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Why is everyone trying to replace Software Engineers?

toddle.dev

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Re: Why is everyone trying to replace Software Engineers?

#61

Post by ge96 »

thr0waway001 wrote: post #54
insane_dreamer wrote: post #47

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.

This is the sad truth. We like to think we're special but we're not. I'd argue a paramedic is more special. Those people save lives and get paid like shit compared to us.

I wish I realized what financial independence is earlier, even making good money I'm still poor/negative net worth due to my dumb decisions earlier on. Trying to be better this time around then I won't be so concerned/can just pivot.

Re: Why is everyone trying to replace Software Engineers?

#63

Post by phreeza »

CharlieDigital wrote: post #26

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…

The industrialization of coding is not a new thing though, all sorts of tooling and standardisation could be described in the same terms. An LLM is just another gizmo that may or may not make the assembly line move faster.

Re: Why is everyone trying to replace Software Engineers?

#64

Post by teeray »

Yenrabbit wrote: post #56
teeray wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 .

What percentage of human software engineers would you guess pass this bar?

Irrelevant. It's greater than the AI's percentage.

Re: Why is everyone trying to replace Software Engineers?

#65

Post by snuxoll »

bogdan wrote: post #34
datadrivenangel wrote: post #10

From 2011: "Don’t call yourself a programmer: “Programmer” sounds like “anomalously high-cost peon who types some mumbo-jumbo into some other mumbo-jumbo.” If you call yourself a programmer, someone is already working on a way to get you fired. You know Salesforce, widely perceived among engineers to be a Software as a Services company? Their motto and sales point is “No Software”, which conveys to their actual custo…

Good thing everybody hates Salesforce.

I dislike the company, I like the product - I have built several small apps on the platform and nothing has ever been "no code" as they like to advertise, but hot damn was I able to throw together something useful for the business in less than a day and have people using it as quickly. As an engineer I find it incredibly valuable for making these low-to-medium value LOB apps that don't justify the man-hours to build, deploy, and fight tech debt for a full-stack web application, at least when factoring in the tradeoff for license costs.

Re: Why is everyone trying to replace Software Engineers?

#67

Post by bilbo0s »

ilikerashers wrote: post #37

My view is that Ai companies saw there was a huge volume of code online and decided coding was a text generation problem and easy to replace. I don't buy it. I also don't think it'll replace writers or artists. Just the low brow, chum bucket stuff which in programming terms is a todo app or web form.

Just the low brow, chum bucket stuff

I think, as software devs, we sometimes kid ourselves with respect to how many of us are working on low brow, chum bucket stuff.

Most of us are not working on GPU based real time physics engines. What most of us do is, well, not rocket science. Even people working in "hard" areas are not really doing the "hard" work. Most game engine developers are using libraries, they aren't developing shaders. Most AI developers are, in actuality, TF or PyTorch monkeys, not real AI experts.

I think devs who move to writing code in areas where problems have not yet been solved will still be necessary. But yeah, not sure devs pushing out another web app will be all that necessary over the next decade.

Re: Why is everyone trying to replace Software Engineers?

#68

Post by the_snooze »

CharlieDigital wrote: post #26

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…

>Adept at prompting and reviewing code instead of writing code.

Don't you need to write your own fair share of code (especially bad code) to judge what gets shipped? LLMs solve the problem of "producing code," but I don't think it necessary follows that LLMs solve the more important problem of "delivering value."

If you're Organization X and are in partnership with Organization Y to produce an integrated solution, an LLM might know how to call some bespoke API between the orgs. But you probably need to have skilled humans to know those APIs' inevitable weirdnesses: unintentional rate limits, resource-constraint edge cases, race conditions, etc.

Re: Why is everyone trying to replace Software Engineers?

#69

Post by eatsyourtacos »

cogman10 wrote: post #25
taylodl wrote: post #13

> Your job was never to write code, it is to solve problems for your users. They are why we have a job. You need to talk with the users, empathize with them, understand their problems and feel their pains. This is much too important to be left exclusively in the hands of product managers and designers. You are the problem solver, so you need to fully understand the problem. Adding to this point, LLMs won't fully unde…

I've honestly never had that success. LLMs for me more often get in the way than actually help anything. It may be that it's because I deal mostly in very large code bases with their own nuances.

Counter point though- what if it was trained on your specific code base? Wouldn't it be able to then help with those given nuances?

The code base I have I would love to be able to just give some AI free reign and learn the structure since a lot of it is fairly repetitive; I know it would be so easy to say "hey add X just like Y" and it would be able to do it easily.

Re: Why is everyone trying to replace Software Engineers?

#70

Post by taylodl »

cogman10 wrote: post #25
taylodl wrote: post #13

> Your job was never to write code, it is to solve problems for your users. They are why we have a job. You need to talk with the users, empathize with them, understand their problems and feel their pains. This is much too important to be left exclusively in the hands of product managers and designers. You are the problem solver, so you need to fully understand the problem. Adding to this point, LLMs won't fully unde…

I've honestly never had that success. LLMs for me more often get in the way than actually help anything. It may be that it's because I deal mostly in very large code bases with their own nuances.

Works much better on greenfield projects. Brownfield requires the LLM to have ingested your codebase and all the libraries you're using. That's why tools such as DeepSeek are exciting because that potentially opens up the door to much better brownfield development - which is where the real value lies!
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