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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?

#171

Post by weatherlite »

iLoveOncall wrote: post #128
weatherlite wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But those H1Bs all come for a very narrow set of work - mostly software development or other adjacent roles. So your 4 million figure that counts all graduates in all fields doesn't make sense when we talk about tech. There are around 100k U.S CS graduates . You're telling me 100k H1-Bs don't make any impact on them?

You're counting only CS bachelors, in reality there's 400K graduates a year in software engineering fields. There's also only 60,000 H1-Bs a year for private companies. Lastly the majority of H1-Bs doesn't go to software engineering jobs, it's around 30-50%. There's also basically no US company hiring juniors via H1-Bs, so yeah, I'm saying it doesn't make any meaningful impact. 30K H1-Bs versus 400K grads...

The way you handled those numbers makes me think you have leadership potential, perhaps even U.S presidency material

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

#172

Post by AnimalMuppet »

nwatson wrote: post #136
AnimalMuppet wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People can switch majors. But despite me saying that, I think it's going to take longer than four years. It takes a while for people to realize that a dream is dead.

Some companies hire junior devs to adopt AI-first practices to then drag their seniors in the same direction.

Juniors to push the accelerator, seniors to pump the brakes. It could work.

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

#173

Post by shimman »

fl4regun wrote: post #140
shimman wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are you bringing racism into the equation? It's not an unreasonable thing for people of a country to think that the government should do more to protect their livelihoods over a corporation's balance sheet.

perhaps if you read the comment chain you would realize I'm not the one who introduced this into the conversation. Sorry that you disagree with my position.

wow I did not read this thread fully, my bad.

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

#174

Post by ryandvm »

Lord, this hits close to home.

It doesn't seem to be happening everywhere, but if you are unfortunate enough to work someplace with a "LinkedIn thought leader" high up on the engineering food chain, there's a really high likelihood that your organization is currently in the throes of an "everyone must be using AI for everything" fever dream.

And boy let me tell you, it is every bit as disastrous as the OP claims. Engineering managers are asking Claude to write up entire initiatives, then they hand off these nebulous AI slop manifestos to the teams where the requirements folks are having Claude shit out tons of superficially plausible Jira tickets. It finally lands on some poor engineer's plate and since these tickets are the technical equivalent of Finnegans Wake, they just end up asking Claude to read all this shit on `ultracode` and draft up a pull request. Which is then peer-reviewed by somebody using Claude.

I wish I were exaggerating.

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

#175

Post by danparsonson »

barbazoo wrote: post #10
florianherrengt wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But now they can now move so fast that nobody has a realistic chance to stop them before the damage compounds. They get into a much deeper mess much faster.

We always talk about damage, what's the damage here?

Code that accidentally ships every 100th order out for free... exploits releasing customer PID and causing regulatory nightmares... self-driving cars that reboot at 70mph... The only limit is your imagination!

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

#176

Post by JeremyNT »

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've heard some refer to this as a "nature is healing" scenario for the industry where if you only signed up for a high paycheck and didn't care to think critically about any of the work you're doing then this will be painful because that previously manual process has been automated. The floor of what's necessary to be considered valuable has been raised.

I feel like this is a bit of cope.

Right now you still need to have some skill to guide these things correctly to produce cohesive and functional products, but at the rate we've seen them improve I question how long this will remain true.

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

#179

Post by florianherrengt »

petcat wrote: post #32

I think it is less about junior/mid engineers, and more just about the kinds of work inexperienced/cheap developers are often doing: assembly line, JIRA-ticket-taker type development. This is especially impacting Indian tech workers in the US [0] since these are often the types of roles that InfoSys and other foreign tech consulting firms are staffing. The new $100,000 fee to sponsor an H1B visa has made it difficult…

I’d expect that layer of the industry to shrink substantially.

Although, I don’t think immigration or country of origin is particularly relevant here. I never worked in the US but there are plenty of "assembly line" developers here in London too.

If your job is essentially taking a ticket and turning it into code without contributing much else, then yes, I think that category of developer is going to be decimated.

That applies equally to everyone.

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

#180

Post by renegade-otter »

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 think for senior devs, some of us are legitimately jaded, especially if have been facing the same or boring problems.

I am just tired of typing and looking up syntax for every line of code.

This, however, is a slippery slope, and one has to be mindful of falling into cognitive surrender.

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