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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

#371

Post by bdangubic »

bborud wrote: post #67

Multiple times per week I have the same conversation. It goes something like this: - AI will make developers irrelevant - Why? - Because LLMs can write code - Do you know what I do for a living? - Yes, write code? - Yes, about 2-5% of the time. Less now. - But you said you are a developer? - I did - So what do you do 95-98% of the time? - I understand things and then apply my ability to formulate solutions - But I ca…

> Yes, about 2-5% of the time. Less now.

I spent 2nd half of my 30y career fixing organizations and process where this was the case. so many things are wrong in places where this is the case (or alternatively you need a different job title :) )

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#372

Post by jstummbillig »

bborud wrote: post #67

Multiple times per week I have the same conversation. It goes something like this: - AI will make developers irrelevant - Why? - Because LLMs can write code - Do you know what I do for a living? - Yes, write code? - Yes, about 2-5% of the time. Less now. - But you said you are a developer? - I did - So what do you do 95-98% of the time? - I understand things and then apply my ability to formulate solutions - But I ca…

> Multiple times per week I have the same conversation.

Really? I mean, good on you if it's true and you like the attention but that's sounds like an implausible amount of interest in someone and their relatively mundane profession.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#373

Post by koonsolo »

AlexCoventry wrote: post #199
bborud wrote: post #67

Multiple times per week I have the same conversation. It goes something like this: - AI will make developers irrelevant - Why? - Because LLMs can write code - Do you know what I do for a living? - Yes, write code? - Yes, about 2-5% of the time. Less now. - But you said you are a developer? - I did - So what do you do 95-98% of the time? - I understand things and then apply my ability to formulate solutions - But I ca…

You don't think AI is going to be able to understand things and apply their ability to formulate solutions better than you, in the near future?

In 2000 I learned about this old technology called "neural networks".

AI really depends on long winters and rare breakthroughs. Deep neural network was the most recent breakthrough.

The iterations you currently see it just adding more storage, but the fundamental neural network structure doesn't change.

I'm confident AGI will not be achieved by the LLM architecture, and when the next AI breakthrough is, is anyones guess. But if you take history into account, it will take a while.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#374

Post by dawnerd »

bborud wrote: post #67

Multiple times per week I have the same conversation. It goes something like this: - AI will make developers irrelevant - Why? - Because LLMs can write code - Do you know what I do for a living? - Yes, write code? - Yes, about 2-5% of the time. Less now. - But you said you are a developer? - I did - So what do you do 95-98% of the time? - I understand things and then apply my ability to formulate solutions - But I ca…

The problem is people think AI can replace the 95-95% that isn't code too. That's where we end up with massive unusable codebases that no one understands.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#375

Post by KalMann »

bel8 wrote: post #243
Aperocky wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The AI is coming for that too. That's where we fundamentally disagree about. Yes, AI is coming for solution formulation, absolutely, but not all of it, because it is actually a statistical machine with context limit. Until the day LLMs are not statistical machine with a context limit, this will hold. Someone need to make something that has intent and purpose, and evidently now not by adding another 10T to the LLM p…

> because it is actually a statistical machine with context limit. So are humans. Machines have surpassed humans by magnitudes in many capabilities already (how many billion multiplications can you do per second?) And I argue that current LLMs have surpassed many of my capabilities already. For example GPT/Opus can understand and document some ancient legacy project I never saw before in minutes. I would take a week+…

> So are humans.

AI advocates are _way_ too confident about the nature human cognition. Questions that have been debated by philosophers and cognitive scientists for decades are now "obvious" according to you people, though you never provide any argument to support your statements.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#376

Post by francisofascii »

dominotw wrote: post #132
Daishiman wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Anecdotally, it feels like something materially changed in the US software hiring market at the start of this year to me. It feels like more and more businesses are taking a wait and see approach to avoid over-investing in human capital in the next few years. My guess is companies overhired in COVID and between that experience and an uncertain market they don't want to make the same mistake twice.

where did the excess labor force suddenly materialize in covid.

Anecdotally, our firm's Covid hires were just okay. The recent hires are better. So my hunch is the weaker CS candidates were able to get jobs back during Covid, while today, they are left out.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#377

Post by hjort-e »

skydhash wrote: post #348
hjort-e wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Huh? So you you don't research if something is technically feasible before you promise your stakeholders a delivery time/ price estimate?

We all do the same stuff, the disagreement would just be what you feel coding is and if you think technical work is the same thing or a superset. If you as software dev aren't hands on with planning or working more than 5% of your time, you are basically a PO with a programing hobby

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#378

Post by KronisLV »

malfist wrote: post #286
cromka wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We've literally just started, what "over and over" do you refer to?

I've been told the past four years that AI is coming for my job. And thats just not true. Its no closer to that than it was 4 years ago.

> Its no closer to that than it was 4 years ago.

There are people and companies out there releasing entire vibe coded projects and for some upwards of 80% of the code they develop is AI-assisted/generated. Since around the end of 2025 and models like Opus 4.6, the SOTA has gotten good enough to work agentically on all sorts of dev tasks with pretty good degrees of success (harnesses and how you use them still matters, ofc).

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#379

Post by geodel »

hjort-e wrote: post #351
geodel wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is irrelevant that complex frontend would be easy for AI or not. To me 1) how many unique complex frontends are needed out of total frontends that millions of sites out there need. 2) Will there be increase in need of such frontend engineers so other displaced folks can land a job there. I think it will be far fewer to have any positive impact on IT engineers' overall job prospects.

But that's equally true for any type of system. Frontend isn't inherently easier than other systems, so i was just wondering why you singled it out. To me AI just seems better at backends and database design

OK, my examples seemed like biased against frontend which was not the intention.

The thrust was overall job prospects for people in software field. It is not that frontend is easy but it is definitely easy to get into. Considering there are far more frontend developers then say C++ system engineers or database designers so in sheer numbers they will be affect more.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#380

Post by koonsolo »

ryandvm wrote: post #104
bborud wrote: post #67

Multiple times per week I have the same conversation. It goes something like this: - AI will make developers irrelevant - Why? - Because LLMs can write code - Do you know what I do for a living? - Yes, write code? - Yes, about 2-5% of the time. Less now. - But you said you are a developer? - I did - So what do you do 95-98% of the time? - I understand things and then apply my ability to formulate solutions - But I ca…

I dunno, man. I've been doing this for 20+ years and I think we're at a really important fork in the road where there are two possibilities. The first is that AI is achieving human-level expertise and capability, but since they're now being increasingly trained on their own output they are fighting an uphill battle against model collapse. In that case, perhaps AI is going to just sort of max out at "knowing everythin…

Do you think the latter can be achieved with the LLM neural network architecture? I highly doubt it. Neural networks are very old tech, and it took us that long to get us here.

I'm sure we'll reach AGI at some point, but looking at AI history, I don't see that coming any time soon.

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