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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?

#921

Post by roenxi »

breezybottom wrote: post #871
roenxi wrote: post #819

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can also buy from companies that hire licensed software engineers if you want to? The main thing that would stop people patronising licensed individuals is if there was no obvious skill gap between a licensed and unlicensed practitioner that justifies the price gap. People don't need a government body to tell them to check for credentials. If people care they can ask (I had to give a copy of my degree certificate…

That's the absurd libertarian logic. I'm supposed to be able to assess the credibility of whatever credentials I'm shown? Despite having no expertise in the field?

The government can sponsor a credential if that helps you? The libertarian position isn't that the government can't have a position on what the standard should be, just that people who think there is a more cost-effective standard should be allowed to use them.

Much like how you can hire a programmer based on that you think their work is good or they made a lot of money programming, rather than just limiting yourself to the people who went to some fancy university. If you don't feel competent at assessing programmer quality then you can exclusively hire ex-Google or MIT programmers or what have you and pay an absurd premium for the most credentialed US developers. But most people don't need to do that.

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

#922

Post by codexon »

Vegenoid wrote: post #911
codexon wrote: post #661

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The output is indistinguishable from manually written code.

"My vibecoded stuff is indistinguishable from handwritten stuff" and "I got anti-AI comments after vibecoding my website even though I didn't say anything about AI" are not very compatible with each other.

There was absolutely nothing showing that it was vibe coded other than the fact that a website that didn't get any updates for 5 years suddenly got a 20+ bullet point update. People just assumed it was vibed because of the sheer number of changes.

There was not 1 mention about anything being broken, they were simply complaining about AI.

Anti-AI psychosis is a very real thing that is happening https://x.com/Jediwolf/status/2054776716770320631

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

#923

Post by WalterBright »

rightbyte wrote: post #782
WalterBright wrote: post #747

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, but it shows a willingness and ability to do the work.

Such recruiting selects for KPI hunters. It is probably bad for an org to select for people that game it rather than doing "what is right". A dice throw and some chitchat would be better recruiting.

These arguments all sound familiar to the "high stakes testing" debate about the SATs. The tests were unfair, did not measure college readiness, could be gamed, etc.

Then universities dropped the SAT requirements. Even MIT was suckered into dropping them. It was a disaster. It turns out the SATs were a very strong predictor of college success. MIT and others reinstated the SATs.

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

#924

Post by WalterBright »

tombert wrote: post #763
WalterBright wrote: post #727

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might be surprised at how incompetent some engineers are. They get filtered out with the leetcode test. Of course, it doesn't filter them all out, and that's why there's a followup interview round.

I have given dozens of interviews at big companies and small companies and medium companies so I am not speaking out of my ass. These leetcode tests are not good filters, nothing is “surprising” me. Generally they are just wanky bullshit from some middle manager’s slightly-incorrect recollection of their first “data structures and algorithms” class, and the solution is almost invariably “use a hashmap” or “use a minh…

[dead]

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

#925

Post by Silhouette »

groundzeros2015 wrote: post #900
Silhouette wrote: post #677

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the physical engineering teams I've worked with the culture you just described is not what happens at all. There are always some people who seemingly live to circumvent the intention of rules lurking around the edges of regulated industries. But my own experience has been that real engineers very much value real engineering - it's often why they got into the field in the first place - and will push back hard again…

> circumvent the intention of rules lurking around the edges of regulated industries That’s not what I said, For every human activity there is an underlying reality and there is a social component of how it’s framed or talked about. Regulatory compliance is 90% social and 10% reality. So a focus on compliance means engineers spend less of their time on reality. > They won't be impressed at all by someone's big title…

Regulatory compliance is 90% social and 10% reality.

Again our experiences are on opposite ends of the spectrum. For safety issues in particular getting an engineer to sign off some plan when they will be accountable for that authority later is often easiest if you simply design the thing properly.

I have certainly seen compliance become a box-ticking exercise in other contexts but usually this seems to happen when the professionals involved were not personally responsible for their own decisions.

Imagine a new grad telling their boss “we aren’t going to build it like that because I learned X in school”. They have the same credentials!

We appear to live in different realities on this one too. In my reality new grads are not the people signing off major decisions in regulated industries and no-one would seriously suggest that a new grad's degree was an equivalent credential to the years of demonstrable professional experience and peer review that are typically required to reach a level of professional qualification where someone does have the authority to sign off those big decisions. Getting an undergraduate degree in a subject like engineering or medicine or law is just a foot in the door. The real work starts afterwards.

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

#926

Post by sleepycat801 »

> This was already happening before AI. But now, a lot more companies that previously might have taken many years to reach an unmaintainable state can get there in just a few months.

