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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

#201

Post by sibeliuss »

JohnMakin wrote: post #191
sibeliuss wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Even clearer, if you don't adapt to the changes taking place in the field there might not be a future for you. Its not about age, it is about attitude and flexibility (which are, admittedly, issues when getting older).

In other words, if you want to continue stubbornly typing out code by hand, the person right over there has already mastered agentic tooling and is doing vastly more than you, more quickly, and with greater precision, and will simply be a more fit candidate to hire. Roles for this type of legacy stubborn personality will be less and less, and you will age out as part of the old school.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#202

Post by hjort-e »

icedchai wrote: post #186
davidw wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Commenting on Hacker News?

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

If you spend 95% of your time on that stuff, you better be working on like critical infrastructure where nothing can go wrong, otherwise you are in an incredibly dysfunctional company.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#203

Post by coldtea »

dmazzoni wrote: post #121
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…

There are periods of time where I might spend 80% of my time "coding", meaning I have minimal meetings and other responsibilities. However, even out of that 80% of my time, what fraction is actually spent "writing code"? AI can be an enormous accelerator for the time I'd normally spend writing lines of code by hand, but it doesn't really help with the rest of the work: - Understanding the problem - Waiting for the bu…

>AI can be an enormous accelerator for the time I'd normally spend writing lines of code by hand, but it doesn't really help with the rest of the work:

- Understanding the problem - Waiting for the build system and tests to run - Manually testing the app to make sure it behaves as I'd like - Reviewing the diff to make sure it's clear - Uploading the PR and writing a description - Responding to reviewer feedback

What part of those you think it doesn't help with?

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#204

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#205

Post by smrq »

ge96 wrote: post #194
LPisGood wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

People didn't leap from jQuery to React. It's a lot easier to imagine an AI looking at jQuery and [insert any server side MVC framework] and inventing Backbone.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#206

Post by cmiles74 »

Comparing software development to carrying heavy things at a construction site feels like a real stretch to me.

'If you work in construction, you need to lift and carry a series of heavy objects in order to be effective. But lifting heavy objects puts long-term wear on your back and joints, making you less effective over time. Construction workers don’t say that being a good construction worker means not lifting heavy objects. They say “too bad, that’s the job”.'

On another note, for sure software developers are saying things like "this is the part of the job that I like" or "if you aren't doing the work, you won't be good at the work." But other people are saying this, too. I just saw an episode of "Hacks" ("QuickScribbl") where the writers say pretty much this exact thing when confronted with AI tooling designed to "make their job easier". Is writing comedy also like lifting heavy objects at a construction site?

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#207

Post by knivets »

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?

how do you know the artifact is correct?

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#208

Post by Aperocky »

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…

> The AI is coming for that too.

That's where we fundamentally disagree about.

Yes, AI is coming for solution formulation, absolutely, but not all of it, because it is actually a statistical machine with context limit.

Until the day LLMs are not statistical machine with a context limit, this will hold. Someone need to make something that has intent and purpose, and evidently now not by adding another 10T to the LLM parameter count.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#209

Post by ASalazarMX »

ge96 wrote: post #194
LPisGood wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

News: "AGI refuses to make another JS framework, rages on the follies of misguided developers and their wateful JS crutches"

Developer community: Wow, we truly have become obsolete now!

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#210

Post by coldtea »

BurningFrog wrote: post #195
LPisGood wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

The history of the last 250 was moving from agriculture to industrial work to service work. Now the last frontier is starting to be overtaken by automation too.

(And in all of those transitions millions where left behind without work or with very worse prospects. The people that took the new jobs were often a different group, not people who knew the old jobs and were already in their 30s and 40s).

And what would be the new professions that uniquely require humans, when even thinking and creative jobs are eaten by AI? Would there be a boom of demand for dancers and chefs, especially as millions lose their service jobs?

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