Earlier quoted context omitted.
Half strawman -- a mudman, perhaps. Because we're seeing proper experts with credentials jump on the 'shit, AI can do all of this for me' realization blog post train.
Which experts?
Does Linus Torvalds count?
The next two years of software engineering
121–130 of 403 posts
Re: The next two years of software engineering
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
All I know is that firing half my employees and never hiring entry level people again nets me a bonus next quarter. Not really sure why this article is talking about what happens 2 years from now since that’s 8 times longer than anything anyone with money or power cares about.
What a benevolent bossman here, keeping 50% of the jockeys around this quarter. He is probably sacrificing one of his yachts for this.
He’s keeping some around so he can fire half again next quarter for another bonus. That’s the sort of forward-thinking strategic direction that made him the boss man.
Re: The next two years of software engineering
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The whole story about vibecoding and LLMs replacing engineers has become a huge distraction Because the first thing that comes from individual speed up is not engineers making more money but there being less engineers, How much less is the question? Would they be satisfied with 10%, 50% or may be 99%?
Generally the demand for software engineers has increased as their productivity has increased, looking back over the past few decades. There seems to be effectively infinite demand for software from consumers and enterprises so the cheaper it gets the more they buy. If we doubled agricultural productivity globally we'd need to have fewer farmers because there's no way we can all eat twice as much food. But we can abs…
This reasoning is flawed in my opinion, because at the end of the day, the software still has to be paid for (for the people that want/need to make a living out of it), and customers wallet are finite.
Our attention is also a finite resource (24h a day max). We already see how this has been the cause for the enshittificaton of large swathes of software like social media where grabbing the attention for a few seconds more drives the main innovation...
Re: The next two years of software engineering
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The whole story about vibecoding and LLMs replacing engineers has become a huge distraction Because the first thing that comes from individual speed up is not engineers making more money but there being less engineers, How much less is the question? Would they be satisfied with 10%, 50% or may be 99%?
Generally the demand for software engineers has increased as their productivity has increased, looking back over the past few decades. There seems to be effectively infinite demand for software from consumers and enterprises so the cheaper it gets the more they buy. If we doubled agricultural productivity globally we'd need to have fewer farmers because there's no way we can all eat twice as much food. But we can abs…
the demand for software has increased. The demand for software engineers has increased proportionally, because we were the only source of software. This correlation might no longer hold.
Depending on how the future shapes up, we may have gone from artisans to middlemen, at which point we're only in the business of added value and a lot of coding is over.
Not the Google kind of coding, but the "I need a website for my restaur1ant" kind, or the "I need to agregate data from these excel files in a certain way" kind. Anything where you'd accept cheap and disposable. Perhaps even the traditional startup, if POCs are vibecoded and engineers are only introducer later.
Those are huge businesses, even if they are not present in the HN bubble.
Re: The next two years of software engineering
#125> Senior developers: Fewer juniors means more grunt work landing on your plate
I'm not sure I agree with that. Right now as a senior my task involves reviewing code from juniors; replace juniors with AI and it means reviewing code from AI. More or less the same thing.
Re: The next two years of software engineering
#126The most useful thing juniors can do now is use AI to rapidly get up to the speed with the new skill floor. Learn like crazy. Self learning is empowered by AI. Engineers > developers > coders.
Scientists > engineers > developers > coders
Re: The next two years of software engineering
#127The most useful thing juniors can do now is use AI to rapidly get up to the speed with the new skill floor. Learn like crazy. Self learning is empowered by AI. Engineers > developers > coders.
Scientists > engineers > developers > coders
Mathematicians > scientists > engineers > developers > coders
Re: The next two years of software engineering
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't see the market flooded yet with software that was "so easy to build using LLMs". Last year was, as it seems, just a normal year in terms of global software output.
This is such a stupid argument. A very significant amount of code never makes it into the public sphere. None of the code I've written professionally in the last 26 years is publicly accessible, and if someone uses a product I've written they likely don't care if it was written with the aid of an LLM or not. Not to mention agent capabilities at the end of last year were vastly different to those at the start of the y…
Even if a portion of software is not released to the general public, you'd still expect an increase in the amount of software released to the general public.
Even if LLMs became better during the year, you'd still expect an increase in releases.
Re: The next two years of software engineering
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
Scientists > engineers > developers > coders
Mathematicians > scientists > engineers > developers > coders
Re: The next two years of software engineering
#130Sometimes I wonder if I made the wrong choice with software development. Even after getting to a senior role, according to this article, you're still expected to get more education and work on side projects outside of work. Am I supposed to want to code all the time? When can I pursue hobbies, a social life, etc.
It's funny you should ask this. When I started out, 30 years ago, here were the answers you'd get from most people: > Am I supposed to want to code all the time? Yes. > When can I pursue hobbies, Your hobby should be coding fun apps for yourself > a social life, etc. You social life should be hanging out with other engineers talking about engineering things. And the most successful people I know basically did exactly…
> And the most successful people I know basically did exactly that.
Well that depends heavily on how you define successful. Successful in life? I would tend to disagree, unless you believe that career is the only thing that counts. But even when career is concerned: the most successful people I know went on from being developer to some high end management role. The skills that brought them there definitely did not come from hanging out with other engineers talking about engineering things.