51–60 of 145 posts
I don't know. Why are you software engineers always trying to replace everyone else?
You need strong guys to move things around because you don't have a pneumatic crane. Now you have pneumatic crane, you can move stacks and stacks of things around with ease. You need less strong guys around and instead there is a new need for fewer people that are well-trained on how to operate this pneumatic crane safely. You'll get more work done with less people. That's what's happening with software engineering a…
Oh, now instead of ten unskilled laborers carrying shit, each being paid $N, you can have one crane operator getting paid $5N? Wait, why can't we pay him $N? What do you mean, if he fucks up it costs us millions? What do you mean, his skill or lack thereof can double or halve the time it takes to move shit around? Ok, what if we pay him $1.1N?
Software Engineers build the tools, so I feel it shouldn't be surprising that one of the first areas it's being applied is the domain it's inventors are most familiar with.
For other engineering disciplines, the data is much thinner and the methods tend to be heavily visual, i.e. mechanical drawings or electronic schematics.
SOTA vision LLMs cannot read a schematic to save their life. The accuracy is <5%.
The same reason all companies try to reduce labor: cut costs, better returns for shareholders. There's nothing special about SWEs vs any other class of worker. If they can be replaced or eliminated, they will be, just like any other worker.
You need strong guys to move things around because you don't have a pneumatic crane. Now you have pneumatic crane, you can move stacks and stacks of things around with ease. You need less strong guys around and instead there is a new need for fewer people that are well-trained on how to operate this pneumatic crane safely. You'll get more work done with less people. That's what's happening with software engineering a…
That's a fantastic insight. There's a popular metaphor comparing software developers to blacksmiths, emphasizing the craft and trade aspects of the profession. Historically, blacksmiths were largely automated out of existence, replaced by highly skilled metallurgists and industrial automation engineers, albeit in much smaller numbers. As we look toward the future, we must consider what the equivalents for software development might be.
its completely over for this field. anyone that doesnt think so has their head in the sand, we are 18 months out from the value proposition of a 50-85th percentile software engineer dropping to the floor
I’ll believe it when I can page an AI at 3AM, go back to sleep, and have it autonomously root-cause and fix a production outage no matter the cause .
A better metaphor for software is like writing a book. Everyone sees writing a book as borderline undoable, and the expectation is that it takes months and months. I think that software and writing have a lot in common (including lots of text, and even the verb used), and that explaining ourselves as book-writers would help set better expectations.
It will grow the sector and massively inflate the combinatorial explosion of system X system X system. Programmers will use AI as a tool in their tool box -- I already do for boilerplate and tests and explaining code -- and they'll use it to write ever more software to work with ever more systems.
What it may do though is cut the bottom off the field. Very junior programming jobs could vanish, creating more of a learning cliff to really get into it. This is happening in every discipline and has been for a while. It's a real problem for our traditional method of school followed by entry level job. I think the future's going to be some kind of school integrated with apprenticeship followed by internship followed by a real job. Unfortunately that may suck in a lot of ways. Fields that are like that require too much 'paying your dues.'
Software developers are basically the only thing standing between the morons and profit at any cost to society, because some of us don't feel like playing that game and they couldn't do it without us if their life depended on it. I realize they think they they finally can do it by themselves, or rather by hooking up a bunch of fresh bootcamp devs with AI; and I look forward to watching them crash, burn and come back…