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

semiengineering.com

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

#221

Post by patsplat »

chii wrote: post #182
directevolve wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Will the modal developer of 2030 be much like a dev today? Writing software was a craft. You learned to take a problem and turn it into precise, reliable rules in a special syntax. If AI takes off, we'll see a new field emerging of AI-oriented architecture and project management. The skills will be different. How do you deploy a massive compute budget effectively to steer software design when agents are writing the c…

> It might just be a very different skillset. which is fine. Blacksmiths back in the day had craft. But they're replaced with CNC and CAD specialists, and hardly anyone bets metal today.

I recommend dialing in a mill before claiming there’s no craft in CNC.

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

#222

Post by eZinc »

SoftTalker wrote: post #33

"Most people who drive cars now couldn’t find the radiator cap if they were paid to, and that’s fine." That's not fine IMO. That is a basic bit of knowledge about a car and if you don't know where the radiator cap is you will eventually have to pay through the nose to someone who does know (and possibly be stranded somewhere). Knowing how to check and fill coolant isn't like knowing how to rebuild a transmission. It'…

Are you able to code with 1s and 0s, as well as be able to reconstruct a computer from raw minerals? If not, that's not fine IMO.

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

#223

Post by MattSayar »

the_af wrote: post #62
SoftTalker wrote: post #33

"Most people who drive cars now couldn’t find the radiator cap if they were paid to, and that’s fine." That's not fine IMO. That is a basic bit of knowledge about a car and if you don't know where the radiator cap is you will eventually have to pay through the nose to someone who does know (and possibly be stranded somewhere). Knowing how to check and fill coolant isn't like knowing how to rebuild a transmission. It'…

This reminds me of "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance". One of the themes Pirsig explores is that some people simply don't want to understand how stuff they depend on works. They just expect it to be excellent and have no breakdowns, and hope for the best (I'm oversimplifying his opinion, of course). So Pirsig's friend on his road trip just doesn't want to understand how his bike works, it's good quality and…

You just realistically can't know everything. I have a tankless water heater. It's almost a magical black box to me, but I know a little bit more about it now that I've taken pictures of it and asked LLMs to explain it to me. I'm still not a water heater technician, but I feel more knowledgeable.

And on the topic of motorcycles, I recently got a crappy bike that barely starts, and I partially got it because I feel capable of fixing it. And now it runs pretty well because I used lots of "video chats" with Gemini (and the owner's manual as context) to fix it!

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

#224

Post by jongjong »

jrowen wrote: post #200
jongjong wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The resistance seems to be the result of certain more privileged people being out of touch with the situation. They don't understand how hard some people are struggling now. This is bad because they won't notice it until it turns into violence... And by that point they'd have lost empathy for them and their struggles. History really does rhyme.

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

#225

Post by pwarner »

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.

I think a big factor is generational. Bigcos are led mlby generations that are phone or email first. Chat is an afterthought. For orgs like that, Teams is great if chat is your least important collaboration method.

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

#226

Post by chii »

patsplat wrote: post #221
chii wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It might just be a very different skillset. which is fine. Blacksmiths back in the day had craft. But they're replaced with CNC and CAD specialists, and hardly anyone bets metal today.

I recommend dialing in a mill before claiming there’s no craft in CNC.

It's a different craft. The whole thread is about the loss of the craft of coding, to be replaced with something else different.

The craft of blacksmithing is certainly different to that of dialing in a CNC, even if the outcome is both nails.

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

#227

Post by allenu »

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…

I don't think it necessarily scales that way. Larger organizations need more communication channels and coordination. If anything, assuming AI does give you 10x ability, there's probably a sweet spot where you have just enough developers that churn out code at a good pace but not too many that it gets too chaotic.

If you compare one developer to 10, for instance, one developer doesn't have to deal with communicating with 9 other people to make sure they're working on things that align with the work everyone else is doing. There is no consensus that has to be reached. No meetings, no messages that have to be relayed, no delays because someone wasn't around to get approval. That one developer just makes a decision and does it.

There are lots of big companies out there and in the past, small startups have been able to create successful products that never would have been created at the big company even though the big company hired way more developers.

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

#228

Post by musicale »

eZinc wrote: post #219
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…

This sounds good in theory, but have you hired someone in 2026? Developers are really lazy in general and don't want to work. The more people you hire, the more you run into the chance of gumming up productivity with unproductive developers. Even if they are productive, once you cross the threshold of 30 people even productive developers become lazy because of entitlement, bad resource distribution, or complexities f…

> Developers are really lazy in general and don't want to work

According to Larry Wall, the three great virtues of programmers are laziness, impatience, and hubris.

Though perhaps perl isn't a great argument for the latter.

https://thethreevirtues.com

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

#229

Post by citizenpaul »

eZinc wrote: post #219
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…

This sounds good in theory, but have you hired someone in 2026? Developers are really lazy in general and don't want to work. The more people you hire, the more you run into the chance of gumming up productivity with unproductive developers. Even if they are productive, once you cross the threshold of 30 people even productive developers become lazy because of entitlement, bad resource distribution, or complexities f…

This sounds like a rant from a dysfunctional out of touch manager more than anything. From a 57 day old account here to pump AI because humans are terrible and not printing you lambos. Totally not a shill or anything. Humans = bad AI = good. Shill.

When you area asked specifics about how you use AI so effectively when others cannot you do not reply. Shill.

I've hired close to 200 people and 4 were bad apples that I had to fire. So no real life does not reflect what you wrote. Most people want to do a good job.

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

#230

Post by re-thc »

SecretDreams wrote: post #204
re-thc wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's hard to take you seriously with this rebuttal. You don't go to coffee shops and probably don't care for coffee if you're talking about instant coffee. Why even speak at all on this subject that you are not familiar with? Not every thought that enters your mind needs to be written out.

> You don't go to coffee shops and probably don't care for coffee if you're talking about instant coffee.

Who says I don't? What I do has nothing to do with the market.

> Why even speak at all on this subject that you are not familiar with?

You're not familiar with it. Living in your own world is not being familiar. The market is huge. Again what you and I do is NOT the market.

> Not every thought that enters your mind needs to be written out.

Exactly. I can go to coffee shops but still acknowledge other things exist. Unlike your reply.

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