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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

#141

Post by [deleted] »

jjmarr wrote: post #138
dominotw wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

where did the excess labor force suddenly materialize in covid.

the "learn to code" campaign began ramping up in 2013. If you started undergrad in 2016 you would've graduated right into the covid market. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learn_to_Code#Policy_impact I think the hype peaked around 2016 where Democrats were portrayed as out of touch for saying laid off coal miners could just "learn to code". By 2019 it was a cliché used to mock laid off journalists on Twitter.

[deleted]

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#142

Post by bborud »

SoftTalker wrote: post #128
bborud wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The AI is coming for that too. To some degree yes, in practice, not so much. In practice you have to be in the world, talk to people, know how to talk to people, know how to listen, and be able to understand the difference between what people say and what they actually need. Not want. Need. This was something I learnt in my very first job in the 1980s. I worked for someone who did industrial automation beyond PLCs…

> To some degree yes, in practice, not so much. We used to say that (not long ago, even) about the code-writing part. Why do we believe that LLMs are going to stop there? Why do we think they won't soon be able to talk to people, listen, and determine what they need? I think it's mostly a cope. We have robots walking just fine now, by the way.

We never noticed how easy the code writing part had already become because it happened slowly. Through mechanical means, through the ability to re-use code, and through code generation.

Heck, even long before LLMs about 10% to 30% of my code was already automatically generated. By tooling, by IDLs and by my editor just being able to infer what my most likely input would be.

> We have robots walking just fine now, by the way.

I don't think you got the point I was trying to make.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#143

Post by insane_dreamer »

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…

What you described are senior developers and system architects.

Junior developers spend most of their time writing code (when they're not forced to attend pointless standups, because Agile/blah/blah)

> The developers who still think their job is about writing code will perhaps not have a job in the future.

So you're saying the same thing everyone else is saying. SWEs won't go away, but they will be greatly reduced, because those whose job is about writing code -- junior devs -- will be replaced.

(How will Sr Devs in the future be created? That's the question, isn't it.)

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#144

Post by nly »

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #64
harimau777 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> Unfortunately, in America places with low cost of living are generally, to put it diplomatically, unpleasant places to live. This will change for the better if more and more educated people relocate there.

And then those areas become more expensive...

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#145

Post by atmavatar »

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…

Enter the carousel. This is the time of renewal.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#146

Post by marcosdumay »

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…

Not in all past industrial transitions.

But yes, the argument has been wrong often enough that the people still repeating it as a rule should be mocked and ashamed.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#147

Post by sefrost »

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…

Only 5% of your time is spent writing code? That sounds like a low estimate for most software engineers I work with.

May I ask if you could estimate how you spend the other 95% of the time?

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#148

Post by SoftTalker »

terseus wrote: post #140
SoftTalker wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> To some degree yes, in practice, not so much. We used to say that (not long ago, even) about the code-writing part. Why do we believe that LLMs are going to stop there? Why do we think they won't soon be able to talk to people, listen, and determine what they need? I think it's mostly a cope. We have robots walking just fine now, by the way.

> Why do we believe that LLMs are going to stop there? Why do you believe they wont? I think it's reasonable to assume that we will hit a ceiling that current models will not be able to break. > We have robots walking just fine now, by the way. Walking and reasoning are unrelated abilities.

Walking was given as an example of "hard to program a robot to do it" by GP. Well, now we have robots that can walk.

What evidence is there that LLMs have hit a ceiling at being able to do things like talk to users or stakeholders to elicit requirements? Using LLMs to help with design and architecture decisions is already a pretty common example that people give.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#149

Post by sarchertech »

SoftTalker wrote: post #128
bborud wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The AI is coming for that too. To some degree yes, in practice, not so much. In practice you have to be in the world, talk to people, know how to talk to people, know how to listen, and be able to understand the difference between what people say and what they actually need. Not want. Need. This was something I learnt in my very first job in the 1980s. I worked for someone who did industrial automation beyond PLCs…

> To some degree yes, in practice, not so much. We used to say that (not long ago, even) about the code-writing part. Why do we believe that LLMs are going to stop there? Why do we think they won't soon be able to talk to people, listen, and determine what they need? I think it's mostly a cope. We have robots walking just fine now, by the way.

If they can do those things they can effectively replace any white collar job. That’s about 45% of the workforce. Societies tend to collapse around 25-30% unemployment.

Imagine 45% of higher than average paying jobs gone.

If that happens we’ll either figure out a new economic system, or society will collapse.

Also saying robots are walking just fine is misleading for any definition of just fine that is anywhere near as good as a human.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#150

Post by insane_dreamer »

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 never read what those careers are

Exactly. I have yet to read a single logically sound argument that even gives a hint of what those professions/jobs might be (remember, they have to be plentiful enough to employ large numbers of people, so "I quit my corporate job and making more as a TikTok influencer" doesn't count). Remember that a new profession has to open up new hitherto unknown revenue streams otherwise there are no companies who will pay you.

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