of the code I write is actually hard, like when the stuff comes in REAL fast and you need to do the processing within a time limit. Or you need to get fancy with PostgreSQL queries to minimise traffic from the app layer to the database.

With LLM assistance I can have it do the boring 95% of scaffolding one more FoobarController.cs , write the models and the entity framework definitions while I browse Hacker News or grab a coffee and chat a bit. Then I have more time to focus on the 5% as well as more time to spend improving my skills and helping others.

Yes. I read the code the LLM produces. I've been here for a long time, I've read way more code than I've written, I'm pretty good at it.

[mexicocitinluez]

> I've been doing this for 25 years and everything I do can be boiled down to API Glue.

Oooof, and you still haven't learned how big this field is? Give me the ego of a software developer who thinks they've seen it all in a field that changes almost daily. Lol.

> The basic stuff has been the same for two decades now.

hwut?

> Maybe 5% of the code I write is actually hard, like when the stuff comes in REAL fast and you need to do the processing within a time limit

God, the irony in saying something like this and not having the self-awareness to realize it's actually a dig at yourself. hahahahaha

Congratulations on being the most lame software developer on this planet who has only found himself in situations that can be solved by building strictly-CRUD software. Here's to hoping you keep pumping out those Wordpress plugins and ecommerce sites.

I have 2 questions for you to ruminate on:

1. How many programming jobs have you had? 2. How many programming jobs exist in the entire world at this moment?

It's gotta be what, a million job difference? lol. But you've seen it all right? hahahazha

[theshrike79]

I didn't say that there aren't people doing cutting edge stuff.

But even John Romero did the boring stuff along with the cool stuff. Andrej Karpathy wrote a ton of boilerplate Python to get his stuff up and running[0].

Or are you claiming that every single line of the nanochat[0] project is peak computer science algorithms no LLM can replicate today?

Take the initial commit tasks/ directory for example[1]. Dude is easily in the top 5 AI scientists in the world and he still spends a good time writing pretty basic string wrangling in Python.

My basic point here is that LLMs automate generating the boilerplate to a crazy degree, letting us spend more time in the bits that aren't boring and are actually challenging and interesting.

[0] https://github.com/karpathy/nanochat [1] https://github.com/karpathy/nanochat/tree/master/tasks

[lm28469]

Well I know for a fact there are more code monkeys than rocket scientists working on advanced technologies. Just look at job offers really...

Anyone with any kind of experience in the industry should be able to tell that so idk where you're going with your "junior" comment. Technically I'm a senior in my company and I'm including myself in the code monkey category, I'm not working on anything revolutionary, as most devs are, just gluing things together, probably things that have been made dozens of times before and will be done dozens of time later... there is no shame in that, it's just the reality of software development. Just like most mechanics don't work on ferraris, even if mechanics working on ferraris do exist.

From my friends, working in small startups and large megacorps, no one is working on anything other than gluing existing packages together, a bit of es, a bit of postgres, a bit of crud, most of them worked on more technical things while getting their degrees 15 years ago than they are right now... while being in the top 5% of earners in the country. 50% of their job consist of bullshitting the n+1 to get a raise and some other variant of office politics

[mexicocitinluez]

> From my friends, working in small startups and large megacorps, no one is working on anything other than gluing existing packages together,

And all my friends aren't doing that. So there's some anecdotal evidence to contradict yours.

And I think you're missing the point.

The point is the field is way bigger than either of us could imagine. You could have decades of experience and still only touch a small subset of the different technologies and problems.

> Well I know for a fact there are more code monkeys than rocket scientists working on advanced technologies

I don't know what this means as it doesn't disprove that fact that the field is enormous. Of course not everyone is working on rockets. But that is irrelevant.

> 50% of their job consist of bullshitting the n+1 to get a raise and some other variant of office politics

Again, this doesn't mean we aren't working on different things.

I actually totally agree with this point made in your previous post:

> "developers" is such a broad term that it basically is meaningless in this discussion

But your follow-up feels antogonistic to that point.

[skydhash]

It’s kinda like this when they think the software they use is mainstream and everything else is niche.