I don't touch LLMs for any purpose (when I can help it, they are frequently shoved in your face regardless); and up until recently was doing just fine. I was fired for this stance, not for performance reasons (officially stated that there was no concern with my output), only for political reasons (insubordination, refusing to use LLMs to do my work for me).
I have been seeing fewer and fewer job ads that ask for/require LLM use over the last couple of months, so I feel like the tide may be turning in our direction; but I am starting to feel the stress. This is the first time I have considered that I might have been "wrong" taking an absolutist stance against LLMs, though I think that's just the unemployment wearing me down.
As a fellow contrarian, I applaud your resolve. I was constructively dismissed for refusing the COVID vax a few years ago. But I think in this case where there was no concern about output, it would be better for you to just pretend to use it. Then you would soon become the most/only knowledgeable dev, be able to leverage that into promotions or new jobs, etc. I know it's distasteful to pretend to believe what you don't believe, but this might be a serious enough matter to justify it.
I went through interviews recently; I told everyone what I think they wanted to hear about my AI usage based on their demeanor; I got a new job; I pretend to use AI at this new job. Either we're right and AI mandates get walked back, so we're in a good spot, or we're wrong and we need to hold onto our jobs for dear life.
Being unwilling to change or changing too much are both equally going to get you fired. I’m the later so I feel your pain. At companies you have to turn your brain off and bahhh with the sheep.
“When you're in Hollywood and you're a comedian, everybody wants you to do other things. All right, you're a stand-up comedian, can you write us a script? That's not fair. That's like if I worked hard to become a cook, and I'm a really good cook, they'd say, ‘OK, you're a cook. Can you farm?’” —Mitch Hedberg
LLM-assisted coding is basically an entirely different career from software engineering, and not everyone wants to do that. (Ditto here; fortunately, I’m self-employed.)
I believe that "have to" is a little strong, no? I think my case was made just as well by remaining one of the only people in my team able to critically analyse changes and plan complex work after three years of the rest of my company diving headlong into the vibe-pit.
Yeah, you don't HAVE TO do anything your employer tells you to do. And they don't HAVE TO keep you employed. That's the deal.
>by remaining one of the only people in my team able to critically analyse changes and plan complex work
Your employer doesn't actually care about this. They care about whether or not you make them more money than you cost them. Obviously that's hard to accurately measure, but it's not hard for an employer to recognize that an employee being unwilling to do what they're being directed to do is probably not the best bet for someone to keep around.
> Yeah, you don't HAVE TO do anything your employer tells you to do. And they don't HAVE TO keep you employed.
Depends where you are. In the UK at least they can't force a material change of role on you or sake you for refusing. They can make you redundant, of course, which amounts to the same thing if you are relatively new to the industry.
> Your employer doesn't actually care about this.
That is true.
> They care about whether or not you make them more money than you cost them.
Unless there is a miraculous improvement in efficiency very soon, that balance is going to change a bit at least temporarily as all the investment capital that the industry is currently haemorrhaging starts to get called in (or it turns out that half the money being passed around in circles no longer really exists as soon as things turn as the value is being propped up by people believing in the value).
If that doesn't happen and the hype continues then dev work is set to be commoditised as much as hospitality work, and we'll end up screwed whether we've played the game or not. It is some way into happening for designers and writers, the bottom has fallen out of employment in accountancy and other areas already too, dev work in various forms is very much next if things continue on the current path.
> what they're being directed to do
I'm not being directed to go AI, yet. That is definitely something that is blocking the light from the other end of the tunnel, but how long that tunnel is has yet to be determined.
> probably not the best bet for someone to keep around
If being kept around means a future sitting in a room alone with nothing for company but Claude/similar, I'd much rather not thanks.
My “coherent case” is that they'll take away the few bits of the job that I still like. Remote working has an undesirable effect on my mental health, and I have no choice about that, I'm not using tools I have principals against on top of that, and I've avoided managing for many years so the “it is like having your own team” thing people bang on about is the exact opposite of appealing to me. I'd rather leave the industry completely if push comes to shove, which I'm pretty sure it eventually will. I'm financially more lucky than many (mortgage paid, no partner or offspring, some savings) so I can survive on the pay cut that this will very likely involve¹. They can't sack me - it is a material change of role³ and under UK law you can't be forced in to a materially different role nor sacked for refusing⁵. I'm going to keep doing the job I signed up for until I can't (either I get sick of it, or they get sick of me!), then I'll move on. Of course when it comes time to pay the piper because all that investment capital (ref https://isaiprofitable.com/) can't just be written off forever, maybe there will still be room for a few of us Luddites⁶ :)
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[1] Though if things go the way of the hype, there will either be many fewer dev jobs, or most of them will become lower paid, or both - so long term that might not be as big a deal if you aren't one of the top people²
[2] Which I know I aren't!
