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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

#291

Post by QuercusMax »

bborud wrote: post #284
therealdrag0 wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It has varied over the years but it isn't actually relevant since I am talking about when I write software. Writing code just isn't what takes time.

Getting the code into a state where it actually does what you want takes time - but a lot of that is research, testing, experimentation, documentation, etc. Those can be faster with AI assistance but you still need to bang on it enough to make sure it works right.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#292

Post by bel8 »

Aperocky wrote: post #280
bel8 wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> We are not pre-trained using the summary of all human knowledge over all of history.

But we are? That's our education system.

The only reason school doesn't try to shove more information in our brains is because we hit bandwidth limits.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#293

Post by jchonphoenix »

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 miss the major factor in your compensation: pricing pressure due to supply/demand.

By removing all the junior engineers, you've fundamentally changed the market forces longer term and most people expect that to negatively impact you in the supply demand curve regardless of whether or not the statements you've made above are true, which they most likely are for senior engineers.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#294

Post by wartywhoa23 »

davidw wrote: post #151
sefrost wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only 5% of your time is spent writing code? That sounds like a low estimate for most software engineers I work with. May I ask if you could estimate how you spend the other 95% of the time?

Commenting on Hacker News?

For those who claim to be developers who code no more than 5% of their time and resort to arguments like "we're already not writing machine code by hand for 50 years, how is AI different from a higher level language?", it's not commenting, it's shilling for the AI corpocracy on HN.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#295

Post by hansmayer »

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?

> We've literally just started

5+ years in the software world is like 30 years in others...So...given lacking use-cases and humongous amounts of capital already wasted on chatbots...It's more like "we" are closer to closing curtains than to "just started"...

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#296

Post by randcraw »

azath92 wrote: post #30
the_real_cher wrote: post #9

Was it ever? It's always seemed weird to me that people even think 'software engineering' is a career. It's a tool for knowledge work. No carpenter is a specialist in drills. It seems to me that the best way to navigate a long term career is to have another specialty and use software engineering as a tool within that specialty.

Id disagree with this analogy: "No carpenter is a specialist in drills." and i think its an interesting lens through which to look at the evolution of our tools. I think there are trades where tool (or process if i may be allowed to extend the analogy) specialists exist and are highly valued. My dad is a plumber, so ill use that example but id trust similar is true for carpentry. there are specialists by task/output…

Yeah, IEEE Spectrum has responded to the dissimilar roles in SW dev by ranking programming language popularity contextually, by separating the project domains and ranking the languages only within each domain. That's a lot more useful than allowing the single dominant project domain to silence the recessive ones, as TIOBE does.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#297

Post by dkersten »

eska wrote: post #282
therealdrag0 wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Try to write a design doc before you implement something (which people find they need to do for LLMs to work at all anyway). You’ll find that you spend much less time actually writing code. Write proper API documentation laying out the assumptions and intent, generate some good API docs, write a design and architecture document (which people find they need for LLMs to work at all anyway). You’ll find that you spend a…

> which people find they need to do for LLMs to work at all anyway

Everything we have to do for AI to function well, would help humans to function better too.

If you take the things for AI, but do them for humans instead, that human will easily 2x or more, and someone will actually understand the code that gets written.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#298

Post by georgemcbay »

BurningFrog wrote: post #195
LPisGood wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The AI is coming for that too. That may be true I’m not gonna say one way or the other, but if AI comes for that then almost all knowledge work is effectively dead, so all that’s left would be sales or physical labor.

The history of the last 250 years is inventing new professions as old ones are automated away. I expect that to continue.

> The history of the last 250 years is inventing new professions as old ones are automated away.

Even if this still holds true ("past performance is no guarantee of future results") the part about it that people handwave away without thinking about or addressing is how awful the transitional period can be.

The industrial revolution worked out well for the human labor force in the long term, but there were multiple generations of people who suffered through a horrendous transition (one that was only alleviated by the rise of a strong labor movement that may not be replicable in the age of AI, given how it is likely to shift the leverage of labor vs. capital).

If you want to lean on history as an indication that massive sudden productivity changes will make things better for humanity in the long run, then fine, but then you have to acknowledge that (based on that same history) the transition could still be absolutely chaotic and awful for the lifespan of anyone who is currently alive.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#299

Post by scj »

ge96 wrote: post #194
LPisGood wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The AI is coming for that too. That may be true I’m not gonna say one way or the other, but if AI comes for that then almost all knowledge work is effectively dead, so all that’s left would be sales or physical labor.

I wonder though, can AI make the next JS framework. I mean that in sincerity, there was the leap from jQuery to React for ex. If an AI only knows jQuery and no one makes React, will React come out of AI.

A thought experiment: When all practical software is only written by AIs, will the AIs use goto? What will the programming language of AIs look like?

My bet is something _like_ assembly, but not assembly.

That being said, I think humans will still program for fun. Just like we paint portraiture in a world with cameras.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#300

Post by shinryuu »

kiba wrote: post #228
ryandrake wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The fundamental issue isn't unemployment due to automation, but the fact that society cannot benefit from unemployment. It should be something for us to celebrate, because it means greater freedom for humans to pursue something else rather than spending time doing drudgery.

Put it another way, the issue is that resources are not shared more equitably. This is especially egregious considering that LLMs are trained on all human knowledge. We've all been contributing to this enterprise, and what we may end up getting in return is unemployment.
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