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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

#491

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 end…

I 100% agree it's coming for everything. I'm just curious what the arguments would be for why frontend would be easier.

As a manager of a full stack team, we've found AI falls short a lot more on front end. It has its weak points on both front and back, but the problems with backend are quite easy to feed back into it -- needs more performance, needs to pass this security audit, needs to deal with xyz system. The problems with frontend are more like this is ugly, it's clunky to use, people don't like it. People without years of frontend experience tend to lack the vocabulary required to get AI to fix it, period, and it ends up going around in loops.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#492
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 an example of survivor bias dressed up as general advice that doesn't consider the entire ecosystem. And we need look no further than what's happened in Hollywood with writing in particular.

The general progression of a Hollywood writing career is from PA (production assistant), which often starts off as a volunteer "intern" position, to writer's assistant. Assistant here usually means doing any meanial task anyone wants from fetching drycleaning to taking a dog for a grooming appointment. When you're a writer's assistant, you will oten spend time in a writer's room. You will see how the process works. You probably won't contribute anything but you may get feedback on tehings you've written from whomever you're working for.

The next step is as a staff writer. You will be paid to produce scripts and stories for a TV show, for example. That writer's room will have a head writer. On a TV show the head writer is almost always the showrunner. The showrunner is effectively the leader of the entire project and is responsible for breaking up a season intoo storylines and making sure those scripts make sense as a collective. They might one or more of those scripts or maybe not. The showrunner will hire directors for each episode.

The path from staff writer to showrunner often goes through being a producer. Producers are responsible for a lot of the logistics of filming a show. Hiring extras, finding locations, coordinating stunts and costumes and making sure the director has everything they need.

As part of all this, in the 22 episode TV era, writers would often end up spending time on set while the show is being filmed. They'd learn from the process.

Every part of this was necessary. Those writers on set are your future producers and showrunners.

So what's happened in the streaming era is that writer's rooms got smaller (so-called "mini writer's rooms"), maybe only the showrunner is ever on set, the writers have stopped working by the time filming even begins and you might only be doing 8-12 episodes. On a 22 eipside season, that one job could support you. 8-12 episodes can't.

But you see how this all breaks down when writers can no longer support themselves, they're no longer being trained to be future producers and showrunners, there's no feedback from set back to the writer's room and you end up with 3 year gaps between seasons. The only reason for all of this is because it's cheaper.

So, you may be a staff engineer who tech leads dozens of other engineers. You're not formally a manager or director but you have a lot of influence about the entire project. But how did you get there? You started as a junior engineer being told what to do. You got to see how other leaders operated. You became responsible for more and more things. You might start fixing bugs under supervision to managing a feature then an entire project and so on.

So what's going to happen here is (IMHO) we will have years of the software engineer space shrinking. There'll be very little entry-level hiring. Layoffs will reduce the entire workforce and there'll be a few tech leaders who hang on because they still produce value. Some of them will probably discover they don't produce enough value and they'll go too.

But where do the future tech leaders come from in this scenario? AI is being used as an excuse to kill the entry-level pipeline and if you go around and say "git gud" [sic] then I'm sorry but you just don't understand the impact of what's happening or you don't care because, at least for now, you're simply not affected.

You see the same thing with people who espouse the myth of meritocracy. Well, if a given workforce shrinks by 50%, half those people are, by definition, not going to survive. An individual may be about to reskill or skill up to survive but not everyone can. And that's how people end up in Amazon warehouses. At least until they're no longer needed there ether.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#493
post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The capacity of the person prompting it to understand is the threshold they won't cross. They can squeeze the gap as much as possible by dumbing down answers or slowly ramping up information complexity but there is a limit to comprehension.

This is an interesting answer for questions about human agency and accountability/personhood questions but I don't see how it leads to increased confidence in the role of human as SWE. If LLMs get good enough, one might be tempted to ask so what if most humans can't understand the output? Human civilization has by and large been a constant exercise in us collectively accomplishing more and more while individually com…

We don't need as many hunters because we've domesticated sources of meat. We still need ranchers, butchers... an entire supply chain to get meat to consumers. We didn't remove humans from the loop, we just created specializations.

