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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?

#291

Post by vogelke »

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 is right on the money. It's not that we have way more bad engineers than before; it's that the damage they do is out of all proportion to their numbers.

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

#292

Post by chasd00 »

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.

> a emergency leader with an eye towards promotion

i've gone this route a few times in my career, it's very stressful and involves angry/panicked people and many all nighters. Also, the glory fades fast. would not recommend.

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

#293

Post by kube-system »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #61
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…

Ironically, AI mitigates bad developers quite a bit. The architecture/design is coming from above bad devs (in a functional org), and AI tends to write less sloppy code than bad devs, and test/validate it more rigorously.

A bad developer with any current frontier model will happily produce syntactically correct code that is unreadable, in a spaghetti architecture, and write an elaborate test suite that tests all of the wrong things.

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

#294

Post by jurgenburgen »

noncoml wrote: post #234
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…

Sounds like bad management to me

My company got rid of line management. I now report to a director with over 20 reports and barely any time for career development. Our performance reviews are AI generated and we’re losing engineers. The industry has gone completely insane.

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

#295

Post by tarkin2 »

The main thing it's removing is the skills you gain through actual practice, and replacing those with the demand that you subscribe to OpenAI etc to do your job.

But, moreover, the demand your company subscribes. But not your company anymore, because you'll probably be replaced by one engineer (and an AI subscription) who's now trying to do your job and about four or five other jobs.

And this one engineer will become more and more reliant on AI companies, AI companies that'll go for the throat once they've hollowed out all the skills that used to exist in the engineering market.

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

#296

Post by butlike »

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…

A hackathon for performance improvement screams to me "you'll be re-interviewing for your own job." I don't foresee this going well for the company. Best case scenario: you wildfire churn all the chaff engineers which limits the company's throughput until they're rehired... with no expectation the new hires will be any better. You also lose A LOT of domain experience and are self-inflicting brain drain.

I'd try and push for some "lunch and learn" meeting where the engineers get lunch catered and in exchange sit in on a meeting where you explain your point of view. Without monetary incentive it'll be hard to change the culture, but not impossible (and food goes a long way in greasing the wheels).

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

#298

Post by win311fwg »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #267
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 proble…

The decisions are important, but the understanding is that you define them as constraints. Which is what a segment of the software community, the upper class if you will, has always believed you should do, even before LLMs were a thing. The LLM simply becomes a constraint solver: machines do the work, people do the thinking.

This is the challenge of the middle class developer. They aren't accustomed to working with constraint thinking and they're past the junior stage where one is expected to still be shaping their thinking so they are struggling to find a fit.

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

#299

Post by dominotw »

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…

> 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 think i fall into this bucket. our "leaders" and executives have told us they dont care about 'shipping good' . we are simply responding to incentives.

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

#300

Post by wiradikusuma »

I told my (small) team of developers that they're free to use anything to get them more productive: (company-provided) AI, black magic, WFH to avoid traffic, etc. But I also tell them that every human (including myself) is responsible for their own (direct/indirect through delegation) work so we can't say "a genie did that, not me". So far it's net positive for us with AI.
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