[3] if it isn't, then the claims that it is revolutionary are false
[5] I could be made redundant by the same distinction, by being given the choice of redundancy or moving to an AI-based role, but I can live with that
[6] Especially those of use who have been around long enough to have a pile of experience/knowledge, generally or for a specific industry.
I'm in a similar position. Our CEO who went full AI psychosis right when OpenClaw first came out. Directive from the top was to "use AI for everything" with no real regard for if it helped productivity, service delivery, or quality of output. That was very quickly reigned back in when they saw the bill. Multiple people using tens of thousands of dollars of tokens in a week, with no demonstrable value.
I'm in two minds on how best to handle these kind of, "but you have to use an LLM" issues. In my heart I'm like you; they hired me to do a job. If I'm doing the job at the rate and quality expected, why should they care if I use an LLM, my brain, or randomly throw mud at the keyboard until something magically works? The practical side of me says, "I like a roof over my head" so if they mandate I have to use an LLM then I'll do it as long as they take responsibility for any negative impact from that decision.
I mean, even outside the context, you ought to be fired for not doing what your employer is telling you to do. Being fired for insubordination is not really "political"; it's the epitome of a performance reason. You're literally refusing to do your job. Your performance in this regard is as bad as it can get.
A political reason would be something like, your manager was threatened by your capabilities and set you up for unfair evaluations, etc. But you just straight up told the people paying you that you won't do what they're paying you to do lol. DEFINITELY make sure you work on your spin on this for future interviews, because knowing you were confidentially disobeying direct instructions is an immediate "pass" for me and anyone with any sense who may be interviewing you.
>This is the first time I have considered that I might have been "wrong" taking an absolutist stance against LLMs, though I think that's just the unemployment wearing me down.
If you think LLMs are a fad that will just go away if you wait long enough, then you need to just remove yourself from this industry. They're not going away, for better or worse, and this kind of work is fundamentally changing. To be direct: you ARE wrong in taking this absolutist stance. It's profoundly naive to have done what you've done, and I hope, for your own sake, that you plan for your future accordingly.
If you have some moral issue with LLMs, then you probably need to just plan on pivoting your career. But if you're just stuck on some weird sense of pride for your "craft," then you need to take a step back and really try to appreciate what the reality of your career means to the people willing to pay you for work.
What a company considers to be "performance" or "insubordination" can certainly still be about office politics. Not that I'm saying this is necessarily the case here, but they're not a hard either/or.
For instance: 996 is a form of office politics. Return to office in general a form of office politics. Pay secrecy is a form of office politics. Some of those things become performance metrics, or evaluations of your "attitude."
"Performance" can mean "the quality of your work." It also can mean "theater." Like when you're measuring performance by token usage, or lines of code, or office attendance... or, in a case I once encountered, manual adherence to a style guide, that required two human beings to check every line of code against a set of conventions, instead of just configuring a formatting tool and being done with it.
Regarding LLMs in particular, I don't necessarily think the absolutist stance is it here, but it is a technology worker's job to know when you can and should automate things, as well as to know when it's not an effective use of resources to throw technology at something just because. I don't know parent's company or use case. I don't know if they were doing something with it that actually enhanced productivity, or just tracking tokens. I don't know if it enhanced their product, or just shoehorned AI into it for investor-driven buzzword utilization. So I'm also not an absolutist on what you're saying.
It could be that parent is too rigid, but (as much as I'm not asking for all this context either) I don't think there's enough information here to be certain about that.
> If you think LLMs are a fad that will just go away if you wait long enough, then you need to just remove yourself from this industry. They're not going away, for better or worse, and this kind of work is fundamentally changing.
They don't have to "go away"; managers just have to stop requiring their usage. In a sane business they will care about output, not tokens. If OP cannot keep up his output because he refuses to use it, sure, fire him. But in my experience the good devs can still keep up. Your post is only true if AIs improve enough that no developer can possibly keep up without them. That is not today, and maybe not tomorrow.
The job is to make widgets, not to use specific tools to make widgets. When has that ever been the case before? None of my bosses ever gave a shit what editors I used, for example. Certainly not the CEOs.
