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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

#541

Post by skydhash »

hjort-e wrote: post #377
skydhash wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it depends on what you feel coding is. To me it's the architecture planning and reading other people code, not just writing code And that would be where we disagree. I don’t read code to look at code. When I’m reading code, I’m looking for the contracts to follow when interacting with a system. It would be nice if it were documented, but more often than not you have to rely on code. It’s very rare that I plan with…

Huh? So you you don't research if something is technically feasible before you promise your stakeholders a delivery time/ price estimate? We all do the same stuff, the disagreement would just be what you feel coding is and if you think technical work is the same thing or a superset. If you as software dev aren't hands on with planning or working more than 5% of your time, you are basically a PO with a programing hobb…

> So you you don't research if something is technically feasible before you promise your stakeholders a delivery time/ price estimate

I believe 99% of requests are not about what’s technically feasible. And the rare time I encountered one of those, my answer has mostly been “you don’t have enough resources to try solving that problem”.

If you know your fundamentals well, very often you will find the same common blocks everywhere. People much more smarter than me has solved a lot of fundamental issues and it’s rare that I see a business request that doesn’t reuse the same familiar stuff.

That’s why coding is mostly boring. You follow the same pattern again and again. But what dictates the flows are the business parameters. And that’s why most senior spend so much time gathering good requirements. Because the code is straightforward after that.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#542

Post by tavavex »

kypro wrote: post #86
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.

Also, it's not necessarily true that there will be other great careers available. This seems to just be an assumption people are making. Of course, there are jobs that will still require human labour for some time yet, but in reality a lot jobs that require physical human labour are now done in other parts of the world where labour is cheaper. Those which cannot be exported like plumbing or waitressing only have limi…

> A lot of the advice we're seeing today about retraining in construction worker or plumber seems to assume that there's an unlimited demand for this labour which there simply is not.

I think that most advice like this is individual - not systemic. We all won't fit into the remaining fields when white collar work gets less demand, but someone who's just pivoting now still could. There's no systemic solution that will actually be implemented. The only advice left to give to people is to not be too late. There's only so many people that can be trained to do this range of work (has a physical component that is difficult to automate + can only be done here + has an education/certification moat) just based on spots in educational programs, and they'd probably be better off getting on that sooner than later if they think that their current job is going to be in the crosshairs soon.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#543

Post by rootusrootus »

lostmsu wrote: post #513
rootusrootus wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like to see the optimism, even if I don't share it. I think it's incredible hubris that humans think we are about to reinvent our own level of intelligence, just because we made a machine that talks pretty.

Your own comment in my timeline is 7 years out of date. GPT-2 talked pretty, that was its whole thing. If you are trying to claim there's no difference between 5.5 and 2 you are delusional (hallucinating?).

I think I was fairly clear, I said that I think it is hubris to think what we have created is anything even slightly like human intelligence. It talks very pretty (a lot of work has gone into this aspect in particular), and it does demonstrate the extent to which, as individuals, most of us do not have especially unique thoughts nor problems to solve. It exposes how quickly humans jump to anthropomorphizing pretty much anything.

Is it a handy tool? Yep! I use it every day. But it is laughable to think this is the path to AGI. The most common counterargument on HN is some variation of "but you can't prove that this isn't just like how a human thinks". A conspiracy theory at best, just reinforcing the fact that we know very little about how even simple non-human brains function.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#544

Post by tavavex »

jhrmnn wrote: post #476
kypro wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, it's not necessarily true that there will be other great careers available. This seems to just be an assumption people are making. Of course, there are jobs that will still require human labour for some time yet, but in reality a lot jobs that require physical human labour are now done in other parts of the world where labour is cheaper. Those which cannot be exported like plumbing or waitressing only have limi…

When no work is safe from mechanization, surely the value of labor wrt capital must fall, and the societal pressure on redistribution will rise. The ultimate outcome of technological progress is either extreme inequality or massive redistribution

I feel like by the time the societal pressure starts rising in any major way, it won't matter anymore. By that point, the people who will profit will become gods with a prepared response for every action the lower classes could take.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#545

Post by layer8 »

bee_rider wrote: post #526
d3rockk wrote: post #504

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Only the keydown, not the keyup.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#546

Post by sefrost »

varispeed wrote: post #329
sefrost wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only 5% of your time is spent writing code? That sounds like a low estimate for most software engineers I work with. May I ask if you could estimate how you spend the other 95% of the time?

The least experienced developer writes the most code. Juniors would be spending whole day in the IDE, typing, testing, typing etc. Senior developers will go to a park for a few hours, think, then come back spent an hour or less typing code that just works or write nothing at all, maybe even delete code. Instead they might update documents, ask clarifications about found edge cases or errors in planning that were not…

I don’t know if that’s true for most of us, who simply work in CRUD apps. Maybe I’m in a bubble though.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#547

Post by rglover »

Screwdriver -> power drill

Hand-coding -> llms/agents

Sometimes the only thing that can fit into a tricky spot is a screwdriver. The power drill didn't make screwdrivers obsolete, it just made them less necessary day-to-day.

Same thing here. LLMs are power tools, but sometimes, the only thing that can fit into a "tricky spot" with code/systems is knowing how to do it by hand.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#548

Post by esafak »

malfist wrote: post #286
cromka wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We've literally just started, what "over and over" do you refer to?

I've been told the past four years that AI is coming for my job. And thats just not true. Its no closer to that than it was 4 years ago.

Ask some juniors how their job search is going. In five years, ask the seniors.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#549

Post by lo_zamoyski »

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.

Maybe I'm weird, but my usage has been very conservative. As in, I treat the LLM like a junior dev that I have to micromanage and handhold.

I am terrified of allowing these things to complete tasks end-to-end with nothing intervening. Maybe that's why I don't run into many of these issues. I mostly delegate grunt work and manual tedium, not reasoning or design choices to the LLM. I may consult the LLM and ask for criticism, but there is no way I'm going to allow it to quietly make design decisions that I don't know about.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#550

Post by eweise »

estebank wrote: post #200
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…

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.

AI is pretty good at figuring out what the right thing to do is.
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