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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?

#271

Post by Shorel »

soperj wrote: post #252
Shorel wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That really sounds like the kind of people who will complain in university about being forced to study calculus. Natural consequence: Then they never grasped the concept of computational complexity. O(n) Vs O(n²)? They have n, what's the difference? Python is fast enough. The only thing that matters is shipping features fast! Features! Our competitor will have this next week, we need to write code fast, everything el…

computational complexity was never part of calculus. Calculus is the math of continuous change.

I should add that text to the rant at my last paragraph!

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

#272

Post by mikert89 »

mrbombastic wrote: post #262
threatofrain wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

You aren’t getting it. They can pay their engineers half what they used to, you don’t need the same level of skill to build photoshop. Yes, you need a bunch of engineers, but they will be driving coding agents, not writing code by hand. They can be hired and fired for cheap

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

#273

Post by SoftTalker »

ex-aws-dude wrote: post #228
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…

Every time I see people say this I think: show me the money? If its so good why aren't you rich?

Why would anyone get rich doing something easy?

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

#274

Post by globalnode »

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…

seems a lot of comments below with disdain for "bad" coworkers. every industry has them, but if theyre objectively bad why not get rid of them? surely some periodic review would do that. how did they get hired in the first place? perhaps hiring managers are the "bad" employees.. or managers that let them go on not performing are "bad". or maybe your expectations arent aligned with reality? who knows? the worlds a complicated place.

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

#275

Post by pengaru »

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…

Mind sharing where you're at?

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

#276

Post by zinodaur »

skydhash wrote: post #264
cautiouscat wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, but much more slowly. And if they realize halfway through implementation that there is a better way to do it, but they are under pressure to deliver, they wont have time to rewrite it and will live with the consequences of that decision forever

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

#277

Post by ok123456 »

apsurd wrote: post #192
ok123456 wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Trust actually does work that way though, the implicit and collective fuzzy agreement of “having my name on it”. Of course that ambiguity needs enforced automated checks, but reputation and one’s own integrity is not for nothing. Generative AI breaks that agreement. It took me over a year to realize my previous CTO actually didn’t care too much about the system design he shipped . And the expectation was actually to…

At different times in recent history, you could have also said:

> Hell is working on other people's NoSQL code.

> Hell is working on other people's Python slop code.

> Hell is working on other people's enterprise Java code.

> Hell is working on other people's Windows Forms/GUI Builder code.

To quote Jean-Paul Sartre: Hell is other people.

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

#278

Post by crnkofe »

All this mindless droning about societal collapse, destruction of jobs, people moving on is really getting old. Sure people have caused mayhem by following (and enforcing) bad practices which resulted in a toxic workplace, a mix of pissed of client due to constantly failing to reach deadlines, unimaginably bad codebase that was a horror to work with and teammates each defending their own turf. LLMs now allow this deterioration to happen much quicker and more effectively.

On the other hand the problem can also be triaged quicker and rewritten faster. Pretty much every startup I joined had at its core disastrous code written by students and overworked techies. I can totally see this shitty base being the future base all startups. It'll likely need an army of agents or devs to make sense of all the spaghetti being written. I won't be surprised if demand for devs skyrockets after the first generation of spaghetti western code "matures".

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

#280

Post by bluefirebrand »

jasode wrote: post #137
sarchertech wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

>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 and PMs look at who’s free and give that person the task. The gp you replied to qualified it with "enterprise software" (LOB, CRUD, etc aka "cost center") so your observations where senior -vs- junior engineers being more fungible can…

> However, in "engineering" type of software products (game engines, RDBMS engines, operating systems, etc) where the software is more often a "product" that's sold (aka profit center) ... there are definitely different layers of complexity where senior and junior engineers are not fungible at all.

That's great and all, but that's a small minority of all software written. I'd love to work on projects like that but ultimately I have to pay the bills. Many software engineers are in the same boat I am.

Now I guess I'm just up shit creek because I built a career on SAAS work that was available instead of holding out hope I could get in at my dream job working on game engines or some other non-SAAS product?

Sorry if I sound bitter. I'm variations tired of hearing variations "If you only worked in SAAS you were always close to meaningless and now we've automated you so you don't deserve to earn anything anymore". Feels like every day.

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