"software engineer" covers a wide range of responsibilities. some engineers spend all their time contributing to the physics in a massive graphics engine. some spend most of their time as the sole maintainer of a web api that mostly plumbs together a bunch of services and provide data to UIs. some are frequently spitting out new services while other are maintaining 10 year old legacy codebases. the work we need to do, the tradeoffs we need to make, its just so vast.
now couple that with the wide range of variety (and dysfunction) that come from the business and organization. being a dev for a company which sells software is a whole different beast than being an in-house dev for a company which sells other products. startup, big org, old org, new org, strike team, the list goes on.
finally, engineers enjoy different aspects of building software more than others. the puzzle, the crafting, the api, the data structure, the architecture, solving end user needs, so many facets to what makes it enjoyable as a career.
this is a big reason why ai discourse online is so uneven and often unhelpful. were all assuming too much about what being a software engineer is; forgetting that my day-to-day can be wildly different than yours.
a lot of ai speedup comes from effective delegation of work. i do it, but i don't like it. it actively makes me feel tired in a way i don't feel when i do the work myself, or when i mentor and grow my team to do the work.
many other devs don't feel the way i do. some suddenly have these ai tools that make them feel more empowered and energized and excited.
llm's are genuinely a new computing paradigm because of their nature: plain human language as the interface. this is different enough that mapping our past computing concepts (like the evolution from assembly to C) may not hold as well as seem they should.
this all digs deep into who we are as individuals with specific desires, career history, goals, a specific role at a specific company. the part that's fucking beautiful and unique and human.
But if the aggressive industry-wide layoffs aren't enough of a clue, these giant ass companies (and the ai gatekeepers driving this shift) are not compatible with individual humans.
i dont mind llms as a tool, but im done with the perverse level of greed and inhumanity they seem to inspire in corporate leaders.