Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career • Hacker News Board

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#211

Post by phyzix5761 » Mon, May 11, 2026, 5:45 PM UTC

lowmagnet wrote: post #102

phyzix5761 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the idea of being an employee is fundamentally changing. Not saying its good or bad but it's shifting to a more entrepreneurial phase where people have to step out of their 9 to 5s and find ways to deliver value that others want to pay for. We saw this pre-ai with uber and door dash. I think as AI automation dies down and most companies are competing at a near optimal level with the new tools we'll need human…

Uber and Doordash are both examples of abusing workers and their resources to externalize costs on the worker.

What about people who have been out of work for a year and all they can do right now is deliver for Uber and Doordash so they can make rent and put some food on the table?

Is it ideal working conditions? No, but its better than nothing, you can set your own hours, and you can leave when the next opportunity comes.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#212

Post by bilbo0s » Mon, May 11, 2026, 5:46 PM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #76

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…

> Which is true, but it’s true as long as it’s not true. It also isn't true. The story of the last 50 years has been that technology, especially computer and communications technology, has facilitated the concentration of wealth. The skilled work got computerized, or outsourced to India or China. That left U.S. workers with service jobs where they have much lower impact on P&L and thus much less leverage. In my field…

>It's not clear to me how that's sustainable

If it makes you feel better, I'm pretty sure it isn't sustainable. (But I'm not an economist so take that with a block of salt.)

I don't think anyone has the answers. It's just some of us are honest enough to concede we have no answers, while others promote an answer that aligns best with their belief system.

"It'll all work out."

"It's the immigrants/blacks/jews/whatever dragging us down."

"Nothing's going to happen and we can all continue doing the work we always have."

"Burn the rich."

Etc etc.

Not a lot of serious attempts out there at even getting a hand on the issues, let alone fixing the issues.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#213

Post by dominotw » Mon, May 11, 2026, 5:46 PM UTC

vineyardmike wrote: post #175

dominotw wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

where did the excess labor force suddenly materialize in covid.

2008 had ~30k CS graduates. 2015 had ~50k CS graduates. 2021 had ~100k CS graduates. You can extrapolate the rest.

thats only a fraction of all the layoffs

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#214

Post by otabdeveloper4 » Mon, May 11, 2026, 5:46 PM UTC

pllbnk wrote: post #29

otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #6

It will be for those fixing AI slop software. (In fact, they might need several lifetimes.)

The problem partially is that AI can also fix AI slop. At this point I am in doubt whether code quality matters anymore in most non-critical software. You can ask an LLM if the code has quality issues and refactor to a _better_ version. It will reason through, prepare a plan and refactor. So now with this "better" code you can expect that your LLM will be able to deliver higher quality results but that's all the qual…

> AI can also fix AI slop

No it can't.

AI knows nothing about software engineering, all it can do is generate code.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#215

Post by ASalazarMX » Mon, May 11, 2026, 5:46 PM UTC

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?

Hype cycles, AI has made developers obsolete like a dozen times in the las couple of years, at least according to their developers.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#216

Post by Teknoman117 » Mon, May 11, 2026, 5:47 PM UTC

> AI-users thus become less effective engineers over time, as their technical skills atrophy

Based on my experience, I think this will prove more true than not in the long run, unfortunately.

Professionally, I see people largely falling into two camps: those that augment their reasoning with AI, and those that replace their reasoning with AI. I’m not too worried about the former, it’s the latter for whom I’m worried.

My mom is a (US public school) high school teacher, and she vents to me about the number of students who just take “Google AI overview” as an absolute source of truth. Maybe it’s just the new “you can’t cite Wikipedia”, but she feels that since the pandemic, there’s a notable decline in the critical thinking skills of children coming through her classes.

We have a whole generation (or two) of kids that have grown up being told what to like, hate, believe, etc. by influencers and anonymous people on the internet. They’d already outsourced their reasoning before LLMs were a thing. Most of them don’t appear to be ready to constructively engage with a system that is designed to make them believe they are getting what they want with dubious quality.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#217

Post by coldtea » Mon, May 11, 2026, 5:47 PM UTC

luckystarr wrote: post #193

cromka wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

So? Hundreds of millions of office and devel jobs are about for developing "optimal solutions" to begin with.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#218

Post by BurningFrog » Mon, May 11, 2026, 5:47 PM UTC

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…

It's important (and calming) to understand that since the Industrial Revolution started ~250 years ago, we've automated away most jobs several times over, while employment levels have stayed pretty constant.

"Automating half the jobs" is the same as "double productivity per worker".

When the doubling happens in 5 years rather than 50, it might be more disruptive, but I'm convinced we're on the verge of huge improvements in human standard of living!

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#219

Post by monknomo » Mon, May 11, 2026, 5:47 PM UTC

ryandrake wrote: post #182

sarchertech wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 e…

45% of folks sitting on their hands are going to have the free time to talk, and this group of people are skilled at organization. Are you planning on throwing your hands up and passively accepting whatever comes your way?

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#220

Post by lostmsu » Mon, May 11, 2026, 5:48 PM UTC

thisisit wrote: post #163

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…

Lot of people don't seem to get that - It is easier to go from terrible to average but much harder to go from average to good. I am sure AI bros are same people who were convinced consumer grade fully automated driving was going happen "by end of the year" for last 7 years.

No, I never believed in fully automated tale by Tesla, but as the LLMs improve my personal estimate for the date of human-level AGI is rapidly moving to "present". Before GPT-2 I had it somewhere in 2100, at GPT-2 I thought maybe by 2060 if we are lucky. Now I think it is 2035 or maybe even sooner.