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What's gonna happen to software engineers?

yakko.dev

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Re: What's gonna happen to software engineers?

#101

Post by iJohnDoe »

This won’t be a popular position, but I don’t have much sympathy for software engineers.

For decades, software engineers have been smug toward a lot of surrounding professions. Look at how they treated IT because developers thought they were server and network experts. Then cloud came along, and some of that work got moved over in the name of DevOps.

Frontend and backend engineers were also treated unfairly at times. Then came roles requiring someone to be an expert in “full stack,” which I never thought was fair unless it paid a ton of money, which at times it didn’t.

Now software engineers are being obfuscated away. Well, for a long time, software engineers acted like their shit didn’t stink. Maybe that was true for a while. Unfortunately, I’ve seen a lot of my colleagues not care who they walked over. But guess what, there are a ton of people out there who are going to be perfectly happy hearing the cries of software engineers now.

“Be careful of the toes you step on today. They may be connected to the ass you need to kiss tomorrow.”

Re: What's gonna happen to software engineers?

#102

Post by collyw »

marssaxman wrote: post #93
prewett wrote: post #92

This is a thoughtful article, but I think the axis isn't between builders and algorithm researches, but between craftsmen and results-oriented builders. Both want to build something, but the craftsman cares about the quality of the result (usability, maintainability, code quality, UI polish, etc.) while the non-craftsman is happy with something that works, even if some of the corners are janky. Or, thinking about Win…

> Microsoft focused on quality code That's a sentence I have certainly never read before!

It's closed source, how would you know?

Re: What's gonna happen to software engineers?

#103

Post by marssaxman »

collyw wrote: post #102
marssaxman wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Microsoft focused on quality code That's a sentence I have certainly never read before!

It's closed source, how would you know?

I used to work there - but I was talking about their reputation, not the actual quality of their code.

Re: What's gonna happen to software engineers?

#104

Post by nextaccountic »

BobbyTables2 wrote: post #59
glouwbug wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not sure. I’ve been reading death-of-the-software engineer for years, but recently the -vibe- feels different. I don’t have anything anecdotal to back it up so take it with a grain of salt. I might be reading what I want to see

In my opinion, as AI was oversold for too long, it was was easy to dismiss it. Classical image processing was marketed as “AI”. Doomsday predictions about AI seemed laughable, just as SkyNet in the Terminator seemed unrealistic. The early ChatGPT versions were also pretty silly and equally oversold. At this point, the popular messaging of AI is still 90% fiction but the remaining real 10% is now a force to be reckone…

> My experience of using AI as a search engine has surprised me. I never expected an overgrown pile of matrices to work that well.

The first version of Google was also surprising. Mind blowing use of linear algebra (also a pile of matrices, but this time sparse matrices mostly) to rank websites

So maybe the search business was always meant to use pile of matrices

Re: What's gonna happen to software engineers?

#105

Post by AaronAPU »

gxs wrote: post #47
englishspot wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work on backend infra. I touch a lot of things and have multiple instances of claude code running at once. I do feel like I'm doing more simultaneously. but that's still more that I have to keep track of and make sense of in my head. claude is making me way more productive, for sure, but at the same time I feel way more overwhelmed than I've ever been. idk how anyone else is doing it and managing all of this. suppo…

Right there with you - this has been my experience as well, to a tee I can do more now…so I do - it’s really that simple And it’s way more exhausting because there’s no room to breathe - fresh code to work with every few minutes with prepping for the next set of tasks in between On the one hand the dopamine’s got me hooked on this like a video game On the other…I’m as overwhelmed as ever line you said, even if it’s m…

It is definitely a different type of stress. I used to lock in on one problem in deep work. Now it’s a constant juggling of 7 problems. It feels good to close one out, but your other 6 keep you perpetually locked in the stress loop.

Re: What's gonna happen to software engineers?

#106

Post by nextaccountic »

Fire-Dragon-DoL wrote: post #29
prplfsh wrote: post #3

I really love using AI to code but more and more I wonder ... Are things really that different? So I guess I'm the business as usual type. I think on the frontend side we're going to see a lot more scope for teams. On a backend infra side it seems as hard as ever. Still have to think really hard problems, think deeply about data structure and flow, and deal with second- and third-order effects. Or even harder because…

My feelings right now can be described as follows: If AI progress stalls now or grinds to a halt, we get to keep a lot of new jobs that are going to show up (it opens a lot of doors), while maintaining software devs as an interesting career. Egoistically, I would love that. If it keeps going and software devs get replaced, so many jobs are going to disappear.

Software developers are in the business of making other people unemployed, so... the second scenario is poetic justice in a sense

Re: What's gonna happen to software engineers?

#107

Post by nh23423fefe »

stvltvs wrote: post #90
sam0x17 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I like is it's still hard, but you can do things like "prove this using game theory" or "find the optimal value for this and a proof" without having to know game theory or deep math really

How do you ensure that the output isn't BS if you don't know those areas? What value does it add to have a mathematical proof of questionable validity?

if you have an intuition something is true, you can verify the proof. even if you couldn't construct the proof. allowing skepticism to terminate thought is a dead end.

Re: What's gonna happen to software engineers?

#108

Post by Fire-Dragon-DoL »

nextaccountic wrote: post #106
Fire-Dragon-DoL wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My feelings right now can be described as follows: If AI progress stalls now or grinds to a halt, we get to keep a lot of new jobs that are going to show up (it opens a lot of doors), while maintaining software devs as an interesting career. Egoistically, I would love that. If it keeps going and software devs get replaced, so many jobs are going to disappear.

Software developers are in the business of making other people unemployed, so... the second scenario is poetic justice in a sense

Every job that's not art-related is about making other people unemployed (by improving efficency)

Re: What's gonna happen to software engineers?

#109

Post by blharr »

james_marks wrote: post #83
singingtoday wrote: post #22

They're going to be overworked. In the old days we programmed systems by literally wiring them. There wasn't much work, only a few "programmers" were employed. Then somebody came up with Punch cards that was much more vision than wiring the systems directly. This opened the door for a lot more people to use them and now programmers were busier. The punch cards didn't scale either so eventually we created panels with…

Jevon’s paradox. We’ve been constrained by how much software could be produced for decades. Making it easier/faster doesn’t increase leisure, it increases the demand for (cheaper) software.

And it also increases the competition! Most of the giant tech companies aren't really making money by having X amount of software. They make their money by having software that is better than their competition, so they can get Y amount of users. But if your product's development is now simplified because AI can reproduce it, you still have to work harder to keep that competitive advantage

Re: What's gonna happen to software engineers?

#110

Post by indymike »

ryandvm wrote: post #7

I've definitely noticed a distinct lack of pride now that Claude Code is writing 90% of the code I'm delivering these days. For simple problems (which most are) it works well enough and you are definitely shipping code faster - and with actual test coverage to boot. But it just doesn't feel the same - there's little craftsmanship and honestly it's boring as fuck. You spend a lot of time setting up guardrails and havi…

If you don't have pride in what you are making with AI, you will let a ton of bugs through. Likewise you will ship bad architecture.
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