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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

#301

Post by czhu12 »

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…

Isn't the long term trend just that we don't need as many engineers, not that there will no more software engineers?

Theres another, different loop I keep seeing which is:

  - Company A lays off engineers citing AI efficiencies
  - People say its because of over hiring during 2020
  - Company B lays off engineers citing AI efficiencies
  - People say its because it was never a good business
  - Company C lays off engineers citing AI efficiencies
  - People say its because theres a recession
I guess to cite a counter example, unemployment is still super low, software jobs are still holding up, but the bear case is that eventually 5% of people will be able to do what people do today, and the demand for software won't grow at the same pace.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#302

Post by fragmede »

jchonphoenix wrote: post #293
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.

In removing junior developers, leaving only senior developers, wouldn't that reduce supply, making the price go up, not down? It's been a while since Econ 101 for me though.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#303

Post by skydhash »

icedchai wrote: post #277
hjort-e wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

Even when it’s not dysfunctional, you spend a lot of time on communication and reading stuff other people wrote (including code). It’s very rare to work in isolation.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#304

Post by randcraw »

chasd00 wrote: post #60
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.

I tell my boys (both in HS now), the combination of a specialized skill/knowledge + competent computer programming is the sweet spot. For example, my oldest wants to go into Petroleum Engineering which is great but I told him to still learn software development and get comfortable solving problems with code. Having specialized Petroleum Engineering knowledge combined with being a competent software developer is a pow…

Yeah, I've seen the same thing happen to data miners in the pharma industry. An increasing fraction of young biologists have skill in basic statistical DM as well as web search proficiency sufficient to gather DM code analysis examples, even without using AI. In the very near future I expect almost all R&D exploratory DM will be done by pharma domain experts (biologists and chemists) rather than served by DM experts (computer scientists or engineers).

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#305

Post by fragmede »

icedchai wrote: post #277
hjort-e wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

So about 26 hours of meetings to 13 hours of "real technical work" per week, but that's is 33%, not 5%.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#306

Post by dev_l1x_be »

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…

And most of the time the statistical aspect of LLMs result in a less creative solution that is more expensive to run and harder to maintain. LLMs at this stage are good at scaffolding, generating the boilerplate you do not want to write and glue things together quickly. It just makes engineers faster.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#307

Post by evilduck »

hjort-e wrote: post #253
geodel wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree. It is just like 2 totally separate groups are arguing. One very tiny slice of speciality/ rare industries where code is critical but overall small part of project costs. I can see if code / software is 5% of overall cost even heavy use of AI for code part is not moving the needle. So people in this group can feel confident in their indispensability. Second group is much larger and peddling CRUD / JS Frontends…

What makes you feel that a complex frontend would be easier for AI than a non-CRUD backend system?

Hubris.

I don't mean this as a snarky jab. It's coming for anything software. I've used AI to accomplish front end development and reverse engineer proprietary USB hardware dongles in C, then rewriting the C into Rust to get easy desktop GUIs around it. Backend APIs, systems programming, embedded programming, they all seem equally threatened it's just a matter of time. Front end is easy to see in the AI web front ends but everything else is still easy pickings.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#308

Post by dakiol »

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…

That doesn't hold because the goal for executives is to increase revenue and the main sales pitch of Anthropic et al is to pay for agents instead of paying for engineers. That means 80% of the workforce is out no matter what. Whether or not one belongs to the remaining 20% is a different story, but obviously not all of us will be there.

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

AI is coming for that too. Don't be naive

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#309

Post by Aurornis »

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #59
Aurornis wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It most certainly was a lifelong career. I’m kind of confused how you might think it wasn’t. Going through a career as a software dev until retirement was very common. Software engineers didn’t just disappear after age 40.

> 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…

> 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;

This wasn't common anywhere except for maybe the Silicon Valley bubble.

The rest of the US and even the world could see that not having a very successful company of your own is to equal to being a failure.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#310

Post by skydhash »

ansk wrote: post #262
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 in…

> 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

Everyone added /dev/random to their offerings, so every LLM tools for coding are non deterministic.

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