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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

#631

Post by malfist »

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?

Wake me up when a peer reviewed study finds even a 2X increase in senior developer productivity

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#632

Post by robot-wrangler »

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…

> Part of the practical degradation of traditional programmers over time has always been concentration and deep calculation, just like in chess.

Fortunately SWEs have the architect path, which frequently rewards having lots of deep intuition even as the details of calculation continue to change. So one question that's urgent but unknowable until we get there is.. are we going to get good architects if they don't come up through the trenches? I'm not sure. All I know is that everyone has a war story about the least qualified ones that got the role without that experience.

Since intuition is what LLMs do more than calculation, it's worth mentioning that this is true but different. They have the collective unconscious of the internet, which isn't taste that comes from good/bad experience. Besides intuition what comes to mind is "good taste".. the actual foundation of good review and really the main job of senior positions in any technical field.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#633

Post by th1sisoldnews »

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…

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Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#634

Post by suzzer99 »

roncesvalles wrote: post #419
ecocentrik wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

100%. Googling when you don't even know enough to ask the right questions, with 50 tabs open and trying to read down to the 3rd or 4th Stack Overflow answer (which is usually the best for some inexplicable reason), was my least favorite part of development.

I don't miss wasting an hour on a problem in a technology I'm not familiar with, where it's not like a big conceptual thing but something I could clear up in 5 seconds if I just had an expert in the room.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#635

Post by Silhouette »

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.

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.

We saw a similar philosophy in TDD advocacy many years ago. Search for something like "Sudoku Jeffries" to see how that went. Then search for "Sudoku Norvig" to see what it looks like when you actually understand the problem.

The idea that you can somehow iterate your way to a solution when you have no idea where you're trying to go or even which direction your next step should be in has always seemed absurd to some of us but in the era of LLMs there's no longer any doubt. In the agentic era (can we call a few months an "era"?) I estimate that 90% or more of the writing I've read about how to use agents most effectively came down to making sure there is a clear specification for what they need to implement first and then imposing extensive guard rails to make sure their output does in fact follow that specification. It's all about doing enough design work up front to remove any ambiguity before coding the next part of the implementation and almost everyone claiming any sort of real world success with coding agents seems to have reached a similar conclusion.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#636

Post by suzzer99 »

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.

Yes, if you're using them to write large chunks of code or entire features. If you just use them to clear up some trivial problem in an unfamiliar technology that you used to spend 30 minutes googling with 50 tabs open, or stuff like write a method to filter, map and reduce an array based on specific criteria, they're a godsend.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#638

Post by ethagnawl »

tavavex wrote: post #615
bluesnowmonkey wrote: post #508

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This may seem like an important change that's making things different today, but it's not. Farms back in the day were constrained by supply, software today is constrained by demand. A farmer couldn't create a farm from nothing, but if you had one, you very likely were able to sell its products - everyone always wants to eat. That is in addition to the natural benefit of being able to use the food grown there to survi…

> A software developer can create software from nothing, but who is going to buy it?

Especially when people or orgs who would have previously paid them for said software can now crap out an 80% solution in a few hours or days.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#639

Post by insane_dreamer »

bluesnowmonkey wrote: post #411
bel8 wrote: 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?

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.

> There's no limit to how many companies can exist in the world.

1) demand for software is not, and was never infinite

2) the AI that put the 6 SWEs out of a job is the same AI that is supplying the demand; meaning there is no demand for 6 new software companies

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#640

Post by insane_dreamer »

koonsolo wrote: post #478
bel8 wrote: 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?

There are jobs with limited work, and jobs with unlimited work. Since your farming land is limited, after the job is done, there is no more work. For software projects, there is always more work to do. It's an arms race between competitors. Imagine you fire developers to maintain your speed, and your competitor keeps their people to go faster. Good luck to you!

> For software projects, there is always more work to do.

sure, but there is not more work that people will pay you to do; that's the important question

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