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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

#191

Post by JohnMakin »

sibeliuss wrote: post #173
JohnMakin wrote: post #162

> The career of a pro athlete has a maximum lifespan of around fifteen years. You have the opportunity to make a lot of money until around your mid-thirties, This sounds ageist - I'm around 40 and feel I am at my mental peak, compared to even my mid 20's. This isn't a good analogy at all, the brain doesn't "wear out" like a professional athletes' body does, it just changes its structure. The brain is a remarkable org…

He just means: by this age you've probably found your preferred title and level, unless you want to rise to more C-level / executive positions, which are rarer in any case and most folks don't want.

This is definitely more charitable, but isn't this already the case now? It seems he's saying past your mid 30's you'd no longer be viable as a software engineer. That's never been the case, and I'm not sure why it would now suddenly be the case.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#192

Post by the_hoffa »

hateful wrote: post #135
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…

Not sure where I first heard this, but I say it to my team all the time: "Programming is thinking, not typing"

I've always told my Jr Engineers to "think twice, code once".

If I gave them a task and they immediately started typing it out, I would tell them to stop typing and ask them to explain to me what they were doing; they'd often just spit out what they thought the code should do, and I'd often point out edge cases they missed and would have missed had they just spit out code and a PR, wasting everyone's time. I would also insulate them from upper management to give them time to actually think (e.g. I wouldn't be coding so they could think then code).

To your point and to the GP's point, and one point I keep raising with LLM's: "typing is not where my time sinks are"

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#193

Post by luckystarr »

cromka wrote: post #168
PunchyHamster wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The AI is coming for that too. Current AI tech giants prove over and over and over again that this is not the case

We've literally just started, what "over and over" do you refer to?

Discovery of the best solution in a problem space is not generative but only verificative. Meaning: the LLM can see if a solution is better than another, but it can't generate the best one from the start. If you trust it, you'll get sub-par solutions.

This is definitely an agent problem instead of an LLM problem. Anybody got something explorative like this working?

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#194

Post by ge96 »

LPisGood wrote: post #137
KronisLV wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> The AI is coming for that too. That may be true I’m not gonna say one way or the other, but if AI comes for that then almost all knowledge work is effectively dead, so all that’s left would be sales or physical labor.

I wonder though, can AI make the next JS framework. I mean that in sincerity, there was the leap from jQuery to React for ex. If an AI only knows jQuery and no one makes React, will React come out of AI.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#195

Post by BurningFrog »

LPisGood wrote: post #137
KronisLV wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> The AI is coming for that too. That may be true I’m not gonna say one way or the other, but if AI comes for that then almost all knowledge work is effectively dead, so all that’s left would be sales or physical labor.

The history of the last 250 years is inventing new professions as old ones are automated away.

I expect that to continue.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#196

Post by bilbo0s »

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.

I'm a software dev in the US and I never call myself "engineer" in that capacity. Always "programmer" or "developer".

I agree. Engineers have to clear a much higher bar. Even though my career was spent in medical diagnostic software where we had to get 510k clearance, I was still keenly aware that this was a fundamentally different activity from actual engineering.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#198

Post by coldtea »

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 understand things and then apply my ability to formulate solutions

  - Well, and AI can do part of that too, maybe more of it soon.
  - ...
  - Besides, you don't need 10 guys in a team to do that. A couple of them will do, then AI will do the coding. What will happen to the rest?
  - ...

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#199

Post by AlexCoventry »

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…

You don't think AI is going to be able to understand things and apply their ability to formulate solutions better than you, in the near future?

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#200

Post by estebank »

doug_durham wrote: post #184
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 ge…

Most of the time is spent figuring what the right thing to do is, not writing the implementation. Sometimes the process of writing the implementation surfaces new considerations about what the right thing is, but still, producing text to feed to a compiler is not the bulk of the work of a software engineer. It is to unearth requirements and turn them into repeatable software.
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