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AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?
361–370 of 818 posts
Re: AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?
#362Earlier quoted context omitted.
> A good engineer, with a good model and harness will produce great stuff. A bad engineer with a good model and harness will produce something faster, but it will be worse. A good engineer, without LLM assistance, will still produce great stuff.
Yes, but much more slowly. And if they realize halfway through implementation that there is a better way to do it, but they are under pressure to deliver, they wont have time to rewrite it and will live with the consequences of that decision forever
> And if they realize halfway through implementation that there is a better way to do it, but they are under pressure to deliver, they wont have time to rewrite it and will live with the consequences of that decision forever
I've never really seen that. What I've seen is the much pragmatic take of marking the source code with a few comments to highlight the problematic areas and then goes on with the implementation. Refactoring can always be done later when the first batch of value has been extracted.
There's always tradeoffs to balance and perfection is something you inch towards, not something you get done in one go.
Re: AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?
#363Earlier 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?
Busy servers generate more heat. Inefficient code makes servers busier. There’s a real physical outcome for bad performance code at scale.
But you don’t really want lots of idle or underused servers, aside from burst capacity management. So if they universally and consistently wrote more efficient code I’d expect a smaller datacenter. Full of still busy servers but just less of them.
Re: AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?
#364I'm not sure what skill really means, or what's considered bad anymore. AI coding ability and human coding ability are different, and different organizations need different skills. No skill is inherently bad—it just depends on what the organization needs. I understand that AI writes better code than people like me in many cases. But an industry should still provide opportunities for those people. And sometimes those…
The industry doesn’t really owe people opportunities. Even if you think it should, that’s not how companies are going to behave.
That is an incredibly short sighted view. By acting this way, the industry is essentially selling its future for short term gains. A systemic reduction in the number of people capable of maintaining systems directly correlates with an inevitable collapse in overall software quality.
The perspectives of market advocates often stop at this short sighted level. In reality, their modeling is incredibly simplistic. I will not elaborate at length on their poor modeling here. The short sighted local optimization that only chases the margin of the next quarter is the exact enemy we must guard against the most. (Of course, given the nature of HN, this specific part of the comment will likely be attacked.)
It is not a matter of companies not owing anything; rather, companies are actively committing self sabotage.
Is it truly right to eat tomorrow's seed corn today?
The essence of the software industry is not the 'generation' of code, but the 'maintenance' of it throughout its life cycle. Why is Linux continually maintained, and why is Windows continually maintained? The core of this industry is fundamentally tied to the entire life cycle of a product.
You might be able to fix code with AI. However, under the current LLM structure, can it actually modify projects spanning hundreds of thousands or millions of lines? It cannot. The skill required to partition those architectures is still entirely left to humans. And the ability to define those boundaries is born strictly from experience.
Labeling certain individuals as useless or inadequate inherently destroys the resilience and buffer of the collective as a whole.
Why do humans embrace and care for the vulnerable when society has the capacity to do so? Why do we strive to preserve diversity? It is because, depending on the context, those very traits might prove to be more advantageous. Every human possesses distinct skills, and their unique temperament and proficiency simply manifest depending on the situation they face.
Re: AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?
#365Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why ask such extreme stuff? Why not ask about the solo entrepreneur who creates a convincing iOS app without a programming background? Advantage the problem on the side of ML and look for winning scenarios today.
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…
And today the line for amateur capability is being drawn at eager entrepreneur making an app on the back of Supabase and Lovable. The fact that iOS apps have zero users owes far more to sales and marketing than to software, so maybe that's where we should be putting our focus?
What can a mid level person do? Instead of a consultancy loaning out a team of 3-4 people, it might just be one person now. That could mean a lot of downsizing.
One thing mid level people wouldn't be counted on to do was create Photoshop or Paypal. The original thread is about top level pros being the ones who stay in the industry, right? That sounds about right if we're moving the conversation over to Photoshop and Paypal.
Re: AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?
#366Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are 100K H1-Bs a year and 4 million grads a year in the US. Anyone who thinks H1-Bs are actually contributing to their inability to find a job is a moron.
-85,000 NEW visas granted each year, not including renewals - The mass majority of those are going into the tech/software - there are only around ~100k CS graduates each year - H1B workers will take much lower salaries and benefits than their US citizen counterparts.
And H-1Bs are easier to overwork and abuse because the threat of deportation and the dangling carrot of citizenship are very powerful motivators that don't exist with US citizens.
Re: AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?
#367Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is me to a tee. I think I'm a fairly good software engineer, and I loved building software and mentoring more junior engineers who I thought had both ability and a good attitude. I also think I was a pretty pragmatic engineer (I was not an "architecture astronaut"), but I did enjoy the craft of getting into the nitty gritty details of software. The past 5-10 years or so saw me pretty beaten down though with soft…
In retrospect, the golden age was the pre-internet era. Some rose-colored glasses maybe, but as I remember it: Paying for software was the norm, so it was more clear what the "product" was, and software writers had a direct incentive to write better software. Updates could not be pushed out so you had to be pretty sure your code worked before you shipped it. Having to ship physical media to all your customers for a b…
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Re: AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?
#368> The engineer opening a 25,000-line PR should have stopped the agent long before it got there. So many A car is simply a faster horse arguments being made here. The “You must review every line of code” camp are going to be in for a seriously bad time when Claude/Grok/etc starts writing machine code, and they absolutely will and you will look like a crazy person the same way as those who said we can’t trust compilers…
I do have a genuine question though: what value are you adding at that point? If you don’t understand the system, don’t know what the code is doing and you’re mostly prompting an LLM to make the decisions and implementation for you, what exactly is your contribution? The ability to operate the tool isn’t much of a moat if everyone else has access to the same tool. I don’t review assembly produced by a compiler becaus…
Do you think it's impossible for someone to have a 25K line PR / diff but not know what's going on in the system?
I ask because I've pushed some of this to the limit in my own testing and when I get the right building blocks / primitives in place in the repo, I'm able to get plans written in a way where I don't just describe what I want but specifically mention outcomes, verifications, constraints, etc. that utlimately describe the shape of my system and my intent.
My plan is my understanding of my system and the changes I'm making, and the execution of that plan (e.g. with subagents), verified against my spec, is the code itself.
With the correct building blocks, I've found that frontier models can write code in fairly predictable ways that lets me maintain my understanding and confidence in pretty large PRs.
I think perhaps the quoted part of your post seems to imply it's not possible / isn't phrased with that nuance?
Re: AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?
#369Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are 100K H1-Bs a year and 4 million grads a year in the US. Anyone who thinks H1-Bs are actually contributing to their inability to find a job is a moron.
Spend some time processing tech job applications and you’ll realize you’re wrong
Take a walk through South Lake or San Francisco and he'll realize he's wrong.
Re: AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?
#370Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
IMO it is and I've been saying it for more than ten years that it would catch up with the industry. And it is now. The LLM shit is just a mask over the larger problem.
The front fell off because the base was never built to support a shakeup of the industry. There's so little support, now and for as long as I can remember, for people to fail gracefully in the field. It's just up up up. And now that programmers are finding their jobs to be a little more precarious, maybe folk will start supporting mentorship as a practice.
This isn't just a "market" problem. It's a problem of people not teaching others skills that help them thrive inside AND outside of work.