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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?

#351

Post by andriy_koval »

pjmlp wrote: post #143
esafak wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the work to be done is infinite, why would there necessarily be fewer people doing it?

Because most companies aren't software driven, they sell physical products and software is a cost center. There is a budget and when it is gone, no contractors until next budget round.

it could mean they are not completely out of automation opportunities, and will lose to more innovative players if won't invest into software. The end state of these companies is grid of cheap robots controlled by software.

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

#352

Post by Chance-Device »

orphereus wrote: post #330
notakio wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I worked at a particular fruit company in Cupertino, my boss had been asked repeatedly by the developer teams to provide a tour of the data center we'd recently finished building out, which housed the servers their code ran on. He gave them a lengthy, grueling, hyper-detailed tour of the entire facility, encompassing the HVAC systems, electrical systems, network and computing systems, finishing with about 20 min…

What was he doing? Showing them that bad code will make them feel hotter?

Maybe he got PTSD from being a former tour guide and this was his time for vengeance.

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

#353

Post by mikert89 »

jkman wrote: post #321
mikert89 wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Until the VC subsidies stop and the human devs are half the cost of the claude tokens lol

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law

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

#354

Post by mikert89 »

kakacik wrote: post #332
mikert89 wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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). Th…

This is cope, ai coding agents will follow the path of self driving cars. They will be watched with extreme caution, but will slowly but surely expand outwards. Eventually manually writing code will be considered a dangerous/bug introducing act

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

#355

Post by bmurphy1976 »

orphereus wrote: post #330
notakio wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I worked at a particular fruit company in Cupertino, my boss had been asked repeatedly by the developer teams to provide a tour of the data center we'd recently finished building out, which housed the servers their code ran on. He gave them a lengthy, grueling, hyper-detailed tour of the entire facility, encompassing the HVAC systems, electrical systems, network and computing systems, finishing with about 20 min…

What was he doing? Showing them that bad code will make them feel hotter?

He was showing how complex and expensive a data center is and giving them real-world visceral experience that inefficient code has real-world implications.

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

#357

Post by michaelrpeskin »

Syntaf wrote: post #168
ThePhysicist wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe those engineers that don't care about making their solution _good_ are actually the good engineers, have you ever thought about that??? There are exceptions where quality really matters but most software shops build CRUD web apps where it's not really a good characteristic to obsess over the cleanest and most elegant details, instead you need to get the stuff the customer wants done! I for one tend to care less…

Totally agree with your framing here, but that is also what I fundamentally consider "good" code -- it's code that solves the problem that your customers/business needs without making it _harder_ to solve the next problem. There are valid situations where the best code you can write is code you never look at and throw out the next month; there are equally valid situations where the best code is well thought through a…

Thanks for the wording on your first sentence there. I've been trying to figure out a way to get that thought expressed succinctly.

I think with AI coding, what we call "good" code changes. Lots of abstractions really only exist to help load the context into the human brain so that they can solve the next problem. If an agent can just search and find all the places to make a change, or to duplicate code with small changes for the next problem, is that bad? Does is just feel bad because that's not what we're used to?

We use structured looping instead of gotos because that makes sense to us, but the compiler still turns it into jumps in assembly. If our interaction is now at a higher layer, do we need good "code" or do we just need good "architecture"?

I don't know, but it's just something I've been thinking about lately.

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

#358

Post by jackyinger »

dcrazy wrote: post #329
notakio wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I worked at a particular fruit company in Cupertino, my boss had been asked repeatedly by the developer teams to provide a tour of the data center we'd recently finished building out, which housed the servers their code ran on. He gave them a lengthy, grueling, hyper-detailed tour of the entire facility, encompassing the HVAC systems, electrical systems, network and computing systems, finishing with about 20 min…

What did the software engineers hope to learn from this tour?

The scale of a cloud datacenter is pretty awesome to witness. I had the opportunity to visit a large cloud company’s data center years ago, it was immense in scale and (mostly) very well thought out.

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

#359

Post by davidw »

chaps wrote: post #323
davidw wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Erm, no. I'm saying that the entire industry failure to cultivate a wide spirit of mentorship is biting everyone's ass.

I mean that could also be true, but it is not - IMO - the cause of the fairly sudden weak market for software engineers.

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

#360

Post by andriy_koval »

a34729t wrote: post #166
mikert89 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

have you been inside any big tech company? lots of orgs are > 80% foreign.

Yeah my new VP is from a certain country in the eastern hemisphere, and the interviews I've conducted for US-based candidates oddly enough have been 100% of engineers from that same country (say 30 or so in the last 2 years).

I hope one day there will be huge class action lawsuits and prosecutions given how clearly obvious this issue is.
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