I'm old enough to remember when people complained that we would never have competent engineers again because new hires are starting with higher level languages rather than doing "real" programming. AI or not, the profession will be fine.
The ladder is missing rungs – Engineering Progression When AI Ate the Middle
21–30 of 62 posts
Re: The ladder is missing rungs – Engineering Progression When AI Ate the Middle
#22Spot on. All those years of slinging code and debugging gave me and others the judgement and eye to check on all the AI generated code. I now wonder often about what hiring looks like in this new era. As a small startup, we just don't need junior engineers to do the day to day implementation. Do we instead hire a small number of people as apprentices to train on the high level patterns, spot trouble areas, develop go…
Here's a depressing take.
Most places I worked at, seniors were expected to do the junior work, only faster. All the actual senior stuff (architecture, refactoring,code quality, you name it) is usually done either against management or as a concession to humor the devs.
Now that our ability to go fast has been supercharged, I suspect we're just going to see a massive lowering of quality across everything. We seem to be already seeing it in windows, osx, iOS, azure...
Either the market stops accepting that lowering and we see a counterpush, or people become content with 97% availability. Considering how normalized it is nowadays to have data leaks, I think the frog's already half boiled.
Re: The ladder is missing rungs – Engineering Progression When AI Ate the Middle
#23Spot on. All those years of slinging code and debugging gave me and others the judgement and eye to check on all the AI generated code. I now wonder often about what hiring looks like in this new era. As a small startup, we just don't need junior engineers to do the day to day implementation. Do we instead hire a small number of people as apprentices to train on the high level patterns, spot trouble areas, develop go…
How much are you willing to pay? Is there any expectation of payoff?
Re: The ladder is missing rungs – Engineering Progression When AI Ate the Middle
#24Spot on. All those years of slinging code and debugging gave me and others the judgement and eye to check on all the AI generated code. I now wonder often about what hiring looks like in this new era. As a small startup, we just don't need junior engineers to do the day to day implementation. Do we instead hire a small number of people as apprentices to train on the high level patterns, spot trouble areas, develop go…
When your senior developers retire, and if the LLMs haven't caught up to their level by that time, where do you think new senior developers will come from?
The response I get offline is that there's millions of seniors right now that can last a couple decades.
Re: The ladder is missing rungs – Engineering Progression When AI Ate the Middle
#25We'll need a house for the feeble minded.
http://employees.oneonta.edu/blechmjb/JBpages/m360/Professio...
Re: The ladder is missing rungs – Engineering Progression When AI Ate the Middle
#26I'm old enough to remember when people complained that we would never have competent engineers again because new hires are starting with higher level languages rather than doing "real" programming. AI or not, the profession will be fine.
I think you are right long term, but not based on misapplied historical trends. In some sense, it does not appear to be a simple "no code/low code" hype as in some of the previous iterations. FWIW, I can only speak for myself and for what I see around me.
Still, what I anecdotally do see is a level of economizing current AI spend in a typical way demanded by most MBA types ( give it to everyone, but make it less expensive somehow being one of the more amusing symptom ).
Re: The ladder is missing rungs – Engineering Progression When AI Ate the Middle
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
When your senior developers retire, and if the LLMs haven't caught up to their level by that time, where do you think new senior developers will come from?
The response I get offline is that there's millions of seniors right now that can last a couple decades.
Buy Now, Pay Later
Re: The ladder is missing rungs – Engineering Progression When AI Ate the Middle
#28[flagged]
Re: The ladder is missing rungs – Engineering Progression When AI Ate the Middle
#29Spot on. All those years of slinging code and debugging gave me and others the judgement and eye to check on all the AI generated code. I now wonder often about what hiring looks like in this new era. As a small startup, we just don't need junior engineers to do the day to day implementation. Do we instead hire a small number of people as apprentices to train on the high level patterns, spot trouble areas, develop go…
As much as I get push back by saying since AI, I never look at the code and I can still be sure it meets the functional and non functional requirements, no one has been able to dispute my methodology.
For functional requirements I review both the unit and more often the integration tests and make sure they align with the requirements.
For security, I validate the API endpoints can’t be accessed without authentication and these days I use Amazon Cognito.
The host environment - lambda, EC2, Docker runtime (ECS/EKS) have IAM roles attached with least privilege.
Then someone asked about multi tenancy and RBAC. Since mostly I deal with B2B clients with large business customers, each customer gets their own AWS account.
For RBAC, DynamoDB and Postgres at least on AWS both have Row level security that you can tie to a user or group - again authorized by Cognito or IAM. Even if the code does miss something - it’s still protected.
The database itself doesn’t have access to the outside world and if I can, I don’t even assign a user to the database and use the AWS Data API when possible that uses the AWS Control plane and IAM. If I do end up using a database use - it again has leash privilege.
Of course UX and UI testing has to be done manually.
I do carefully review the “works on my machine” and “works with small dataset” footguns - like concurrency implementations and I also have scalability tests.
Re: The ladder is missing rungs – Engineering Progression When AI Ate the Middle
#30Spot on. All those years of slinging code and debugging gave me and others the judgement and eye to check on all the AI generated code. I now wonder often about what hiring looks like in this new era. As a small startup, we just don't need junior engineers to do the day to day implementation. Do we instead hire a small number of people as apprentices to train on the high level patterns, spot trouble areas, develop go…
When your senior developers retire, and if the LLMs haven't caught up to their level by that time, where do you think new senior developers will come from?
Thats a tragedy of the commons problem. But not my problem. I’m judged as a senior+ by meeting my quarterly and at most yearly goals and strategy.
No current manager (I’m not one) is incentivized to care.