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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

#241

Post by traderj0e »

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 call myself a computer programmer unless someone is asking for my official job title (software engineer)

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#242

Post by senko »

hnthrowaway0315 wrote: post #89
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…

If you are lucky and got in early, then probably yes, it could be a lifetime career. It's like all careers, when you joined early, you got a lot of opportunities, you also rode the wave, you eventually rose to the top if you grit through. It's a lot easier to be early than to be smart or quick.

If you're on the top, you probably aren't coding much. So you're more in management than getting your hands dirty.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#243

Post by bel8 »

Aperocky wrote: post #208
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'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…

> because it is actually a statistical machine with context limit.

So are humans.

Machines have surpassed humans by magnitudes in many capabilities already (how many billion multiplications can you do per second?)

And I argue that current LLMs have surpassed many of my capabilities already.

For example GPT/Opus can understand and document some ancient legacy project I never saw before in minutes. I would take a week+ to do the same and my report would probably have more mistakes and oversights than the one generated by the LLM.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#244

Post by whstl »

bilbo0s wrote: post #196
hellojesus wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm an electrical engineer that moved to software engineering and there's a lot of commonalities between what I do now and what I did previously as an electrical engineer. The bar might seem high, but that's the only way I know how to work, honestly.

On the other hand, with the modern division of labour in a lot of companies and with the rhetoric I see here in HN and in other places: a lot of developers are indeed not even close to being engineers.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#245

Post by oytis »

I don't understand it. The time-limited career would work if we were born with innate ability for software engineering and would lose it over time by using AI. Most people are not born with that ability though, it needs to be developed first.

And read Programming as Theory Building already, it's not that long

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#247

Post by hibikir »

golddust-gecko wrote: post #127
ryandvm wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dunno, man. I've been doing this for 20+ years and I think we're at a really important fork in the road where there are two possibilities. The first is that AI is achieving human-level expertise and capability, but since they're now being increasingly trained on their own output they are fighting an uphill battle against model collapse. In that case, perhaps AI is going to just sort of max out at "knowing everythin…

100% this. I'll also add another factor: it's become increasingly clear at our company that AI-enabled humans are getting to the bottom of the backlog of feature ideas much quicker. This makes the 'good ideas' part of the business the rate limiting step. And those are definitely not increasing with AI, beyond that generated by the AI churn itself ("let's bolt on a chat experience or an MCP!") So maybe the coding assi…

Yes, but as the price of getting work done goes down, a lot of companies that were priced out of custom software before now can hire devs, as the value hiring a few can provide just goes up. Fewer people per product, absolutely. No more teams of 10 or 20 working on the same thing. But there's so much out there that doesn't get done at all because you'd never be able to afford it.

Simple marginal thinking: When you lower the price of something, it gets more use cases. A rich person might not take even more flights because they are cheaper, but more people will consider flying when they wouldn't have at old prices

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#248

Post by tjwebbnorfolk »

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…

>> I understand things and then apply my ability to formulate solutions

> The AI is coming for that too.

If this is true, then you'd have to conclude that AI is coming for everything. I'm still not convinced by that. But I am convinced that the part of software development that involves typing code manually into an IDE all day is likely gone forever.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#249

Post by TremendousJudge »

huani wrote: post #41
torben-friis wrote: post #15

Unless I'm missing something, there's an obvious logic issue here. If we truly need to sacrifice our skill to be productive by using LLMs that atrophy us, then the only devs that have a limited lifespan are us. The next ones won't have a skillset to atrophy since they won't have built it through manual work. Also, I hereby propose to publicly ban the "LLMs generating code are like compilers generating machine code" a…

why is the LLM-compiler analogy flawed? Is it only because LLM output is non deterministic?

I have mentioned it several times lately, but if the analogy was correct, people would be committing prompts and not code. High-level source code gets committed, binaries don't. If prompts were really "just a higher level of abstraction", then there wouldn't be a need for saving the code. Or at least you'd see people publish their prompts and chat history alongside the code.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#250

Post by CodeMage »

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"

That's very true, which is why I find it insulting that so many AI proponents use the word "typing" to refer to writing code. It carries an implication that if you enjoy writing code by hand, you enjoy a mindless activity.
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