AI’s impact on engineering jobs may be different than expected • Hacker News Board

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

#191

Post by ThrowawayB7 » Fri, Jan 30, 2026, 7:00 AM UTC

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

At large companies, UI/UX is done by UI/UX designers and features are chosen and prioritized by product management and customer research teams. Developers don't get much input.

As Steve Jobs said long ago "The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste." but you can apply the same to Google and anyone else trying to compete with them. Having infinite AI developers doesn't help those who have UI designers and product managers that have no taste.

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

#192

Post by jimbo808 » Fri, Jan 30, 2026, 7:02 AM UTC

torginus wrote: post #173

jimbo808 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have read this same comment so many times in various forms. I know many of them are shill accounts/bots, but many are real. I think there are a few things at play that make people feel this way. Even if you're in a CRUD shop with low standards for reliability/scale/performance/efficiency, a person who isn't an experienced engineer could not make the LLM do your job. LLMs have a perfect combination of traits that ca…

I just wanna make the point that I've grown to dislike the term 'CRUD' especially as a disparaging remark against some software. Every web application I've worked on featured a database, that you could usually query or change through a web interface, but that was an easy and small part of the whole thing it did. Is a webshop a CRUD app? Is an employee shift tracking site? I could go on, but I feel 'CRUD' app is about…

It's a pretty easy category to identify, some warning signs:

- You rarely write loops at work

- Every performance issue is either too many trips to the database or to some server

- You can write O(n^n) functions and nobody will ever notice

- The hardest technical problem anyone can remember was an N+1 query and it stuck around for like a year before enough people complained and you added an index

- You don't really ever have to make difficult engineering decisions, but if you do, you can make the wrong one most of the time and it'll be fine

- Nobody in the shop could explain: lock convoying, GC pauses, noisy neighbors, cache eviction cascades, one hot shard, correlating traces with scheduler behavior, connection pool saturation, thread starvation, backpressure propagation across multiple services, etc

I spent a few years in shops like this, if this is you, you must fight the urge to get comfortable because the vibe coders are coming for you.

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

#193

Post by Ekaros » Fri, Jan 30, 2026, 7:06 AM UTC

confidantlake wrote: post #170

cxvwbvb wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It is so depressing that teams won despite being worse than pretty much every other chat application just because MSFT bundled it with office.

From outside as consumer. The end problem is that these product do not compete on price. A chat app on enterprise at the scale of customers they have should probably be 1€ a month. Not 10 or 20€.

That might not be multi billions a year business, but maybe chat app should not be one.

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

#194

Post by toraway » Fri, Jan 30, 2026, 7:15 AM UTC

9rx wrote: post #119

acuozzo wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're experiencing throttling. Use the API instead and pay per token. You also have to treat this as outsourcing labor to a savant with a very, very short memory, so: 1. Write every prompt like a government work contract in which you're required to select the lowest bidder, so put guardrails everywhere. Keep a text editor open with your work contract, edit the goal at the bottom, and then fire off your reply. 2. Ins…

> You're experiencing throttling. Use the API instead and pay per token. That was using pay per token. > Write every prompt like a government work contract in which you're required to select the lowest bidder, so put guardrails everywhere. That is what I was doing yesterday. Worked fantastically. Today, I do the very same thing and... Nope. Can't even stick to the simplest instructions that have been perfectly fine i…

Drives me absolutely crazy how lately any time I comment about my experience using LLMs for coding that isn’t gushing praise, I get the same predictable, condescending lecture about how I'm using it ever so slightly wrong (unlike them) which explains why I don't get perfect output literally 100% of the time.

It’s like I need a sticky disclaimer:

  1. No, I didn’t form an outdated impression based on GPT-4 that I never updated, in fact I use these tools *constantly every single day* 
  2. Yes, I am using Opus 4.5
  3. Yes, I am using a CLAUDE.md file that documents my expectations in detail
  3a. No, it isn’t 20000 characters or anything
  3b. Yes, thank you, I have in fact already heard about the “pink elephant problem”
  4. Yes, I am routinely starting with fresh context
  4a. No, I don’t expect every solution to be one-shotable 
  5. Yes, I am still using Opus fucking 4.5 
  6. At no point did I actually ask for Unsolicited LLM Tips 101.

Like, are people really suggesting they never, ever get a suboptimal or (god forbid) completely broken "solution" from Claude Code/Codex/etc?

That doesn't mean these tools are useless! Or that I’m “afraid” or in denial or trying to hurt your feelings or something! I’m just trying to be objective about my own personal experience.

It’s just impossible to have an honest, productive discussion if the other person can always just lob responses like “actually you need to use the API not the 200/mo plan you pay for” or “Opus 4.5 unless you’re using it already in which case GPT 5.2 XHigh / or vice versa” to invalidate your experience on the basis of “you’re holding it wrong” with an endlessly slippery standard of “right”.

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

#195

Post by aitchnyu » Fri, Jan 30, 2026, 7:35 AM UTC

3vidence wrote: post #37

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

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.

Would this be a problem if you can write E2E tests just like unit tests, like with Django+playwright?

https://github.com/mxschmitt/python-django-playwright/blob/m...

