I think everyone deserves to participate in meaningful and dignified work.

They can all get that if they want it! At a very nice but not as high wage.

From the article, it seems to me they've been "relegated" to coming up with Leetcode problems for AI. Which, let's face it, a bunch of them probably already did before for their SWE interview circus. I can see why they may feel under-employed/under-utilized but aside from the dystopian data gathering, I really find it hard to see what they are complaining about.

The article even admits that their current tasks are easier than before. For the same paycheck! For 200K I will dredge through the most obscure IMO/Leetcode/ICPC problems and the palm of my hands will remain delicately smooth, in danger only of drying from the air conditioning. If there is no meaning and dignity in that I'm sure I'll have plenty leftover from that comp to find meaning and dignity elsewhere be it a side gig, charity work, or heck even just good times with my family and my social circle. A lot of people "just do a job" for much, much less and still live rich inner lives.

Really, an orchestra of small violins playing while I read this one.

> From the article, it seems to me they've been "relegated" to coming up with Leetcode problems for AI. Which, let's face it, a bunch of them probably already did before for their SWE interview circus.

It is a grim irony.

   1. Human trains on leetcode to land AOGMX SWE job
   2. Job forces them into new role writing leetcode to train AI
   3. ...
   4. AI eats human, inherits the earth

That is why I have no sympathy to spare for anyone who chose to work for Zuckerberg's social toilet.

After Meta you can get a job at any normal org pretty easily. After Meta’s “AI department “ doubly so.

I’ve never thought of Linear as particularly fast.

I wouldn’t.

A ticket tracker, like any collaborative tool, is inherently Web-based. The question is how much latency the app adds on top of the network, and by that metric I bet Linear does well.

> I don't think my actual cognitive skills have declined by using AI

I'm not speaking about you but... I know most people would not have much awareness of their cognitive decline. I know this because that awareness gap is there with or without LLMs, across all age groups and cultures.

Especially since attention -- which the parent commenter says has been diminished by LLMs -- is a key part of cognition.

For cognition, sure, but that's a fairly weak claim. A dog that chases its tail for 3 hours might be considered conscious, but maybe not highly intelligent.

The attention deficit part of ADHD hurts some people, but a high intelligence is able to make up for it in other ways. Attention span is a multiplier for intelligence. Someone with a lower IQ but a longer attention span is able to outperform a higher IQ but shorter attention span, traditionally.

What's required though, is the attention span and the memory to really dig deep into a problem, and then go for a run. If AI makes that easier, since it lets you skip the boring parts and get to the meat of the problem, then hey.

One thing I'll point out is the attention thing might be more of a lack of motivation on my part. It used to be banging out features quickly gave me a nice dopamine rush and the satisfaction of having built something I'm proud of. With LLMs, I don't really have that feeling because even if I guided it to that endpoint I feel less invested and somewhat less interested.

adding to the irony is the fact that the mechanism used by the NN architecture in LLMs is also called attention

True, I guess I try to have some objective measures like my chess elo and maybe some canaries like what books I'm reading. But it would be really hard to tell.

Cognitive ability can be highly specific. If you don't use it you lose it. You may be able to keep your chess ELO high, but realize you can't implement basic algorithms in C++ quite as readily as you used to. Or you can't write as well as you used to. Or you can't quite make that old recipe taste as good as you remember.

We can argue about what skills are important or not, but these things tend to sneak up on us.

It’s easy to imagine this being a problem both in quality and in volume. Verifiable work is less valuable than verified work. And noise is always costly.

The “higher level of abstraction” phrase used to describe what LLMs are in relation to programming… That phrase needs to die.

The python type hints are useful for static analysis (and yes, should be the default) but it’s a joke compared to the utility of types in a language like Haskell.

If you're comparing type systems against Haskell you're excluding all mainstream languages except maybe Scala and Rust

Yes.

I don't think parent was praising Trump, neither directly nor indirectly by praising populism.