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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

#261

Post by therealdrag0 »

bborud wrote: post #257
doug_durham wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Are you, perchance, assuming that since you spend most of your time struggling with actual code, this is so for everyone else? Or are you saying that I'm lying. That I am secretly hammering away at my keyboard while pretending not to? No, writing code hasn't been how I spend most of my time for many decades now.

Are you a staff level engineer that has dozens of other engineers banging away at code projects you help define?

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#262

Post by ansk »

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…

I see what you're getting at, but determinism isn't the right word either. LLMs are fundamentally deterministic -- they are pure functions which output text as a function of the input text and the network parameters[1]. Depending on your views on free will, it could be effectively argued that humans are deterministic as well.

The concept you're touching on is the idea that LLMs (and humans) are functions which are inscrutable. Their behavior cannot be distilled into a series of logical steps that you can fit in your head, there are no invariants which neatly decompose their complexity into a few interpretable states, and the input and output spaces are unstructured, ambiguous, underspecified, and essentially infinite. This makes them just about impossible to reason about or compose using the same strategies and analysis we apply to traditional programs.

[1] Optionally, they can take in a source of entropy to add nondeterminism, but this is not essential. If LLM providers all fixed their prng seeds to a static value, hardly anyone would notice. I can't imagine there are many workflows which feed an LLM the exact same prompt multiple times and rely on the output having some statistical distribution. In fact, even if you wanted this you may just end up getting a cached response.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#263

Post by boring-human »

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…

The true argument is about quantity - of people, not code. All qualitative arguments are missing the point.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#264

Post by onethought »

hyperjeff wrote: post #258
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’re a ”developer“, i guess, but not a coder (anymore), which is what your interlocutors are probably asking about. You’ve migrated to a middle manager job, not something they probably can just start doing competently. Essentially you’re agreeing with their initial sentiment, that coders will be made irrelevant.

I think it’s more nuanced. Even a “coder” spends the majority of their time, not coding.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#265

Post by mainmailman »

jayd16 wrote: post #77
giobox wrote: post #36

Anecdotally, it feels like something materially changed in the US software hiring market at the start of this year to me. It feels like more and more businesses are taking a wait and see approach to avoid over-investing in human capital in the next few years. It also feels like the hiring "signal", which was always weak before, is just completely gone now, when every job you do advertise receives over 500 LLM written…

Honestly, AI doesn't feel like it's affecting hiring needs from the trenches. We don't have engineers sitting on their hands because AI wrote up everything the leadership could imagine. Instead, we get an economy that feels like it's on the cusp of a fall or at the very least a roller coaster. Poor tax incentives to hire. ZIRP is long gone. And the hiring managers are overrun with slop. But bosses are happy to say it…

Thank you, it's been all but confirmed that lot of "AI layoffs" are due to reaching a workforce equilibrium from Covid era over hiring.

Saying AI for anything, good news or bad news, is a get out of jail free card for execs who want to appease shareholders.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#266

Post by VonGallifrey »

borski wrote: post #189
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.

If there were a license in the US for it, I’d agree with you. But as is, if you are “doing” engineering, you’re an engineer. If you are a licensed engineer of some kind, you’d state that outright. The equivalent of stolen valor would be claiming to be a licensed software engineer; except there is no such license so it would also be fraud, misrepresentation, etc. (I know this is different elsewhere)

> If there were a license in the US for it, I’d agree with you.

Yeah, that is basically the thing in my country. You can't call yourself an engineer without passing a test, but I can't take it because there isn't one for software engineering.

Same thing for freelancing. Freelance jobs are defined in a list, and other jobs cannot benefit from the simplified tax rules that freelancers enjoy, but that list was written before software development was a thing.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#268

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#269

Post by ex-aws-dude »

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?

Exactly, the argument makes sense if its about inference at runtime

But that's not the case here

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#270

Post by wartywhoa23 »

BurningFrog wrote: post #218
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…

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 improveme…

What in the current state of world affairs outside of IT do you think is indicative of that potential for huge improvements in human standard of living?
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