Software specialization might look very different in 10 years but I doubt that technically specialized humans will be completely removed from their professions. We might not be carrying bows and arrows anymore but we will be carrying the equivalent of a rope and a Stetson.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#494
post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#495

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lot of people don't seem to get that - It is easier to go from terrible to average but much harder to go from average to good. I am sure AI bros are same people who were convinced consumer grade fully automated driving was going happen "by end of the year" for last 7 years.

I agree with the statement and think a lot of people miss this, but I also wonder how many people probably don't care for good, they only care for 'good enough'.

Many large systems can’t be built good enough because they just fall apart. Try letting a junior dev make an ERP or a database system.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#496
post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The word “incorporate” is doing some very heavy lifting in your assertion. These LLMs already have access to the whole corpus of architectural knowledge and software best practices, and yet they’re unable to reliably implement those best practices. Why not? Why do they often make completely unintuitive decisions, even when repeatedly prompted to ask clarifying questions?

To be clear by that and "cultural corpus" I meant their skill with natural languages. It is well known for instance that early LLMs were curiously better at composing sentences in English than doing basic math. Regarding such formal reasoning we have already seen marked improvement in the last year or two alone. The question is how this weighs on your prediction re their capabilities in the next two, five, ten, etc y…

What are the properties of LLMs that have convinced you that there remains emergent complexity (e.g. the “ability” to formally reason) that we have not yet seen?

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#497
post #367
post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Nothing, it’s that same story again. Industrialization turned peasants to blue collar workers by mechanizing agriculture. Then blue collar workers were turned to white collar workers by mechanizing all manual labor. Now AI is coming for white collar workers by mechanizing intellectual labor. The big question is what will white collar workers turn into.

The globalized economy has demonstrated that a single country and supply the majority of the world's manufacturing needs, at least for a while.

Taiwan creates most of the worlds semiconductors. China makes the majority of everything else. Silicon Valley created a majority of the tech market's value.

But there's a cap where the world has enough stuff at least in the short term, and growth slows.

Humans only need a certain amount to survive. With populations leveling out, industry will shift from servicing human needs, to the needs of corporations and other industries. Consumers will become a minority in the future economy.

What will corporations value in the future, that they're willing to spend on recurring human capital expenses? I think the answer will always be: the tasks that will help companies grow.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#498
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 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…

Your answer reminds me that my biggest gripe with this site and programmer forums in general is the lack of awareness of the breadth and scale of software development. I'm curious what you work on, because it doesn't sound anything like what I work on.

> 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.

I don't think I've experienced this to a large degree. Maybe early in my career. Most of my time now is spent formulating a solution, and time spent coding is mostly spent trying to compose my changes with the existing code in a way that is performant, reliable and meets the specifications.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#499
post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I highly doubt that a significant portion of farm labor became salesman or researchers. Builders? I could see that but robots already replaced a portion of those too.

That's how it always happens. Technology advances, and there are more jobs than we're displaced. That's why technology keeps getting better AND the number of jobs keeps increasing with population.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#500
post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of the time is spent figuring what the right thing to do is, not writing the implementation. Sometimes the process of writing the implementation surfaces new considerations about what the right thing is, but still, producing text to feed to a compiler is not the bulk of the work of a software engineer. It is to unearth requirements and turn them into repeatable software.

If you’re spending time thinking and not experimenting, then it’s because experimentation is expensive. With an LLM you don’t have to try to predict a complex system in advance, experiments are so cheap to can just converge to a solution directly. None of this pontificating; it’s really not that useful anymore.

> If you’re spending time thinking and not experimenting, then it’s because experimentation is expensive.

No, because no amount of experimentation can solve many of the problems that have been solved by thinking. Even your claim about "experiments are cheap" requires thinking to decide what experiments to do. No one is generating all possible solutions that fit in X megabytes; you have to think to constrain the solution space.

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