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How AI is upending the software development industry

reuters.com

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Re: How AI is upending the software development industry

#61

Post by 8n4vidtmkvmk »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #53
8n4vidtmkvmk wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think you two are disagreeing. That was the parents point, no? It's hard to pick candidates otherwise . Which is sad, because there are some good candidates without degrees from top tier schools (myself included, but I was lucky to get in after 8 years of trying). Boot camp on its own though.. I don't disagree with you there. I was never convinced this stuff could be properly learned in such a short period of…

> Feels like an admission that they have no real way to vet candidates otherwise. That's the statement I disagree with. Software companies (good ones anyway) have plenty of tools to vet candidates. It's just that they'd rather go fishing where the pool is full than where it's mostly minnows.

Ah, sure. If you take "no real way" at face value instead of meaning the hard way is less cost effective. But I'm not them so I don't know

Re: How AI is upending the software development industry

#62

Post by jiggawatts »

oceansky wrote: post #44
jiggawatts wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Junior developers are the equivalent of the draftsmen that used to work under architects. Just like how CAD has almost entirely eliminated that line of work, the same thing will happen in software development. Only the “architects” will remain. There is an implicit assumption made by the people concerned about junior devs disappearing that that’s where senior developers come from . The reality is that almost junior d…

How would you verify if a candidate know how to use a database engine? This can actually have a lot of depth

I simply ask the candidate what a B-Tree is and how a database engine would use one.

If they don’t know that, then the database engine internals will forever remain a mysterious black box to them.

Explaining each of the four letters in ACID is the follow-up question if they pass.

These are the equivalent of “why do we put steel rebar into concrete?” If you can’t answer these questions immediately upon graduating then you cannot ever be responsible for anything. You can only be entrusted to copy or “fill in the blanks” where an anctual engineer worked out the design.

Re: How AI is upending the software development industry

#63

Post by bbqfog »

bcrosby95 wrote: post #43
bbqfog wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People were saying this about coding bootcamps just a little while ago! "All of these bootcamp coders don't really know what they're doing and us seniors will have to clean up after them". Same with outsourcing before that. Most people (seniors included) suck at coding. AI is already better than all but the the very best. It will continue to improve.

Yes, I was told in 2001 that I was never going to make a dime programming due to a combination of the dotcom crash and all the huge tech companies focusing on outsourcing. I'm not sure how bringing up outsourcing helps what you're saying, because tech salaries went ballistic shortly after outsourcing became popular.

My point is people keep saying the same thing throughout different eras and the truth is the quality of code has always been low. If anything, ai is going to greatly improve it.

Re: How AI is upending the software development industry

#64

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

atmavatar wrote: post #59
mikert89 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with this is it creates a caste system that gets locked in based on how you did on math tests when you were 14. There is certainly predictive power, but people get into these schools for all sorts of reasons. Also, there are unforeseen consequences. Take venture capital, its actually relatively easy for a harvard grad to raise money, the reason being: - everyone is trying to get an early piece of a compan…

It has at least as much to do with how wealthy your family is as it does with how well you do on standardized testing. I was accepted to MIT, but my family wasn't poor enough to receive need-based aid, and we certainly weren't wealthy enough for me to go without aid (especially because it would have been out-of-state tuition), so I ultimately went elsewhere. I expect a fair number of others here have similar stories.…

> especially because it would have been out-of-state tuition

I'm calling bullshit on this story because MIT is not a public school - there is no in-state vs. out-of-state tuition, and as someone who did a ton of cost comparisons on the private vs. public schools where I was accepted, I have difficulty believing someone who was accepted to MIT would confuse this fact.

Re: How AI is upending the software development industry

#66

Post by michaelnovati »

joshdavham wrote: post #17
GMoromisato wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It will be like med school. Juniors will pay to get trained (or get scholarships, etc.)

Weren’t they already doing this? College/bootcamps is precisely that: paying to get trained.

Apprenticeships with government incentive are better examples

Re: How AI is upending the software development industry

#67

Post by rediscovery »

bbqfog wrote: post #20
baxtr wrote: post #9

> Coding bootcamps have been a mainstay in Silicon Valley for more than a decade. Now, as AI eliminates the kind of entry-level roles for which they trained people, they’re disappearing. OK, so I think there is a fair chance it will play out like this: the younger generation won't study CS anymore / learn how to code. Instead, they'll all vibe code. This will lead to a massive increase in demand for seniors to clean…

People were saying this about coding bootcamps just a little while ago! "All of these bootcamp coders don't really know what they're doing and us seniors will have to clean up after them". Same with outsourcing before that. Most people (seniors included) suck at coding. AI is already better than all but the the very best. It will continue to improve.

Well have developer salaries grown over this period when outsourcing and bootcamps became prevalent?

Re: How AI is upending the software development industry

#68

Post by rediscovery »

bbqfog wrote: post #63
bcrosby95 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I was told in 2001 that I was never going to make a dime programming due to a combination of the dotcom crash and all the huge tech companies focusing on outsourcing. I'm not sure how bringing up outsourcing helps what you're saying, because tech salaries went ballistic shortly after outsourcing became popular.

My point is people keep saying the same thing throughout different eras and the truth is the quality of code has always been low. If anything, ai is going to greatly improve it.

So there is a clear pattern but "this time is different"?

Funny how that was also said at those times.

Re: How AI is upending the software development industry

#69

Post by rediscovery »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #50
jonas21 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's likely that the skills you'd learn as an entry-level engineer today will be mostly irrelevant to being a senior 10 years from now -- just as knowing how to write a program on punch cards is irrelevant to today's engineers. Seniors will have to come from somewhere, but it wouldn't be through this pipeline, even if companies were still hiring at full rate for entry-level work. For some just getting into the field,…

Couldn't disagree more. Learning the basic building blocks of programming (which is stuff that LLMs can do at a high level when dealing with small, self-contained problems) is critical because understanding the low-level details is so important when you're applying systems-level thinking. I've interviewed more that a few "software architects" who couldn't put together a for loop, and these folks were largely just BS…

The only skill set that exists in knowledge work is formal logic.

But yeah I'm sure increasing energy input into symbolic systems will not increase their entropy and thus the demand for workers capable of formal logic to keep it in check.

Because dumping representations of formal logic on a exponentially increasing repository of compressed data will surely start giving out output with higher informational content than the input. Any time now. Just double the size of the model a few more times and we will start getting lower entropy outcomes for free.

Re: How AI is upending the software development industry

#70

Post by general1726 »

RivieraKid wrote: post #18
grunder_advice wrote: post #3

If nobody hires juniors, then where are the seniors supposed to come from?

By the time this becomes a problem, seniors won't be needed either.

And that's going to be before or after customers will be able to exactly specify what they want and will be able to tell you where the error is including stack trace and set of steps which they did before the crash, not just "it is not working"
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