[dakiol]

> It's the expertise of engineers on the team that push it back on track.

But how are you so sure your colleagues are not more "expert" than you? Prior LLMs there was room for very good engineers and mediocre engineers to work together in 99% of the companies out there. With LLMs, only the "best" engineers will survive, because nobody needs mediocre engineers anymore.

This being HN, I imagine every engineer reading this thinks they are in top the 10-5% of their company/city/country, and therefore they think they are not "mediocre" engineers that can get affected by the introduction of LLMs. Statistically, they are probably wrong. So, it's all about ego. Chances are you are not a rockstar and LLMs will eventually take over your job.

As usual, the only winners here are corporations and executives. Most of us are the last monkeys in the chain, and so we'll get screwed.

[aleqs]

The corporations and executives are already winning if you swallowed the concept of 'rockstar' engineer. Sure there are more and less experienced engineers, but even interns can and often do provide good input and spot mistakes made by seniors. The 'rockstar' engineer at most tech companies simply equates to the somewhat autistic guy with a brown nose who's working 15 hour days for a pat on the head from management (and making many mistakes in the process).

[mancerayder]

>The 'rockstar' engineer at most tech companies simply equates to the somewhat autistic guy with a brown nose who's working 15 hour days for a pat on the head from management (and making many mistakes in the process).

I love it! And posts on HN about Big Ideas and uses corpspeak to justify driving people to long hours. The engineer who's picked up talking points of his employer because he's well-paid and trapped on the spectrum, making it hard to comprehend a life of Play outside of work.

[misnome]

For the most part there aren’t 10x engineers

But there are certainly 0.1x engineers

[Fargren]

The study that defined the 10x engineer defined him as 10x as good as the worst engineer. If there is a 0.1x engineer, and a 1x engineer, that 1x engineer is the very definition of a 10x engineer.

[trumpdong]

I've long thought a 10x engineer is one with just the right amount of analysis paralysis - not too much or too little. It's not that they're 10x engineers, it's that everyone else is 0.1x due to a confluence of reasons. And the ones we call 0.1x are 0.01x.

[trumpdong]

Some famous examples of a "10x developer" state: Linus Torvalds writing Git, Brendan Eich writing JavaScript. Somewhat less famously, I get that feeling often when I stop thinking and start doing on an electronics project, a wooden shed or even a cosplay. Every hackathon ever, same principle - stop thinking, start doing.

But it's only a 10x state if you're doing the right thing, otherwise it's a -10x state, and that means you need to have already done the right amount of thinking and have a good intuition for what you're trying to do. (As long as you can recognize a failed experiment and revert, risk of being -10x isn't that terrible)

[rightbyte]

There certainly are 10x engineers just that they get most of the x from turning down bad ideas and saving work.

[rjbwork]

and -10x

[klabb3]

This is such an obvious observation that I’m surprised to find it often missing. 0.1X is nothing compared to the destruction (ie negative X) you can do with the right combination of recklessness and managerial pressure. Definitely happens with engineers. Perhaps even more with PMs.

[throwaway7783]

Even if we forget "rockstar", there are certainly different levels of engineers. More experience doesn't automatically mean better either. That is not to say experience doesn't matter. It matters quite a bit. Sure , good interns can sometimes have good feedback or spot mistakes. But not consistently enough.

All of this to say that it's not just experience that makes one a better engineer.

[aleqs]

Experience is one of the only objective signals we have, but you're right it's not the only one. I've seen plenty great junior engineers and interns, and plenty of incompetent staff/principal engineers.

[throwaway7783]

True, it is the only objective signal, but as you have observed as well, it is also a very poor one.

[Aperocky]

> because nobody needs mediocre engineers anymore.

This is giving too much credit to LLM. I think LLMs are great and it is incredibly useful both in personal and professional settings. However, it exist on a separate plane than human workers in the tools category.

Sooner or later, people will find out that LLMs only overlaps with existing human hierarchy (e.g. junior dev X%, senior dev Y%, etc), but almost never 100%. If it was 100% to a certain position, you are probably using the humans wrong to begin with there - since humans have one of the most priced thing that I don't see an single ounce out of LLMs: initiative

[dorgo]

It's hard to show initiative without a pulse. Most agents don't have that (yet). But can't be too hard to build.

[Aperocky]

Well I think that's the next trillion dollar question, if you can figure it out.

We don't need to know the entire knowledge base of mankind to want or know what to do next. It points to an entirely separate architecture than LLM.

[Yokohiii]

> With LLMs, only the "best" engineers will survive, because nobody needs mediocre engineers anymore.

I don't think this is true.

A good engineer doesn't have infinite throughput. In my opinion the best engineers should be constantly bottlenecked because they solve difficult problems. They don't have time for grunt work. Every company needs less than perfect engineers, AI assisted or not.

[sigotirandolas]

Perhaps that's true of the top 5% engineers. But the question is if the top 40% of engineers can replace the bottom 60%.

