Was it ever a lifetime career? Haven't most people looked around and asked themselves where are all the 50+ engineers? They basically don't exist in large numbers. Ageism is real in this industry. You either save up enough money to retire early, switch into management, or get forced out of the industry eventually. AI is just accelerating the trend. I see very few junior engineers resisting AI. I see a LOT of staff+ engineers resisting it. Just look at the comments on HN. Anti-AI sentiment is real.
Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career
51–60 of 809 posts
Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career
#52If 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.
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My concern would be whether creating that software pays enough to keep up with skyrocketing costs of living.
You might need to relocate to a place with much lower costs of living.
This was the idea behind remote working discussed during COVID-19 times:
- the company can pay less money because the employee is living at a much cheaper place than the expensive city where the company is located
- on the other hand, even with a smaller salary, the employee has more money at the end of the month because of the smaller costs of living
So both sides win.
Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career
#53Seems the solution here is the same it's actually always been if you want career progression: be more than just a code jockey. The true value of an engineer is to be plugged into overall roadmaps, broader thinking around product, how to achieve company goals, etc etc. Yes, LLMs might dramatically reduce the amount of code we write by hand. But I'm a lot less convinced they'll solve all of the amorphous, human-interac…
My exprience has been that companies actively work to prevent people from becoming more than just code jockeys. For example, most of the places I've worked have viewed code delivered as the ONLY metric used to evaluate performance. Attempts to contribute to roadmaps or strategy are ignored at best and punished at worst.
Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career
#54I 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 argument is that “that’s what always happened in the past”. Which is true, but it’s true as long as it’s not true. The classic example of how drastically this kind of thinking can fail is Malthusian theory, that populations would collapse because food growth was linear while population growth was exponential. This was true for all of history until Malthus actually made this observation. At a mechanistic level, th…
It’s also not that true, and highly dependent on a lot of factors.
Anecdotally I see a lot of schadenfreude online about tech jobs after a decade or two of lecturing everybody from Appalachians in coal country, to Midwestern autoworkers, that they should just “learn to code.”
Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career
#55Was it ever a lifetime career? Haven't most people looked around and asked themselves where are all the 50+ engineers? They basically don't exist in large numbers. Ageism is real in this industry. You either save up enough money to retire early, switch into management, or get forced out of the industry eventually. AI is just accelerating the trend. I see very few junior engineers resisting AI. I see a LOT of staff+ e…
> Haven't most people looked around and asked themselves where are all the 50+ engineers? They basically don't exist in large numbers.
I'm not discounting ageism in the industry, but how popular of a career was it 30+ years ago compared to now?
Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career
#56I 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.
It's not going to happen, just as it didn't happen for skilled industrial workers whose jobs got outsourced to China. The government will pay just enough in welfare to keep the situation manageable. Then they'll demonize you in the culture, as a Luddite, etc.
Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career
#57If 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.
In 2020, there are two companies that are competitors with each other. They each employ 100 programmers to do their job, and we all know how those organizations operated; perpetually behind, each feature added generating yet more possible future features, we've all lived it and are still largely living it today.
In 2026, both companies decide that AI can accelerate their developers by a factor of 10x. I'm not asserting that's reality, it's just a nice round number.
Company 1 fires 90 of their programmers and does the same work with 10.
Company 2 keeps all their programmers and does ten times the work they used to do, and maybe ends up hiring more.
Who wins in the market?
Of course the answer is "it depends" because it always is but I would say the winning space for Company 1 is substantially smaller than Company 2. They need a very precise combination of market circumstances. One that is not so precise that it doesn't exist, but it's a risky bet that you're in one of the exceptions.
In the time when the acceleration is occurring and we haven't settled in to the new reality yet the Company 1 answer seems superficially appealing to the bean counters, but it only takes one defector in a given market to go with Company 2's solution to force the entire rest of their industry to follow suit to compete properly.
The value generation by one programmer that can be possibly captured by that programmer's salary is probably not going down in the medium and long term either.
Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career
#58I really wish seemingly intelligent people would stop using the abstraction analogy (like the article does). The key word is: determinism. Every level of abstraction (inc. power tools, C, etc.) added a deterministic layer you can rely on to more effectively do whatever it is that you're doing - same result, every time. LLM's use natural language to describe programming and the result is varied at the very best (hence…
every time a person uses the abstraction argument, an angel dies
Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career
#59Was 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.
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Software engineers didn’t just disappear after age 40.
At the end of the 90th and beginning of the 00th ("dotcom bubble") it was a common saying that if as a programmer, when you are 30 or 40, you don't have a very successful company (and thus basically set for life), you basically failed in life; exactly because "everybody" knew that programming is a "young man's game" (i.e. you likely won't get a programming job anymore when you are, say, 35 or 40 years old).
So,
> Software engineers didn’t just disappear after age 40.
is rather a very recent phenomenon.
Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career
#60Was 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 tell my boys (both in HS now), the combination of a specialized skill/knowledge + competent computer programming is the sweet spot. For example, my oldest wants to go into Petroleum Engineering which is great but I told him to still learn software development and get comfortable solving problems with code. Having specialized Petroleum Engineering knowledge combined with being a competent software developer is a powerful combination.