Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

seangoedecke.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 809 posts

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#181

Post by fooker »

hnthrowaway0315 wrote: post #81
xtracto wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> non-deterministic answers

It doesn't make sense to get hung up on this aspect of LLMs. We prefer non deterministic so far because it tends to work slightly better even if it is completely possible to ask for a temperature=0 deterministic answer.

With more scale and research, at some point you'll get results that are both useful and deterministic, if it's not already the case.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#182

Post by ryandrake »

sarchertech wrote: post #149
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.

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…

Look at how the billionaires are talking about AI: Their clear, unambiguous goal is basically to replace all white collar "knowledge" jobs. And there's currently nothing regulatory that's stopping them--they just need to wait for the state of the art to improve. Once AI is "good enough" if it ever is, they won't even think twice about 45% unemployment. What are we unemployed workers going to do about it? There's no effective labor organization left. Workers have basically no political power or seat at the table. We're not going to get violent--the police/military are already owned by the billionaire class. We're just going to eventually become economically irrelevant and die off.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#183

Post by bluGill »

djeastm wrote: post #69
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.

At least in the US, the only major non-AI growth field seems to be healthcare to deal with the swell of baby boomers living longer than people have before. But if we're waiting to be paid to retrain there, I wouldn't hold our collective breath.

Baby boomers had already started the face of dying though. The next generation is still going to be right there. That generation is smaller. These people will always be dying. However, I wouldn't hold my breath if you're a young person in that field. Maybe but maybe not

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#184

Post by doug_durham »

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…

This is a bit of glib answer. Most of the time is spent coding which encompasses typing, retyping, and retyping again. It also includes banging your head against the wall while trying to get one of your rewrites to work against and under-documented API.

OP's formulation makes SWE sound like a purely noble enterprise like mathematics. It's more like an oil rig worker banging on pieces of metal with large hammers to get the drill string put together. They went in with a plan, but the reality didn't agree and they are on a tight schedule.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#185

Post by jerf »

rayiner wrote: post #105
jerf wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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% afte…

Of course it does. It ignores a lot of things. Mostly I just want to present the view that things aren't entirely hopeless and the entire industry is doomed to contract by 90% because of AI. Your legal system point also fits in precisely with what I'm trying to convey, just in a different direction.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#186

Post by icedchai »

davidw wrote: post #151
sefrost wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Commenting on Hacker News?

In all seriousness, communications consumes a lot of time. Meetings, emails, Slack messages, pestering stake holders and other developers...

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#187

Post by dusted »

I'm a software engineer and architect, I love my job, I love diving into the small details, I love the grand overview.. I love identifying concepts and applying them to achieve elegant high-performing systems.

I love thinking about what kind of assembler the compiler may generate (though honestly, I haven't got a chance), I love thinking about how languages should be more dynamic (Who's got actually-first-class functions? Like, ones that you can build, compose, combine and manipulate to the same degree you can a string or a JSON object, no LISP, you're cheating, close no point).

And yet.. I don't care that much. Not because I'm late in my career (I'm 40, there's still some years left in me), but because I want to make computers do things, and what I enjoy doing is thinking up ways the things can happen, and sometimes the particulars that matter when making a lot of different things happen in a coherent system.. And yea, LLMs are trained on peoples output, and from what I'm seeing everywhere, is that people are overall fairly terrible at that, and most of the plumbing-type glue being written is not worth anyones time..

And I'm not saying I don't care because LLMs can't do my job (heck, even after hours of back-and-forth spec building and refining every little nook and cranny, the stupid coding agent still cheats or gets it wrong (even after it's beautifully explained, proven even, by reasoning and example alone, and on first try even) that the words coming after the previous words makes sense, as soon as the plan is put into motion, it'll mess it up on some scale so fundamental I should just have done it myself.. And I hope that changes, I hope that I don't have to go into such detail.. I hope to become a steward of taste rather than a code-reviewer.. I hope that I will eventually not be needed for that anymore.. I want it to replace me, so I can move to telling what I want, and have it made that way..

I hope I won't need to steward good taste, and that nobody will.. I hope the applications I use in 5 years will be a collection of one-offs, and gradually improving tools that was written _just_ for me, for my way of working, and my way of thinking.. I want to prompt the damn program to change itself as I discover new ways to do things, until it can eventually figure out how to automate the last bit of my task away.. And then I'll go do something else exciting.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#188

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#189

Post by borski »

hellojesus wrote: post #172
madduci wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because that classifies in "developers" and "software engineers". And software engineering isn't going to disappear anytime soon

Weird. I call myself a developer because I don't have an engineering degree from an abet certified engineering program. I recognize, in some capacity, that this isn't the norm and in the US "professional engineer" is protected and not simply "engineer", but it feels akin to stolen valor to me.

If there were a license in the US for it, I’d agree with you. But as is, if you are “doing” engineering, you’re an engineer.

If you are a licensed engineer of some kind, you’d state that outright.

The equivalent of stolen valor would be claiming to be a licensed software engineer; except there is no such license so it would also be fraud, misrepresentation, etc.

(I know this is different elsewhere)

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#190

Post by bluGill »

passivepinetree wrote: post #120
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…

Ignoring the preference of people generally wanting to live in HCOL areas, this only works if every company hires equally from LCOL areas. One of the benefits of living in a HCOL area is access to the job market it provides. It's much easier to get hired for a software position living in San Francisco than it is living in Deming, New Mexico.

More importantly, in San Francisco, there are a lot more opportunities than in coming. I've never been to either city (i'm not going to come to the conference I was at because I never left the hotel.) however, I can still tell you confidently that if you have a weird hobby, you're much lower than you can find other people with that interest, stores that sell the things you need to complete the hobby, and all those other things in life that you want. If you love doing the types of things people in Deming do, well, it's a great life, I'm sure. However, as soon as you want to do something off the wall, well, you may not even find enough people in Deming to have your cricket team, while I have no doubt that San Francisco has a team that you could join.
Post reply on HN