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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?

#311

Post by [deleted] »

mikert89 wrote: post #60
davidw wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not actually true; people have been complaining about this for decades, and it's never been the zero-sum game that they claim it is. I mean, I wrote this 12 years ago in response to similar discussions on this same site, and in the intervening years, we had a great market for software engineers: https://journal.dedasys.com/2014/12/29/people-places-and-job... What has changed is 1) the zero interest rate enviro…

ive worked at multiple FAANG, almost always been the only american on a team of 10. theres some huge push by corporations to deny it to justify shipping in more foreign labor.

[deleted]

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

#312

Post by markstos »

Perhaps more broadly AI will hollow out "middle intelligence".

We could end up with a gulf between those who use AI for cognitive inquiry vs passive delegation. Those who accelerate learning by asking "help me understand this" vs those who relinquish understanding and analytical thinking to AI to complete their work.

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

#313

Post by dupflo »

florianherrengt wrote: post #225
dupflo wrote: post #177

At the same time, it also brings very low level "vibecoder" to the pool

I wrote about this before. I don't think the vibecoders will have a job for a long time. At best, it will be minimum wage. See "AI Won't Take Your Job, Someone Using AI Will" > There's no lucrative middle ground where 'AI whispering' is a high-value skill. https://blog.florianherrengt.com/vibe-coder-career-path.html

2026 is starting to slow time there emergency and 2027 will clean. Unfortunately they still contribute to overwhelm socials media with there content.

Nice first name btw

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

#314

Post by BeetleB »

iLoveOncall wrote: post #128
weatherlite wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But those H1Bs all come for a very narrow set of work - mostly software development or other adjacent roles. So your 4 million figure that counts all graduates in all fields doesn't make sense when we talk about tech. There are around 100k U.S CS graduates . You're telling me 100k H1-Bs don't make any impact on them?

You're counting only CS bachelors, in reality there's 400K graduates a year in software engineering fields. There's also only 60,000 H1-Bs a year for private companies. Lastly the majority of H1-Bs doesn't go to software engineering jobs, it's around 30-50%. There's also basically no US company hiring juniors via H1-Bs, so yeah, I'm saying it doesn't make any meaningful impact. 30K H1-Bs versus 400K grads...

> There's also only 60,000 H1-Bs a year for private companies.

Actually, more like over 80,000. They have a separate pool for people with advanced degrees (MS or higher) in tech fields.

Agree with everything else.

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

#315

Post by mrbombastic »

SoftTalker wrote: post #273
ex-aws-dude wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every time I see people say this I think: show me the money? If its so good why aren't you rich?

Why would anyone get rich doing something easy?

Because the companies everyone claims are now obsolete are making a lot of money still doing the supposedly obsolete things?

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

#316

Post by davidw »

chaps wrote: post #304
davidw wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Are you saying that precise thing changed 10 years ago and hasn't always kind of been with us?

I am talking about the weak market for software engineers right now and what caused it.

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

#317

Post by Kuraj »

aabdi wrote: post #28

> You were never expected to understand every service and every database. But at least someone did and would explain it to you. I agree with most of this except this. Think there’s some rose tinted glasses here or I’ve got bad luck over time. Life before ai was bad as well. There wasn’t any one to explain to you anything! You had to figure it out yourself. The people either already left or was busy with something els…

If there is any positive to be had from this, it's that we finally started documenting the codebases for AI as we should have always done it for other teammates.

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

#318

Post by mannanj »

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…

Part of the problem is self confidence bias. Everyone things they're the good engineer, while dunning Krueger would say maybe you are the bad engineer.

Prove who's good and bad.

And you can't really, because there's always tradeoffs you're making as an engineer. The really self confident ones think their tradeoffs win, and maybe they do, though often they don't and these people are just self aggrandizing and stroking their large egos. Are you a better engineer just because you made a big talk and had the confidence to share it with lots of people?

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

#319

Post by alpha_squared »

Anecdotally, the essay is so spot-on. In my last job, I'd regularly have to review +20k-line change PRs from mid/junior devs only to reach a point where I'd have to just shut down the PR and ask for it to be broken apart. Sometimes, the issue would get escalated and I'd have to speak to their management/director chain. More often, they'd realize that if they spent some time trying to understand how to break it apart, the changeset actually needed to be much smaller and I'd come back to a 400 or 500-line PR to review.

In one particular case, a senior teammate of mine went the extra effort to actually explore what the intent of the change is and created a whole new PR for the junior dev that was a simple configuration change of 5 lines instead of the 14k lines they put for review.

This is utterly unsustainable and something will give at some point.

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

#320

Post by dzonga »

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…

pretty good presentation.

my take is everyone in the industry should read grog-brained developer, & no silver bullet before working as a professional.

the other is a mindset change - the best working code is code that's never written as it doesn't have bugs or suffer technical debt. Agentic coding doesn't solve that. Human taste does, which means our job is to reduce the amount of lines we write. agents etc are useful for the filler or bullshit part of our jobs e.g generating tests.

but ultimately I think the whole spec-driven development & agents spitting 100000s of lines era will be looked upon as mass psychosis.

last thing to give an analogy - you don't carve a David statue by gluing together pieces of marble - but you carve it by cutting pieces of a huge block of marble.

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