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AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?

blog.florianherrengt.com

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

#241

Post by j45 »

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…

I'm not sure if it's replacing the middle class of software engineering, but I do feel it's generally true that the static approaches to middle class software engineering are evolving quicker than people are keeping up.

Hopefully when there's bad devs, there's a bit less making a mess where someone doesn't know better and as a result some amount of average or general best practices start happening.

This can be true not just for software development, but making a mess in anything, including a spreadsheet.

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

#243

Post by johnnyanmac »

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.

>be a emergency leader with an eye towards promotion..

You assume those people haven't already left, been kicked out, or were hired to begin with. We're not in a rational job market right now.

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

#244

Post by florianherrengt »

jdw64 wrote: post #115

I'm not sure what skill really means, or what's considered bad anymore. AI coding ability and human coding ability are different, and different organizations need different skills. No skill is inherently bad—it just depends on what the organization needs. I understand that AI writes better code than people like me in many cases. But an industry should still provide opportunities for those people. And sometimes those…

The industry doesn’t really owe people opportunities. Even if you think it should, that’s not how companies are going to behave.

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

#245

Post by matchagaucho »

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…

"Okay. I'll create a loop and goal so it doesn't stop until it's checked that everything works."

This is where the quality magnification seems to be occurring.

Goal-driven loops can make good code great, or bad code worse.

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

#246

Post by jplusequalt »

This blog conflates productivity with expertise.

Are LLMs rewarding experienced developers with tons of productivity gains? Yes.

Are LLMs actively degrading their expertise of understanding code? Also yes.

This article has made the implicit assumption that the top quartile of engineers are immune from skill decline. They're not. If you're an engineer who increasingly outsources the planning, writing, and analysis of code to an LLM, you're losing your ability to plan, write, and analyze code.

All of this is to say--senior engineers who have fully adopted AI tools are blowing smoke up their asses to dodge the reality of their own obsolescence. The senior engineers can talk about productivity all day, but they're only marginally closer to understanding a complex system that was written by LLMs than the "middle class" of engineers are.

You reading this--yes you--get over yourself. Your skills are depreciating too.

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

#248

Post by blub »

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…

In my experience, those that can’t understand design in the small (code level) don’t understand it in the large (sw or systems architecture) either.

Doing the right thing for the customer is independent from good design and good code. It’s a problem of requirements and project management. This is an excuse some poor programmers use, that they can’t write good code, but at least they fulfilled the customer requirements :D

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

#249

Post by budsniffer952 »

ryandrake wrote: post #131
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…

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…

If your company has bad engineers cranking out 10,000 line PRs your engineering culture and product was already bad, I guarantee it.

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

#250

Post by uncivilized »

aabdi wrote: post #28

> You were never expected to understand every service and every database. But at least someone did and would explain it to you. I agree with most of this except this. Think there’s some rose tinted glasses here or I’ve got bad luck over time. Life before ai was bad as well. There wasn’t any one to explain to you anything! You had to figure it out yourself. The people either already left or was busy with something els…

It’s just the typical BS where a Hacker News wants to feel smarter than they are
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