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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?

#191

Post by fsnovask »

ok123456 wrote: post #185
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…

To everyone complaining about "slop" and "+20000 PRs," what kind of systematic quality assurance, test plans, and tech debt reductions were you doing before the "LLMpocalypse?" Were you only relying on the difficulty of producing "working" from replacement skill/rate "software engineers" and their level of disinterest being the only real circuit breaker?

Secondarily, the business itself is also driving the throughput increases by demanding more volume, but there is no accountability to them for asking for throughput at the expense of quality. They may also deny the engineering time to work on things that would stabilize quality that supports faster delivery because features earn money more directly than developing quality processes.

This isn't coming solely from engineers wanting to produce more stuff faster.

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

#192

Post by apsurd »

ok123456 wrote: post #185
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…

To everyone complaining about "slop" and "+20000 PRs," what kind of systematic quality assurance, test plans, and tech debt reductions were you doing before the "LLMpocalypse?" Were you only relying on the difficulty of producing "working" from replacement skill/rate "software engineers" and their level of disinterest being the only real circuit breaker?

Trust actually does work that way though, the implicit and collective fuzzy agreement of “having my name on it”. Of course that ambiguity needs enforced automated checks, but reputation and one’s own integrity is not for nothing.

Generative AI breaks that agreement. It took me over a year to realize my previous CTO actually didn’t care too much about the system design he shipped . And the expectation was actually to just throw it away, have AI reimplement “what wasn’t working”. Use AI to ship, AI to learn what shipped, and AI to fix what shipped.

I quit because of it. Hell is working on other people’s AI code.

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

#193

Post by florianherrengt »

danielovichdk wrote: post #178

"You can't afford bad engineers anymore" You never could.

Agreed. But it’s the difference between crashing at 30 km/h (19 mph) and crashing at 200 km/h (124 mph).

AI massively increases the speed and scale at which bad engineers can do damage while fixing it is still slow, difficult work.

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

#194

Post by Shorel »

RSHEPP wrote: post #97
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…

This 100%. I just requested a hackathon for performance improvement (might be wasted effort). We are pushing tons of code and now our CPU usage has grown exponentially over the past year because the bad engineers just ship whatever Claude gives them and do not think about the consequences. Our biggest consumer of CPU right now is HTTP connection churn because engineers are creating new clients every request we handle…

That really sounds like the kind of people who will complain in university about being forced to study calculus.

Natural consequence: Then they never grasped the concept of computational complexity.

O(n) Vs O(n²)? They have n, what's the difference? Python is fast enough. The only thing that matters is shipping features fast! Features! Our competitor will have this next week, we need to write code fast, everything else is a matter of adding more compute, which we will pay with revenue!

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

#195

Post by __turbobrew__ »

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…

The analogy I have heard is that LLMs are a force multiplier, so if you were a 2x engineer before you are now a 10x engineer, and if you were a -2x engineer you are now a -10x engineer.

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

#196

Post by snovymgodym »

iLoveOncall wrote: post #108
WarmWash wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The reason you're not getting a job at Amazon isn't because of brown people, The correct framing is "The reason you're not getting a job at Amazon isn't because of people willing to work for less money,"

The compensation bands and the actual compensation are exactly the same regardless of immigration status.

Bands yes, packets no.

Big tech companies aren't like a Government job with rigorous pay grades based on role and seniority. You can have people even within the same role and level at big tech with multiple $100k pay discrepancies.

If someone's continued ability to stay in the country where they currently live is contingent on employment then they will accept worse conditions and pay.

That's the entire reason why tech companies use H1B, it's not as though there's a dearth of Java developers or DevOps people who are US citizens.

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

#197

Post by la6479 »

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…

But sooner or later for AI to reach its true potential we need to have HOTL ie Human Out of the Loop. Meta prompting or using AI to develop the prompt by coaxing it to ask relevant questions , creating specs and going through multiple loops with LLMs - things like this can be a good start towards the final goal. Final means the over abundance of goods and services like the men of the millenium are suggesting us mere mortals will reach one day,. .. and work will be optional.

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

#198

Post by graemep »

florianherrengt wrote: post #132
dominotw wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what is so 'hard thinking' about building a crud app

Nobody is getting paid significant money just to build a simple CRUD app. Even before AI. Companies pay experienced engineers because the supposedly simple CRUD sits inside a messy real system with years of business rules, constraints, integrations and bad decisions have consequences.

The complexity I have seen in supposedly simple CRUD apps is amazing, especially what some less experienced people do.

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

#199

Post by mirmor23 »

RSHEPP wrote: post #97
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…

This 100%. I just requested a hackathon for performance improvement (might be wasted effort). We are pushing tons of code and now our CPU usage has grown exponentially over the past year because the bad engineers just ship whatever Claude gives them and do not think about the consequences. Our biggest consumer of CPU right now is HTTP connection churn because engineers are creating new clients every request we handle…

If your company has sketchy process and minimal checks on the software quality, of course it naturally follows that they hire bad engineers as well. fortunately, that also opens up an opportunity to be a emergency leader with an eye towards promotion.

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

#200

Post by ryandvm »

esafak wrote: post #22
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

Only if you run out of things to write. Is your back log ever empty?

My backlog is less empty than ever - it just happens to be overflowing with whispy Claude-written tickets for functionality that somebody else's Claude suggested after summarizing some other Claude-infused Slack chat.
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