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Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

seangoedecke.com

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Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#31

Post by harimau777 »

fooker wrote: post #18

If by software engineering, one means typing code character by character into a text editor, sure it's going to be difficult to find someone to pay you for it. If you mean creating software, well we are creating more software than ever before and the definition of what software is has never been so diverse. I can see many different careers branching off from here.

My concern would be whether creating that software pays enough to keep up with skyrocketing costs of living. In the past, the jobs created by automation have generally been lower paid with less autonomy.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#32

Post by delusional »

> Construction workers don’t say that being a good construction worker means not lifting heavy objects. They say “too bad, that’s the job”

I dont know, maybe in your part of the world, but where I'm from we have a series of robust worker protection laws that try to limit the damage the work does to you. We generally consider it a bad thing for workers to damage their bodies, and if we could build houses without it, we'd prefer that.

In this specific case we do have a techniques to build software without causing damage, so why change that?

This post is arguing that maybe software enginnering should start being harmful, even though we know it doesn't have to. It's a post of a guy begging to be fed into the capitalist meat grinder. Meaningless self sacrifice.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#33

Post by shhsshs »

vasco wrote: post #3

Are people seriously thinking that you can make yourself dumber by using a chat UI? If talking to an AI makes me dumber and a limited career, then all the customer support people that ever existed were in the same or worse position talking to dumb humans on chat all day answering tickets always about the same topics and linking the same docs over and over. This makes no sense.

If you constantly pawn a task or cognitive load onto someone else (AI or not), you'll eventually get worse and worse at that particular type of thinking. Your overall mind doesn't necessarily get weaker, but you definitely start to get worse at anything you don't regularly practice.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#34

Post by GrinningFool »

incognito124 wrote: post #14
otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #6

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

Why do people think there will be fixing AI slop software? I see that opinion here and there on HN. The cost of codegen is next to nothing. It makes no sense to spend large sums of money having an engineer fix something that could be generated over and over until gods of stochasticity come in your favour. We've entered a period of single-use-plastic software, piling up and polluting everything, because it's cheaper t…

When everything is generated on-demand - each exploit has to be discovered anew. No more conveniences like common libraries.

This is sarcasm, but it's probably also going to get sold as a feature at some point.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#35

Post by lanstin »

harimau777 wrote: post #31
fooker wrote: post #18

If by software engineering, one means typing code character by character into a text editor, sure it's going to be difficult to find someone to pay you for it. If you mean creating software, well we are creating more software than ever before and the definition of what software is has never been so diverse. I can see many different careers branching off from here.

My concern would be whether creating that software pays enough to keep up with skyrocketing costs of living. In the past, the jobs created by automation have generally been lower paid with less autonomy.

This problem is not a software engineering problem nor an AI problem but a problem of the balance of power between working hard vs. investing. If the people who believe in working hard organize and slow down the tendency to rig everything for investors, then the markets should stabilize at a more generally prosperous place.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#36

Post by giobox »

Anecdotally, it feels like something materially changed in the US software hiring market at the start of this year to me. It feels like more and more businesses are taking a wait and see approach to avoid over-investing in human capital in the next few years.

It also feels like the hiring "signal", which was always weak before, is just completely gone now, when every job you do advertise receives over 500 LLM written applications and cover letters that all look and feel the same.

The pro-athlete comparison in this article is bit silly IMO- there are obvious physical body issues that occur with aging if you rely on your muscles etc to make money. If you compare to other fields of knowledge work, such as say law or medicine, there are loads of examples of very experienced, very sharp operators in their 40s and 50s.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#37

Post by bdcravens »

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.

The same is true of the industries that software disrupted.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#38

Post by [deleted] »

bdcravens wrote: post #37
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.

The same is true of the industries that software disrupted.

[deleted]

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#39

Post by mariopt »

Why are we upvoting this?

Virtually, the entire blog is about AI with a ridiculous publishing rate (https://www.seangoedecke.com/page/5), funny how I can look at this site HTML and know right away it was done with AI.

Can we stop upvoting vibe published articles? The arguments are flawed and don't even make sense to anyone who does software

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#40

Post by azan_ »

philipnee wrote: post #26

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.

If AI becomes good enough to easily produce maintainable and high quality software, then I really can't see how demand for software engineers would not plummet. Even lots of non-coding work that software engineers do, such as accurately capturing what client actually wants, will become much less valuable - e.g. currently misunderstanding of client's requirements is catastrophic and can lead to waste of months of labour; with AI it could become matter of max few hours lost. So I can understand argument that software engineering careers might be safe because AI may plateau and we might never reach level where it's actually capable of producing good software. But I absolutely don't buy that software engineering will be safe even if such AI exists. Even if your current work is just 20% actually coding, you must remember about second order effects that will take place once quality code generation is 1000 times faster.
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