From my limited vantage point... companies have had a hard to finding good developers to supported their custom applications, so now they are looking to low-code, SAAS solutions to solve their problems, which doesn't work well either because these tools are too generic and BA types struggle customizing them. So maybe my answer is, if you are good at programming and like it, stay in it. If you are just doing it because its a supposed to be a sustainable job, look into something else you might like, like configuring SAAS solutions.
Ask HN: In 2024, is SWE a sustainable career?
41–50 of 63 posts
Re: Ask HN: In 2024, is SWE a sustainable career?
#42Here is my perspective as JavaScript developer with over 15 experience and possibly more than a hundred interviews. This includes any job that mentions things like jQuery, React, Angular, Vue, TypeScript, Node.js, Deno, and on and on. 1. Nobody knows how to evaluate for competence, so technical interviews always start with basic literacy and are generally (not always) extremely subjective. This holds true even for se…
Ya, I've been a fan of a license due to how bad interviewing is. Why do I need to keep proving my competence over and over?
Re: Ask HN: In 2024, is SWE a sustainable career?
#43My personal opinion is most software will be easy to write by a junior programmer. There will still be high paid roles, but this will be a low paid profession. Web development, UI, etc will be heavily automated with LLMs. You will guide the model in building the software. It's already this way using cursor.sh, most people just havent realized it yet.
Honestly, even in practice the number of 'senior' people are laughably high. Tbh, swe leans junior.
Re: Ask HN: In 2024, is SWE a sustainable career?
#44I'm probably more negative on this than average since I'm already x-tech and long term unemployed (middle aged) but my take is it was never a sustainable career for _most_ people. A minority get lucky, or are otherwise able to signal the right qualities to retain steady employment. Even if you do manage to make it as an IC all the way into your forties, you're going to run into the pervasive age discrimination, which…
What are you considering right now as a plan b?
Re: Ask HN: In 2024, is SWE a sustainable career?
#45I've been programming since approximately age 8, so around 40 years. For the past few years have been focused on generative AI, agents, etc. I have built multiple agent frameworks in Node.js, Rust and now Python. I use AI with my agent system to help me write code for projects and my agent system. The leading edge models are incredible, but still somewhat brittle. They can make some weird mistakes. And I definitely h…
If AI agents do get better than human SWEs, they'll also get better than their human counterparts at other jobs - including being an entrepreneur. When people call out the doom of SWE careers at the hands of AI, they seem to think that only SWE careers will be affected, which seems weirdly biased to me. If AI comes for our jobs, it'll come for everyone's jobs. And if that is the case, economics/capitalism as it exist…
I'm not sure I agree. LLMs are great coders, because we have a lot of training data to make next token prediction work well for writing software programs.
A mistake to make here is to conflate 'AI' with some non sensual dream of 'AGI'.
LLMs are able to do a lot of what a swe does and if nothing else that just means we need less SWEs.
Re: Ask HN: In 2024, is SWE a sustainable career?
#46SWE has always been in a boom and bust cycle. Sometimes they love you and pay accordingly, sometimes they hate you and look for any reason to possibly get rid of you. Some of the best advice I've ever received from senior engineers was to live below your means and to have a high savings rate. You don't have to go to the FIRE extreme and definitely shouldn't make yourself miserable. What would I do about LLMs? I'd liv…
Sounds like a pretty unsustainable career to me
Re: Ask HN: In 2024, is SWE a sustainable career?
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
The thing that people strangely still seem to not get is that these systems will continue to improve rapidly. This baffles me as well. So many low hanging fruits to pick, we literally just started with these large models. One obvious direction is predicting the next video frame. Infinite training data is available.
> One obvious direction is predicting the next video frame. This is being done. There are incredible generative video models...
I would not call them “incredible”. Video generation is still at gpt-1 level. It will need several orders of magnitude scaling to get to gpt-2 level. We’ve just started making very first baby steps in this direction.
Re: Ask HN: In 2024, is SWE a sustainable career?
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
If AI agents do get better than human SWEs, they'll also get better than their human counterparts at other jobs - including being an entrepreneur. When people call out the doom of SWE careers at the hands of AI, they seem to think that only SWE careers will be affected, which seems weirdly biased to me. If AI comes for our jobs, it'll come for everyone's jobs. And if that is the case, economics/capitalism as it exist…
It absolutely still makes sense. It just won’t be so great for the humans.
In which case there will be massive social upheaval, which won't be good for the newly minted god-CEOs. They are incentivized to share the spoils of infinite productivity. What good is being a god of a world in flames?
Re: Ask HN: In 2024, is SWE a sustainable career?
#49- About LLMs, AIs, and Agents:
Have you used enough time some LLMs in IDE/editors? At first it seems magical, but the moment you're working on a big project, with multiple libraries, dependencies, and interfaces outside your project files, they are prone to either hallucinate or just use incorrectly existing function or other code parts.
They will help us to do slightly repetitive tasks, like writing unit tests or writing some boilerplate, but I don't expect it to solve big problems specific to your task.
- About people:
I don't know in your country, but in Spain, lots of people outside tech backgrounds/spaces are pivoting to CS, SWE, and similar degrees because during/after the COVID they felt tech people had a lot easier, as because they could WFH, they didn't lose their job, they were well paid, and they could find a new one fast, even if this isn't true now.
This both makes the junior engineer market worse, due to having too much people, and also makes the HR work harder as they have to sieve between more people, but on the other hand, I think this will make HR more concerned about enthusiastic people who learnt by pure interest really useful skills aside formal education, like learning other languages, to use and configure UNIX systems, to use proficiently the terminal, or having done some side projects.
Re: Ask HN: In 2024, is SWE a sustainable career?
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it will be the opposite, actually. AI seems to be eating the bottom, but there is still demand for higher level decision making that seniors or architects do. The stuff that I would usually delegate to junior devs, e.g. "move this button" or "change this column" are the things it can easily do now and in the near term. But questions like "How should I design this system" are not and I don't see that happening…
The SOTA models can absolutely create system designs very effectively. Have you even tried that? Like literally, let's get someone to randomly propose a few specs. Then we get some developers to try to create a system design. Some have Claude 3.5 Sonnet or o1-preview to help them work on it. Some of them have you to help. Each group has one hour. Then we have another group that evaluates the system designs on some nu…
I have not tried that, no. I'm not even sure what a SOTA model is (which is my other issue with AI right now: the fragmentation). Sure, the AI design can be done quicker and may be "better" by some objective measure. However, can it present its model to upper management in a coherent way to justify the budget it is about to be given? Can it translate this design into a series of tasks for (surely AI) engineers to implement? Can it deal with late-breaking changes to the design based on new requirements? You'll tell me it probably can, or shortly will be able to. The thing is, as long as humans are making the ultimate decisions, they'll probably want another human in the loop somehow, at least within this generation.
I mean, look, there's no one who wants to stop having to write code more than me. Our industry is full of make-work and pointless drudgery for no reason and I'd love to see that be made pointless by AI. But there's the old quote about overestimating the short term progress and underestimating the long term progress that applies here. Your version of "awhile" is probably pretty similar to the "awhile" of people excited about past technologies. As another comment pointed out, we engineers have been trying to automate ourselves out of a job for quite a while now and I don't see this being much different. I'm old enough to remember the 4GL fad and people were just as breathless then that you didn't need those pesky engineers anymore and soon you'd be able to do similar things as AI is promising. Low-code was a thing recently too. These things gradually chip away at the skills you need to make things happen, but something has to ultimately be responsible for the results and that's where humans come in.