Ask HN: Is Engineering Doomed? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Is Engineering Doomed?

#11

Post by Rugu16 » Tue, Oct 22, 2024, 7:14 PM UTC

beardyw wrote: post #7

> lots of people thought all their windows and console programming knowledge is gone, next was apps and iphone when people thought all their knowledge of web programming is gone Those were gentle transitions. Probably the biggest was from mainframe to PC. I was in a team of designers in the early 90s and found I was the only one who could think in terms of user interaction instead of a basically linear flow. I had wo…

Right , gradual changes are great and you can look fe to them like from windows to web platforms however AI is changing daily.

Re: Ask HN: Is Engineering Doomed?

#12

Post by shortrounddev2 » Wed, Oct 23, 2024, 12:50 PM UTC

Rugu16 wrote: post #9

shortrounddev2 wrote: post #4

I am not afraid of being replaced by AI, at all

That means you are ok financially to retire

No, my thinking is that if software engineers are replaced by AI, then any job can be replaced by AI and the global economy will catastrophically collapse. I'm not afraid of being replaced because not only can I do nothing about it, but i will be utterly powerless to find any kind of income afterwords also. AI will have destroyed the world without any violence and then we'll all be in the same boat

Re: Ask HN: Is Engineering Doomed?

#13

Post by meiraleal » Wed, Oct 23, 2024, 1:14 PM UTC

So when every era ended, the next would was much bigger. This one won't be any different and we will see the need for engineers skyrocket again. The ones that don't update themselves will have difficult staying in the game, for sure.

Re: Ask HN: Is Engineering Doomed?

#14

Post by JohnFen » Wed, Oct 23, 2024, 3:22 PM UTC

> Did you ever feel in your career that your job and field it self will be gone in few years

My career is over 30 years long so far, and I've never felt this. AI isn't making me feel it now.

What is true is the exact landscape is in flux -- but that's been true for longer than I've been in the business. All it means is that it remains necessary to do what has always been necessary to do: engage in constant learning and skill expansion.

Re: Ask HN: Is Engineering Doomed?

#15

Post by JohnFen » Wed, Oct 23, 2024, 3:25 PM UTC

Rugu16 wrote: post #9

shortrounddev2 wrote: post #4

I am not afraid of being replaced by AI, at all

That means you are ok financially to retire

I'm not afraid of it either, but that has nothing to do with how financially secure I am. It has more to do with me not seeing a path to AI replacing engineers in any significant way.

Re: Ask HN: Is Engineering Doomed?

#16

Post by ankurdhama » Thu, Oct 24, 2024, 7:29 AM UTC

FYI, the move from desktop apps to web apps to phone apps to whatever in future will not make your programming knowledge obsolete. Programming at its fundamental level is same as it was earlier - you write instructions to read, process, write data. What changes is the tools/frameworks/languages etc which you should be able to pick and learn as you move to new things.

Overtime the abstraction level of programming has changed, earlier you would write a sort function in assembly, now you just call the standard library. This was bound to happen due to the idea of software/code re-usability. AI for programming, if it kept improving, will be just another abstraction layer in the same way but that doesn't mean anybody who has no idea whatsoever about fundamentals of software engineer and programming can just use AI to create (complex enough) software.