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

#196

Post by re-thc » Fri, Jan 30, 2026, 7:35 AM UTC

SecretDreams wrote: post #117

re-thc wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think I'd like to be a barista or deliver the mail once all the jobs are gone. Those are even easier to automate or have already been most of the way.

Are you going in to a lot of coffee shops?

And? As people (the consumers) get automated away there will be less. We also have things like instant coffee, automatic coffee machines, etc that have all reduced the need for manual coffee.

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

#197

Post by acuozzo » Fri, Jan 30, 2026, 7:55 AM UTC

cxvwbvb wrote: post #151

acuozzo wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're experiencing throttling. Use the API instead and pay per token. You also have to treat this as outsourcing labor to a savant with a very, very short memory, so: 1. Write every prompt like a government work contract in which you're required to select the lowest bidder, so put guardrails everywhere. Keep a text editor open with your work contract, edit the goal at the bottom, and then fire off your reply. 2. Ins…

Nonsense. I have ran an experiment today - trying to generate a particular kind of image. Its been 12 hours and all the image gen tools failed miserably. They are only good at producing surface level stuff, anything beyond that? Nah. So sure, if what you do is surface level (and crap in my opinion) ofc you will see some kind of benefit. But if you have any taste (which I presume you dont) you would handily admit it i…

> if what you do is surface level (and crap in my opinion)

I write embedded software in C for a telecommunications research laboratory. Is this sufficiently deep for you?

FWIW, I don't use LLMs for this.

> But if you have any taste (which I presume you dont)

What value is there to you in an ad hominem attack here? Did you see any LLM evangelism in my post? I offered information based on my experience to help someone use a tool.

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

#198

Post by acuozzo » Fri, Jan 30, 2026, 8:02 AM UTC

toraway wrote: post #194

9rx wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You're experiencing throttling. Use the API instead and pay per token. That was using pay per token. > Write every prompt like a government work contract in which you're required to select the lowest bidder, so put guardrails everywhere. That is what I was doing yesterday. Worked fantastically. Today, I do the very same thing and... Nope. Can't even stick to the simplest instructions that have been perfectly fine i…

Drives me absolutely crazy how lately any time I comment about my experience using LLMs for coding that isn’t gushing praise, I get the same predictable, condescending lecture about how I'm using it ever so slightly wrong (unlike them) which explains why I don't get perfect output literally 100% of the time. It’s like I need a sticky disclaimer: 1. No, I didn’t form an outdated impression based on GPT-4 that I never…

When I wrote my reply I was not familiar with the existing climate of LLM-advice-as-a-cudgel that you describe.

> to invalidate your experience on the basis of “you’re holding it wrong”

This was not my intent in replying to 9rx. I was just trying to help.

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

#199

Post by jrowen » Fri, Jan 30, 2026, 8:23 AM UTC

FloorEgg wrote: post #155

jrowen wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Have we? It feels like a lot of stuff in my life is unnecessarily expensive or hard to afford. Look at a bunch of job postings and ask yourself if that work is going to make things cheaper for you or better for society. We're not building railroads and telephone networks anymore. One person can grow food for 10,000. Stuff is expensive because free market capitalism allows it and some people are pathologically greed…

The first half of your comment doesn't quite click for me. I appreciate the elaboration in the second half. That sounds a lot more constructive than "attack", but now I understand you meant it in the "attack the problem" sense not "attack the people" sense. What I think we agree on is that society has resource redistribution problem, and it could work a lot better. I think we might also agree that a well functioning…

> The first half of your comment doesn't quite click for me.

Anything specific?

> When able bodied and minded people chose to spend their time playing zero and negative sum games instead of positive sum games we all lose.

What types of behaviors are you referring to as zero and negative sum games?

I think at the very least we should move toward a state where the existence of dare-I-say freeloaders and welfare queens isn't too taxing, and with general social progress that "niche" may be naturally disincentivized and phased out. Some people just don't really have a purpose or a drive but they were born here and yes one would hope that under the right conditions they could blossom but if not I don't think it's worth worrying about too much.

I would say that education is essentially at the core of everything, it's the only mechanism we have to move the needle on any of it.

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

#200

Post by jrowen » Fri, Jan 30, 2026, 8:27 AM UTC

jongjong wrote: post #134

jrowen wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, can we just STFU about AI and jobs already? We've long since passed the point where there was a meaningful amount of work to be done for every adult. The number of "jobs" available is now merely a function of who controls the massive stockpiles of accumulated resources and how they choose to dole them out. Attack that, not the technology.

Great point. The people who popularized 'the end of history' were right about it from the PoV of innovation benefiting humans. It's been marginal gains since. Any appearance of significant gains (in the eyes of a minority of powerful people) has been the result of concentration in fewer hands (zero-sum game). The focus of politics after the 90s should have shifted to facilitating competition to equalize distribution…

I've encountered resistance to UBI from otherwise like-minded people because Musk and Thiel talk about it or something. When described as gradually lowering the social security age, it clicks. We already have this stuff. It's crazy.