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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?

#261

Post by dabbz »

sameesh wrote: post #48
petcat wrote: post #32

I think it is less about junior/mid engineers, and more just about the kinds of work inexperienced/cheap developers are often doing: assembly line, JIRA-ticket-taker type development. This is especially impacting Indian tech workers in the US [0] since these are often the types of roles that InfoSys and other foreign tech consulting firms are staffing. The new $100,000 fee to sponsor an H1B visa has made it difficult…

What's with people using the number "0" for their first reference? I have only ever seen that practice here at Hacker News.

Hey everyone! I found the COBOL developer!

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

#262

Post by mrbombastic »

threatofrain wrote: post #189
ryandrake wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Why ask such extreme stuff? Why not ask about the solo entrepreneur who creates a convincing iOS app without a programming background? Advantage the problem on the side of ML and look for winning scenarios today.

because this comment is responding to: "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"

photoshop, paypal, and many more companies etc. have software of vast complexity that cannot be reproduced or maintained today solely with llms, ipso facto you still need software developers or some similar role to build and maintain the complexity of _yesterday_

some guy shipping an iOS app to zero users doesn't change that. although i think it is good we can have more bespoke software.

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

#263

Post by saulpw »

SoftTalker wrote: post #206
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is me to a tee. I think I'm a fairly good software engineer, and I loved building software and mentoring more junior engineers who I thought had both ability and a good attitude. I also think I was a pretty pragmatic engineer (I was not an "architecture astronaut"), but I did enjoy the craft of getting into the nitty gritty details of software. The past 5-10 years or so saw me pretty beaten down though with soft…

In retrospect, the golden age was the pre-internet era. Some rose-colored glasses maybe, but as I remember it: Paying for software was the norm, so it was more clear what the "product" was, and software writers had a direct incentive to write better software. Updates could not be pushed out so you had to be pretty sure your code worked before you shipped it. Having to ship physical media to all your customers for a b…

You're right about those things, but you're forgetting that we had no source control, and almost all software was closed source. You took what you were given and you liked it, and you developed strong attachments to particular versions of software which you clung to well beyond its use-by date (like Python 2.7). MS-DOS 3.3 forever!

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

#264

Post by skydhash »

cautiouscat wrote: post #87
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 think this point gets lost on people. A frequent argument I see in favor of vibecoding is: “well there’s also bad engineers”. In other words, bad code is already being written, so who cares if the LLM is wrong sometimes? The issue is that with no reins, the LLM is a fire hose of bad code compared to the garden hose of bad code orgs had before. A good engineer, with a good model and harness will produce great stuff.…

> A good engineer, with a good model and harness will produce great stuff. A bad engineer with a good model and harness will produce something faster, but it will be worse.

A good engineer, without LLM assistance, will still produce great stuff.

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

#265

Post by jplusequalt »

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.

> * The engineer who refuses to change with the times

There is plenty of software in existence where being incorrect, even once, can spell disaster.

Everything about the picture being painted in the article is anathema to keeping such systems safe and reliable.

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

#266

Post by SoftTalker »

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…

By contrast I have not worked anywhere that engineers originated tickets. And thankfully, only one place that used Jira (but the engineers didn't interact with it).

Tickets came from the product side, after being evaluated and prioritized. Engineers got involved with estimating effort (in "points") and doing the actual implementation of course.

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

#267

Post by bluefirebrand »

eshack94 wrote: post #230

This 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 (witho…

> 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.

I know it's a cliche but the old IBM adage holds very true today

Machines should work, people should think

Maybe that's part of the problem I have with LLMs writing code. It would be nice if they just did the work, but there's a lot of underlying thinking and decision making with software work that is being offloaded any time you have the LLM do it

It seems like those decisions are being handwaved off as "not important" nowadays. Just let the LLM make those choices! But that is not sitting right with me for whatever reason. Something I should think about I guess

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

#268

Post by florianherrengt »

pelagicAustral wrote: post #23

I don't know what kind of company has got a large codebase and it's taking 20,000 loc pr's expecting that shit to be sustainable, but I work AI first and at the most PR's are touching 12 to 15 files, with the more radical ones sitting at 30. They are still human-reviewable. They are still the kind of change you can revert back to original without breaking all the rest... there are ways of doing this stuff, dear luddi…

I’m hardly a Luddite and you’re basically making my point.

You’re deliberately constraining the output so changes stay small, human-reviewable and reversible. That’s good engineering culture.

It isn’t all or nothing. I use AI heavily but that doesn’t mean I have to pretend there aren’t serious problems with how it’s being used.

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

#269

Post by notakio »

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…

When I worked at a particular fruit company in Cupertino, my boss had been asked repeatedly by the developer teams to provide a tour of the data center we'd recently finished building out, which housed the servers their code ran on.

He gave them a lengthy, grueling, hyper-detailed tour of the entire facility, encompassing the HVAC systems, electrical systems, network and computing systems, finishing with about 20 minutes where he had them stand inside a hot aisle that he was just outside of, giving a fantastic soliloquy on the importance of code efficiency, and the consequences of ignoring it. It was hilarious to watch from the comfort of the cold aisle, knowing full well what he was doing.

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

#270

Post by skydhash »

saulpw wrote: post #263
SoftTalker wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In retrospect, the golden age was the pre-internet era. Some rose-colored glasses maybe, but as I remember it: Paying for software was the norm, so it was more clear what the "product" was, and software writers had a direct incentive to write better software. Updates could not be pushed out so you had to be pretty sure your code worked before you shipped it. Having to ship physical media to all your customers for a b…

You're right about those things, but you're forgetting that we had no source control, and almost all software was closed source. You took what you were given and you liked it, and you developed strong attachments to particular versions of software which you clung to well beyond its use-by date (like Python 2.7). MS-DOS 3.3 forever!

We had version control in the 70s with SCSS and then RCS. They were primitive, but a lot of software were only a few files.
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