AI is removing the middle class of software engineering? • Hacker News Board

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

#331

Post by wojciii » Wed, Aug 12, 2026, 5:27 PM UTC

I got a person from my small team fired before the sommer holidays. Not that I wanted to, but he didn't deliver the quality that I was expecting from a thinking human with an engineering degree.

Adding AI to the mix just made things worse. I'm still finding issues in the codebase/documentation that I need to review, test and fix.

The replacement is being trained. I made sure that, while I expect them to use LLM supported development .. they own their contribution.

This is going to be a fun ride.

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

#332

Post by kakacik » Wed, Aug 12, 2026, 5:27 PM UTC

mikert89 wrote: post #272

mrbombastic wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

because this comment is responding to: "I think the field is basically over as a long term career unless you are truly exceptional. It will become very easy to build most software" photoshop, paypal, and many more companies etc. have software of vast complexity that cannot be reproduced or maintained today solely with llms, ipso facto you still need software developers or some similar role to build and maintain the c…

You aren’t getting it. They can pay their engineers half what they used to, you don’t need the same level of skill to build photoshop. Yes, you need a bunch of engineers, but they will be driving coding agents, not writing code by hand. They can be hired and fired for cheap

It won't be photoshop then. It will be shitty, buggy clunky app that costed a (major) fraction to develop but it will also earn a fraction. Companies like MS can afford this ie with Office suite but patience of markets and customers can allow them to go only so far, if ie Excel becomes semi-useless thats the end of Office and big cash cow for M$ (I'd say about time, that monopoly is not good for consumers at all).

This is in a way the same argument that all companies will use just boxed (albeit customized) software. In reality many, ie banks run their own custom software and for good reasons. Wake me up (in retirement) when any major bank decides to run their finances, regulatory stuff and transactions on llm-generated stuff made by underpaid devs like you describe.

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

#333

Post by doron » Wed, Aug 12, 2026, 5:27 PM UTC

xvilka wrote: post #307

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.

"The underlying purpose of AI is to allow wealth to access skill, while removing from the skilled the ability to access wealth"

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

#334

Post by burningChrome » Wed, Aug 12, 2026, 5:28 PM UTC

butlike wrote: post #289

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…

Tell me how to paradigm shift careers and I'll get out of your hair and stop shipping uninspired features. But, right now I'm paralyzed with fear in how to make a successful career switch without starting from literally "new grad level." I have wisdom, so it doesn't feel like I should have to start at the bottom rung again. Egotistically, I don't even mind, it's just the salary hit that would be the main issue. Maybe…

>> Egotistically, I don't even mind, it's just the salary hit that would be the main issue.

This is whare I am right now. Even senior positions have dropped 50-60K in range so I've effectively priced myself out of a lateral move because I would be taking a massive hit in salary for the same role I'm doing now. I'm currently at a company that continues to lay people off in lieu of offshore talent and AI. I'm stuck in a weird state of purgatory.

>> Should I just apply for a managerial role and in the cover letter state management is my intended path for growth?

I know many of my friends in senior dev roles have put their resume in Claude and said they were interested in moving into a management role and had Claude revamp their resume into something that was more management focused. Three of them were hired quite quickly not only based on their dev backgrounds with mentoring, training and light management of junior devs, but having enough emerging AI skills they said helped them close the deal.

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

#335

Post by vivzkestrel » Wed, Aug 12, 2026, 5:28 PM UTC

- unrelated but from your blog

- you have a very nice article on how llms work here https://blog.florianherrengt.com/how-llms-work.html

- but in your diagram titled "Word vectors plotted in semantic space" dont you think you need to add arrows to show where those vectors are actually pointing?

- because i dont get how you arrived at this Using vector arithmetic, you can calculate: woman + (uncle - man) = aunt without seeing the math vector directions

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

#336

Post by dzonga » Wed, Aug 12, 2026, 5:29 PM UTC

SpacePortKnight wrote: post #118

scronkfinkle wrote: post #52

I think of it more as "the automation of the stackoverflow engineer". In enterprise software, there has always just been a non-negotiable large volume of code that was required to be written. This has traditionally been offloaded by having seniors do the hard thinking then distill it into a jira ticket which could be handed off to an engineer that'd actually write the code and punch every hiccup into google along the…

I have been a software engineer for 8 years and not once I have had a jira ticket handed over to me by a senior engineer. I have worked in startups before and currently work at bkng, and have friends at uber. Everywhere it is expected that the engineers will create their own tickets and refine them with the team. If you are in a product facing team, your PM could even help you with a PRD but I have not seen one in th…

you're one of the lucky ones.

usually in most when engineers tend to create their own tickets - it's for useless shit like improve x, clean up y etc.

very few people have worked in places with high agency - where you work with a higher up & create a feature/product line that has customer impact. startups are one of the few places I can think of with high agency.

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

#337

Post by palmotea » Wed, Aug 12, 2026, 5:29 PM UTC

florianherrengt wrote: post #301

palmotea wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

FYI, your comment showed up as [dead] like you were banned until I vouched for it, but I don't see any reason for that. Just thought I'd let you know in case you want to follow up.

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

#338

Post by dzonga » Wed, Aug 12, 2026, 5:31 PM UTC

mikert89 wrote: post #15

declan_roberts wrote: post #12

Between 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.

I think the field is basically over as a long term career unless you are truly exceptional. It will become very easy to build most software, and the upper end will be filled with the top people in the country/from abroad. Wages are certainly going down for most software roles

nah the world needs more software - it's just the delivery mechanism that's different.

we are entering the world of smaller service firms (1 - 3 people) - where technical chops will even get paid more. the age of cookie-cutter apps is over.

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

#339

Post by ivanmontillam » Wed, Aug 12, 2026, 5:32 PM UTC

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…

> A hackathon for performance improvement screams to me "you'll be re-interviewing for your own job."

Not necessarily, great engineers do also ship temporary code they didn't have the time to trim.

Our process is of 1) make it work, 2) make it right and 3) make it fast; not necessarily that engineer had time for the 3rd step.

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

#340

Post by Kinrany » Wed, Aug 12, 2026, 5:33 PM UTC

xvilka wrote: post #307

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.

That's not an interesting question, it'll be the same path as before but somewhat longer.