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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?

#281

Post by skydhash »

SoftTalker wrote: post #157
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…

Nor have I seen this "punch every hiccup into google" approach. Most errors are things that (a) you've seen before if you have any significant experience and (b) have a pretty obvious cause if you simply read the error message and look at your code. Sure you might lean more on Google or SO if it's something you haven't seen before, or it's something deep in a stack that isn't code you actually wrote. But as the noob…

I'm more likely to have several tabs of the libraries/language docs open than opening Google. And when I do, it would be just a faster way to get to the docs. After a while in a project, my history and bookmarks list is much more useful than a web engine. If it goes into months and years, it's mostly tweaking the code to solve some bugs, meaning a lot of reading of source code.

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

#282

Post by saulpw »

skydhash wrote: post #270
saulpw wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In the 80s, source control was like networking. Yes some orgs had it (mostly academia) but the rest of us just had a precious floppy that we copied the known-good source onto.

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

#283

Post by dr_dshiv »

Shorel wrote: post #194
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…

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…

As a side note; There is plenty of useful math that many people need (or would benefit from) in the real world. Much math curricula is arguably poorly aligned to needs, as it emerged from various historical flukes of design-by-committee. Popular math curricula is not perfect by any means. I recommend looking at high school or college textbooks and considering whether it is well prioritized.

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

#284

Post by zug_zug »

I think that piece is half right and half wrong.

I think it's largely correct that hiring bad engineers is dangerous to the company. But that's always been true, especially those "hack out a prototype, get director applause, and leave it for somebody else to own" people. But management has usually chosen to keep such people around, because they can look good on paper (see how many tickets they closed?).

The question is really a management / business-owner question -- will managers/directors stop hiring yolo-engineers? Will they empower engineers to close PRs simply on complexity/size grounds? Will they fund refactors and simplifications as first-class concern? If not, it will be a problem, and I don't envy the engineers who try to be the glue at such a company.

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

#285

Post by no_input »

WarmWash wrote: post #86
dauertewigkeit wrote: post #45

Earlier 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?

Pretty much no other engineering field made sense to go into for about a decade. Even kids who did go EE, Mech E, or even Chem E ended up taking software jobs. The pay, benefits, and work/life balance of SWE just absolutely obliterates everything else. Or did at least

Exactly this. Went into physics but the academic landscape is hell so shipped off to SWE.

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

#286

Post by jadar »

I appreciate that the OP puts his finger on the problem. I think he's right. I wish there was more optimism or ideas about how to solve it, though. How do I fight against it as an engineer? Or, how do I become a "good" engineer? It feels like sometimes the only solution people have is effectively "don't use it."

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

#287

Post by SoftTalker »

ebb_earl_co wrote: post #71
sameesh wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Lots of (most?) programming languages are 0-indexed so it feels natural for software developers and our ilk.

Not really. 0-based indexing is different from counting and starting with 0 in a counting context is weird. Would you ever say a set has zero elements when it actually contains a single element?

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

#288

Post by florianherrengt »

oceanplexian wrote: post #149

> The engineer opening a 25,000-line PR should have stopped the agent long before it got there. So many A car is simply a faster horse arguments being made here. The “You must review every line of code” camp are going to be in for a seriously bad time when Claude/Grok/etc starts writing machine code, and they absolutely will and you will look like a crazy person the same way as those who said we can’t trust compilers…

I do have a genuine question though: what value are you adding at that point?

If you don’t understand the system, don’t know what the code is doing and you’re mostly prompting an LLM to make the decisions and implementation for you, what exactly is your contribution?

The ability to operate the tool isn’t much of a moat if everyone else has access to the same tool.

I don’t review assembly produced by a compiler because the compiler isn’t deciding what my system should do. It’s translating a program whose semantics were already specified. More importantly, that translation is deterministic.

A compiler takes a human-specified program and translates it into another representation while preserving its semantics.

If in five years I can give an agent a complete specification and reliably verify the resulting machine code against it, then sure, reviewing code may become obsolete and I’d happily stop doing it.

Also, keeping changes small isn’t just about making individual lines readable. It limits blast radius, makes behaviour easier to reason about, isolates mistakes, makes changes easier to revert and so many other things. None of those properties suddenly become obsolete because code generation got faster.

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

#289

Post by butlike »

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…

Tell me how to paradigm shift careers and I'll get out of your hair and stop shipping uninspired features.

But, right now I'm paralyzed with fear in how to make a successful career switch without starting from literally "new grad level." I have wisdom, so it doesn't feel like I should have to start at the bottom rung again. Egotistically, I don't even mind, it's just the salary hit that would be the main issue.

Maybe it's not even a paradigm shift (though, I've always wanted to work on film productions). I've sort of lost the passion for being an IC, but how can I make a transition to management without any management experience? Should I just apply for a managerial role and in the cover letter state management is my intended path for growth?

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

#290

Post by satisfice »

palmotea wrote: post #217
mirmor23 wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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. AI disease is encouraging "sketchy process and minimal checks on the software quality." QA has been eliminated from my team, and the QA engineers that are left have b…

More like developers are now testers and nobody is doing QA.
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