Have you met any software engineers?
Nope. Tons of programmers, though.
I have an EE degree. Pleasure to meet you.
Why is everyone trying to replace Software Engineers?
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Re: Why is everyone trying to replace Software Engineers?
#72From 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.
It's a valuable product. Salesforce knows this, and prices accordingly, which is why everybody hates salesforce but still pays them.
Re: Why is everyone trying to replace Software Engineers?
#73This is either delusional, or trying to sell a course. That aside, it's interesting that software engineering will probably be among the first to be destroyed by ASI. This is simply because it's easy to do reinforcement learning on.
Just like robotic cars, the first 90% of the effort will come easy and the remaining 10% will take decades to perfect. They're going to need AGI to fully replace the intuition and knowledge integration of a dev.
Exactly, self driving for example on paper seems like an easy task to automate, you only need to make a decision for the upcoming 2 seconds, and still sucks at it, because it needs 100% accuracy, 90% is fatal and useless
Re: Why is everyone trying to replace Software Engineers?
#74I was part of a group people that tended towards artsy (and definitely not rationalist). This was when everyone had an idea for a new app, and I kept getting people trying to get me to work for equity. They seemed to have these same kinds of unrealistic expectations. I eventually came to the conclusion that they saw software as like painting. It seems to take about 8 - 24 hrs to create a work of art (assuming the ide…
> Everyone sees writing a book as borderline undoable
I would think the opposite. Surely everyone thinks they could write a book?
Re: Why is everyone trying to replace Software Engineers?
#75I don't know. Why are you software engineers always trying to replace everyone else?
because everyone else has a tough and boring job and being replaced by computer program and some device they will be free from this tedious jobs and have more time to do what they like instead. World will be a better place.
> have more time to do what they like instead
With what money?
Re: Why is everyone trying to replace Software Engineers?
#76I don't know. Why are you software engineers always trying to replace everyone else?
I think this is a mischaracterization. In my decades of writing software I have seen it replace some job descriptions but typically (and especially for skilled labor tasks) the person enjoys more capability with less effort.
I've seen hardware replace people. I've seen software upend industries. But I haven't yet seen software replace people.
Re: Why is everyone trying to replace Software Engineers?
#77This is either delusional, or trying to sell a course. That aside, it's interesting that software engineering will probably be among the first to be destroyed by ASI. This is simply because it's easy to do reinforcement learning on.
Just like robotic cars, the first 90% of the effort will come easy and the remaining 10% will take decades to perfect. They're going to need AGI to fully replace the intuition and knowledge integration of a dev.
It's easy to compile and run a program. It's hard to accurately simulate driving.
Re: Why is everyone trying to replace Software Engineers?
#78> 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…
Developer productivity tools are developer replacement tools. If the current paradigm is: principal/senior devs design system, implemented by more junior devs, and LLM tools enable the seniors to produce lots of code, then the juniors are the ones getting replaced. The next step up the stack is enabling the PMs and business people to design (and implement) the system. There is no reason to think LLM based tools are i…
IDK, I've been developing software for 40 years now and have been through several of these "developer replacement" hype cycles. Every single time what ended up happening was even more developers were required. I see this as being the same, at least for the next few years. I do believe that the ultimate end point is quite different - developers will be replaced - but that's several years away and will require major changes to the approach currently being used for software development.
Re: Why is everyone trying to replace Software Engineers?
#79You 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…
> Don't you need to write your own fair share of code
Do you need to be good at making films to be a good critic of films? (Roger Ebert)
Do you need to be a great chef to be a Michelin reviewer or food critic?
Do you need to be a great singer to be a good judge of musical talent? (Simon Cowell)
I think you can tell if some output is "good" without being expert at the doing part. You need to understand the domain, the inputs, the outputs, the range, but not necessarily be expert at the doing part.
In fact, many, many more of us can tell "this book is good", but relatively few of us could write a very good novel. We have a sense that "this show or movie is entertaining", but few of us could produce one!
One of the teams I worked with, our support engineer was extremely adept at reading code. He would trace defect reports to the lines of code and write excellent tickets that deeply understood the root cause of the error because he had a good conceptual model of the design and he was skilled at reading code. However, when it came to fixing the error, he had no clue!
Re: Why is everyone trying to replace Software Engineers?
#80I have my own side projects, which I hoped I could make much faster progress with LLMs. Didn't work... Actually, it decreased progress. LLMs don't code themselves and explaining things to them takes an enormous amount of time and they misunderstand things so much. How could somebody think a statistical parrot can replace any kind of knowledge work?