[dead]
LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do
31–40 of 1001 posts
Re: LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do
#32The market still seems to be hot for roles that provide leverage like platform engineers and Staff+ engineers
Re: LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do
#33Code quality and architecture still matter, because they also make it easier for LLMs to reason about the system.
That said, Opus 4.8 and Codex 5.5 both can write code that is higher quality than your average engineer. They are not quite there yet in terms of code re-use, but I think that's a solvable problem.
Re: LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do
#34I sympathise with the author being in the same boat, largely.
I just want to emphasise a point... Calculators give 100% correct answers and yet we still hire accountants; for the simple fact that we don't want all to be accountants.
People will hire software engineers for the simple fact that they do not want to be software engineers.
Re: LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do
#35To me looks like, if we're not collectively careful, civilisation will soon be on a path to an evolutionary dead-end. Anything that can replace a deeply experienced s/ware engineer can replace anyone in the employment stack, meaning that only the owners of capital will be left, and they too will soon fade as the economy falls off a cliff and money has no value, because the only value that money has is the value of a…
> Anything that can replace a deeply experienced s/ware engineer can replace anyone in the employment stack
Nope, just knowledge workers. We’re decades away from automating many manual labor professions, even “unskilled” ones.
Turns out brains just aren’t as special as we thought.
Re: LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do
#36> Maybe I should consider transforming my woodworking hobby into a profession... Whatever your feelings on the future of the industry are, it's hard to imagine you'll find more professional success in artisan woodworking than artisan software.
Depends what you mean by woodworking I work with a guy who does decking (gardens, caravans, etc) and builds sheds, fences, things like that and he does very well indeed (he's also incredibly good at it to be fair)
Most people would just call that construction
Re: LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do
#37Realistically, what should we have done instead? Not invent LLMs? What happens when a couple thousand people invent the next disruptive technology and even more of the population loses their jobs?
It seems like new tech is something most of us have to lie down and accept as the new reality each time it's invented, barring full-scale rioting. Much as with the Cold War.
Re: LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do
#38There’s one force where software engineering is being automated by LLMs, but the other force is that there isn’t really much more software that needs to be built. Even before AI coding became big, back in 2021, we were already in late stage SaaS territory where each new idea was an increasingly minor variation of an existing idea. There were no new GitHubs, Herokus, Stripes, Salesforces, Instagrams, Reddits, just variations of those for more specialized markets.
It’s really unfortunate that AI hasn’t raised the ceiling on the space of possibilities as much as it’s raised the floor on how much can be automated, we’re all getting squeezed in the space between.
Re: LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Whatever your feelings on the future of the industry are, it's hard to imagine you'll find more professional success in artisan woodworking than artisan software. A small percentage of the market, maybe a fraction of a percent, are still willing to pay for hand-built goods - bonus if it's thoroughly modern but retro (steam-punk keyboards, maybe). Exactly zero percent of the market is willing to pay for hand-built s…
> Exactly zero percent of the market is willing to pay for hand-built software. You took this statistic out of your rear end?
It is fairly obvious that the majority of people who buy software (>99%) don't really care how it's built. They care a lot about the outcome of using it, they care a little bit about whether there are bugs or not, and they care about the cost a lot, but beyond that nothing seems to matter to the purchaser. Even obvious things like whether or not there are tests, documentation, SLAs for fixes, or backwards compatibility between versions don't really seem to matter much.
That doesn't mean you couldn't carve out a niche providing hand built software to people it does matter to, because the software industry is large, but saying 'zero percent of the market isn't willing to pay for it' isn't really wrong. It's just a rounding error that does care.
(One massive caveat though ... the argument assumes that 'hand built' means 'higher quality than AI-assisted', and that's probably not true for >99% of developers.)
Re: LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Exactly zero percent of the market is willing to pay for hand-built software. You took this statistic out of your rear end?
> You took this statistic out of your rear end? We are less than a year into good-enough coding agents, and as of right now there is not a single job opening I see that offers a salary for non-AI output.
[flagged]