You sound weirdly angry and aggressive — like in a “back away slowly” kind of way. Relax, and stop gatekeeping the industry. As strange as it may sound to you, I expect that there will always be segments of it that don’t rely on LLMs.
that's a bit harsh. the job is to solve a problem, implement a solution. as a developer i should have some leeway on how i accomplish that. be able to choose the tools that i believe are the best for the given task. there may be constraints, but using an LLM as a constraint does not make sense because the LLM affects the process but not the outcome.
I would argue the same in most situations, but let’s be honest: what matters most to most employers is their employees falling in line. There is some sense to this: it is easier to manage a bunch of people doing things more-or-less the same way, but I do ultimately agree that professionals should be treated more like professionals.
Seeing as how LLMs objectively increase performance when used correctly, I'd support the company's decision to let you go for specifically performance reasons. I'm not saying you should be all in on LLMs end to end, but there are individual processes in every workflow that can be enhanced by the tool. If you find those, you will perform better than you could without LLMs, no question.
They have the SEO juice to push out and replace dedicated wikis as the top result, even when there are long-standing dedicated wikis for the game/universe. Fandom wikis then typically have maybe half of the information from the dedicated wiki PLUS a bunch of intrusive ads. There's no instance that I know of where a Fandom wiki popping up for a community was a positive unless they simply didn't have one to start with.
I also went cold turkey from escitalopram about a decade ago, and my experience was not as tame as yours; my ideation kicked into 6th gear, with paranoia, nausea, and insanely intense and vivid dreams every night. That was while on a 10mg dose.
I have been on over-max-dose venlafaxine for nearly a year now. I think it has been an enormous improvement in my life on nearly every axis, but if I miss a dose by even a few hours I get zaps, confusion, and dizziness. What happens to me now if I become unable to access my meds for more than a couple of days really keeps me up some nights.
Venlafaxine has also been a godsend for me. My doctor started me on ut first and past the two weeks of rebalancing (big ideation swings and so much calling to act on it...) and all kinds of pains (digestive mostly), it literally allowed me to smile again, which my wife realized hadn't happened in over a year.
I can relate to the feeling when missing a dose. No tolerance for being forgetful. Lots of anxiety brought by this tether... and the permanent anorgasmia (in my case) is sad but I was dying...
Sadly I built tolerance over 2 years and had to stop, taper off (horrible experience) and try others (most that were cited in this comment section). All had painful and very annoying side effects and tapering was a pain after trying and each time feeling so disappointed and tired. Most worked on reducing ideation but the costs (inability to concentrate, brain fog, sometimes inability to work) were too high.
Turns out tolerance to venlafaxine ebbs out after some time, so after a moment I was able to restart for a year until I didn't need antidepressants anymore.
I've learned reading forums of the gamut of experiences with antidepressants and just want to add a voice to 'they can work, great even, not perfect' and between dying and trying them (with clear open eyes about the tradeoffs) I'd advise trying.
Venlafaxine has a small half-life so that might be why if you miss a dose by a few hours you'd get withdrawal symptoms. Drugs is leaving fast you body and so concentration is quickly decreasing. Apparently there's a extended-release, don't know if it's already what you have but maybe you could ask to try another SNRIs that has a longer half-life.
Yep I’m on XR, I’ve tried taking half my dose twice daily instead, which did smooth out the effects a bit but also made me much more likely to miss a dose. Not really any other solution other than tapering afaict.
Yes, or you could ask your doctor to go on another one with longer half-life.
At least that would give you more room to miss by a few hours a dose and not going haywire into withdrawal. Especially when anxiety is already a problem and withdrawal symptoms kicks back the anxiety stronger...
I think it's unfortunate that they chose to adapt _that_ one, really. It's good, but it's before Pratchett really got into his stride, and it's far closer to a straight satire of fantasy novels than subsequent books.
I am in exactly the same position; I don't feel left behind per se but I was just fired for my stance. Management is entirely deluded across the industry, and in my case it was even acknowledged and agreed that my output and the quality of work was not in question, simply the fact that I didn't use LLMs to produce it.
I reckon everything needs another 6-18 months to ripen, then those of us who haven't bet the farm on slop will be in big business contracting and consulting to drag companies out of the pit they're digging themselves.
Some guy, profiling his linux distro, wonders why ssh connections are a few hundred milliseconds slower than expected, finds there PR introduced and RCE backdoor and p0wns the whole project.
Seriously, this is driving me insane. The XZ hack told us what we had to do to secure our supply chain, and instead we went ahead and implemented a worldwide standard for NLP-to-action and figured we'd worry about the guardrails later. Mad.
