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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

#301

Post by florianherrengt »

palmotea wrote: post #222
ryandrake wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. For most of my career, bad engineers (or juniors who were earnestly learning) would struggle to even create output that compiled, let alone ran. And it would take them a long time to implement something poorly. So the blast radius from their incompetence would be limited. Today, a bad engineer can churn out ten thousand lines of garbage that actually compiles and runs, before my first cup of coffee. If not o…

> Today, a bad engineer can churn out ten thousand lines of garbage that actually compiles and runs, before my first cup of coffee. If not on a tight leash, they'll sink the whole codebase or inundate every senior person with garbage code review requests. The blast radius is unlimited! The term for that is "10x AI engineer." Anyone who has anything negative to say about such people is just jealous of their insane pro…

The supposed “10x engineer” may simply be someone stealing productivity from everyone around them.

You measure the output of one person while ignoring the cost they impose on their team.

If I generate 10 PRs in a day but three engineers now have to spend the next two days reviewing them, figuring out what I changed, correcting bad assumptions, debugging regressions and explaining why half of it needs to be redone, I haven’t become 10x more productive. I’ve just moved the work onto other people.

Worse, I’m consuming the time of the people who are usually the hardest to replace and whose attention is already scarce.

That’s why PR count, lines changed or features “completed” are terrible measures of productivity. You can make your own numbers look incredible while reducing the throughput of the entire team.

Re: AI is removing the middle class of software engineering

#302

Post by [deleted] »

__turbobrew__ wrote: post #195
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 analogy I have heard is that LLMs are a force multiplier, so if you were a 2x engineer before you are now a 10x engineer, and if you were a -2x engineer you are now a -10x engineer.

[deleted]

Re: AI is removing the middle class of software engineering

#303

Post by a2ff6eeb0 »

coffeebeqn wrote: post #210
a2ff6eeb0 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think AI is getting pretty good at generating the tickets as well. Not amazing, but it feels like ticket generation today is where code generation was a year ago. I wonder if there's an agent harness that would work well for requirements gathering.

Not really in my experience. I’d much rather have just the prompt rather than the seven paragraph slop

That assumes you're the one that's implementing it. If the agents get good enough at figuring out specs, I'd expect you could just pass it along to the next agent for implementation -- vibe coding today, vibe speccing tomorrow.

Re: AI is removing the middle class of software engineering

#304

Post by chaps »

davidw wrote: post #162
chaps wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Orrrrrr... it could be a complex combination of outsourcing, an over-reliance on degrees, LLMs, a lack of "apprenticeship" mentoring, etc etc etc. I was very fortunate to get a job in a NOC a little bit after high school where I learned things one'd expect to learn in an entry level job. The team I worked on was all about mentorship, learning, and building people to the next level. Haven't seen that attitude elsewher…

> outsourcing, an over-reliance on degrees, LLMs, a lack of "apprenticeship" mentoring, Which of those things changed (along with higher interest rates) in the past few years though? All the other variables did not change. They were present 5 years ago and present 10 years ago too. To me that's indicative that those factors are not the cause of a soft market for software engineers in 2026.

Are you seriously suggesting that ten years of a systemic failure to mentor the new generation hasn't had an impact on the culture of mentorship?

Re: AI is removing the middle class of software engineering

#305

Post by Shorel »

dr_dshiv wrote: post #283
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…

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.

In principle I agree with you.

The missing part of mathematics education, IMO, would be to focus more into developing the intuition of what something means, instead of the current focus on getting some (numeric) results.

Re: AI is removing the middle class of software engineering

#306

Post by butlike »

chasd00 wrote: post #292
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.

> 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.

Also you don't get the money. Why pay for a job already done

Re: AI is removing the middle class of software engineering

#307

Post by xvilka »

Now the question is - no one was born good or best engineer/programmer/scientist. Often it was a long path of sleepless nights, daily grinding, failing million times, doing dumb mistakes along the way, the usual package of suffering sometimes called "experience". What is the path now for the next generation of good or best engineers? There will be no opportunities/budget to do the same anymore.

Re: AI is removing the middle class of software engineering

#308

Post by MyHonestOpinon »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #76
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 me to a tee. I think I'm a fairly good software engineer, and I loved building software and mentoring more junior engineers who I thought had both ability and a good attitude. I also think I was a pretty pragmatic engineer (I was not an "architecture astronaut"), but I did enjoy the craft of getting into the nitty gritty details of software. The past 5-10 years or so saw me pretty beaten down though with soft…

I also consider myself a fairly good pragmatic software engineer. I have led small (3 engineers), medium (15), and large (100+) teams.

To me, the best time was late 90s, early 2000s. We had a lot of autonomy. People would just trusted that we knew what and how to build it. I could focus on building a great product. Overtime, we lost control, to the point that we now work based on jira tickets made by managers or product owners with one tenth of the experience that we have.

Re: AI is removing the middle class of software engineering

#309

Post by MyHonestOpinon »

saulpw wrote: post #263
SoftTalker wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In retrospect, the golden age was the pre-internet era. Some rose-colored glasses maybe, but as I remember it: Paying for software was the norm, so it was more clear what the "product" was, and software writers had a direct incentive to write better software. Updates could not be pushed out so you had to be pretty sure your code worked before you shipped it. Having to ship physical media to all your customers for a b…

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!

I started using SCCS in the late 80s, then RCS, then CSV, then subversion, and finally git.

Re: AI is removing the middle class of software engineering

#310

Post by wonnage »

butlike wrote: post #296
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…

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 p…

they meant application performance
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