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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

#341

Post by rootusrootus »

oblio wrote: post #113
KronisLV wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yes, about 2-5% of the time. There are also those for whom that percentage is higher, let’s say 6-50%. > I understand things and then apply my ability to formulate solutions The AI is coming for that too. You might just be lucky to be in circumstances that value your contributions or an industry or domain that isn’t well represented in the training data, or problem spaces too complex for AI. Not everyone is, not ev…

>> I understand things and then apply my ability to formulate solutions > The AI is coming for that too. In that case all [1] non manual work is doomed, until robotics has an LLM moment. [1] With the exception of all fields protected by politics or nepotism.

> all non manual work is doomed

All work in general. Knowledge workers can still do manual work, and will compete to do so when there is no option to continue what they do today.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#343

Post by rootusrootus »

lostmsu wrote: post #220
thisisit wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lot of people don't seem to get that - It is easier to go from terrible to average but much harder to go from average to good. I am sure AI bros are same people who were convinced consumer grade fully automated driving was going happen "by end of the year" for last 7 years.

No, I never believed in fully automated tale by Tesla, but as the LLMs improve my personal estimate for the date of human-level AGI is rapidly moving to "present". Before GPT-2 I had it somewhere in 2100, at GPT-2 I thought maybe by 2060 if we are lucky. Now I think it is 2035 or maybe even sooner.

I like to see the optimism, even if I don't share it. I think it's incredible hubris that humans think we are about to reinvent our own level of intelligence, just because we made a machine that talks pretty.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#344

Post by hjort-e »

skydhash wrote: post #303
icedchai wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree it would be absurd for it to take 95% of your time. I have, however, seen that it takes a lot more time than one would think. I did some contracting work for a severely dysfunctional meeting heavy organization and it was about 2 hours of meetings for every hour of real technical work!

Even when it’s not dysfunctional, you spend a lot of time on communication and reading stuff other people wrote (including code). It’s very rare to work in isolation.

I guess it depends on what you feel coding is. To me it's the architecture planning and reading other people code, not just writing code. If we say it's just typing, then 95% is not absurd no

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#345

Post by udave »

phpnode wrote: post #92
joduplessis wrote: post #43

I really wish seemingly intelligent people would stop using the abstraction analogy (like the article does). The key word is: determinism. Every level of abstraction (inc. power tools, C, etc.) added a deterministic layer you can rely on to more effectively do whatever it is that you're doing - same result, every time. LLM's use natural language to describe programming and the result is varied at the very best (hence…

People always say this but it’s misguided imo. Yes LLMs are not deterministic, but that’s totally irrelevant. You aren’t executing the LLMs output directly, you’re using the LLM to produce an artefact once that is then executed deterministically. A spec gets turned into code once. Editing the spec can cause the code to be updated but it’s not recreating the whole program each time, so why does determinism matter?

try distributing this spec amongst your team members, ask each of them to drive it to completion. no follow up edits. deploy to individual environments and then run a rigorous test suite against all of the deployments. see if all of them behave the same way.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#346

Post by skydhash »

evilduck wrote: post #307
hjort-e wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Hubris. I don't mean this as a snarky jab. It's coming for anything software. I've used AI to accomplish front end development and reverse engineer proprietary USB hardware dongles in C, then rewriting the C into Rust to get easy desktop GUIs around it. Backend APIs, systems programming, embedded programming, they all seem equally threatened it's just a matter of time. Front end is easy to see in the AI web front end…

> I've used AI to accomplish front end development and reverse engineer proprietary USB hardware dongles in C, then rewriting the C into Rust to get easy desktop GUIs around it. Backend

That is not hard. It’s just tedious and very slow to do manually. The hard part would be about designing a usb dongle and ensuring that the associated software has good UX. The reason you don’t see kernel devs REing devices is not because it’s impossible or that it requires expert knowledge. It’s because it’s like counting sands on the beach.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#347

Post by deflator »

joe_mamba wrote: post #160
rayiner wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did the younger people find better jobs? You used to have all these jobs for people who were maybe a bit smarter than average with good judgment. In the 1990s, the local community college used to advertise associates degrees for paralegals. That's a job that doesn't exist in the same way anymore thanks to computers. Now it's become an internship for kids with top credentials before they go to law school. Which is fin…

>It seems to me like all of these people are flocking now to healthcare fields. That seems totally unsustainable. Why? There will never be a shortage of sick/dying people. So medical staff, and also undertakers, aren't going anywhere.

My understanding is that healthcare keeps growing because the large Boomer generation is aging. When they have passed though, then we should see a corresponding slide in healthcare growth

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#348

Post by skydhash »

hjort-e wrote: post #344
skydhash wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even when it’s not dysfunctional, you spend a lot of time on communication and reading stuff other people wrote (including code). It’s very rare to work in isolation.

I guess it depends on what you feel coding is. To me it's the architecture planning and reading other people code, not just writing code. If we say it's just typing, then 95% is not absurd no

> it depends on what you feel coding is. To me it's the architecture planning and reading other people code, not just writing code

And that would be where we disagree. I don’t read code to look at code. When I’m reading code, I’m looking for the contracts to follow when interacting with a system. It would be nice if it were documented, but more often than not you have to rely on code.

It’s very rare that I plan with a technical mindset. Yes I use the jargon, but it’s all about the business needs. Which again create contracts.

Same with writing code. Code is like English for me. If I don’t have a clear idea on what to write, I stop and do research (or ask someone). But when I do, it’s as straightforward as writing a sentence.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#349

Post by powvans »

estebank wrote: post #200
doug_durham wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a bit of glib answer. Most of the time is spent coding which encompasses typing, retyping, and retyping again. It also includes banging your head against the wall while trying to get one of your rewrites to work against and under-documented API. OP's formulation makes SWE sound like a purely noble enterprise like mathematics. It's more like an oil rig worker banging on pieces of metal with large hammers to ge…

Most of the time is spent figuring what the right thing to do is, not writing the implementation. Sometimes the process of writing the implementation surfaces new considerations about what the right thing is, but still, producing text to feed to a compiler is not the bulk of the work of a software engineer. It is to unearth requirements and turn them into repeatable software.

Feels like lately most of the time is spent arguing about or at least worrying about whether or not AI is going to replace all software developers.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#350

Post by ge96 »

scj wrote: post #299
ge96 wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder though, can AI make the next JS framework. I mean that in sincerity, there was the leap from jQuery to React for ex. If an AI only knows jQuery and no one makes React, will React come out of AI.

A thought experiment: When all practical software is only written by AIs, will the AIs use goto? What will the programming language of AIs look like? My bet is something _like_ assembly, but not assembly. That being said, I think humans will still program for fun. Just like we paint portraiture in a world with cameras.

Yeah that's my thing for my hardware projects, I'm not going to reach for an LLM to do it, I want to write the code myself/be present. For something new I would consider using LLM to generate something, like a computer vision implementation or something I don't already know. The end result I would know how it works, just for POC.
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