The code change makes no sense and should do nothing. The commit message described a very deep investigation into garbage collection on the C++ side. Some object is being kept alive when the test requires it to be collected, and changing the code in this way allegedly prevents that. But wouldn't you think there would be a better way to ensure an object gets collected, like setting the variable to null?
The comments in the code don't make a lot of sense either. Something so obscure and brittle has to be explained extremely clearly.
While the issue might be real, this commit is so far away from the locus of normal that it's sending red alert. Plus a hallucination is very likely with such a long investigation - once an LLM agent starts investigating it just assumes there is a problem. And this is the 1 out of 1 robobun commit that I looked at.
Make sure the fs module keeps working if someone freezes or seals its exports table. I was wondering who was going around freezing random tables from other modules, so I checked the linked issue - robobun reported the issue, too. Why? I'm skeptical of whatever robobun was doing when it decided that it was necessary for code outside of a module to freeze their export tables. It needs a very good justification.
The first is, annoyingly, a relatively common problem and solution when dealing with GC lifetimes in tests. Few interpreters/JITs want to generate extra instructions to null out stack slots or pre clobber registers to ensure something becomes collectible at a specific point. Eager nulling of a variable often gets removed by dead store elimination or even just from being a disconnected SSA node. I've written extra nested scopes or wrappers in Java to deal with this in tests.
If this is needed in tests it needs to be known how it works, it needs to work consistently, and it needs to be documented how it works. It can't be an ad-hoc deep investigation and random fix each time. The comment should then be just // ensure foo is no longer a GC root, see gc_roots.md
Sometimes I read these mental gymnastics comments about being leashed to half a dozen providers for “convenience” and wonder if these people have actually tried to learn how to use something like a NAS.
I think the part they really dislike is the undermining of the moral superiority they claim by donating their money to corporations that contribute ~nothing to the actual evolution of culture. Inventing strawmans about how difficult it is to click one button in Jellyseer and have a max-quality, buffering free copy of what you want to watch in perpetuity is an order of magnitude more work than renting a poor-quality subset of the media that publishers consider it profitable to provide.
> I think the part they really dislike is the undermining of the moral superiority they claim by donating their money to corporations that contribute ~nothing to the actual evolution of culture.
My local farmers and grocery stores contribute ~nothing to actual evolution of culture. I still think they deserve to get paid for what they do. I don’t think this is as smart of a point as you thought it was.
Regardless, the content can’t both be worthless and worth pirating at the same time.
This boils down to “I want free stuff but I want to feel morally superior about it”
> the content can’t both be worthless and worth pirating at the same time.
More commonly, at least in Australia which at various times has had record level piracy, content can be worth _something_ and also not worth "that much" and hence worth pirating.
This has been seen with games - once charged in Australia significantly more than in Europe or the US. Game piracy was rife and didn't really drop in volume until Australian game prices fell more in line with elsewhere.
With the coming of Netflix TV and movie piracy dropped a lot - as prices rose and sheer number of providers rose making it impossible to see whatever caught your eye all on the one source subscription, piracy volume in AU increased again.
This boils down to "We'll pay for stuff .. but only so far".
You’re moving the goalposts from “contributing nothing” to “actually it’s valuable but I don’t want to pay that much but I also don’t want to not watch it”
This is still a silly argument. If the price of something is higher than you want to pay, that doesn’t justify taking it.
This has come all the way back to supporting what I said above: The only service problem is that people don’t like the part where it charges their credit card. Piracy lets them skip that part.
Nope. I'm a first time commentator in this subthread I'm stating a position held in one part of the world.
Maybe it'd require moving your "goalposts" to get there .. but I'm not moving anything, just pointing out exactly how the ground has lain here for decades.
I never said the content was worthless, I said the distributors are worthless. If I can get the same content, at a higher quality, more efficiently and cheaper (free) through piracy than legal means, the distributors are by definition not providing value.
I absolutely pay for physical media, for which a much higher share of revenue goes to the actual creators of content than the leeches who extract rent from it.
This is exactly why Steam has and continues to dominate the gaming market, they made it easier than piracy, and didn’t fall victim to the terminal-stage capitalism that has turned every previously decent streaming platform into hot garbage.
I have been seeing fewer and fewer job ads that ask for/require LLM use over the last couple of months, so I feel like the tide may be turning in our direction; but I am starting to feel the stress. This is the first time I have considered that I might have been "wrong" taking an absolutist stance against LLMs, though I think that's just the unemployment wearing me down.
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