While there are bad engineers, I imagine that teams that have evolved alongside AI and have maintained their size and consistency without adjustment may have structural issues. I would argue that team size counts ought to be smaller now than before Claude. Unfortunately this idea could feed an AI-induced layoff trend, but it could instead lead to product diversification instead.
AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?
221–230 of 811 posts
Re: AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?
#222Earlier 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…
Exactly. For most of my career, bad engineers (or juniors who were earnestly learning) would struggle to even create output that compiled, let alone ran. And it would take them a long time to implement something poorly. So the blast radius from their incompetence would be limited. Today, a bad engineer can churn out ten thousand lines of garbage that actually compiles and runs, before my first cup of coffee. If not o…
> Today, a bad engineer can churn out ten thousand lines of garbage that actually compiles and runs, before my first cup of coffee. If not on a tight leash, they'll sink the whole codebase or inundate every senior person with garbage code review requests. The blast radius is unlimited!
The term for that is "10x AI engineer." Anyone who has anything negative to say about such people is just jealous of their insane productivity and speed.
Re: AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?
#223Re: AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?
#224> 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?
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Re: AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?
#225At the same time, it also brings very low level "vibecoder" to the pool
I wrote about this before. I don't think the vibecoders will have a job for a long time. At best, it will be minimum wage.
See "AI Won't Take Your Job, Someone Using AI Will" > There's no lucrative middle ground where 'AI whispering' is a high-value skill.
https://blog.florianherrengt.com/vibe-coder-career-path.html
Re: AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?
#226I 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…
>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 way. This is the theory, but I’ve never worked anywhere (and I’ve worked at a lot of places over 20 years) that actually did it like that in practice. What tends to happen is that the EMs an…
> If your company is highly product driven, you’ll often find that the juniors end up lea[d]ing projects more often than not because they will tell the PM exactly what they want to hear
I worked in a company where this happened, and it wasn't pretty. Product managers used their experience and seniority to intimidate junior engineers and exert control over project management of engineering projects, which they predictably used to move as much work as possible to post-launch, including testing and security. They also gaslit junior engineers into agreeing that issues with contradictory or impossible product asks could be figured out later, leading to software getting released to customers that fundamentally could not be made reliable, performant, or even secure.
Even after the entire company went on site visits where customers told us they weren't using any of the features released in the last year because they were all buggy, and the only information they wanted about upcoming releases was assurance that their use cases wouldn't be impacted, product still kept claiming that the time it took to release new features was the biggest problem facing the company and kept fighting back against engineers who said we were in a quality crisis and desperately needed to make time for better testing and design.
The only thing that can shield you is good engineering management. Weak management will end up getting rolled by product and start promoting the bad behavior that product insists on. At that company I had a boss whose attitude towards us was "engineers in a startup should make decisions independently and stand by their work" but made sure engineers felt unsafe making engineering decisions that product wasn't happy with, likely because they felt unsafe themselves.
Re: AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?
#227> 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?
Quality assurance and test plans don't catch slop. They just test your code. It can't prove the absence of bugs.
In general, the way we still do it is: some basic static analysis finding anti-patterns, but the meat of it is, and always will be, code review. Except you can't review code at the pace AI generates it.
Where I work someone is still responsible for the output. We expect developers to examine the code the LLM produces before burdening someone else with it.
Re: AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?
#228Earlier 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
> It will become very easy to build most software We keep hearing this, but where is the Photoshop killer written by a gas station attendant? Where is the PayPal alternative written by a retired nurse? Over and over we're told that software is now trivial to write, and Claude is evidently writing some billions of lines of code a day, but where are the results? Where is the vibe coded app toppling the legacy hand-code…
Every time I see people say this I think: show me the money?
If its so good why aren't you rich?
Re: AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?
#229Writing code was never the job. Creating value was the job -- coding was just how to implement that goal.
Re: AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?
#230This blog post illustrates the importance of NEVER outsourcing your critical thinking or outsourcing decision-making to an LLM. And to never take shortcuts with learning. Learning is hard, but learning things properly allows you to understand what is happening and allows you to ask the right questions about whether the changes an agent wants to make are the changes that will best serve the goals of the project (without creating an unwieldy level of tech debt in the future).
Personally speaking (and I'd love to hear others' takes on this): when using an LLM for work-related and development tasks, I never use the "full-auto" mode, and I never manually approve of something that I don't understand. When I don't understand something an agent wants to do, I go on a side-quest to learn more about said thing and to educate myself first. This takes extra time, but I feel that it's the right thing to do, so I can at least approve/deny/redirect from a more informed position, rather than flying blind and hoping for the best.
In addition to what the author discusses, I think skill-atrophy, stagnation due to complacency (i.e.: "why grow and learn if an agent can do it" mindset), and cognitive laziness are additional risks that come with overrelying on LLMs. Humans were meant to think. LLMs are a tool.