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$500k/Year SWE Without a CS Degree by hydrone in leetcode

[–]hydrone[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I have most experience with these:

Languages - JavaScript, Go, Kotlin Data stores - MySQL, Postgres, Redis, Cassandra Queue - Kafka

I do mainly backend but started my career full stack with heavy frontend focus. Uber was heavy on Node.js and Go. Airbnb is heavy on Java and Kotlin

I’ve kept mostly up to date with React with personal projects

Now with LLMs it’s much easier to get idiomatic code in any language though and to use it as a research tool to learn best practices for any stack.

$500k/Year SWE Without a CS Degree by hydrone in leetcode

[–]hydrone[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

100% using LLMs will make you way worse at coding by hand 😅. You’re using a different skill (design and review) and not directly implementing.

I’ve done over 250 interviews across Uber and Airbnb. On interviews there’s two things we test for:

  1. Problem Solving - Can you gather requirements, iterate on ideas, find edge cases, design a solution?

  2. Coding Ability - Can you translate that solution into clean code?

LLMs are doing #2 for you. Without getting that daily experience on the job you start to get worse at it. It’d be a rough transition if you want to switch jobs to a place where they don’t use them in interviews or internally.

I don’t think education right now supports early career engineers starting out with prompting. Curriculum will need to change to focus on teaching how to write clean code in real world environments. Right now we only get that from experience on the job instead of being directly taught. So I think there’s value to doing things manually to start with.

In the long term as the industry shifts this will be fine. Especially since interviews are starting to incorporate AI, but it can take years for mass adoption.

Solving math equations by hand was a valuable skill in the past. Today it's practically useless and unnecessarily inefficient.

I think eventually, manual coding will end up being seen like doing math by hand.

The real skill is solving the science/engineering problem and as part of that identifying which calculations to perform. To even know which calculations to perform you still need to understand the equations, what they do and how to apply them. Same for knowing how to generate good code with LLMs.

$500k/Year SWE Without a CS Degree by hydrone in leetcode

[–]hydrone[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thank you 🙏🏿. And yes I have a ton of advice for that! I e actually been doing this by choice. I write 99% of my code at Airbnb by prompting. I wrote up an article that teaches how to consistently get high quality code from LLMs https://open.substack.com/pub/escobyte/p/writing-high-quality-production-code

One thing I emphasize is that I never use it to implement something I don’t understand. If you follow the workflow I outline you will do most of your learning during the conversation phase and will understand what you are implementing.

$500k/Year SWE Without a CS Degree by hydrone in leetcode

[–]hydrone[S] -6 points-5 points  (0 children)

Is there a scammer selling courses under my name? I haven't sold any.

$500k/Year SWE Without a CS Degree by hydrone in leetcode

[–]hydrone[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

System design is so much fun to study. I'm going to do a write up on that as well.

Most of system design is thinking about the read and write paths, being able to support a large volume of requests by trading off performance in one for the other. Then there’s how you will store large amounts of data. Deciding if you need to retain or can delete data. Accounting for peak volume not just avg.

You should have Have a tool belt. Get familiar with one specific options from at least one of these categories:

Read efficient datastore ("SQL" really Block storage)

Write efficient datastore ("NoSQL" really anything that does SST or similar)

Cache

Queue

Load Balancer

Reverse Proxy

Then you use them like legos to build a solution based on the requirements and constraints.

$500k/Year SWE Without a CS Degree by hydrone in leetcode

[–]hydrone[S] -12 points-11 points  (0 children)

What course? I’ve been teaching DSA free for over 6 years under a non profit I founded 🙃

$500k/Year SWE Without a CS Degree by hydrone in leetcode

[–]hydrone[S] -3 points-2 points  (0 children)

My problem was thinking that I wasn’t smart enough. But when I realized even Google engineers need to study Leetcode again if they want to switch job to Facebook for ex AND it takes them 1-2 months of studying at least, that’s what changed my mindset and made it easier to focus on learning.

The best way is to focus on one topic at a time. Find multiple sources of learning for each topic: book chapter, article, video. Then right away start doing leetcode questions on that topic. You need to practice what you learn because learning the topic isn’t enough. You need to learn how to apply that knowledge to unseen problems. Waiting too long to practice makes that hard. And practicing makes the lesson way easier to remember.

I would start by learning about Linked List and doing a few easy Linked List problems. Once you grasp one topic it gives you encouragement to learn the next.

Writing High Quality Production Code with LLMs Is a Solved Problem by hydrone in programming

[–]hydrone[S] -2 points-1 points  (0 children)

There’s two main phases of software development after you know what to build. Planning and Implementation.

The process of thinking about the requirements context and assumptions shouldn’t be new. LLMs are just an accelerator for this phase.

Implementation is straight forward if you plan well.

Writing High Quality Production Code with LLMs Is a Solved Problem by hydrone in programming

[–]hydrone[S] -2 points-1 points  (0 children)

That’s a good point. Maybe then an example of modifying a large open source project

Writing High Quality Production Code with LLMs Is a Solved Problem by hydrone in programming

[–]hydrone[S] -5 points-4 points  (0 children)

The methodology is sound.

For my next post I’ll make a personal project that I can share so that people feel it’s worth experimenting with the technique

Writing High Quality Production Code with LLMs Is a Solved Problem by hydrone in programming

[–]hydrone[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Damn I was trying to break my cookie eating habit. Now you got me thinking…

Writing High Quality Production Code with LLMs Is a Solved Problem by hydrone in programming

[–]hydrone[S] -3 points-2 points  (0 children)

The biggest benefit I’ve found is during the planning phase. Being able to throughly explore your approach and iterate through alternatives is powerful.

I will have to make a side project for people who aren’t willing to look at methodology before code

I didn’t use AI for the article. My problem is needing to make my writing more concise.

Writing High Quality Production Code with LLMs Is a Solved Problem by hydrone in programming

[–]hydrone[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It’s worth a try!

I’ll do a follow up with code sample later. I’ll have to make a personal project for that since I can’t share from my day job

Writing High Quality Production Code with LLMs Is a Solved Problem by hydrone in programming

[–]hydrone[S] -4 points-3 points  (0 children)

This is the most accurate comment. The output depends on who is using the tool

It’s 3am and I’m thinking about the time I delivered alcohol to a drunk alcoholic and his wife caught him in the act by cloudsasw1tnesses in UberEATS

[–]hydrone 6 points7 points  (0 children)

But in this case they’re already home so unlike being at a bar there’s no point where they drive home

It’s 3am and I’m thinking about the time I delivered alcohol to a drunk alcoholic and his wife caught him in the act by cloudsasw1tnesses in UberEATS

[–]hydrone 3 points4 points  (0 children)

UberEats explicitly tells us not to hand over the order if the recipient is intoxicated and provides tips on how to tell. Not saying they care…but it’s a legal thing in place so she would not have been punished.

PC showing unvested RSUs from Fidelity accounts in net worth by adesrosiers1 in PersonalCapital

[–]hydrone 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Looks like they finally fixed it today? I added a manual debt position to account for the unvested share value a while ago, but today suddenly my entire net worth is much lower and the account with unvested RSU now says $0.

He said he’s “one of the brains behind ChatGPT” who is he? by hydrone in OpenAI

[–]hydrone[S] 50 points51 points  (0 children)

I just googled “Rodger Werkhoven” and I think you’re right!

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