Ask HN: What is the future of the entry-level software engineering job?

Post by wwkeyboard » Wed, Apr 03, 2024, 12:42 PM UTC

austin-cheney wrote: post #31

beoberha wrote: post #19

I don’t think there’s going to be much change if any in the next 5 years. I feel like I’m taking crazy pills when I see people say LLMs can replace software engineers. Maybe if you’re writing basic CRUD web apps, but most systems have enough complexity that an LLM cannot currently ascertain. Not to say they’re not helpful - ChatGPT is jawdroppingly good at pointing out bugs in code. They’re going to make people more…

> Maybe if you’re writing basic CRUD web apps, Isn’t that half or more of employed software developers? The complexity that you speak of are poorly refined business requirements or unnecessary abstractions, which are communications problems not a technology problem. Nearly all of those CRUD app developers are replaceable right now, which is striking considering the current immaturity of AI.

Post by mriet » Thu, Apr 04, 2024, 7:01 AM UTC

aeionotyou wrote: post #10

If entry-level software jobs are being eliminated by AI or other means, how will people gain the experience necessary to become more senior developers?

Post by Ekaros » Thu, Apr 04, 2024, 7:04 AM UTC

mriet wrote: post #34

aeionotyou wrote: post #10

If entry-level software jobs are being eliminated by AI or other means, how will people gain the experience necessary to become more senior developers?

I think there's a good chance of there being some really bad bugs/system failures in about 25 years because of this. "AI can do code" -> less experienced engineers -> no one has deep understanding of the whole system -> boom. But it will take 25 years before this series of events plays out.

Post by fuzztester » Thu, Apr 04, 2024, 8:54 PM UTC

LarsDu88 wrote: post #22

charlie0 wrote: post #13

Prompt engineering along with being able to describe problems exceptionally well will become important. Just the other day I needed to write a complex script using a library I knew very little about. I knew "what" I wanted to do and that the library could solve the issue, but did not know enough about the lib to to solve it. I wrote pseudo-code and ChatGPT was able to generate a working script on the first shot. I pr…

My experience has been... if you are competent enough to write a good prompt, you were probably good enough to write the code to being with. LLM copilots simply make that writing faster by 1.5x to 2x