AI is removing the middle class of software engineering? • Hacker News Board

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

#211

Post by whilenot-dev » Wed, Aug 12, 2026, 3:56 PM UTC

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…

The handling of backpressure is such a good example to distinguish bad from good engineering. A good implementation even presents all the typical "clean" code indicators: DRY, KISS etc.

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

#212

Post by tayo42 » Wed, Aug 12, 2026, 3:58 PM UTC

SpacePortKnight wrote: post #118

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 have been a software engineer for 8 years and not once I have had a jira ticket handed over to me by a senior engineer. I have worked in startups before and currently work at bkng, and have friends at uber. Everywhere it is expected that the engineers will create their own tickets and refine them with the team. If you are in a product facing team, your PM could even help you with a PRD but I have not seen one in th…

My last job was like that, it was miserable having no agency. The whole team was from fang companies and were all ok with the tell me what to do dynamic.

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

#213

Post by florianherrengt » Wed, Aug 12, 2026, 3:58 PM UTC

maerF0x0 wrote: post #127

> In the story above, everyone is failing: IMO The author fails to list the hypothetical person with 13 PRs to review is also failing. > * The engineer who refuses to change with the times IMO many of the old ways of software engineering were local maxima. We're still seeking how to hit a new maxima and the journey may take us through zones lower than the previous local maxima.

I use AI heavily, so this isn’t about refusing to change.

You still have to understand the change yourself if you’re going to take responsibility for approving it.

That work is fundamentally much slower than generating the code, even with the help of AI.

We’ve made producing a large change extremely cheap and fast. We haven’t found an equivalent shortcut for building a correct mental model of what that change does, how it interacts with the rest of the system and whether the decisions behind it are actually sound.

Maybe one day we'll find one. As of today, I don’t think we have.

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

#214

Post by perrygeo » Wed, Aug 12, 2026, 3:58 PM UTC

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…

Rather than good or bad engineers, I'd focus on the quality of the idea. Every software engineer has good and bad ideas. Historically, bad ideas were kept in check by the effort it would take to code the implementation. With that barrier nearly gone, there's no friction - a bad idea in the morning gets deployed to prod in the afternoon. No thinking required!

So yes, garbage in -> garbage out, but framed in a way that makes it clear what is garbage. The ideas, not the engineer themselves :-)

This suggests we need to be doing more designing and planning; introducing that friction intentionally to make sure bad ideas get culled, viable ideas get refined. Critical thinking becomes the bottleneck; the quality of the idea becomes the deciding factor in success.

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

#215

Post by Kinrany » Wed, Aug 12, 2026, 3:58 PM UTC

ThePhysicist wrote: post #68

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…

Maybe those engineers that don't care about making their solution _good_ are actually the good engineers, have you ever thought about that??? There are exceptions where quality really matters but most software shops build CRUD web apps where it's not really a good characteristic to obsess over the cleanest and most elegant details, instead you need to get the stuff the customer wants done! I for one tend to care less…

If you're writing CRUD, there's no excuse not to write it competently since you're not solving a new problem

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

#216

Post by adamtaylor_13 » Wed, Aug 12, 2026, 3:59 PM UTC

It's not clear to me what "the middle class" is supposed to be here. All engineers exist on some spectrum between "good" and "bad" and it's pointless to try to identify the exact markings, but we all know good engineers and bad engineers.

So AI isn't really doing anything but giving sharper tools to both groups.

So, as it was before, we simply need to set expectations and remove those who cannot adapt and meet expectations... You know, the way it's always been.

So why is AI the problem here?

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

#217

Post by palmotea » Wed, Aug 12, 2026, 3:59 PM UTC

mirmor23 wrote: post #199

RSHEPP wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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.

AI disease is encouraging "sketchy process and minimal checks on the software quality." QA has been eliminated from my team, and the QA engineers that are left have been declared to be developers now.

Gotta move fast, and I guess making sure the stuff we ship works was "slowing us down."

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

#218

Post by KetoManx64 » Wed, Aug 12, 2026, 4:01 PM UTC

iLoveOncall wrote: post #42

declan_roberts wrote: post #12

Between AI and competing against the world with H-1B, it's really never been harder to get an entry or mid-level software engineering job. Which means our pipeline to senior engineer is completely broken.

There are 100K H1-Bs a year and 4 million grads a year in the US. Anyone who thinks H1-Bs are actually contributing to their inability to find a job is a moron.

-85,000 NEW visas granted each year, not including renewals - The mass majority of those are going into the tech/software - there are only around ~100k CS graduates each year - H1B workers will take much lower salaries and benefits than their US citizen counterparts.

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

#219

Post by pydry » Wed, Aug 12, 2026, 4:01 PM UTC

mirmor23 wrote: post #199

RSHEPP wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The bigger issue (I find) is that the pipeline for finding those engineers is completely fucked.

Hiring pipelines that tested the wrong thing have existed for years but the problem is magnified 10x when you test for something that weakly correlates with ability at best which an AI can do better than a human.

This is leading to stuff like incompetent junior-level engineers being hired as principals.

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

#220

Post by devdude1337 » Wed, Aug 12, 2026, 4:03 PM UTC

People should realize that programming is not a liability. Programming per se is the actual creation of detailed knowledge by writing.

You get a task, how does it interact with all other invariants? What are the implications on data flow, processing and user workflows? You can rarely answer those questions beforehand, you step on them during programming as the formal language forces you to take them into account sooner or later.

If you outsource this knowledge-building you’re losing the steering ability when stuff hits the fan. You lose the ability to navigate the code properly in order to identify bug or violations of invariants.

LLM optimize locally, that’s their nature. Invariants are often implicitly scattered around the whole code base. Explaining them to the LLM is much more tedious than just to write the code in the first place. At least for me as I have much better expression-ability in Code than in natural language when it comes to describing any form of computation.