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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

#41

Post by jalev »

iandanforth wrote: post #18

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…

Unfortunately every software related industry is embracing LLM/Codegen. Your banks, fintechs, insurance. Everyone. Your concerns are the same I'm having, yet it's regularly dismissed or hand-waved away as "don't worry about it the delivery velocity/ROI is worth it"

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

#42

Post by nkrisc »

p-e-w wrote: post #25
josephg wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

People can’t even reliably recognize AI art anymore. The classic “AI images were everywhere in 2023, but I rarely see them now” phenomenon.

I see a lot more bad art now. I suspect most of it is AI, but I can’t prove it.

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

#43

Post by gdiamos »

What I tell my team to do is to drop using so many cloud saas apps, and build more themselves using LLMs.

I’m not planning on firing people, but I am planning on building more, using more tokens, and less app subscriptions.

One aspect of building that doesn’t erode is human values.

LLMs don’t create software with zero direction and although I do have 12 agents building constantly, I run out of attention to increase that to 100.

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

#44

Post by jmyeet »

cassianoleal wrote: post #15

> 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…

That's an extraordinarily rosy view of the future.

I'm old enough to remember the dot-com crash, specifically the years afterwards. In 2002-2003, the unemployment rate of software engineers was something like 40%. In fact, the only reason it wasn't higher was because of the number of people who had permanently left the field to become plumbers (or other trades).

I think this is going to be worse. In the dot-com crash, what really happened is that non-businesses got funded and it basically the capital markets ceased to function to a large degree. That's not what's happening now. Yes, huge amounts of money are going into AI companies but the change is more structural.

Other industries have gone through this. In the 1980s a bunch of industries were intentionally destroyed or offshored in areas that have never recovered. This has continuing social, economic and political impacts. I think people are being naive here thinking this can't or won't happen in tech.

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

#45

Post by Hamuko »

jalev wrote: post #41
iandanforth wrote: post #18

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…

Unfortunately every software related industry is embracing LLM/Codegen. Your banks, fintechs, insurance. Everyone. Your concerns are the same I'm having, yet it's regularly dismissed or hand-waved away as "don't worry about it the delivery velocity/ROI is worth it"

Are banks that concerned about velocity? Because moving fast and breaking things in the banking sector can get extremely expensive. It's also not a who-gives-a-shit industry like operating a taxi service or hosting images, but a very tightly regulated sector.

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

#46

Post by NikolaNovak »

cassianoleal wrote: post #15

> 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…

>>"Domain knowledge can be learnt much quicker than how to apply good engineering principles."

I'm not sure that's universally true. Good software engineers who are arrogant about easily acquired domain knowledge have been the downfall of many an ERP system.

There's SO much IT that's literally all about putting business rules into the system.

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

#47

Post by verdverm »

trilogic wrote: post #5

>Of course, I'm still employable because someone has to review the code and steer the robot... We will work for the robots, steering them to steer us.

The saying goes... first we shape our tools, then they shape us

We are now manufacturing intelligence (why it's artificial) and it shall be interesting to see how it shapes us individually and as a whole.

While marching on May Day, the woman next to me made the comment that Ai will force every human and humanity to reflect on what it means to be human, all of us at the same time over a short time period. What makes a human valuable beyond their work? Why do we go to other people when their expertise is at everyone's fingertip? What value are we giving, trading, or sharing in the time we have in this world?

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

#48

Post by mactavish88 »

> I still have one pillar standing, though: code quality and software architecture - what's now being reduced to being called "taste".

Genuine question: what exactly is "quality"?

It's something I've been trying to understand for a very long time. It seems like it's entirely contextual, and it has both subjective and objective facets (the latter only for quantifiable things, and still entirely contextual).

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

#49

Post by dominotw »

gdiamos wrote: post #43

What I tell my team to do is to drop using so many cloud saas apps, and build more themselves using LLMs. I’m not planning on firing people, but I am planning on building more, using more tokens, and less app subscriptions. One aspect of building that doesn’t erode is human values. LLMs don’t create software with zero direction and although I do have 12 agents building constantly, I run out of attention to increase t…

you dont need to vibe code shitty apps. you just need to learn how to use apps like codex, claude desktop.

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

#50

Post by misswaterfairy »

cassianoleal wrote: post #15

> 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…

> Domain knowledge can be learnt much quicker than how to apply good engineering principles.

Partially disagree. Broad-strokes domain knowledge can be learned quickly, but honing that domain knowledge with nuance and consideration for complexity, particularly for organisations that are unique and are not often thought of as 'software development houses', can take years if not decades.

Yet I still see (and code review) 'professional' software developers that don't follow good software engineering practice.

> Engineers whose main competitive advantage is domain knowledge are probably not that brilliant at engineering.

The same is also true of engineers without domain knowledge, certainly in my experience. Maybe we just got unlucky...

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