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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

#501

Post by amw-zero »

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…

I agree in principle, but I think the 2-5% estimate is extremely low. I could be sold on most developers spending ~25%, up to 40% of their time on code. But very few people are spending 2% of their time on it. Unless you're some sort of super senior staff / advisor to the CTO at a gigantic company, which has already placed you on rare terrain.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#502

Post by magicalhippo »

marcindulak wrote: post #356
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…

After hearing various similarly sounding opinions about CRUD being easy for LLMs, I started tracking how well LLMs handle a standard CRUD Django app I'm familiar with at https://github.com/marcindulak/learning-api-styles-gen-ai-ex... . So far it appears that LLMs still require constant hand-holding, even for a small educational CRUD app.

We've had reasonable effectiveness for CRUD. It's mainly the UI toolkits we use, but the plumbing it can do quite well. It's not 100% vibecoding but certainly a significant accelerator for parts of the job.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#503

Post by antonvs »

datsci_est_2015 wrote: post #464
pear01 wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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?

> Why do they often make completely unintuitive decisions

Most likely because you haven't constrained their behavior in your prompt. You're making the assumption that they "understand" that using best practices is what you want. You have to tell them that, and tell them which practices they should use.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#504

Post by d3rockk »

amw-zero wrote: post #501
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…

I agree in principle, but I think the 2-5% estimate is extremely low. I could be sold on most developers spending ~25%, up to 40% of their time on code. But very few people are spending 2% of their time on it. Unless you're some sort of super senior staff / advisor to the CTO at a gigantic company, which has already placed you on rare terrain.

might be closer to accurate if the 2-5% is his estimate of the physical time spent making key-strokes

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#505

Post by sophacles »

bonesss wrote: post #434
flatline wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really doesn't have to come for everything to feel like it's taking everything. If it eliminates 10% of white collar jobs over the next decade, the impact will be felt everywhere.

I struggle to understand the logic (in general, the way people are talking), normally efficiencies come with increases in production and scale and use-cases. So of 10% of lawyers get AI-d away, let’s say, the remaining 90% are 1.1x+ efficient and also up against other lawyers enjoying the same… work might go up. And on the customer side there is sooooo much BS with lawyers, but if both lawyer and customer can communi…

And what do those 10% of lawyers do? Every other industry also got reduced by 10+%, its not like they have a job elsewhere.

So.... they just starve in the streets?

Even if some other, arguably better job comes along, would they retrain for it? (You can say yes, but take a look at the long history of people choosing to join a cult and vote for an orange moron instead of learning a new skill).

Either you're convinced you won't be too badly affected and will gladly watch huge swaths of people suffer, or you're deluded enough to think that it will really, truly be different this time. In any case, I hope you get the worst results of what you preach.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#506

Post by pear01 »

datsci_est_2015 wrote: post #496
pear01 wrote: post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

There may be gains to be had in such emergence but that is not where I see the gains in the next five years. Those gains will be made by connecting LLMs more robustly with formal reasoning, which computers are already very good at. Continued iteration on connecting these right/left brain faculties could then lead to further emergence down the line.

The present notions of harnesses, structured output or looping in the LLM to some external state or sandbox be it debugger output or embedding into a runtime already show early promising results along these lines. I see no reason to believe these gains will not continue over the next five years.

If you have some theories in the converse in that regard I am all ears.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#508

Post by bluesnowmonkey »

ryandrake wrote: post #436
bluesnowmonkey wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"Just start your own company!" - Hacker News

Yeah pretty much. Have you seen Polsia and its ilk? Maybe "trivial" would be too strong a word but... in 2026 it's not hard.

That's my point. You couldn't tell an unemployed farm worker to go start their own farm. They probably don't have the land or substantial capital it takes. But an unemployed software engineer just doesn't need anything like that to go into a business built on AI.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#509

Post by conductr »

mainmailman wrote: post #265
jayd16 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, AI doesn't feel like it's affecting hiring needs from the trenches. We don't have engineers sitting on their hands because AI wrote up everything the leadership could imagine. Instead, we get an economy that feels like it's on the cusp of a fall or at the very least a roller coaster. Poor tax incentives to hire. ZIRP is long gone. And the hiring managers are overrun with slop. But bosses are happy to say it…

Thank you, it's been all but confirmed that lot of "AI layoffs" are due to reaching a workforce equilibrium from Covid era over hiring. Saying AI for anything, good news or bad news, is a get out of jail free card for execs who want to appease shareholders.

Who did they overhire? Like, Covid didn’t just increase the number of people in the field. Prior to Covid there was a so called talent shortage. The hiring that did occur was mostly net zero in aggregate. Workers got poached, grads got hired, compensation went to far up. And, that’s what they mean by overhired. They over paid. They now see the benefits of hiring cheaper talent on another continent. Cheaper talent that can use the same tools as you are going to use. AI equalized a lot of talent, the US labor doesn’t have the edge it once did. In a sense, this should have been happening at higher rates much earlier than it did but for some reason investors saw value if you paid big salary to smart people in one part of California for a very long time. Now, the thing that should have happened is happening. And they also realize it’s not limited to California, turns out even salaries in Alabama are high compared to other parts of the world.

There is also much more productivity. But I’m not sure it’s really a driving force yet as with the new productivity people are still just trying to do more with it which doesn’t translate to efficiency. Yet. It might once AI loses its wow factor and is just status quo. I feel like this is fast approaching but still may be a few years away.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#510

Post by pear01 »

ecocentrik wrote: post #493
pear01 wrote: post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bow…

Ranchers, butchers... and factory farms. Most meat Americans consume have had very little interaction with a person until they are being devoured on the plate.

I appreciate your points. I agree with you that not all "technically specialized humans will be completely removed" but let's not pretend the comparison is going from a caveman with a spear to a cowboy with a lasso. If you concede it is likely to be very different at some point calling it SWE is no longer useful.

I think SWEs would be better off realizing they have enjoyed a relatively extreme level of privilege, and rather than trying to hold onto it, use what time they still have to advocate for a more egalitarian society, even if that means giving up some of their gains. Otherwise speaking of farming, the mass layoffs to come when software has been disrupting blue collar jobs for decades will really be a chickens coming home to roost moment.

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