The LLMs don't need to be perfect, they just need to be good enough so that the cost of fixing their code is lower than the communication overhead and the 'lost in translation' overhead from delegating tasks to mediocre engineers.

[Yokohiii]

I am sure the tech industry will try to further reduce headcount. The question is what jobs emerge. We already see companies laying off, just to hire "AI interns".

If AI + lower skill engineers turn out to be valuable, it also becomes more attractive for smaller companies and startups to do software or expand / inhouse software. Which is actually a good opportunity to level up, because many devs don't become great because they miss the chance to take responsibility. Which is harder in smaller companies.

[onlyrealcuzzo]

> With LLMs, only the "best" engineers will survive, because nobody needs mediocre engineers anymore.

LLMs are going to show that there's a huge divide in "engineers" between people who love "coding" and people who like "engineering".

The group of people kicking and screaming the most are the people who love code and don't want to see their coding go away.

These are typically the build vs buy folks. "We can't use anything anyone else wrote, I can do it better..."

What do you think Staff level engineers do? They don't sit around coding all day.

Writing the code is just something you had to do in the past to get the job done.

What you get paid to do is "engineer". The two are related, but they are separate. Coding is a very small part of the average engineer's job (and almost none at staff level and above).

And yet the vast majority of engineers think that the world is going to end if they aren't spending most of their time "coding".

[ksenzee]

I disagree with most of this. I'm kicking and screaming pretty hard, and yet I'm not one of the "I can do it better" folks. My whole career has been in open source. I'm all about choosing the right tool. I'm also tech lead on a team of seven, so I'm not writing a lot of code anyway. What I am doing all day is sending AI-generated code back to be rewritten, rethought, re-architected. I'm starting to think we would get more done if nobody on my team used Copilot.

[cheesecakegood]

Why is everyone acting like this is unknowable? Can’t you just look and see what the team’s output was like 2-3 years ago? Of course there might be long term risks that have a time lag and are thus not visible yet, but it shouldn’t be a complete mystery

[itemize123]

Would you explain this - " I'm starting to think we would get more done if nobody on my team used Copilot." ?

Interesting to see if you why you see it destructive. I can certainly see that a lot of the times, copiloted solutions are working but less than ideal

[onlyrealcuzzo]

> What I am doing all day is sending AI-generated code back to be rewritten, rethought, re-architected. I'm starting to think we would get more done if nobody on my team used Copilot.

Sounds like a "your team" problem, and not a tool problem...

I hate to break it to you...

If your team can write crap in Ruby, they can write crap in Rust, too.

And if they can write crap with AI, they can write crap without it, too.

[AndrewKemendo]

Very well said and if you look at some of the other threads on hacker news about why people don’t like AI it specifically because they like typing and coding

The majority of my time is an engineering manager has been teaching “engineers” how to actually do engineering with any kind of rigor

The number of engineers who have an absolutely no theoretical structural or system basis for what they’re doing is the vast vast majority

[diordiderot]

Exactly. Same with tractors. Once they arrived, nobody benefited except Big Tractor.

Famously a net loss for humanity.

[bobnamob]

At the very least _big_ tractor (John Deere) is a net drain on society

[pjmlp]

Agreed, this is the fallacy of current discourse, the guys getting fired due to AI improvements are on the other team, "nothing will happen to me" seems to be the current mindset.

I have seen teams being reduced in size due to offshoring, move into cloud, move into SaaS and iPaaS products, this is the next step and no one is safe.

[itemize123]

don't agree with your logic at all - agree with your conclusion. your logic is deeply flawed - a) you've to justify mediocre engineers not been necessary, the mechanism they are pushed out by LLM matters. b) relative ranking is useless - it's the difference between absolute ability and that is close for say top 50% most likely. This might mean half of us will lose jobs, and half see compensation pressured but it's not as certain as your argument make it out to be.

[epolanski]

Well almost 70% of the developers in the industry can't write a fizz buzz.

But, besides coding skills (which some possess), the engineering, social, and business ones are close to non existent.

[chipsrafferty]

0% chance this is true as I work at a F500 where I can assure you that probably every developer can write fizz buzz.

I would bet my life and everyone I care abouts' lives that much more than 70% CAN write fizz buzz.

[baobabKoodaa]

Did you pull this 70% out of your ass or from some other place? It's quite obviously not reality.

[epolanski]

https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-cant-programmers-program/

There was also another study I cannot find where 56% of engineering graduates struggled to write a fizz buzz.

I think people highly underestimate how long is the average developer, closed in their bubbles of mostly well established software teams that forget that for each of them there's 10 software consultants in southern Europe glueing APIs with trial and error on Java 8 monstrosities.

[baobabKoodaa]

The link that you gave does not show this 70% number anywhere? Also, the link is from 20 years ago. I don't believe the real number is anywhere near 70%. Maybe 10% or something.

[epolanski]

Mate, you're on HN, you live probably in a bubble made of better software developers than the overwhelming majority out there.