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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

#81

Post by hnthrowaway0315 »

xtracto wrote: post #45
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.

We are experiencing what Civil Engineers experienced going from slide rules to calculators. Or electrical engineers going from manual circuit path drawing to CAD tools. The interesting thing to me is that, Software Engineering will have to evolve. Processes and tools will have to evolve, as they had evolved through the years. When I was finishing university in 2004, we learned about the "crisis of software " time, th…

Calculators and CAD tools do not give you non-deterministic answers. Both of them simply automate part of the manual work for them without creating anything "new". I haven't used CAD tools but I did use some level editors such as Trenchbroom -- I think what is automated is the 3d shapes that you want to make -- e.g. back in the day of '96, when ID Software is creating Quake, there was very little pre-drawn shapes in the level editor and they have to make the blocks by themselves, thus it is very difficult and time consuming to make complex shapes such as curved walls and tunnels. Then better tools were invented and now it is much easier to create a complex shape. But you don't type "a Quake level with theme A, and blah blah" and then you get a more or less working level -- this is what AI is doing right now.

I think the right analogy to calculators and CAD tools, is IDE with Intellisense for SWE -- instead of typing code one char by one char, we can tab to automate some part of it.

But I agree with your consensus -- SWE is changing, whether we like it or not. We need to adapt, or find a niche and grit to retirement.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#82

Post by rayiner »

nemomarx wrote: post #71
adjejmxbdjdn wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm also pretty sure in the past industrial transitions, many of the people who lost their jobs at the start of the change never found better ones. It took a generation or so for new opportunities to really be found and fine tuned and you're competing for those new roles with younger people anyway. If ai does take a lot of white collar work, is it a lot of comfort that maybe jobs in a very different sector will be be…

Did the younger people find better jobs? You used to have all these jobs for people who were maybe a bit smarter than average with good judgment. In the 1990s, the local community college used to advertise associates degrees for paralegals. That's a job that doesn't exist in the same way anymore thanks to computers. Now it's become an internship for kids with top credentials before they go to law school. Which is fine for them, but what about everyone else?

It seems to me like all of these people are flocking now to healthcare fields. That seems totally unsustainable.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#83

Post by GrinningFool »

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #59
Aurornis wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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…

> 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"

That seemed commonly held among folks participating in the dot-com bubble. Plenty of people had been doing it for decades even as the bubble was growing.

> Software engineers didn’t just disappear after age 40.

>> is rather a very recent phenomenon.

Not really. It's not that they disappeared, it's that they're a small fraction of the overall SWE population as a side-effect of how much that population has grown.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#85

Post by antisthenes »

adjejmxbdjdn wrote: post #49
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 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…

> 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.

Malthusian observation can still be true...It only has to be true once, and the only reason people say it isn't right now is due to industrial fertilizers and short memories.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#86

Post by kypro »

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.

Also, it's not necessarily true that there will be other great careers available. This seems to just be an assumption people are making.

Of course, there are jobs that will still require human labour for some time yet, but in reality a lot jobs that require physical human labour are now done in other parts of the world where labour is cheaper.

Those which cannot be exported like plumbing or waitressing only have limited demand. You can't take 50% of the current white-collar workforce and dump them in these careers and expect them to easily find work or receive a decent wage. The demand simply does not exist.

Additionally, at the same time as white-collar jobs are being lost an increasing number of "low-skill" manual labour jobs are also being automated. Self-checkout machines mean it's harder to get work in retail, robotaxis and drone delivery will make it harder harder to find work in delivery and logistics, robots in warehouses will make it harder to find warehouse jobs.

It seems to me there is an implicate assumption that AI will either create a bunch of new well-paid jobs that employers need humans for (which means AI cannot do them) and jobs which cannot be exported abroad for cheaper. What well-paid jobs would even fit the category of being immune to AI and immune to outsourcing? Are we all going to be really well paid cleaners or something? It makes no sense.

A lot of the advice we're seeing today about retraining in construction worker or plumber seems to assume that there's an unlimited demand for this labour which there simply is not. And even if hypothetically there was about to be a huge increase in demand for construction workers, it would take years to even have the machinery, supply chain and infrastructure in place to support the millions of people entering construction.

The most likely scenario is that people will lose their jobs and will be stuck in an endless race to the bottom fighting for the limited number of jobs that are left in the domestic economy while everything else is either outsourced or done by robots and AI.

The better advice is to start preparing for this reality. Do not assume the government will or can protect you. When wealth concentrates corruption because almost inevitable and politicians have families to look after too.

Please take this seriously. Even if I'm wrong it's better to prepare for the worse rather than to assume everything will be find and you'll be able to retrain into a new well-paid career.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#87

Post by boredatoms »

jerf wrote: post #57
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.

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 asserti…

This resonates strongly with me, in that all that extra margin has to be spent on something other than dividends

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#88

Post by ReptileMan »

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.

Except we are now in the golden age where people with 20 or 30 years of experience know what quality software is - or at least what it is not. So they are able to steer the LLMs. Once this knowledge is gone - the quality could go downhill.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#89

Post by hnthrowaway0315 »

woeirua wrote: post #51

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+ e…

If you are lucky and got in early, then probably yes, it could be a lifetime career. It's like all careers, when you joined early, you got a lot of opportunities, you also rode the wave, you eventually rose to the top if you grit through.

It's a lot easier to be early than to be smart or quick.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#90

Post by bbg2401 »

huani wrote: post #41
torben-friis wrote: post #15

Unless I'm missing something, there's an obvious logic issue here. If we truly need to sacrifice our skill to be productive by using LLMs that atrophy us, then the only devs that have a limited lifespan are us. The next ones won't have a skillset to atrophy since they won't have built it through manual work. Also, I hereby propose to publicly ban the "LLMs generating code are like compilers generating machine code" a…

why is the LLM-compiler analogy flawed? Is it only because LLM output is non deterministic?

Compiler: "Here is an exact program. Translate it while preserving its meaning."

LLM code generation: "Here is an intent/specification. Invent code that hopefully satisfies it."

Does the compiler analogy provide value under those terms? I don't think it does. In fact, I think it provides negative value.

We don't need to use tortured analogies to express excitement over these tools.

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