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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?

#941

Post by defrost »

WalterBright wrote: post #940
tombert wrote: post #933

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I haven't heard of any interview method that wasn't roundly condemned on HN. Sure, but none have been more thoroughly condemned (and correctly) than the idiotic leetcode whiteboard challenges. > And you wouldn't be wasting your time on candidates who: 1. don't know what a hashmap or minheap is 2. didn't bother to study up before the interview OR, and hear me out, you actively filter out people who know how stupid t…

I appreciate that, but my whole life I've heard again and again and again that "high stakes testing" does not work. I've heard all the arguments. But the bottom line is the testing is an effective filter. After all, would you get on a jetliner piloted by a handsome fellow with a firm handshake who failed to pass all the written tests, but really knows how to fly? It's not that hard to study the leetcode books. Doesn'…

Person that can fly every time - Diana Barnato Walker flew 80 types of aircraft before finally getting a commercial flying licence.

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

#942

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

Silhouette wrote: post #928
disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #839

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 taugh…

> 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.

This is why any such regulation is likely to end up in a much better state if it's driven by actual practitioners. However, given how many software people are wildly against this, it seems unlikely to happen and so we'll end up in the less good state you note above.

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

#943

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

groundzeros2015 wrote: post #896
disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #836

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It’s similar to how lawyers and regulatory compliance rarely change the product. They change how the product is talked about and framed for the purpose of regulation. This is true, and basically what tends to happen is that if the Head of some compliance function (e.g. internal audit) is causing problems for the business, then they are replaced with someone who won't cause such problems. It's still better than noth…

> It's still better than nothing. Once again the alternative is not nothing. The most important factor is that they are stakeholders in a project with influence. That is the reality right now, even without credentials.

> Once again the alternative is not nothing.

Can you help me understand what the alternative is?

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

#944

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

sadlyuramoron wrote: post #909
disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #833

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> About occupational licensing for software: it's also a uniquely global market, so I'm not sure how any one economy moving ahead with occupational licensing would work, unless they also restricted what software you can import or use in the cloud. Relatively easily, tbh. Just create a regulation that requires either the country's standards or equivalent ones to be used in the creation of any software sold to people/b…

Want to get standards-compliant garbage? That's how you get standards-compliant garbage.

I don't really, but at least there would be standards. Like, the massive amount of hacks and breaches we've seen in the past ten years indicate that something needs to happen.

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

#945

Post by blu3pr1n7 »

dijit wrote: post #865
blu3pr1n7 wrote: post #848

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it really possible to do that? I think if we were to go down this avenue we would need to consider titles other than software engineer.

yes, it's possible. That's why there's no Software "Engineers" without degrees in Quebec.

Maybe I wasn’t clear enough. The engineering requirements to be a competent software engineer in HFT a Genomics vary wildly. If completing a computer science degree and maybe a Msc in computer science is the answer fair enough, but I don’t think those credentials are enough to label someone a competent Software Engineer.

What could be a generic framework? Do you have any reference to standards?

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

#947

Post by tombert »

WalterBright wrote: post #940
tombert wrote: post #933

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I haven't heard of any interview method that wasn't roundly condemned on HN. Sure, but none have been more thoroughly condemned (and correctly) than the idiotic leetcode whiteboard challenges. > And you wouldn't be wasting your time on candidates who: 1. don't know what a hashmap or minheap is 2. didn't bother to study up before the interview OR, and hear me out, you actively filter out people who know how stupid t…

I appreciate that, but my whole life I've heard again and again and again that "high stakes testing" does not work. I've heard all the arguments. But the bottom line is the testing is an effective filter. After all, would you get on a jetliner piloted by a handsome fellow with a firm handshake who failed to pass all the written tests, but really knows how to fly? It's not that hard to study the leetcode books. Doesn'…

> It's not that hard to study the leetcode books. Doesn't the prize of a top shelf salary make it worthwhile? It's a good investment in your career

You are arguing two different points here.

I am, generally speaking, reasonably good at the leetcode stuff, because I agree that it’s not that hard to get good at it. As a practical thing for society as it currently is, sure, studying up on the idiotic leetcode stuff is a relatively good investment.

But that pays little bearing on whether leetcode is a good test, and whether it should be something that we are using as a metric. I am arguing that it’s a dumb test and we should stop doing it at a systemic level.

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

#948

Post by Silhouette »

disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #942
Silhouette wrote: post #928

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 taugh…

> 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…

It looks like we agree here. I too think any useful regulation should be specified primarily by experienced practitioners who have been achieving demonstrably good outcomes. And I too think that in reality it would mostly likely be a very different type of person who got to write the rules - which is why I don't think our industry is ready for that kind of regulation and I believe introducing it now would be counterproductive.

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

#949

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

ryandrake wrote: post #142
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

> It will become very easy to build most software We keep hearing this, but where is the Photoshop killer written by a gas station attendant? Where is the PayPal alternative written by a retired nurse? Over and over we're told that software is now trivial to write, and Claude is evidently writing some billions of lines of code a day, but where are the results? Where is the vibe coded app toppling the legacy hand-code…

Extremely bad software is now easy to write.

Sadly, we have trained software users to pay for shit code.

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

#950

Post by andai »

dgellow wrote: post #454
api wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you go back in time and imagine yourself in 1950, would you have said that about computers in general? Yes their decisions are the result of pre programmed heuristics, but to the operator that can feel as opaque as AI. In fact in the early days of computing AI was used to refer to a broader swath of what we now call heuristics and machine learning. Is a very sophisticated computer driven adaptive control system ma…

LLMs don’t have a will of their own and will (very likely) never have one, they aren’t an entity or anything that can have a sense of self. They are a compressed dataset with a next token prediction engine. From the token prediction + complexity of the dataset + reinforcement learning + whatever other techniques AI folks are using we are able to derive judgement and decision making (of course the LLMs don’t judge or…

My fridge has a will to keep the food at a certain temperature.
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