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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

#271

Post by itsafarqueue »

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…

Yours is a “God of the gaps” argument. You will remain technically correct (the best kind of correct!) long after the statistical machine has subsumed your practical argument, context limit and all.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#272

Post by randcraw »

hnthrowaway0315 wrote: post #98
philipnee wrote: post #26

80% of my day to day job has never been pumping out lots of code. it is a complicated career is it? we do a lot of alignment, design and thinking. i can't even agree the idea of outsourcing thinking, i think AI is very good at helping us to think clearly, but it doesn't really "think" for us. if you do that then... likely very replacable.

AI can also do alignment and pull from its vast training dataset for design and "thinking" -- because 99% of the problems in this world were already solved, multiple times, maybe not in the exactly same format, but in a very similar format. I also see that in the future humans will adapt to AI, instead of the opposite. Why? Because it's a lot easier for humans to adapt to AI, than the opposite. It's already happening…

Rather than coining a new word like adaption, I'd call this acculturation. It's reshaping not only SW dev but natural language too -- how we read and write and how we speak.

Everyone knows that AI-written slop isn't worth actually reading. So when reading mass media content we skim over each paragraph's opening phrases rather than read it deliberately, sentence by sentence. We also do this while writing notes, dropping determiners, acronymming common phrases, and making references to characters/scenes in popular media. Now with the rise of vocal interfaces and ever shorter rounds of engagement, all this abbreviating will only exponentiate.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#273

Post by ex-aws-dude »

AstroBen wrote: post #115
phpnode wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

If it's not deterministic you can never fully trust it. In a deterministic abstraction I don't need to audit the lower levels.

Who said you need to trust it? Reviewing code is still way faster than writing code.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#274

Post by no_op »

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…

Even if AI advances continue, for quite a while there's likely still going to be the 'Steve Jobs' role. That is, even if AI coding agents can, in the future, replace entire teams of SWEs, competently making all implementation decisions with no guidance from a tech-savvy human, the best software will likely still involve a human deciding what should be built and being very picky about how, exactly, it should externally behave.

I don't know if it makes sense to call that person an SWE, and some people currently employed as SWEs either won't be good at this or aren't interested in doing it. But the existing pool of SWEs is probably the largest concentration of people who'll end up doing this job, because it's the largest concentration of people who've thought a lot about, and developed taste with respect to, how software should work.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#275

Post by Schiendelman »

bel8 wrote: post #255
hibikir wrote: post #237

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…

But when a senior can do the job of 6 coworkers, what do you suppose will happen to the coworkers? In farming, those who were replaced by tractors did not keep their jobs. What is different now?

They build tractors, or sell tractors, or work in agricultural research and development...

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#277

Post by icedchai »

hjort-e wrote: post #202
icedchai wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I agree it would be absurd for it to take 95% of your time. I have, however, seen that it takes a lot more time than one would think.

I did some contracting work for a severely dysfunctional meeting heavy organization and it was about 2 hours of meetings for every hour of real technical work!

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#278

Post by malfist »

coldtea wrote: post #203
dmazzoni wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There is no shortcut to understanding. No one can understand things for you

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#279

Post by j45 »

Most careers evolve as technology does.

Other professions do too, whether it's healthcare, etc.

Software being a new field, didn't really become a standardized profession in the way engineering might be.

The goalposts are moving because the standards are moving, because the capabilities are moving.

Remaining a self-directed learner will remain critical.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#280

Post by Aperocky »

bel8 wrote: post #243
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…

> 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+…

We are not pre-trained using the summary of all human knowledge over all of history. Yet we make certain decisions with much more ease.

We are much more limited, but we fundamentally work differently. Hence adding more parameter like certain companies are doing isn't necessarily going to help. We need to rethink how LLM work, or how it work in tandem with something that's completely different.

I think it's doable, I just don't believe it's LLM, and I don't think anyone now knows what it is.

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