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

231–240 of 809 posts

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#231

Post by RealityVoid »

phyzix5761 wrote: post #211
lowmagnet wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

His point is that it's not entrepreneurship, it's employment.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#233

Post by RealityVoid »

keybored wrote: post #78
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.

The most future-proof “career” right now is having money. At least multiple million dollars. That’s a skill that is very much in demand.

Whoo, deff a field where I would try breaking in.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#235

Post by randcraw »

harimau777 wrote: post #53
afavour wrote: post #47

Seems the solution here is the same it's actually always been if you want career progression: be more than just a code jockey. The true value of an engineer is to be plugged into overall roadmaps, broader thinking around product, how to achieve company goals, etc etc. Yes, LLMs might dramatically reduce the amount of code we write by hand. But I'm a lot less convinced they'll solve all of the amorphous, human-interac…

My exprience has been that companies actively work to prevent people from becoming more than just code jockeys. For example, most of the places I've worked have viewed code delivered as the ONLY metric used to evaluate performance. Attempts to contribute to roadmaps or strategy are ignored at best and punished at worst.

Yeah, 95% of the available advancement in computing is in people management, not technical mastery. Businesses much prefer to hire externally to serve any non-core capabilities, especially to minimize internal culpability should anything go wrong. That leaves little opportunity to think outside the box technically.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#236

Post by foldr »

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 think the future is pretty up in the air in this respect, but my guess is that AI will just lead to another shift in the set of knowledge that a 'real programmer' is expected to have. I'm old enough to remember when people would make fun of web developers for 'programming' using HTML and JavaScript. And of course, back in the day, you couldn't be a real programmer unless you wrote assembly language. In a few years' time, being able to write (as opposed to read) source code in any specific programming language will probably become a niche skill. The next generation will be able to read Python to about the same extent that I can read x86 assembly.

Perceptions of what knowledge counts as 'low level' are constantly shifting. These days, if you write C, you're a low-level, close to the metal programmer. In the 70s, a lot of people made fun of Unix for being implemented in a high-level programming language (i.e. C) rather than assembly.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#237

Post by hibikir »

In my experience, it's been the complete opposite. The very experienced engineers that are actually willing to use top of the line tooling are much better than they were before, including those that are over 40, and over 50.

Part of the practical degradation of traditional programmers over time has always been concentration and deep calculation, just like in chess. The old chess player knows chess much better than a 19 year old phenom, but they cannot calculate for that many hours at the same speed as before, so their experience eventually loses to the raw calculation. Maybe at 35, or at 45, but you are just not as good. Claude Code and Codex save you the computation, while every single instinct and 2 second "intuition", which is what you build with experience, is still online.

It's not just that it's a more fair competition: It's now unfair in the opposite direction. The senior that before could lead a team of 6 is now leading a team of agents, and reviewing their code just as before. Hell, it's easier to get the agent to change direction than most juniors around me, which will not be easy to correct with just plain, low-judgement feedback.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#238

Post by mancerayder »

woeirua wrote: post #51

Was it ever a lifetime career? Haven't most people looked around and asked themselves where are all the 50+ engineers? They basically don't exist in large numbers. Ageism is real in this industry. You either save up enough money to retire early, switch into management, or get forced out of the industry eventually. AI is just accelerating the trend. I see very few junior engineers resisting AI. I see a LOT of staff+ e…

Managers are being slammed - FB, Amazon and recently Cloudflare and Coinbase.

New grads are being slammed, "because LLMs can do that work."

No new folks, no managers, and no olds. What a delightful career we've chosen for ourselves.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#239

Post by selimthegrim »

atmavatar wrote: post #145
aleph_minus_one wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Software engineers didn’t just disappear after age 40. At the end of the 90th and beginning of the 00th ("dotcom bubble") it was a common saying that if as a programmer, when you are 30 or 40, you don't have a very successful company (and thus basically set for life), you basically failed in life; exactly because "everybody" knew that programming is a "young man's game" (i.e. you likely won't get a programming job…

Enter the carousel. This is the time of renewal.

I'm not sure anyone under 40 is getting that reference.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#240

Post by nothinkjustai »

coldtea wrote: post #221
Aperocky wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 p…

> but not all of it, because it is actually a statistical machine with context limit. And the human mind is not?

It’s not.
Post reply on HN