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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

#91

Post by phyzix5761 »

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.

I think the idea of being an employee is fundamentally changing. Not saying its good or bad but it's shifting to a more entrepreneurial phase where people have to step out of their 9 to 5s and find ways to deliver value that others want to pay for.

We saw this pre-ai with uber and door dash. I think as AI automation dies down and most companies are competing at a near optimal level with the new tools we'll need humans again in more traditional roles to build the next generation of innovations. And then the whole cycle will repeat.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#92

Post by phpnode »

joduplessis wrote: post #43

I 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…

People always say this but it’s misguided imo. Yes LLMs are not deterministic, but that’s totally irrelevant. You aren’t executing the LLMs output directly, you’re using the LLM to produce an artefact once that is then executed deterministically. A spec gets turned into code once. Editing the spec can cause the code to be updated but it’s not recreating the whole program each time, so why does determinism matter?

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#93

Post by kypro »

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.

There will be more software in the same way there is more agricultural output today.

The idea that productivity gains which result in more of something being produced also create more demand for labour to produce that thing is more often wrong that true as far as I can tell. In fact, it's quite hard to point to any historical examples of this happening. In general labour demand significantly decreases when productivity significantly increases and typically people need to retrain.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#94

Post by ReptileMan »

ryeights wrote: post #46
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.

s/software engineer/secretary/ s/creating software/typing correspondence/ In a world where software programming/architecting is solved by AI, value will accrue to people with expertise in other domains (who have now been granted the power of 1000 expert developers), not the people whose skillsets have been made redundant by better, faster and cheaper AI tools.

It could go either way. Don't forget that LLMs also have expertise in the other domains. Who would do better - the chemist with vibe coded app or the developer with vibe coded chemistry?

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#95

Post by pllbnk »

bcrosby95 wrote: post #44
pllbnk wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 qual…

Sure, but also, AI will always find issues. It will never be mildly satisfied with the codebase and say so.

Not from my experience. It's true that it will always find new issues in a new session but it is happy to say so when the code is good.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#96

Post by fatata123 »

Natfan wrote: post #66
aleph_minus_one wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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, eve…

but moving to a lower COL area can reduce that amount of public and private services one gets access to, no? network connectivity will, for example, likely be worse out in the sticks

[dead]

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#98

Post by hnthrowaway0315 »

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.

AI can also do alignment and pull from its vast training dataset for design and "thinking" -- because 99% of the problems in this world were already solved, multiple times, maybe not in the exactly same format, but in a very similar format.

I also see that in the future humans will adapt to AI, instead of the opposite. Why? Because it's a lot easier for humans to adapt to AI, than the opposite. It's already happening -- why do companies ask their employees to write complete documentation for AI to consume? This is what I called "Adaption".

I can also imagine that in the near future, when employment plummets, when basic income become general, when governments build massive condos for social housing -- everything new will be required to adapt to AI. The roads, the buildings, everything physical is going to be built with ease-of-navigation by AI in consideration. We don't need a Gen AI -- that is too expensive and too long term for the Capitalist class to consider. We only need a bunch of AI agents and robots coordinated in an environment that is friendly to them.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#99

Post by strken »

Argument A: AI means you don't learn as much, so even though you are more effective, it inhibits your growth and you shouldn't use it. However, on a pragmatic level, it's effective to hire a bajillion people, fire them at will, and get AI to do everything. You will get so many JIRA tickets closed and so many lines of code written.

Argument B: AI means you don't learn as much, and the single most useful work product of a software engineer is knowing how the code functions, so it's depriving your company of the main benefit of your work. Also, layoffs are terrible business strategy because every lost employee is years of knowledge walking out the door, every new hire is a risk, and red PRs are derisking the business.

Institutional and personal knowledge seem similar, but the implications of each are radically different.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#100

Post by SoftTalker »

harimau777 wrote: post #61
aleph_minus_one wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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, eve…

[flagged]

But at least stereotyping happens everywhere!
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