The next two years of software engineering • Hacker News Board

Re: The next two years of software engineering

#331

Post by rightbyte » Mon, Jan 12, 2026, 10:06 PM UTC

jmyeet wrote: post #305

brabel wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re focusing on the US. In Europe, worker protections are great. However, Europe has been lagging behind the US for a couple of decades and the gap has been growing. All tech giants are based in the US or China. Maybe things will collapse in the US now, but very unlikely to do so in Europe unless the impact from the US is so great it propagates to Europe, despite Europe itself not having done the things that cause…

Oh I couldn't disagree more. Europe is on the verge of full-blown fascism. Europe has Reform (UK), AfD (Germany) and National Front (France) as well as Hungary. Europe created the Russia-Ukraine problem by giving their energy security to Russia. Interestingly, this is a (super) rare win for the first Trump administration: forcing Europe to build an LNG port in 2018 [1] and warning against the dangers of dependence on…

This is so depressing to read but I can't help feeling you are right. The feeling is quite surreal becouse if I turn off my computer I can't notice the difference locally in my county. It is like lunatics from "the internet" runs alot of things now irl.

Re: The next two years of software engineering

#332

Post by WorldMaker » Mon, Jan 12, 2026, 10:09 PM UTC

chankstein38 wrote: post #224

maciejzj wrote: post #143

TBH, it all feels like a huge gamble at this point. Neither skills, education, institutional ties, nor current employment can guarantee a stable foundation for life. This hits harder depending on how much money, social capital, or debt you accumulated before this volatility began. If you’ve paid off your debts, bought a house, and stabilized your family life, you’re gambling with how comfortable the coming years will…

Amen. It's hard to live with hope right now at all. Programmer or otherwise we're constantly told we're all going to be replaced and the economy is a mess (US). Definitely a depressing time to be alive.

If you are looking for any sort of hope, even a cursed one: there is the perspective that LLM generated code is legacy code as a service. LLMs were trained on a lot other people's legacy code. A lot of "vibe coding" is for what de facto are "day one legacy code apps". If my career has taught me anything, companies will always sunk cost fallacy throw new money at "fixing"/"expanding" legacy apps or the endless "rewrite cycle" of always trying to rewrite legacy apps but never quite succeeding.

Skills like Legacy Code Anthropology and Reverse Engineering will grow into higher demand. Like the worst legacy apps built by junior developers and non-developers (Access/Excel VBA and VB6 alone had a lot of "low code" legacy by non-developers), LLMs are great at "documenting" What was built, but almost never Why or How, so skills like "Past Developer Mind Reading" and "Code Seances" will also be in high demand.

There will be plenty of work still to do "when" everything is vibe coded. It's going to resemble a lot more the dark matter work a lot of software engineering is in big enterprise: fixing other people's mistakes and trying to figure out the best way you can why they made those mistakes so you can in theory prevent the next mistake.

It's a very dark, cursed hope to believe that the future of software engineering is the darkest parts of its present/past. As a software developer who has spent too large of an amount of my career in the VB6 IDE and who often joked that my "retirement plan" was probably going to be falling into an overly-highly-paid COBOL Consultancy somewhere down the line, I'm more depressed that there will be a lot more legacy work than ever, not that there won't be enough work to go around, and it will be some of the ugliest, most boring, least fun parts of my career, forever, and will have even less "cushiness" to make up for it. (That "dream" of a highly paid COBOL Consultancy disappears when good Legacy Code becomes too common and thus the commodity job. Hard to demand slicker, higher salaries when supply is tainted and full.)

Re: The next two years of software engineering

#333

Post by qsera » Mon, Jan 12, 2026, 10:12 PM UTC

menaerus wrote: post #307

qsera wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not about complexity. I ll list some attributes of software development that makes it unique. * No hard rules, textbooks to follow, industry as a whole still make costly mistakes and recovery cycles. * No easy way to gauge the requirement-fit of the thing you made. Only time will tell. * Cheap (financially) to practice, make mistakes and learn.

You're making some strong assumptions about other industries which are incorrect. All of that exists elsewhere and is not so unique to software as you may think. Things are never that simple. Your argument reads more as a justification to the status quo and gatekeeping rather than being objective. I'm sure the doctors would have said something similar for their profession too but it doesn't necessarily mean it is tru…

>doctors would have said something similar for their profession

Actually that applies to doctors. A doctor who is not curious and is not willing to do learn/research on their own initiative is only a marketing hand of pharma.

But it is quite hard for doctors to do any real research independently. They can't really do experiments on real people...

Software is really special.

Re: The next two years of software engineering

#334

Post by _0l5x » Mon, Jan 12, 2026, 10:13 PM UTC

AstroBen wrote: post #285

maciejzj wrote: post #143

TBH, it all feels like a huge gamble at this point. Neither skills, education, institutional ties, nor current employment can guarantee a stable foundation for life. This hits harder depending on how much money, social capital, or debt you accumulated before this volatility began. If you’ve paid off your debts, bought a house, and stabilized your family life, you’re gambling with how comfortable the coming years will…

Fresh grads will be fine regardless. You're okay to start over from scratch at 25. 42 on the other hand is tough I feel for the mid-career people with families to support. Can't imagine how stressful that would be

This is a fresh perspective for me. I'm around 25 and have been struggling with finding some kind of path towards making my career into something sustainable long-term, but never really considered the other side. I think the issue many have on my end is that they don't really have much of anything to stand on while they rebuild yet, whereas they might think that someone more experienced could pivot to business and people-oriented roles by leveraging what they have now. I know many people personally struggling to find work as it is right out of school, and many have student loans which exacerbate the situation. For a lot of people, starting from scratch is not realistically feasible in the near future unless they're content with being homeless for a while.

