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Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

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Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#21

Post by somebehemoth »

vasco wrote: post #13
meheleventyone wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're misrepresenting the potential problem. It's more along the lines of using AI stops you exercising the cognitive processes you would doing things yourself and those encompass skills, knowledge and brain function that can atrophy. For an extreme example you can look at cognitive decline in the elderly which can be mitigated by taking part in activities that are cognitively stimulating.

Can you comment on other jobs though? The large majority of jobs require no big mental effort? Even switching from programming to management would go through that. Under that light it'd be impossible for a manager to ever become technical again because they'd atrophy so quickly?

The longer the manager is out of the game, the harder it is to return to the game. Returning to the game takes time. Depending on age and income, returning to the game may be impossible for some people over time.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#22

Post by delusional »

vasco wrote: post #13
meheleventyone wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're misrepresenting the potential problem. It's more along the lines of using AI stops you exercising the cognitive processes you would doing things yourself and those encompass skills, knowledge and brain function that can atrophy. For an extreme example you can look at cognitive decline in the elderly which can be mitigated by taking part in activities that are cognitively stimulating.

Can you comment on other jobs though? The large majority of jobs require no big mental effort? Even switching from programming to management would go through that. Under that light it'd be impossible for a manager to ever become technical again because they'd atrophy so quickly?

I can't answer for the other guy, but my answer would be that talking to a clanker is LESS mental effort than being a manager, and that's why your reasoning atrophies so quickly.

Managers can go back to being technical, because they are still interacting with problems that require human thinking. Token farmers don't.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#23

Post by strken »

the_real_cher wrote: post #9

Was it ever? It's always seemed weird to me that people even think 'software engineering' is a career. It's a tool for knowledge work. No carpenter is a specialist in drills. It seems to me that the best way to navigate a long term career is to have another specialty and use software engineering as a tool within that specialty.

Software is wood, not drills, and if we somehow invented bacteria that gradually built an ugly but saleable house when fed on water and nutrients and nudged into shape, I bet carpenters (well, framers or whatever they're called in the US) would have an identity crisis too.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#24

Post by Aurornis »

the_real_cher wrote: post #9

Was it ever? It's always seemed weird to me that people even think 'software engineering' is a career. It's a tool for knowledge work. No carpenter is a specialist in drills. It seems to me that the best way to navigate a long term career is to have another specialty and use software engineering as a tool within that specialty.

It most certainly was a lifelong career.

I’m kind of confused how you might think it wasn’t. Going through a career as a software dev until retirement was very common.

Software engineers didn’t just disappear after age 40.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#25

Post by jake-coworker »

the_real_cher wrote: post #9

Was it ever? It's always seemed weird to me that people even think 'software engineering' is a career. It's a tool for knowledge work. No carpenter is a specialist in drills. It seems to me that the best way to navigate a long term career is to have another specialty and use software engineering as a tool within that specialty.

I think the logical next step is that "XYZ knowledge worker" will become a software engineer of sorts. Not literally writing code, but at minimum encoding processes/workflows into some language.

If you're a paralegal or an accountant who can't manage their workflows with AI, you're going to be way less productive than someone who can.

And if you're a paralegal or an accountant who can manage a lot of your workflows with AI, you don't need custom software (hence less dedicated software engineers).

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#26

Post by philipnee »

80% of my day to day job has never been pumping out lots of code. it is a complicated career is it? we do a lot of alignment, design and thinking. i can't even agree the idea of outsourcing thinking, i think AI is very good at helping us to think clearly, but it doesn't really "think" for us.

if you do that then... likely very replacable.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#27

Post by pphysch »

On the contrary, in an efficient economy, every business operations manager (MBA) would be a skilled software engineer, able to comfortably manage data flows and design custom automated processes. There's so much potential energy there in unlocking this technical literacy.

Less "pure" programming, but lots more programming in general.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#28

Post by HumblyTossed »

harimau777 wrote: post #20

I keep reading about how AI will be fine because people can just retrain for different careers. However, I never read what those careers are or who is going to pay for retraining. I certainly don't have the money or time to go back to college and start a new career at the bottom.

> However, I never read what those careers are or who is going to pay for retraining.

There aren't any careers and if there were, you would have to pay. Corporations certainly won't except under extremely rare situations where they have to to compete.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#29

Post by pllbnk »

otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #6

It will be for those fixing AI slop software. (In fact, they might need several lifetimes.)

The problem partially is that AI can also fix AI slop. At this point I am in doubt whether code quality matters anymore in most non-critical software. You can ask an LLM if the code has quality issues and refactor to a _better_ version. It will reason through, prepare a plan and refactor. So now with this "better" code you can expect that your LLM will be able to deliver higher quality results but that's all the quality that is needed.

Actually, at this point I feel that the value in software engineering is moving from coding to testing and quality assurance.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#30

Post by azath92 »

the_real_cher wrote: post #9

Was it ever? It's always seemed weird to me that people even think 'software engineering' is a career. It's a tool for knowledge work. No carpenter is a specialist in drills. It seems to me that the best way to navigate a long term career is to have another specialty and use software engineering as a tool within that specialty.

Id disagree with this analogy: "No carpenter is a specialist in drills." and i think its an interesting lens through which to look at the evolution of our tools.

I think there are trades where tool (or process if i may be allowed to extend the analogy) specialists exist and are highly valued. My dad is a plumber, so ill use that example but id trust similar is true for carpentry. there are specialists by task/output (new construction, repairs, boilers etc) but also tool specialist plumbers and companies for example drain clearing equipment or certain kinds of pipe for handling chemicals other than water are very specialised, and there are roles for them because the thing they enable, and the criticality of the task, and often the cost and complexity of using the tool are high enough to make specialisation valuable.

IMO software has, for the 10 years ive been working in it, been in an unusual position where the tools (languages, engineering practices, tech stacks) were super technical and involved, but also could be applied to a large number of problems. That is the perfect recipe for tool specialists: complex tool with high value and broad domain/problem space applicability.

Because of that tool specialisation, we've separated the application of the tool to a problem/domain from the tool use. reduction of complexity of applying these tools to many problems, means all domain specialists will use them, relying less on tool specialists.

imaging a mcguffin tool for attaching any two materials together, but which took a degree to figure out (loose hyperbole here), that sudenly you could use for 5 bucks and a quick glance at the first page of the manual. An industry that used to have lots of mcguffin engineers, would be mega disrupted, and you could argue that those tool specialists would have to identify more with what they were building than the mcguffin they were using.

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