There's going to be very very very few engineers.
The ladder is missing rungs – Engineering Progression When AI Ate the Middle
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Re: The ladder is missing rungs – Engineering Progression When AI Ate the Middle
#12Haven't we been saying similar for all other aspects of software engineering too as they have changed over time? Writing code is just one responsibility amongst many.
I don't want code from someone/something that doesn't know the needs of the business, cannot find where to compromise effectively, does not understand the deployment environments their app will run in, would not know how to respond to an incident with their application in production, etc.
I don't think writing code with AI is relevant to career progress at all. What matters that I can hold someone accountable for the code we have in prod, and they'd better have answers or they don't have a job.
If they are dependable there, only then they can be trusted with more responsibility. That's all we're really talking about. You get paid to be accountable. You do not get paid to do one narrow thing well. It should not take you a decade to read and write code quickly and effectively. I'd argue that should have happened when you were in high school and college (how it was for everyone in upper management right now).
I feel like the quality of new hires has progressively become worse over the years, and we have made so many concessions to remedy it (AI included), and all it's doing is making the problem worse.
Re: The ladder is missing rungs – Engineering Progression When AI Ate the Middle
#13> and those tasks were never just tasks. They were the mechanism that built judgment, intuition, and the ability to supervise the systems we now delegate to AI.
Bullshit. The busywork wasn't being done by low level engineers to train them up, they were doing it because it needed doing, it was undesirable, and they were lowest on the totem pole.
Jobs are self training. Sure doing other jobs may give you some intuition that can be applied to new jobs. Manually writing code and fixing your human created mistakes obviously carries over for debugging AI written code. But people who start their careers with AI written code will also learn how to debug AI code. You don't learn how to architect a system by coding a system somebody else architected. At best you might pick up some common patterns by osmosis, but this often breeds worse engineers who do things as they have been done in the past without understanding why and without regard to how they really ought to be done. True understanding of why A was chosen in this case and B works better in another comes from actually doing the high level work.
Indeed, if AI usage is like any other tool that has come before it, those who grow up using it will be much more adept at utilizing it in practice than those who are adopting it now after spending a lifetime learning a different skillset. We don't exactly lament how much worse software engineers have gotten since they no longer learn how to sort their punch cards if they drop them.
Even if you are of the opinion that the tasks junior engineers do, which now AI can do, are fundamental to becoming competent at higher level skills, that's no problem. You can train people without them doing value-added work. Have engineers code the old fashioned way for training purposes. It's no different from doing math problems despite calculators existing. This is a problem only for extracting underpaid labor out of junior engineers with the lie that they are being paid in experience.
Re: The ladder is missing rungs – Engineering Progression When AI Ate the Middle
#14> and those tasks were never just tasks. They were the mechanism that built judgment, intuition, and the ability to supervise the systems we now delegate to AI. Bullshit. The busywork wasn't being done by low level engineers to train them up, they were doing it because it needed doing, it was undesirable, and they were lowest on the totem pole. Jobs are self training. Sure doing other jobs may give you some intuition…
>> and those tasks were never just tasks. They were the mechanism that built judgment, intuition, and the ability to supervise the systems we now delegate to AI.
>Bullshit. The busywork wasn't being done by low level engineers to train them up, they were doing it because it needed doing, it was undesirable, and they were lowest on the totem pole.
Why not both? It was work that needed doing AND it taught people to be better engineers.
Re: The ladder is missing rungs – Engineering Progression When AI Ate the Middle
#15> and those tasks were never just tasks. They were the mechanism that built judgment, intuition, and the ability to supervise the systems we now delegate to AI. Bullshit. The busywork wasn't being done by low level engineers to train them up, they were doing it because it needed doing, it was undesirable, and they were lowest on the totem pole. Jobs are self training. Sure doing other jobs may give you some intuition…
>> and those tasks were never just tasks. They were the mechanism that built judgment, intuition, and the ability to supervise the systems we now delegate to AI. >Bullshit. The busywork wasn't being done by low level engineers to train them up, they were doing it because it needed doing, it was undesirable, and they were lowest on the totem pole. Why not both? It was work that needed doing AND it taught people to be…
> it taught people to be better engineers.
It generally does not.
And if it does, they can still do those tasks as exercises.
Re: The ladder is missing rungs – Engineering Progression When AI Ate the Middle
#16Demand for software is large and as the cost goes down we'll want more of it, so there will be demand to keep training people.
Maybe. Depends on how good the substitute is. Demand for number crunching went up as costs went down, but nobody is training human "computers" anymore.
Re: The ladder is missing rungs – Engineering Progression When AI Ate the Middle
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah… > For tasks that would take a human under four minutes—small bug fixes, boilerplate, simple implementations—AI can now do these with near-100% success. For tasks that would take a human around one hour, AI has a roughly 50% success rate. For tasks over four hours, it comes in below a 10% success rate Opus 4.6 now does 12hr tasks with 50% success. The METR time horizon chart is insane… exponential progression.
How is success defined in those metrics? Is success "perfect - can deploy to prod immediately" or "saved some arbitrary amount of engineering time"? Anecdotal experience from my team of 15 engineers is we rarely get "perfect" but we do get enough to massive time savings across several common problem domains.
I think for me, it’s not so much an objective success metric as it is showing its progression over time.
That’s what marvels me is how fast LLMs are progressing. And it still feels like early days (!).
For methodology, I would check out the METR website though, they’ve published their results.
Re: The ladder is missing rungs – Engineering Progression When AI Ate the Middle
#18Kids growing up with PCs and learning by tinkering and making crap code reminds me of the Go (game) proverb: "Lose your first 50 games as quickly as possible." That time was so valuable.
Or, as I tell my students, "Every failure is a growth opportunity." I let them resubmit corrected projects for points, too. I'm desperate for them to get the reps in that they'd normally have had as juniors in the field.
Re: The ladder is missing rungs – Engineering Progression When AI Ate the Middle
#19[deleted]
Re: The ladder is missing rungs – Engineering Progression When AI Ate the Middle
#20Spot on. All those years of slinging code and debugging gave me and others the judgement and eye to check on all the AI generated code. I now wonder often about what hiring looks like in this new era. As a small startup, we just don't need junior engineers to do the day to day implementation. Do we instead hire a small number of people as apprentices to train on the high level patterns, spot trouble areas, develop go…
When your senior developers retire, and if the LLMs haven't caught up to their level by that time, where do you think new senior developers will come from?