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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

#101

Post by KronisLV »

bborud wrote: post #67

Multiple times per week I have the same conversation. It goes something like this: - AI will make developers irrelevant - Why? - Because LLMs can write code - Do you know what I do for a living? - Yes, write code? - Yes, about 2-5% of the time. Less now. - But you said you are a developer? - I did - So what do you do 95-98% of the time? - I understand things and then apply my ability to formulate solutions - But I ca…

> Yes, about 2-5% of the time.

There are also those for whom that percentage is higher, let’s say 6-50%.

> I understand things and then apply my ability to formulate solutions

The AI is coming for that too.

You might just be lucky to be in circumstances that value your contributions or an industry or domain that isn’t well represented in the training data, or problem spaces too complex for AI. Not everyone is, not even the majority of devs.

People knocking out Jira tickets and writing CRUD webapps will end up with their livelihood often taken away. Or bosses will just expect more output for same/less pay, with them having to use AI to keep up.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#102

Post by lowmagnet »

phyzix5761 wrote: post #91
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 human…

Uber and Doordash are both examples of abusing workers and their resources to externalize costs on the worker.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#103

Post by meheleventyone »

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 think you're probably castrophizing the impact with statements like "it'd be impossible for a manager to ever become technical again" because that's not the likely outcome as I understand things. But yes people who stop programming for an appreciable amount of time do find it harder to pick back up again.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#104

Post by ryandvm »

bborud wrote: post #67

Multiple times per week I have the same conversation. It goes something like this: - AI will make developers irrelevant - Why? - Because LLMs can write code - Do you know what I do for a living? - Yes, write code? - Yes, about 2-5% of the time. Less now. - But you said you are a developer? - I did - So what do you do 95-98% of the time? - I understand things and then apply my ability to formulate solutions - But I ca…

I dunno, man. I've been doing this for 20+ years and I think we're at a really important fork in the road where there are two possibilities.

The first is that AI is achieving human-level expertise and capability, but since they're now being increasingly trained on their own output they are fighting an uphill battle against model collapse. In that case, perhaps AI is going to just sort of max out at "knowing everything" and maybe agentic coding is just another massive paradigm shift in a long line of technological paradigm shifts and the tooling has changed but total job market collapse is unlikely.

The other possibility is that we're going to continue to see escalating AI capability with regard to context, information retrieval, and most importantly "cognition" (whatever that means). Maybe we overcome the challenges of model collapse. Maybe we figure out better methodologies for training that don't end up just producing a chatbot version of Stack Overflow + Wikipedia + Reddit. Maybe we actually start seeing AI create and not just recreate.

If it's the latter, then I think engineers who think they are going to stay ahead of AI sound an awful lot like saddle makers who said "pffft, these new cars can only go 5 miles per hour."

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#105

Post by rayiner »

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…

Your hypothetical ignores the distribution of programmer talent. Company 1 can pay more per person and hire 10x programmers, who can then leverage AI to produce the same or more as Company 2.

We have seen this in other knowledge industries. U.S. legal sector job count is about the same today as it was 20 years ago. But billing rates have exploded and revenues in the 200 largest firms have increased more than 50% after adjusting for inflation. Higher-end law firms have leveraged technology to be able to service much more of the demand and push out smaller regional competitors.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#106

Post by SoftTalker »

mikestew wrote: post #73
HighGoldstein wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

In 1996? Software development was the hot ticket to upper middle class in the early 80s when I was a recent CS grad, and I was already working with people who were in it for the money. By the late 90s, if you could spell “HTML”, you were making decent money as a web developer. This all came crashing down during the Dot Bomb collapse, but SW has been pretty popular for most of my career, and it just continued to get m…

In retrospect the Dot Bomb was a bump in the road. Yes, some people who only knew enough HTML to be a "Webmaster" might have been filtered out, but pretty quickly anyone who could really build software had opportunities greater than before.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#107

Post by realharo »

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.

Yeah, that's just a copium answer from people who simply want to hand wave away the issue instead of admitting they have no good answers.

Like a politician who's asked about this in a town hall, but thinks that "our plan is to do absolutely nothing" doesn't sound very appealing.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#108

Post by surgical_fire »

bborud wrote: post #67

Multiple times per week I have the same conversation. It goes something like this: - AI will make developers irrelevant - Why? - Because LLMs can write code - Do you know what I do for a living? - Yes, write code? - Yes, about 2-5% of the time. Less now. - But you said you are a developer? - I did - So what do you do 95-98% of the time? - I understand things and then apply my ability to formulate solutions - But I ca…

I normally say that I have zero concerns regarding AI in terms of employment. At most I am concerned in learning the best practices on AI usage to stay on top of things.

It's ability to write code is alright. Sometimes it impresses me, sometimes it leaves me underwhelmed. It certainly can't be left to do things autonomously if you are responsible for its output.

Moderately useful tool, but hellishly expensive when not being subsidized by imbeciles that dream of it undrrmining labor. A fool and his money should be separated anyway.

What I am really concerned about the incoming economic disaster being brewed. I suspect things will get very ugly pretty soon.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#109

Post by rayiner »

lanstin wrote: post #35
harimau777 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The balance of power is dictated by economic facts, not by organizing or politics. Auto workers in 1950 weren't better organized than auto workers in 2026. They just had more leverage because they weren't competing with auto workers in China. Likewise, Silicon Valley isn't paying people writing web apps $$$ because those workers are organized. They are doing it because they don't have a feasible alternative. If AI enables them to do more with less, they'll take that option.
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