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AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?

blog.florianherrengt.com

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Re: AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?

#131

Post by ryandrake »

RSHEPP wrote: post #97
Syntaf wrote: post #35

> bad engineers were always a liability This part of the article hits home for me. With AI, "bad" engineers can now amplify their "bad" engineering x10 across the organization. The most egregious of these cases for me is often long tenured engineers who have lost interest in the craft, creating a dangerous combination of having enough merit to ship but not enough interest to make what they ship _good_. I am still a f…

This 100%. I just requested a hackathon for performance improvement (might be wasted effort). We are pushing tons of code and now our CPU usage has grown exponentially over the past year because the bad engineers just ship whatever Claude gives them and do not think about the consequences. Our biggest consumer of CPU right now is HTTP connection churn because engineers are creating new clients every request we handle…

Exactly. For most of my career, bad engineers (or juniors who were earnestly learning) would struggle to even create output that compiled, let alone ran. And it would take them a long time to implement something poorly. So the blast radius from their incompetence would be limited. Today, a bad engineer can churn out ten thousand lines of garbage that actually compiles and runs, before my first cup of coffee. If not on a tight leash, they'll sink the whole codebase or inundate every senior person with garbage code review requests. The blast radius is unlimited!

Re: AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?

#132

Post by florianherrengt »

dominotw wrote: post #116
scronkfinkle wrote: post #52

I think of it more as "the automation of the stackoverflow engineer". In enterprise software, there has always just been a non-negotiable large volume of code that was required to be written. This has traditionally been offloaded by having seniors do the hard thinking then distill it into a jira ticket which could be handed off to an engineer that'd actually write the code and punch every hiccup into google along the…

what is so 'hard thinking' about building a crud app

Nobody is getting paid significant money just to build a simple CRUD app. Even before AI. Companies pay experienced engineers because the supposedly simple CRUD sits inside a messy real system with years of business rules, constraints, integrations and bad decisions have consequences.

Re: AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?

#133

Post by Applejinx »

edukite wrote: post #69
Manfrednotfunny wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a few years, it just might. If maintenance and security is fully automated and for small changes or a small feature you will only dump some spec document into your agent platform, for sure.

Just another 6 months bro, only another funding bro, I promise, all devs will be replaced bro I have stupid question here. Why they sell tokens instead of AI generated full application and AI fixes to your code without you needing a single dev?

Wait.

Re: AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?

#134

Post by _fat_santa »

Syntaf wrote: post #35

> bad engineers were always a liability This part of the article hits home for me. With AI, "bad" engineers can now amplify their "bad" engineering x10 across the organization. The most egregious of these cases for me is often long tenured engineers who have lost interest in the craft, creating a dangerous combination of having enough merit to ship but not enough interest to make what they ship _good_. I am still a f…

My team is currently developing our 3rd product this year where 99% of the code is written by an agent. One thing I've definitely noticed is our problem solving hasn't stopped, it just moved up the stack to the "agent layer".

A big part of this is ensuring that a "bad" engineers can still write solid code and also investing in systems that make it easier for us to review code.

When it comes to writing code, we have this entire library of coding standards that we've moved from one project to another. It describes, sometimes in excruciating detail, exactly how we want our code structured, antipatterns, best practices, etc.

On the review side we have invested equally into skills that split up code into readable chunks, take screenshots of any UI changes for quick validation, and a whole battery of tests to ensure that we're not generating slop.

If you were to look at just our development process, you would conclude that we're very lazy engineers. We seldom write code by hand, we seldom ask for corrections and our reviews are more of a cursory look at the PR rather than a deep review.

But the real work is not in the "development layer", it's now in the "agent layer". Making sure the agent knows how to write solid code so we don't need to write code by hand, making sure it doesn't make dumb mistakes so we don't have to correct it, and structuring our review process in such a way where an engineer only has to take a cursory look at the code.

The key difference we noticed between the "old way" and the "new way" is the "new way" is way more scalable and we're able to move way faster than we ever could before.

Re: AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?

