Jobs comprise different tasks, some more amenable to LLMs than others. My view is that where scepticism exists amongst professional senior engineers, its probably well-founded and grounded in the kinds of tasks that they are engaged with.

I'd imagine everyone in the debate is using LLMs to some degree; and that it's mostly about what productivity factor we imagine exists.

For the first 10 years of my career I was a contractor walking into national and multinational orgs with large existing codebases, working within pre-existing systems not merely "codebases". Both hardware systems (e.g., new 4g networking devices just as they were released) and distributed software systems.

I can think of many daily tasks I had across these roles that would not be very significantly speed-up by an LLM. I can also see that there's a few that would be. I also shudder to think what time would be wasted by me trying to learn 4g networking from LLM summarisation of new docs; and spending as much time working from improperly summarised code (etc.).

I don't think snr software engineers are so scepticial here that they're saying LLMs are not, locally, helpful to their jobs. The issue is how local this help seems to be.