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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?

#161

Post by mikert89 »

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…

the future is already here, its just not evenly distributed

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

#162

Post by davidw »

chaps wrote: post #51
davidw wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People have been fretting about 'foreigners' taking their jobs for decades and it never really happened. This is all about LLM's. I mean, think about it; just a few short years ago there was a very strong market for software engineers, despite outsourcing and immigration being very much part of the landscape.

Orrrrrr... it could be a complex combination of outsourcing, an over-reliance on degrees, LLMs, a lack of "apprenticeship" mentoring, etc etc etc. I was very fortunate to get a job in a NOC a little bit after high school where I learned things one'd expect to learn in an entry level job. The team I worked on was all about mentorship, learning, and building people to the next level. Haven't seen that attitude elsewher…

> outsourcing, an over-reliance on degrees, LLMs, a lack of "apprenticeship" mentoring,

Which of those things changed (along with higher interest rates) in the past few years though? All the other variables did not change. They were present 5 years ago and present 10 years ago too. To me that's indicative that those factors are not the cause of a soft market for software engineers in 2026.

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

#163

Post by ok123456 »

falcor84 wrote: post #64
Tangurena2 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maintenance will be forever. Tax laws change annually, so the payroll app will never stop being updated.

I don't accept that argument. As I see it, laws should be structured as data rather than code, using a clean non-Turing-Complete DSL for any embedded logic and calculations. Maybe there would still be occasional situations when new software features are needed, but it should be a rare occurrence rather than on every new change.

People just need to add/subtract an input box and update the tax rates. They don't need an ontology of taxes and goods.

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

#165

Post by cindyllm »

fennecfoxy wrote: post #155
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 have found this to some degree (even though I work with amazing people day to day). It's much easier for people to pump out absolute garbage, you know the kind of "just get it done fast" slop that management types cry out for. And then they wonder why everything end ups broken, not being maintained etc. And I think the contrast between good and bad code output is much more impactful. Someone can pump out 10x the ba…

[dead]

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

#166

Post by a34729t »

mikert89 wrote: post #38
davidw wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People have been fretting about 'foreigners' taking their jobs for decades and it never really happened. This is all about LLM's. I mean, think about it; just a few short years ago there was a very strong market for software engineers, despite outsourcing and immigration being very much part of the landscape.

have you been inside any big tech company? lots of orgs are > 80% foreign.

Yeah my new VP is from a certain country in the eastern hemisphere, and the interviews I've conducted for US-based candidates oddly enough have been 100% of engineers from that same country (say 30 or so in the last 2 years).

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

#167

Post by shimman »

SpacePortKnight wrote: post #118
scronkfinkle wrote: post #52

I think of it more as "the automation of the stackoverflow engineer". In enterprise software, there has always just been a non-negotiable large volume of code that was required to be written. This has traditionally been offloaded by having seniors do the hard thinking then distill it into a jira ticket which could be handed off to an engineer that'd actually write the code and punch every hiccup into google along the…

I have been a software engineer for 8 years and not once I have had a jira ticket handed over to me by a senior engineer. I have worked in startups before and currently work at bkng, and have friends at uber. Everywhere it is expected that the engineers will create their own tickets and refine them with the team. If you are in a product facing team, your PM could even help you with a PRD but I have not seen one in th…

Do you think it's acceptable to do the work of multiple full time positions? I can't imagine it's very sustainable, nor healthy for you (both body and soul).

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

#168

Post by Syntaf »

ThePhysicist wrote: post #68
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…

Maybe those engineers that don't care about making their solution _good_ are actually the good engineers, have you ever thought about that??? There are exceptions where quality really matters but most software shops build CRUD web apps where it's not really a good characteristic to obsess over the cleanest and most elegant details, instead you need to get the stuff the customer wants done! I for one tend to care less…

Totally agree with your framing here, but that is also what I fundamentally consider "good" code -- it's code that solves the problem that your customers/business needs without making it _harder_ to solve the next problem.

There are valid situations where the best code you can write is code you never look at and throw out the next month; there are equally valid situations where the best code is well thought through and reasoned abstractions for an area you expect to become core to the business in the near future.

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

#169

Post by b40d-48b2-979e »

cbg0 wrote: post #75
xyst wrote: post #43

AI generated code is the new "lines of code" metric used by middle management.

Actually "AI spending" is the new "lines of code" metric.

Too real. I got DMed by management recently asking if I was anti-AI because I had the lowest spend on the team as the lead, y'know, the one that has to review all the slop my peers are generating.
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