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AI’s impact on engineering jobs may be different than expected

semiengineering.com

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Re: AI’s impact on engineering jobs may be different than expected

#141

Post by randycupertino »

pousada wrote: post #47
volkk wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the wonderful modern world of "everyone must build their personal brand"

The worst thing is that it works. (As a musician) i never invested in a personal brand or taking part in the social media rat race and figured I concentrate on the art / craft over meaningless performance online. Well guess who is getting 0 gigs now because “too few followers/visibility” (or maybe my music just sucks who knows …)

I routinely see this in biotech, I've seen hiring managers from our Clinical Science team blatantly discriminate against candidates not on linkedin, even if they come with a strong referral and have 15-page super thorough CVs with 150 credible publication references. "Oh, they're not on linkedin, this person is sketchy" - immediately disqualifies candidate.

I had a pretty slim linkedin and actually beefed it up after seeing how much weight the execs and higher ups I work with give it. It's really annoying, I actually hate linkedin but basically got forced into using it.

Re: AI’s impact on engineering jobs may be different than expected

#142

Post by daxfohl »

jacquesm wrote: post #139
daxfohl wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's good to hear actually. It's usually a downer when a strongly held belief is contradicted with hard evidence, but I'm excited to hear that there's life yet in the industry outside of AI. Any specific trends or themes you can share?

Energy is a much larger theme than it was in the years before (obviously, since we're in the EU and energy overall is a larger theme in society here. This has a reflection in the VC market, but it also is part of a much larger trend, climate change and CO2 neutrality). Another trend - and this surprised us - is a much stronger presence of really hard tech and associated industries and finally - for obvious reasons, s…

Totally makes sense. Things that (once complete) have more realizable tangible value, rather than "optimizing user engagement" aka "enshittification" as some kind of imaginary value store for the last 20 years and is now being called in.

Re: AI’s impact on engineering jobs may be different than expected

#143

Post by bopbopbop7 »

llmslave wrote: post #13

Its pretty clear that any white collar work where the outputs can be verified and tested in a reinforcement learning environment, will be automated

Right. And when we automate work by formalizing it into verifiable, testable rules, it's called… programming. We have been doing that for decades.

Re: AI’s impact on engineering jobs may be different than expected

#144

Post by jacquesm »

daxfohl wrote: post #142
jacquesm wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Energy is a much larger theme than it was in the years before (obviously, since we're in the EU and energy overall is a larger theme in society here. This has a reflection in the VC market, but it also is part of a much larger trend, climate change and CO2 neutrality). Another trend - and this surprised us - is a much stronger presence of really hard tech and associated industries and finally - for obvious reasons, s…

Totally makes sense. Things that (once complete) have more realizable tangible value, rather than "optimizing user engagement" aka "enshittification" as some kind of imaginary value store for the last 20 years and is now being called in.

What is especially interesting is to see the delta between the things that are looked at in pre-DD and which then make it to actual DD after terms are signed.

Re: AI’s impact on engineering jobs may be different than expected

#145

Post by bigfishrunning »

reactordev wrote: post #131
Lramseyer wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have to understand the people in the article are execs from the chip EDA (Electronic Design Automation) industry. It's full of dinosaurs who have resisted innovation for the past 30 years. Of course they're going to be blowing hot air about how they're "embracing AI". It's a threat to their business model. I'm a little biased though since I work in chip design and I maintain an open source EDA project. I agree wi…

It’s in software too. Old guard leadership wanting “AI” as a badge but not knowing what to do with it. They are just sprinkling it into their processes and exfiltrating data while engineers continue to make a mess of things. Unlike real AI projects that utilize it for workflows, or generating models that do a thing. Nope, they are taking a Jira ticket, asking copilot, reviewing copilot, responding to Jira ticket. The…

Lol it's cute you think they're reviewing copilot. They're copying and pasting a wall of text without reading it.

Re: AI’s impact on engineering jobs may be different than expected

#146

Post by [deleted] »

llmslave wrote: post #43
3vidence wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ironically I feel like our QA team is busier than ever since most e2e user-ish tests require coordinating tools that is just beyond current LLM capabilities. We are pumping out features faster that require more QA to verify.

this is just an intermediate thing until the tooling and models catch up

[deleted]

Re: AI’s impact on engineering jobs may be different than expected

#147

Post by bopbopbop7 »

falloutx wrote: post #135
llmslave wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this is just an intermediate thing until the tooling and models catch up

Progress is not always linear, Until it actually does it we can't say anything. This assumption is only peddled by AI companies to get the investments and is not a scientific assumption.

Just a couple more weeks and a couple more trillion to Altman.

Re: AI’s impact on engineering jobs may be different than expected

#148

Post by reactordev »

bigfishrunning wrote: post #145
reactordev wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s in software too. Old guard leadership wanting “AI” as a badge but not knowing what to do with it. They are just sprinkling it into their processes and exfiltrating data while engineers continue to make a mess of things. Unlike real AI projects that utilize it for workflows, or generating models that do a thing. Nope, they are taking a Jira ticket, asking copilot, reviewing copilot, responding to Jira ticket. The…

Lol it's cute you think they're reviewing copilot. They're copying and pasting a wall of text without reading it.

No, it’s integrated into the repo through “projects” and stuff in github enterprise. It’s not copy and paste…

Re: AI’s impact on engineering jobs may be different than expected

#149

Post by cxvwbvb »

pwarner wrote: post #122
warmedcookie wrote: post #118

Let's presume / speculate for a moment that companies will only need 1 developer to do the job of 10 developers because of AI. That would also mean 10 developers can do the job of 100 developers. A company that cuts developers to save money whose moat is not big enough may quickly find themselves out-competed by a company that sees this as an opportunity to overtake their competitor. They will have to hire more devel…

Yeah I think this is a good way to think about it. I mean Google, MSFT for example have effectively unlimited developers, and their products still suck in some areas (Teams is my number one worst) so maybe AI will allow them to upgrade their features and compete

ermmm youre missing a bigger point.

MSFT, GOOG et al have an enormous army of engineers. And yet, they dont seem to be continually releasing one hit product after another. Why is that? Because writing lines of code is not the bottleneck of continually producing and bringing new products to market.

Its crazy to me how people are missing the point with all this.

Re: AI’s impact on engineering jobs may be different than expected

#150

Post by mNovak »

I'm going to call BS on that chart of "AI-driven chip design". What "AI" tools has Cadence been providing since 2021 that are reaching 40-50% of "chip design" (what does that even mean?). Is AI here just any old algorithmic auto-router? Or a fuzzy search of the IP library?
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