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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

#411

Post by bluesnowmonkey »

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?

With farming, you couldn't just start your own farm, because it requires farmland, and there's only so much of that. But those 6 software engineers can start their own companies, fire up their own team of agents. There's no limit to how many companies can exist in the world.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#412

Post by pear01 »

ecocentrik wrote: post #328
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…

Glib is called for. The amount of information asymmetry that's still on the table as vibe coders and vibe engineers and vibe doctors emerge is staggering. Professional experience is still incredibly valuable. Most software developers might spend more than 6% of their time coding but no senior developers are banging their heads for hours over typos. https://www.youtube.com/shorts/xBilK3gT5e0

This is temporary. What is the SKILL.md equivalent going to be in five years? In ten? You don't already see a pattern emerging around solutions to encode that "professional experience" into the tools themselves?

These LLMs can already incorporate our entire cultural corpus yet your "professional experience" is the threshold they won't cross?

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#413

Post by Xirdus »

czhu12 wrote: post #301
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 cit…

If company A is Amazon, company B is Ubisoft, and company C is Oracle, then I think it's very likely there isn't any pattern or "loop" here and it's legitimately just 3 different companies in 3 different situations doing layoffs for 3 different reasons but all 3 reaching for the same PR playbook. "We're leveraging AI to increase productivity" is the new "we're streamlining our business and focusing on our core products".

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#414

Post by vips7L »

phyzix5761 wrote: post #91
harimau777 wrote: post #20

I keep reading about how AI will be fine because people can just retrain for different careers. However, I never read what those careers are or who is going to pay for retraining. I certainly don't have the money or time to go back to college and start a new career at the bottom.

I think the idea of being an employee is fundamentally changing. Not saying its good or bad but it's shifting to a more entrepreneurial phase where people have to step out of their 9 to 5s and find ways to deliver value that others want to pay for. We saw this pre-ai with uber and door dash. I think as AI automation dies down and most companies are competing at a near optimal level with the new tools we'll need human…

How the hell is uber or door dash entrepreneurial?

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#415

Post by laughing_man »

no_op wrote: post #274
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…

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 externall…

How many Steve Jobses do we need as a percentage of people developing software?

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#416

Post by vagab0nd »

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…

This is a valid perspective, but I don't think a useful one.

Being able to produce code is a huge unlock for many non-programmers. So in a way, it doesn't matter how much time existing developers spend on coding. It's about helping anyone become a developer.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#418

Post by dzonga »

such an incoherent argument.

> professional athletes & construction workers - work in physical fields which means there's physical limits to what they experience both in terms of what they do & what their body can do.

> software engineering is an art & engineering. which means as long you're of sound mind - you can do it till you die of old age or even if say you go blind. Because you ability to refine / taste is not dependent on your physical capabilities.

> llm's one shoting things - is not engineering because engineering is about compromising within constraints & using rules of thumb. so if you have no constraints u r not engineering.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#419

Post by roncesvalles »

ecocentrik wrote: post #328
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…

Glib is called for. The amount of information asymmetry that's still on the table as vibe coders and vibe engineers and vibe doctors emerge is staggering. Professional experience is still incredibly valuable. Most software developers might spend more than 6% of their time coding but no senior developers are banging their heads for hours over typos. https://www.youtube.com/shorts/xBilK3gT5e0

These days nobody bangs their heads over typos.

LLMs evaporated 90% of the "moments of despair" when you have an error and googling it isn't helping, or googling it made you realize you have to read 30min of documentation.

Coding is a joy now. LLMs shaved off all the rough edges.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#420

Post by EliRivers »

The majority of my activity today as a professional software engineer with two decades' of experience; trying to get Team Sales to express what they want. It's so hard. I see no way an LLM can do this. I could possibly be replaced with someone who spent their time begging Team Sales to type what they want into an LLM.
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