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LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do

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Re: LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do

#11

Post by witx »

lelanthran wrote: post #7
applfanboysbgon wrote: post #4

> Maybe I should consider transforming my woodworking hobby into a profession... Whatever your feelings on the future of the industry are, it's hard to imagine you'll find more professional success in artisan woodworking than artisan software.

> Whatever your feelings on the future of the industry are, it's hard to imagine you'll find more professional success in artisan woodworking than artisan software. A small percentage of the market, maybe a fraction of a percent, are still willing to pay for hand-built goods - bonus if it's thoroughly modern but retro (steam-punk keyboards, maybe). Exactly zero percent of the market is willing to pay for hand-built s…

> Exactly zero percent of the market is willing to pay for hand-built software.

You took this statistic out of your rear end?

Re: LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do

#12

Post by phase_9 »

The glory days are over. In the future, one software engineer will be able to support multiple product areas much like how one HR team can support 1,000's of employees.

LLMs have made domain knowledge and reasoning "cheap"; it doesn't matter if the output is lower quality - look around you for countless examples of where cheap wins and "cheap" continues to improve.

Good luck out there; we will all need it.

Re: LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do

#14

Post by lelanthran »

To me looks like, if we're not collectively careful, civilisation will soon be on a path to an evolutionary dead-end.

Anything that can replace a deeply experienced s/ware engineer can replace anyone in the employment stack, meaning that only the owners of capital will be left, and they too will soon fade as the economy falls off a cliff and money has no value, because the only value that money has is the value of a human backing that, with thought, with ideas, with human output.

Whether you like it or not, "Economic output" is just a different phrase for "Human output that is valuable". When all human output is valued at the fractions of a penny per month of work, there is no future.

Re: LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do

#15

Post by cassianoleal »

> The company is now hiring again for a few roles and domain familiarity is not a strong differentiator anymore. We used to list "Software Engineer - Area". Now it's just "Software Engineer" and the team assignment comes after the offer is accepted.

> Of course, this is good for brilliant engineers that never had the chance to get deep into the domain and now have better chances at getting a job, but it's also sad to think that other brilliant engineers that spent their lives collecting domain knowledge are now competing on the same lane.

If the author's vision of the future is correct, then competent software engineers are safe. Domain knowledge can be learnt much quicker than how to apply good engineering principles.

Engineers whose main competitive advantage is domain knowledge are probably not that brilliant at engineering. They might still find employment in other areas of the industry where they accumulated domain knowledge.

Re: LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do

#16

Post by josephg »

lelanthran wrote: post #7
applfanboysbgon wrote: post #4

> Maybe I should consider transforming my woodworking hobby into a profession... Whatever your feelings on the future of the industry are, it's hard to imagine you'll find more professional success in artisan woodworking than artisan software.

> Whatever your feelings on the future of the industry are, it's hard to imagine you'll find more professional success in artisan woodworking than artisan software. A small percentage of the market, maybe a fraction of a percent, are still willing to pay for hand-built goods - bonus if it's thoroughly modern but retro (steam-punk keyboards, maybe). Exactly zero percent of the market is willing to pay for hand-built s…

> Exactly zero percent of the market is willing to pay for hand-built software.

People are increasingly associating “AI art” with cheap slop. I wonder if the same will ever happen to programming.

Re: LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do

#17

Post by ieie3366 »

Yes this has been my experience as well.

It's crazy the crazed anti-AI people yelling with foam with their mouth that it's useless, meanwhile Claude for me at work oneshots complex bugs in a massive project with a 95% success rate. And the customer happiness survey has never been as good as it's now btw

Re: LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do

#18

Post by iandanforth »

Wut? I pilot LLMs all day but there's no way in hell I'd agree to be at the helm of a finance product. That first pillar is still there. Maybe the author isn't aware of the impact they have, but I know, with the evidence of reverted PRs, that when I step outside my area of deep knowledge I can no longer call BS on the agents. Our most capable agent, with access to the same kind of distributed systems the author talks about, is regularly wrong, frequently myopic, and just outright dumb constantly. It's the expertise of engineers on the team that push it back on track.

Re: LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do

#20

Post by nkzd »

I am also feeling anxious. I lucked out by having natural inclination towards software development, career which can provide good upper middle class life to anyone. But I feel like writing is on the wall. If I don’t find a way to pivot to something else, I might experience class migration, but in the opposite direction this time.
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