#136

Post by nwatson »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #111
whateveracct wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Degrees take 4 years. It's a very laggy indicator.

People can switch majors. But despite me saying that, I think it's going to take longer than four years. It takes a while for people to realize that a dream is dead.

Some companies hire junior devs to adopt AI-first practices to then drag their seniors in the same direction.

Re: AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?

#137

Post by jasode »

sarchertech wrote: post #65
scronkfinkle wrote: post #52

I think of it more as "the automation of the stackoverflow engineer". In enterprise software, there has always just been a non-negotiable large volume of code that was required to be written. This has traditionally been offloaded by having seniors do the hard thinking then distill it into a jira ticket which could be handed off to an engineer that'd actually write the code and punch every hiccup into google along the…

>This has traditionally been offloaded by having seniors do the hard thinking then distill it into a jira ticket which could be handed off to an engineer that'd actually write the code and punch every hiccup into google along the way. This is the theory, but I’ve never worked anywhere (and I’ve worked at a lot of places over 20 years) that actually did it like that in practice. What tends to happen is that the EMs an…

>This is the theory, but I’ve never worked anywhere (and I’ve worked at a lot of places over 20 years) that actually did it like that in practice.

>What tends to happen is that the EMs and PMs look at who’s free and give that person the task.

The gp you replied to qualified it with "enterprise software" (LOB, CRUD, etc aka "cost center") so your observations where senior -vs- junior engineers being more fungible can be true.

However, in "engineering" type of software products (game engines, RDBMS engines, operating systems, etc) where the software is more often a "product" that's sold (aka profit center) ... there are definitely different layers of complexity where senior and junior engineers are not fungible at all.

One way to describe the differences of complexity and criticality in various parts of the source tree is the "core" parts vs the "leaf" parts. E.g. in a game engine or Linux kernel, the deep parts of the engine or os process scheduler where the tight loops are located are the "core" parts. They most likely would be worked on by the most senior people.

But the game engine may have some less complex code for handling text width on a menu for different foreign languages. Or the os needs a new menu option on the installer to ask for the users age. Those would be more "leaf" functionality in the source tree. A junior could get assigned to those parts with less risk. After a few years of experience, he might be trusted enough to work on the deep "core" logic without screwing things up in catastrophic ways for a million customers.

A product with several million lines of source code will invariably have both the "hard parts" and "easy parts" so the new hires and juniors will work on the easier stuff first.

There's also a spectrum of hard-to-easy in enterprise software but it's much more narrow than engineering code bases.

Re: AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?

#138

Post by jnpnj »

Syntaf wrote: post #35

> bad engineers were always a liability This part of the article hits home for me. With AI, "bad" engineers can now amplify their "bad" engineering x10 across the organization. The most egregious of these cases for me is often long tenured engineers who have lost interest in the craft, creating a dangerous combination of having enough merit to ship but not enough interest to make what they ship _good_. I am still a f…

I've seen a subtler variant of that. Since 2025 winter model improvements, low quality developers can now commit somehow decent stuff more regularly, but as before, they still don't own the solution space independently. LLM output is now larger than what they can envision and cracks will simply happen further away, only to be discovered by someone else later. It's strange everything changes so nothing changes phenomenon.

Re: AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?

#139

Post by pjmlp »

esafak wrote: post #22
mikert89 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the field is basically over as a long term career unless you are truly exceptional. It will become very easy to build most software, and the upper end will be filled with the top people in the country/from abroad. Wages are certainly going down for most software roles

Only if you run out of things to write. Is your back log ever empty?

Yes, when the project budget runs out and contractor team has to leave.

Re: AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?

#140

Post by fl4regun »

shimman wrote: post #120
fl4regun wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IME many big companies are filled with mediocre morons, or at least people who just don't care enough to do better than mediocre. Still not the fault of brown people either way.

Why are you bringing racism into the equation? It's not an unreasonable thing for people of a country to think that the government should do more to protect their livelihoods over a corporation's balance sheet.

perhaps if you read the comment chain you would realize I'm not the one who introduced this into the conversation. Sorry that you disagree with my position.
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