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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

#521

Post by [deleted] »

nomel wrote: post #443
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…

The perspective here is "lifetime career", so you need to project out 30 years here, for a meaningful argument. I think, much sooner than that, you'll have AI pumping out practically complete implementations that meet the requirements of function , set by the people who desire that function. THOSE people will be the developers, and will be more akin to technical "creatives", more on the product side, than the develop…

[deleted]

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#522

Post by datsci_est_2015 »

pear01 wrote: post #506
datsci_est_2015 wrote: post #496

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, not the opposite. There’s no current evidence to suggest limitless progress, or even superlinear progress with regards to compute and energy. My guess would be sub linear or even logarithmic progress vs. linear growth in compute and energy, as that’s how most physical systems behave.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#523

Post by FrankRay78 »

arcboii92 wrote: post #487
roncesvalles wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

LLMs moved the moments of despair to PR reviews for me. It used to be that you could check on a junior dev occassionally throughout the day to make sure they're on the right track. Now you step away for 2 hours and they're raising a PR of bad code smell spaghetti and moving on to repeat their AI slopfest on the next task. It's getting hard to keep up with trying to teach new devs what bad code looks like. And I swear…

Write a damn good automated review agent that runs against their PRs before even looking at them… works well for me!

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#524

Post by jimbokun »

7e wrote: post #437
estebank wrote: post #200

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.

So the infinite monkeys with infinite typewriters approach.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#525

Post by jimbokun »

skeeter2020 wrote: post #439
roncesvalles wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You can't possibly believe this, or you and me (and many others) are doing something different. LLMs have created an entire new - huge - set of bang-your-head moments, as they go off half-cocked in a million simultaneous directions, chasing their tail, or just making shit up. And since the vast majority of work is on existing - often ancient - codebases, let's find out if you feel the same way in 18 months.

Give them work in smaller chunks.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#526

Post by bee_rider »

d3rockk wrote: post #504
amw-zero wrote: post #501

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Surely we should only count the time actuating the key. Apple keyboard users are in shambles.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#527

Post by Terr_ »

mancerayder wrote: post #227
phyzix5761 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That's a lot of SV-speak. How exactly do people step into an entrepreneurial phase? They're at work in corporate settings with fixed defined roles. Most workplaces are not many-hatted-donning startup environments, but restricted roles where there are deliverables, deadlines, meetings, etc. Which leaves out of hours for "entrepreneurship" whatever that is. Github project work on the weekends? That's not possible for m…

> That's a lot of SV-speak. How exactly do people step into an entrepreneurial phase?

Oh, you simply decide to use grit and willpower to pull yourself up by your bootstraps, placing some calls to people you met at certain parties aided by a small 6 digit loan from your family. /s

My default expectation of "employees should be more entrepreneurial" is that's it's a kind of victim-blaming. I'm especially cynical if the concept seems is getting introduced by groups that spent the last several decades putting up barriers to entry, drafting non-compete contracts, capturing regulators, and basically pulling up the ladders behind them.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#528

Post by jimbokun »

arcboii92 wrote: post #487
roncesvalles wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

LLMs moved the moments of despair to PR reviews for me. It used to be that you could check on a junior dev occassionally throughout the day to make sure they're on the right track. Now you step away for 2 hours and they're raising a PR of bad code smell spaghetti and moving on to repeat their AI slopfest on the next task. It's getting hard to keep up with trying to teach new devs what bad code looks like. And I swear…

At some point there needs to be an uncomfortable conversation about how if all they’re doing is copy pasting everything they get from you into ChatGPT, you can do it yourself for much much cheaper.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#529

Post by indiosmo »

NiloCK wrote: post #179
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 grant that there's a definition of abstraction that LLMs don't fall into. But people describing LLMs as another abstraction layer aren't all misunderstanding this. Instead, they are using the term ... more abstractly. EG: How did Mark Zuckerberg make software five years ago? He's as capable of opening up an editor as I am, but circumstance had offered him a different interface in terms of human resources. Instead o…

The way I frame this is that LLMs are not replacing the tools, whic are are deterministic. They are replacing the humans, which are themselves non-deterministic, as in your Zuckerberg example.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#530

Post by [deleted] »

jayd16 wrote: post #77
giobox wrote: post #36

Anecdotally, it feels like something materially changed in the US software hiring market at the start of this year to me. It feels like more and more businesses are taking a wait and see approach to avoid over-investing in human capital in the next few years. It also feels like the hiring "signal", which was always weak before, is just completely gone now, when every job you do advertise receives over 500 LLM written…

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…

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