> Addy Osmani is a Software Engineer at Google working on Google Cloud and Gemini
Ah, there it is.
The next two years of software engineering
21–30 of 403 posts
Re: The next two years of software engineering
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
If that's "the idea", then clearly we need a more holistic, useful degree to replace CS as "the" software degree.
Despite what completely uninformed people may think, the field "computer science" is not about software development. It's a branch of mathematics. If you want an education in software development, those are offered by trade schools.
What I want is for universities to offer a degree in Software Engineering. That's a different field from Computer Science.
You say that belongs in a trade school? I might agree, if you think trade schools and not universities should teach electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, and chemical engineering.
But if chemical engineering belongs at a university, so does software engineering.
Re: The next two years of software engineering
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
Despite what completely uninformed people may think, the field "computer science" is not about software development. It's a branch of mathematics. If you want an education in software development, those are offered by trade schools.
What I want is for universities to offer a degree in Software Engineering. That's a different field from Computer Science. You say that belongs in a trade school? I might agree, if you think trade schools and not universities should teach electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, and chemical engineering. But if chemical engineering belongs at a university, so does software engineering.
Last I checked ASU does, and I’m certain many other universities do too.
Re: The next two years of software engineering
#24My experience hasn't been LLMs automate coding, just speeds it up. It's like I know what I want the solution to be and I'll describe it to the LLM, usually for specific code blocks at a time, and then build it up block-by-block. When I read hacker news people are talking like it's doing much more than that. It doesn't feel like an automation tool to me at all. It just helps me do what I was gonna do anyways, but with…
It’s a better Google for me. Instead of searching AWS or StackOverflow it hallucinates a good enough output that I can refactor into an output.
Re: The next two years of software engineering
#25My experience hasn't been LLMs automate coding, just speeds it up. It's like I know what I want the solution to be and I'll describe it to the LLM, usually for specific code blocks at a time, and then build it up block-by-block. When I read hacker news people are talking like it's doing much more than that. It doesn't feel like an automation tool to me at all. It just helps me do what I was gonna do anyways, but with…
> My experience hasn't been LLMs automate coding, just speeds it up.
This is how basically everyone I know actually uses LLMs.
The whole story about vibecoding and LLMs replacing engineers has become a huge distraction from the really useful discussions to be had. It’s almost impossible to discuss LLMs on HN because everyone is busy attacking the vibecoding strawman all the time.
Re: The next two years of software engineering
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
I disagree. 1) Senior developers are more likely to know how to approach a variety of tasks, including complex ones, in ways that work, and are more likely to (maybe almost subconsciously) stick to these proven design patterns rather than reinvent the wheel in some novel way. Even if the task itself is somewhat novel, they will break it down in familar ways into familar subtasks/patterns. For sure if a task does requ…
> in the early 80's, a time when you basically had to invent everything from scratch, so certainly there is no mental block to having to do so, and I'm aware there is at least a generation of developers that grew up with stack overflow and have much more of a mindset of building stuff using cut an paste, and less having to sit down and write much complex/novel code themselves. I think this is really underappreciated…
To me, the "hacker" distinction is not about novelty, but understanding.
Bashing kludgy things together until they work was always part of the job, but that wasn't the motivational payoff. Even if the result was crappy, knowing why it was crappy and how it could've been better was key.
LLMs promise an unremitting drudgery of the "mess around until it works" part, facing problems that don't really have a cause (except in a stochastic sense) and which can't be reliably fixed and prevented going forward.
The social/managerial stuff that may emerge around "good enough" and velocity is a whole 'nother layer.
Re: The next two years of software engineering
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why is this necessarily true?
A CS degree is there to teach you concepts and fundamentals that are the foundation of everything computing related. It doesn't generally chase after the latest fads.
Sure, but we need to update our definitions of concepts/fundamentals. A lot of this stuff has its own established theory and has been a core primitive for software engineering for many years.
For example, the primitives of cloud computing are largely explained by papers published by Amazon, Google, and others in the early '00s (DynamoDB, Bigtable, etc.). If you want to explore massively parallel computation or container orchestration, etc, it would be natural to do that using a public cloud, although of course many of the platform-specific details are incidentals.
Part of the story here is that the scale of computing has expanded enormously. The DB class I took in grad school was missing lots of interesting puzzle pieces around replication, consistency, storage formats, etc. There was a heavy focus on relational algebra and normalization forms, which is just... far from a complete treatment of the necessary topics.
We need to extend our curricula beyond the theory that is require to execute binaries on individual desktops.
Re: The next two years of software engineering
#28> Addy Osmani is a Software Engineer at Google working on Google Cloud and Gemini Ah, there it is.
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Re: The next two years of software engineering
#29Love the article, I had a struggle with my new identity and thus had to write https://edtw.in/high-agency-engineering/ for myself, but also came to the realisation that the industry is shifting too especially for junior engineers.
Curious about how the Specialist vs Generalist theme plays out, who is going to feel it more *first* when AI gets better over time?
Re: The next two years of software engineering
#30My experience hasn't been LLMs automate coding, just speeds it up. It's like I know what I want the solution to be and I'll describe it to the LLM, usually for specific code blocks at a time, and then build it up block-by-block. When I read hacker news people are talking like it's doing much more than that. It doesn't feel like an automation tool to me at all. It just helps me do what I was gonna do anyways, but with…
> My experience hasn't been LLMs automate coding, just speeds it up. This is how basically everyone I know actually uses LLMs. The whole story about vibecoding and LLMs replacing engineers has become a huge distraction from the really useful discussions to be had. It’s almost impossible to discuss LLMs on HN because everyone is busy attacking the vibecoding strawman all the time.
Half strawman -- a mudman, perhaps. Because we're seeing proper experts with credentials jump on the 'shit, AI can do all of this for me' realization blog post train.