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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

#151

Post by davidw »

sefrost wrote: post #147
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?

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Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#152

Post by michaelrpeskin »

phpnode wrote: post #92
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?

In my experience, I'm using LLMs as my abstraction to "junior engineer". A junior engineer isn't deterministic either. I find that if you treat the LLM output like a person's output, you're good. Or at least in my projects, it's been very successful. I don't have it generate more code than I can review, or if I give it a snippet to help me fix it, if it ends up re-writing it like an ambitious engineer would do, I tell it to start over and make minimal changes.

I guess I'm not spun up about the determinism because I've been working at the "treat it like a person" level more than the "treat it like a compiler" level.

To me, it's really like an engineer who knows the docs and had a good memory rather than infallable code generator.

I work at a small company, so we don't have tons of processes in place, but I imagine that if you already had huge "standards" docs that engineers need to follow, then giving the LLM those standards would make things even better.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#153

Post by mxksisksm »

sefrost wrote: post #147
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?

[dead]

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#154

Post by shimman »

dominotw wrote: post #132
Daishiman wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Anecdotally, it feels like something materially changed in the US software hiring market at the start of this year to me. It feels like more and more businesses are taking a wait and see approach to avoid over-investing in human capital in the next few years. My guess is companies overhired in COVID and between that experience and an uncertain market they don't want to make the same mistake twice.

where did the excess labor force suddenly materialize in covid.

It didn't. The elites never want to admit that they have failed to efficiently use capital for the last 40 years. It's always the fault of workers that should never be trusted. Just continue trusting the elites as they ruined US manufacturing jobs, surely the same institutions won't fail the workers again!

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#155

Post by vga1 »

KronisLV wrote: post #101
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 ev…

>bosses

The AI is coming for those too.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#156

Post by geodel »

KronisLV wrote: post #101
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 ev…

Agree. It is just like 2 totally separate groups are arguing.

One very tiny slice of speciality/ rare industries where code is critical but overall small part of project costs. I can see if code / software is 5% of overall cost even heavy use of AI for code part is not moving the needle. So people in this group can feel confident in their indispensability.

Second group is much larger and peddling CRUD / JS Frontends and other copy/paste junk. But as per industry classification they are just part of same Coder/Developer/IT Engineer group. And their bleak prospects is not some future scenario, it is playing out right now with tons of them getting laid off. And whole lot of people with IT degrees, certifications are not finding any jobs in this field.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#157

Post by atoav »

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…

Saying being a programmer is about writing code is a bit like saying being an artist is about drawing lines on a canvas.

Yeah technically drawing lines on canvases may be an very important part of being a painter, but it is hardly the core of what makes or breaks great art.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#158

Post by SoftTalker »

bborud wrote: post #142
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.

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…

True, but I guess I see a distinction between scaffolded/templated boilerplate or autocomplete and actual application logic. People have generated boilerplate from templates for ages, as you say. RoR maybe a pretty good example, but there wasn't even early-days AI involved in doing that.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#159

Post by qnleigh »

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…

LLM's don't have to achieve perfect reliability to replace lots of work. They just have to reach the balance of reliability and cost suitable for a given task. This will depend on the task.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#160

Post by joe_mamba »

rayiner wrote: post #82
nemomarx wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fin…

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

Why? There will never be a shortage of sick/dying people. So medical staff, and also undertakers, aren't going anywhere.

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