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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?

#371

Post by tossandthrow »

ryandrake wrote: post #142
mikert89 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> It will become very easy to build most software We keep hearing this, but where is the Photoshop killer written by a gas station attendant? Where is the PayPal alternative written by a retired nurse? Over and over we're told that software is now trivial to write, and Claude is evidently writing some billions of lines of code a day, but where are the results? Where is the vibe coded app toppling the legacy hand-code…

My non technical wife asked ai to brush up the photo for her cv.

Ai did that with whatever cli tools were available and what it would write itself.

Ai is not a faster horse. It is a phase shift.

We won't see a gas station clerk write photoshop because we won't need a photoshop.

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

#372

Post by RSHEPP »

bmurphy1976 wrote: post #349
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…

Do you have SLO/SLAs defined? Are you monitoring performance? CPU usage? Cost increases? You should have plenty of data to review regularly and push back on any teams that are causing problems. That's a process problem and you need a process for it. Trace the increase back to specific deployments, call out those teams, and make them fix their shit.

Yes to all, but it's just me responsible for monitoring performance/cost. I either push back or fix it myself, but I am behind. So this is an attempt to give/push more ownership to the teams.

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

#373

Post by swat535 »

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…

> 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 wouldn't be so quick to judge the long tenured engineers. They probably realized that moving business forward is more important than writing artisan code.

You always have some young hotshot who comes in and wants to rewrite your old boring Java monolith into a micro services disaster for "better architecture".

The greybeards learned the life lessons the hard way.

The other aspect to consider is this: stay in this industry long enough and it will beat the soul out of you.

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

#374

Post by lubujackson »

pydry wrote: post #219
mirmor23 wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your company has sketchy process and minimal checks on the software quality, of course it naturally follows that they hire bad engineers as well. fortunately, that also opens up an opportunity to be a emergency leader with an eye towards promotion.

The bigger issue (I find) is that the pipeline for finding those engineers is completely fucked. Hiring pipelines that tested the wrong thing have existed for years but the problem is magnified 10x when you test for something that weakly correlates with ability at best which an AI can do better than a human. This is leading to stuff like incompetent junior-level engineers being hired as principals.

My company's hiring process is basically: Can you code a product quickly with AI? Can you understand the generated code?

That's basically it. It is surprising hard to find people that can do both, but engineers are becoming much, much better at the first gate while flaming out on the second.

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

#375

Post by overgard »

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…

I kind of think the whole "Learn to Code" push of the 2010s was one of the worst things that happened to our industry. Call me a gatekeeper if you want but, we ended up with a lot of people that just can't do the job. The problem is our industry mostly doesn't have any sort of reasonable mentorship or apprenticeship culture, so we've always left it to the engineers to teach themselves. Sink or swim. The problem is that worked when the industry was mostly composed of people that were implicitly interested in this stuff, but the people that just got in it for a paycheck don't have that motivation, and we don't have a good culture of getting them up to speed. So now we have seniors that can barely write a function, much less reason about a complex system.

I remember people used to debate all the time about if there were "10x" engineers or whatever. A few I'm sure, but I think the real problem is we have a lot of 0.1x engineers or worse.

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

#376

Post by mejutoco »

falcor84 wrote: post #64
Tangurena2 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maintenance will be forever. Tax laws change annually, so the payroll app will never stop being updated.

I don't accept that argument. As I see it, laws should be structured as data rather than code, using a clean non-Turing-Complete DSL for any embedded logic and calculations. Maybe there would still be occasional situations when new software features are needed, but it should be a rare occurrence rather than on every new change.

> laws should be

You are comparing what it is with what should be.

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

#377

Post by thraway3837 »

Interesting article, and it makes a lot of salient points.

I think I can agree with most of it while also arguing that I don't think good code has ever had an honest measurement of quality. From an end user perspective, the end product either works or doesn't. Working terribly is the same thing as doesn't work and working well is the same as works.

What AI changes is the actual code part. The actual code lines output by AI is identical to or better than the best programmers. The systems design, architecture, QA, integration into existing legacy systems, to just name a few, is where the strengths and skillset lies.

In order to be a good engineer, you have to be a systems thinker. AI or no AI does not change that. The entire picture has to be taken in to account, and I think this is going to obliterate the vast majority of engineers who cannot or don't want to think about systems. It's no longer about putting on your headphones and outputting code. It's about having to interact with other humans, systems, architectures, organizations, and an API or MCP is not going to help with that.

I truly do feel bad for terrible older aged engineers, and the young new grads. I think it's unfair that a lot of new grads were told that CS was a great career, only for them to start their freshman year before AI, and then graduate when AI coding is in full use at nearly every workplace.

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

#378

Post by marssaxman »

jayd16 wrote: post #183
CuriouslyC wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ironically, AI mitigates bad developers quite a bit. The architecture/design is coming from above bad devs (in a functional org), and AI tends to write less sloppy code than bad devs, and test/validate it more rigorously.

Less sloppy in that it's clean and consistent looking but much more sloppy in the AI good looking non-sense way.

Just like compiler-generated machine code, then.

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

#380

Post by rootusrootus »

spamizbad wrote: post #125
sarchertech wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 way. This is the theory, but I’ve never worked anywhere (and I’ve worked at a lot of places over 20 years) that actually did it like that in practice. What tends to happen is that the EMs an…

Oh I'd say its real. Years ago I worked as that senior who divvied up the work to a team of 4 mid-level engineers in that exact fashion (they were mostly Latin American contractors with limited english). We actually shipped some good stuff too! Unfortunately, looking back, I could easily see Claude replacing 3 out of 4 of those developers. Myself + one other dev + AI would probably would've shipped a bit more a littl…

I'm there now. I have a team of low level engineers in Hyderabad and Bengaluru which can be useful but I have to spend a lot of time writing very detailed specifications and instructions to walk them through what has to be done. There are plenty of instances I can point to where it would have been faster for me to implement the solution myself, by hand, no Claude. Now bring Claude into the mix and I do not really have any use for these engineers at all aside from providing operational support during IST.

We're not too much an AI-friendly company yet, so we don't officially have Claude access, but I can tell with certainty that several of my Indian teammates are using Claude anyway. I'm pretty familiar with the style of code it creates. And the comments are decidedly better English, which is a big giveaway itself.

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