AI gives more leverage to exceptional people, its an amplifier not an extender
That is true of all tools. AI is a tool. A tool provides leverage. It does not make a bad craftsperson good.
right but we have never seen a tool like this
AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?
31–40 of 607 posts
Re: AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?
#32I 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 to justify hiring foreign tech workers when most of the time they are just going to be using American LLMs to do their work anyway.
[0] https://thefederal.com/category/news/h1b-visa-indian-tech-wo...
Re: AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?
#33In the words of Admiral Ackbar, "It's a trap". Any apparent short term gain is really a prescription for long term pain. Ignore what AI fanboys say and instead look at what they do. https://northeasttimes.com/2026/08/07/oracle-bans-ai-code-fr...
Oracle banned AI code for copyright reasons, you cannot interpret that as a assessment of the practical output of the models.
Oracle banned AI code from a public project they maintain and backport/share with a commercial product because they're a very litigious company, anticipating future legal cases.
Re: AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?
#34Between AI and competing against the world with H-1B, it's really never been harder to get an entry or mid-level software engineering job. Which means our pipeline to senior engineer is completely broken.
People have been fretting about 'foreigners' taking their jobs for decades and it never really happened. This is all about LLM's.
I mean, think about it; just a few short years ago there was a very strong market for software engineers, despite outsourcing and immigration being very much part of the landscape.
Re: AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?
#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 firm believer in garbage in -> garbage out, AI is only as good as the abstractions and contracts you put in place for it. I don't subscribe to the idea that AI generated code is fundamentally bad, just that people lack the right skills today to wrangle agents into writing good code.
Earlier in the year I put together a talk for my company on what the future of architecture & design means for us in the career, I'm very proud of it and will share here in case folks have their own thoughts to share on the topic: https://youtu.be/SIZrt9Rt05Q?si=W57eirniWmoSFeBu
Re: AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?
#36It's very true, you used to have to hire people you knew were not very good just to have warm bodies who could throw together widgets, minor bug fixes, etc. You still had to have a competent developer review what they did, which was annoying, but ultimately a time saver over doing it themselves.
Now the competent developer can just run agents and do the same review process, except it's ~free (relative to human salaries, even outsourced).
So we've got a bimodal distribution going on where the bottom X% of developers have become essentially worthless while the top Y% of developers are now more valuable than ever.
Re: AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?
#37It baffles me that someone can just send a PR without knowing the gist of how it works and why it’s done this way.
If you can’t answer this basic question then why tf do we even need you around?
Re: AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?
#38Between AI and competing against the world with H-1B, it's really never been harder to get an entry or mid-level software engineering job. Which means our pipeline to senior engineer is completely broken.
People have been fretting about 'foreigners' taking their jobs for decades and it never really happened. This is all about LLM's. I mean, think about it; just a few short years ago there was a very strong market for software engineers, despite outsourcing and immigration being very much part of the landscape.
have you been inside any big tech company? lots of orgs are > 80% foreign.
Re: AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
But now they can now move so fast that nobody has a realistic chance to stop them before the damage compounds. They get into a much deeper mess much faster.
We always talk about damage, what's the damage here?
The next decade of software consulting will be defined by repairing the Big Ball of Mud https://www.laputan.org/mud/
Re: AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
Only if you run out of things to write. Is your back log ever empty?
ofcourse not, but they can pay someone 80k a year to work on the backlog, whereas maybe they used to pay 175k. its not about work going down, its the skill set needed to complete the work is lower than ever, and they need less people than ever
they won't even need that as agents talk to their own lanes in some Linear project management workflow that your sales team agents are connected. The entire system is going to end up agentic and even the CEO will be out of work unless they are founders and owners of the company. We'll all have our own business this way. Or it all collapses. Time will tell.