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Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

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Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#311

Post by whodidntante »

kypro wrote: post #86
harimau777 wrote: post #20

I keep reading about how AI will be fine because people can just retrain for different careers. However, I never read what those careers are or who is going to pay for retraining. I certainly don't have the money or time to go back to college and start a new career at the bottom.

Also, it's not necessarily true that there will be other great careers available. This seems to just be an assumption people are making. Of course, there are jobs that will still require human labour for some time yet, but in reality a lot jobs that require physical human labour are now done in other parts of the world where labour is cheaper. Those which cannot be exported like plumbing or waitressing only have limi…

+1

50% of the workforce was in farming near the end of the 1800's. Today, 2% 40% of the workforce was in manufacturing early to mid 1900's. Today 8% 60+% of the current workforce is white collar. What will it be in 20 years ?

LLM's are only a couple of years old, we have no idea where this will go. Maybe it will be a big hallucination, maybe we are looking at the very early version of farm and manufacturing machines.

The ENIAC was larger than a person, we now have watches that are significantly more powerful. Maybe in the future, your Apple watch will have more compute than several racks of H100's.

When they came for the farmers, no one else cared - everyone got cheap and bountiful food. When they came for the manufacturers, no one else cared - everyone got cheap and bountiful products. Now they are coming for the white collar workers, and their highly paid laptop lifestyles.

Who is left to care ? The billionaires ?

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#313

Post by varispeed »

Software engineering was not a career long time ago. The companies have no respect for software engineers and treat them as commodity that can be replaced at any time. The traditional career "progression" also doesn't exist. You can get pay rise only so many times and become the seniorest senior or you want to fulfil the Peter's principle.

While most developers were busy grinding, the corporations did the most ensuring the only sensible pathway to wealth and development is closed = running own business that is. In many countries, due to regulatory capture enacted by corrupt governments, making profit is next to impossible, that if you manage to jump bureaucratic hurdles that are not present for larger corporations.

AI is just a tool. Will AI replace software engineer is like asking will hammer replace the carpenter?

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#315

Post by bluefirebrand »

ex-aws-dude wrote: post #273
AstroBen wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it's not deterministic you can never fully trust it. In a deterministic abstraction I don't need to audit the lower levels.

Who said you need to trust it? Reviewing code is still way faster than writing code.

> Reviewing code is still way faster than writing code.

Writing code results in a much better understanding of the code than reviewing it

In fact I would say that in large complex codebases, in order to develop the same understanding of what the code is doing might actually take longer than writing it from scratch would have

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#316

Post by geodel »

hjort-e wrote: post #253
geodel wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree. It is just like 2 totally separate groups are arguing. One very tiny slice of speciality/ rare industries where code is critical but overall small part of project costs. I can see if code / software is 5% of overall cost even heavy use of AI for code part is not moving the needle. So people in this group can feel confident in their indispensability. Second group is much larger and peddling CRUD / JS Frontends…

What makes you feel that a complex frontend would be easier for AI than a non-CRUD backend system?

It is irrelevant that complex frontend would be easy for AI or not. To me 1) how many unique complex frontends are needed out of total frontends that millions of sites out there need. 2) Will there be increase in need of such frontend engineers so other displaced folks can land a job there.

I think it will be far fewer to have any positive impact on IT engineers' overall job prospects.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#317

Post by brandensilva »

bborud wrote: post #67

Multiple times per week I have the same conversation. It goes something like this: - AI will make developers irrelevant - Why? - Because LLMs can write code - Do you know what I do for a living? - Yes, write code? - Yes, about 2-5% of the time. Less now. - But you said you are a developer? - I did - So what do you do 95-98% of the time? - I understand things and then apply my ability to formulate solutions - But I ca…

I remember being that kid in high school who ran math and logical problems hard which contributed to me being very technical and to learn to push through painful mental challenges on the regular. Out of most of my graduating class there were not many of us that went on to become engineers for a reason because it isn't easy work by any means and I'm guessing is quite draining for people who don't use their brain like we do.

So while AI will change the industry I don't see any reputable company firing the smartest ones in the room for junior level intelligence.

Even with it advancing someone has to be responsible for when it screws up which we know it will.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#318

Post by Terr_ »

dominotw wrote: post #213
vineyardmike wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2008 had ~30k CS graduates. 2015 had ~50k CS graduates. 2021 had ~100k CS graduates. You can extrapolate the rest.

thats only a fraction of all the layoffs

Someone may graduate with that degree only once in their lifetime--or not at all--and be laid off multiple times. :p

We might be able to make a flow-comparison for "entering the field" versus "exiting the field forever", but layoffs don't really measure the latter.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#320

Post by varispeed »

dakiol wrote: post #308
bborud wrote: post #67

Multiple times per week I have the same conversation. It goes something like this: - AI will make developers irrelevant - Why? - Because LLMs can write code - Do you know what I do for a living? - Yes, write code? - Yes, about 2-5% of the time. Less now. - But you said you are a developer? - I did - So what do you do 95-98% of the time? - I understand things and then apply my ability to formulate solutions - But I ca…

That doesn't hold because the goal for executives is to increase revenue and the main sales pitch of Anthropic et al is to pay for agents instead of paying for engineers. That means 80% of the workforce is out no matter what. Whether or not one belongs to the remaining 20% is a different story, but obviously not all of us will be there. > I understand things and then apply my ability to formulate solutions AI is comi…

It will be interesting for governments using workers as proxy for taxing corporations.
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