And who is going to want to fix that? Maintainers and systems people were the first to be laid off, by management who never valued the "cost centre" they represented, and the few remaining are trying to fight gravity and will likely take the blame when the systems they oversee fall in a heap.

Any new hire knows they will spend a few years building a mental map of institutional knowledge, only to be tossed on the scrapheap as soon as the system is working again.

If companies want to develop internal software as they appear to, they need to stop defining business processes in code, and certainly stop defining them in Jira tickets. Middle management has outsourced so much of their work to the software or operations departments and now its about to backfire.

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

#927

Post by sscaryterry »

WalterBright wrote: post #918
sscaryterry wrote: post #841

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they likely don't have the ambition to get the high pressure jobs. What absolute drivel. I've done plenty of leetcodes. I don't care about writing a qsort algorithm, I know the trade-offs, unless you're working for a FAANG or FAANG-adjacent company, the need to write your own sorting algorithm implementation is probably zero or near zero.

> I don't care about writing a qsort algorithm That wasn't the point. Would you wash your car before picking up your date for the first time? A dirty car would drive just as well, but your date will figure you don't care about the date going well.

There is difference between being a tidy, kept person and having ambitions. You're conflating the two.

(Edit: Perhaps I should have written in my original comment: I'm nobody's code-producing monkey, I'm not dancing for money or peanuts)

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

#928

Post by Silhouette »

disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #839
Silhouette wrote: post #677

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the physical engineering teams I've worked with the culture you just described is not what happens at all. There are always some people who seemingly live to circumvent the intention of rules lurking around the edges of regulated industries. But my own experience has been that real engineers very much value real engineering - it's often why they got into the field in the first place - and will push back hard again…

> They won't be impressed at all by someone's big title and even bigger budget while they're exercising that professional judgement either. Some of these people have had pretty stellar careers so I think it's safe to say their professional conduct hasn't damaged them with their employers or clients. It really depends on the status of the profession in society and the company. I'd expect lots of software organisations…

I'd expect lots of software organisations to fire a bunch of people looking for people pleasers until this becomes an accepted part of the business approach.

No doubt. Imposing this kind of professional standards to regulate an industry as rich as tech would never work unless the penalties for cutting corners involved making the offending organisations significantly less rich very quickly. They would need to be taught a very clear lesson that hiring people pleasers had become an expensive mistake.

As I commented elsewhere - the problem then becomes who gets to define what the proper path is. For example destroying companies because they chose not to follow the latest sage advice from anyone who once signed the Agile Manifesto does not seem like a good way to promote better quality software to me. And yet it seems highly likely that those are the kinds of people who would initially be engaged as "experts" by those seeking to establish the regulatory environment.

I don't want people like them. I want the quiet, unassuming developer you've never heard of because they're the principal engineer of a team you've also never heard of that has been developing life saving medical equipment without a single significant failure in a live environment for the 15 years since their first device went into use at a local hospital. Get me those people to write the rules - starting with what is acceptable practice when developing software that really needs to work and letting the people who know how to achieve the most challenging results figure out how to tone everything down for applications where imperfections might be more acceptable - and then we can talk about whether regulating software development effectively is now a viable proposition.

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

#929

Post by timr »

DonHopkins wrote: post #792
eloisius wrote: post #759

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So if it’s just a shit-test to see if the applicant has enough grit to grind through an arbitrary filter, and not to measure their aptitude, why not use Minecraft or something? Come into our office and show us how long it takes you to kill the End Dragon.

Factorio is a much better test of your design and programming and refectoring ability than Minecraft.

Just fly everyone out in a group and have a big rock-paper-scissors tournament. You can save on airfare.

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

#930

Post by sleepycat801 »

overgard wrote: post #375
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 kind of think the whole "Learn to Code" push of the 2010s was one of the worst things that happened to our industry. Call me a gatekeeper if you want but, we ended up with a lot of people that just can't do the job. The problem is our industry mostly doesn't have any sort of reasonable mentorship or apprenticeship culture, so we've always left it to the engineers to teach themselves. Sink or swim. The problem is th…

"learn to code" is just learning to read and write in a software language. But the industry expected those with basic literacy to perform any specialised task related to reading and writing.

Meanwhile, software engineering courses taught it as abstractions and algorithms, and electronic engineering taught control flow on bare metal.

No one, it appears, is taught design or system architecture outside the context of operating systems. Even requirements engineer is a rare job title.

As more complexity has fallen into the domain of software, nobody has been given responsibility for it. The way we treat junior developers now would be like expecting a carpenter or bricklayer to figure out building architechure and structural engineering, without formal training.

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