So, blame the engineers now? Most likely they were forced by a manager to push more PRs faster else piped.
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AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?
231–240 of 850 posts
Re: AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?
#232Earlier quoted context omitted.
All fields are basically over as a long term career besides perhaps prostitutes and even there I'm not entirely sure. But the questions of how soon and by how much matter a lot. Being early is the same as being wrong a clever guy once said.
no programming is verifiable, and the major LLM companies are focused on it. its the first domino to fall by probably 5+ years
> no programming is verifiable, and the major LLM companies are focused on it. its the first domino to fall by probably 5+ years
Which is kinda proof they're populated by sociopaths with extremely little empathy. The people who are building that stuff are programmers, and if they had a tiny bit of functioning empathy they'd stop or slow down or at least be unenthusiastic.
And we're not talking about very high level empathy here, but the very basic kind of thinking about the effects on someone very much like yourself.
Re: AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?
#233> 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…
I think the parallels with AI art are uncanny - nowadays people with zero artistic skill, vision or effort invested are capable of creating stuff that would've previously taken a master artist a solid week of work - doesn't mean any of that is good, but it does mean that the logic of 'if it works and looks good, it's good' is completely broken now.
Re: AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?
#234> 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…
Sounds like bad management to me
Re: AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?
#235> 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…
> > bad engineers were always a liability
> With AI, "bad" engineers can now amplify their "bad" engineering x10 across the organization.
Yup, and that's going to be the comeuppance for a decade of aggresive overhiring.
There are so many "bad engineers" filling the ranks now that in many teams and divisions there's not even anyone left around who can recognize them as such.
This was already manifesting as a rapid decline in software quality and worsening practices, and the amplification effect of AI is mostly going to make everything worse for a while as we wait for all these declining projects to buckle under their weight.
If you are a good engineer, it's a good time to work on small teams with other good engineers and rigorous practices. You can be using AI to amplify what you do (and probably should), but you need to be rigorously considering your processes and guarding yourself from seduction by blind-leading-blind hype you see on social media or in iconference talks.
Re: AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?
#236This is really well written. I deal with the exact same issues almost daily. Senior engineers who want to guard quality are becoming a bottleneck.
If the people trying to understand the changes and guard quality are now considered the bottleneck, the answer isn’t that the reviewers need to move faster.
Re: AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?
#237> - "Why are we doing this here?"
> They send you a link. It's a Claude conversation.
LLMs spared my neck of the woods for now but is this really how PR review looks like these days for an average SWE or its just an example of a Junior in a team?
Re: AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?
#238This is really well written. I deal with the exact same issues almost daily. Senior engineers who want to guard quality are becoming a bottleneck.
If the people trying to understand the changes and guard quality are now considered the bottleneck, the answer isn’t that the reviewers need to move faster.
I wasn't saying that either
Re: AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?
#239Ai isn't removing the middle class of software engineering.
Software engineering is evolving, and the middle class (and beginner) is going to have to grow instead of being able to leverage the same skills for longer and longer.
It's so true from some of the other posts that you can outsource your thinking, but you should never outsource your learning and understanding.
Re: AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?
#240Earlier quoted context omitted.
For some reason people never mention this, but aren't there also much more people graduating with CS degrees than ever before?
Degrees take 4 years. It's a very laggy indicator.
Right. CS Enrollments dropped 8% this year. High schoolers got the message.