Some of my friends who are senior/staff engs at various fang companies are basically convinced their jobs are at risk over the next few years due to how good the llms have gotten this year.
I switched over to consulting/contracting so I don’t have the visibility like they do, but my work is heavily dependent on llms. However I don’t see it wiping out the industry but rather making people more efficient.
They have much more robust tooling though around their llms and internal products that have automated much of their workflows which is I believe where the concern is coming from. They can see first hand how much of their job has turned into reviewing outputs and feeding outputs into other tools. A shift in skills but not fully automated solution yet.
It’s hard to gauge where things are going and where we’ll be in 5 years. If we only get incremental improvements there’s still huge gains to be made in building out tooling ecosystems to make this all better.
What does that look like for new college grads though? How much of this is really computer science if you are only an llm consumer?
Staff+ work is not that much (exclusively) coding anymore, but identifying correct big things to work on and keeping focus on it, making Bob and Steve from different teams talk to each other instead of building the same stuff twice, making opinionated decisions on things, blocking harmful initiatives, finding elephant in the room and saying things out loud that no one wants to say etc.
It's not really the work that LLMs currently do. I mean sure, maybe if you plug an LLM to read all emails and slacks and zoom transcripts of the entire company, it could do it at some point in the future. But would it have the same amount of influence compared to an industry & company veteran who has the company specific knowledge and experience that is nowhere written down?
Computer science isn’t even about code. Finding the most efficient way to pack boxes into a limited space is computer science. Code is the language. Could LLMs solve such real world problems and all their forms? If it’s in their training data, maybe.
If you’re a master of the syntax fog you’re done. If you understand computation from first principles to tcp frames and transformer architecture you’re golden.