In general, you should be suspicious of engineers who are trying to give you advice. Even during ordinary times, this industry is so wide and changes so quickly…

In general, you should be suspicious of engineers who are trying to give you advice. Even during ordinary times, this industry is so wide and changes so quickly that nobody really knows anything for sure. And we are not in ordinary times. The advent of LLMs and AI agents is the largest change to software engineering in my professional lifetime, and possibly the largest change ever. That said, here’s my advice:

  • Don’t trust senior engineers who are telling you to pick political fights
  • Don’t play games. Keep your head down and be helpful
  • Be conscientious and try hard to actually understand what you’re working on
  • Don’t panic about AI, and don’t delegate your judgement to it
  • Don’t avoid AI — keep thinking!
  • Don’t lose hope
  • abbadon420@sh.itjust.works
    0·
    24 days ago

    Good advice, except the “keep your head down” part soudns like a “it depends” thing. In some situations it is best to speak up, like when you have experience in a specific use case and there is a problem in that use case, or when you want to learn something, or when a senior is being a racist pos. There are times for speaking up and times for keeping your head down, learn to feel the situation.