Of course labor jobs will always exist, and a 25 year old would (on average) be much more physically able for that than someone older, so it goes both ways.

Re: The next two years of software engineering

#335

Post by Havoc » Mon, Jan 12, 2026, 10:14 PM UTC

maciejzj wrote: post #143

TBH, it all feels like a huge gamble at this point. Neither skills, education, institutional ties, nor current employment can guarantee a stable foundation for life. This hits harder depending on how much money, social capital, or debt you accumulated before this volatility began. If you’ve paid off your debts, bought a house, and stabilized your family life, you’re gambling with how comfortable the coming years will…

And not just SWE. If that falls then we're pretty close to societal upheaval because the difference vs other jobs is largely just better training data (github)

Re: The next two years of software engineering

#336

Post by raw_anon_1111 » Mon, Jan 12, 2026, 10:16 PM UTC

brabel wrote: post #296

jmyeet wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I say this without hyperbole: we are (IMHO) on the verge of total systemic collapse. We've had 50+ years of deteriotating worker conditions and a massive concentration of wealth to like 10,000 people. The 1980s crushed the labor movement, to all of our detriment. The GFC destroyed the career prospects of many millenials who discovered their entry-level positions no longer existed so we created a generation that we're…

You’re focusing on the US. In Europe, worker protections are great. However, Europe has been lagging behind the US for a couple of decades and the gap has been growing. All tech giants are based in the US or China. Maybe things will collapse in the US now, but very unlikely to do so in Europe unless the impact from the US is so great it propagates to Europe, despite Europe itself not having done the things that cause…

Worker protection doesn’t do you any good if companies refuse to hire people abd the government can’t afford the social safety net.

Re: The next two years of software engineering

#337

Post by thw_9a83c » Mon, Jan 12, 2026, 10:19 PM UTC

sanderjd wrote: post #288

cheschire wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And can’t be mentored by the senior except in some ersatz flat text instruction files.

Yeah, this is a big thing. AIs (at the moment) don't learn. You wait for a new model to come out and hope it is better than the last one. But that isn't the same thing as a person learning over time.

> AIs (at the moment) don't learn.

Yes, and even when it learns (because there's new version of the AI model) it doesn't learn according to your company/team's values. Those values might be very specific to your business model.

Currently, AI (LLM) is just a tool. It's a novel and apparently powerful tool. But it's still just a tool.

Re: The next two years of software engineering

#338

Post by raw_anon_1111 » Mon, Jan 12, 2026, 10:29 PM UTC

girvo wrote: post #155

misja111 wrote: post #125

> Senior developers: Fewer juniors means more grunt work landing on your plate I'm not sure I agree with that. Right now as a senior my task involves reviewing code from juniors; replace juniors with AI and it means reviewing code from AI. More or less the same thing.

The juniors get better and closer to the ideal that my team requires via this process. Current AIs don’t, not the same way.

And then because of salary compression and inversion where new employees at the same level as your former junior developers get paid more based on market trends while HR won’t give your former junior developers raises, they end up leaving when ther get “good enough”.

So why hire juniors at all instead of poaching a mid level ticket taker from another company?

If you are a line level manager, even if you want to retain your former junior now mid level developer, your hands are probably tied.

Re: The next two years of software engineering

#339

Post by AstroBen » Mon, Jan 12, 2026, 11:09 PM UTC

_0l5x wrote: post #334

AstroBen wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fresh grads will be fine regardless. You're okay to start over from scratch at 25. 42 on the other hand is tough I feel for the mid-career people with families to support. Can't imagine how stressful that would be

This is a fresh perspective for me. I'm around 25 and have been struggling with finding some kind of path towards making my career into something sustainable long-term, but never really considered the other side. I think the issue many have on my end is that they don't really have much of anything to stand on while they rebuild yet, whereas they might think that someone more experienced could pivot to business and pe…

Consider people in their 40s have..

A mortgage: if you were assuming a strong income that would continue, you very likely could be forced to sell your house and take a huge loss

A family, kids: people relying on you

Time: at this point you have retirement plans and financial deadlines you need to hit if it's to ever become a reality

God forbid you have any health issues that cost $$$ which tend to come as you age. Can you afford to lose health insurance?

If you think about re-skilling and starting off at entry level.. people don't really want to hire older beginners.

Of course that's absolute worst case scenario, but I guarantee there are a lot of people there.

I'd 100% choose living out of my car for a while. In your 20s you can upend everything and completely reinvent yourself. Time, minimal responsibilities and energy are priceless

> could pivot to business and people-oriented roles by leveraging what they have now

There's a reason that's really vague, right? Because who knows if it'll be available

I don't think AI is gunna reach this point but who knows. It's not off the table

Re: The next two years of software engineering

#340

Post by CodeMage » Mon, Jan 12, 2026, 11:16 PM UTC

jmyeet wrote: post #305

brabel wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re focusing on the US. In Europe, worker protections are great. However, Europe has been lagging behind the US for a couple of decades and the gap has been growing. All tech giants are based in the US or China. Maybe things will collapse in the US now, but very unlikely to do so in Europe unless the impact from the US is so great it propagates to Europe, despite Europe itself not having done the things that cause…

Oh I couldn't disagree more. Europe is on the verge of full-blown fascism. Europe has Reform (UK), AfD (Germany) and National Front (France) as well as Hungary. Europe created the Russia-Ukraine problem by giving their energy security to Russia. Interestingly, this is a (super) rare win for the first Trump administration: forcing Europe to build an LNG port in 2018 [1] and warning against the dangers of dependence on…

> There's a lot of thinking that Congress won't allow Trump to withdraw from NATO

I wonder how that is supposed to work when the Executive branch has proven they can do whatever they want regardless of the other two branches. The rules are worthless if there are no consequences for breaking them.