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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?

#381

Post by swat535 »

weatherlite wrote: post #73
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

All fields are basically over as a long term career besides perhaps prostitutes and even there I'm not entirely sure. But the questions of how soon and by how much matter a lot. Being early is the same as being wrong a clever guy once said.

I hear you, but just to pedantic.. prostitution is certainly not a long term career either.. never has been. After 35, you're not going to find work as a sex worker..

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

#382

Post by cdud3 »

cautiouscat wrote: post #87
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 think this point gets lost on people. A frequent argument I see in favor of vibecoding is: “well there’s also bad engineers”. In other words, bad code is already being written, so who cares if the LLM is wrong sometimes? The issue is that with no reins, the LLM is a fire hose of bad code compared to the garden hose of bad code orgs had before. A good engineer, with a good model and harness will produce great stuff.…

The easiest way is to actually review the prompt input, put it through a LLM to catch the typical missing steps and automatically forward the result as review comment to the MR.

Let the LLM wars start!

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

#383

Post by cdud3 »

saulpw wrote: post #282
skydhash wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We had version control in the 70s with SCSS and then RCS. They were primitive, but a lot of software were only a few files.

In the 80s, source control was like networking. Yes some orgs had it (mostly academia) but the rest of us just had a precious floppy that we copied the known-good source onto.

We had an own good-releases directory in our svn repository! That's when you realize old habits are hard to change.

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

#384

Post by UncleOxidant »

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…

> With AI, "bad" engineers can now amplify their "bad" engineering x10 across the organization.

It's even worse than that. We've got a CEO who has suddenly learned how to vibe code and the stuff he's coming up with is... kind of horrendous. He's coming up with new "products" and proclaiming them the next big thing for us to work on and we're kind of over here scratching our heads asking who would want this? Who would pay for it? I mean, he was able to put together a kind of a cool web app (with 0 web app knowledge) that's supposedly going to let users design thingys with AI, but it just seems like he re-invented a harness/IDE. I suggested that maybe what he wants is a VS Code plugin like Cline or KiloCode... but he hadn't used VS Code.

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

#385

Post by mrbombastic »

threatofrain wrote: post #365
mrbombastic wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

this is a more reasonable argument IMO, but i would still disagree that that means only the top level pros stay for a few reasons (although it might happen / is already happening in the short term):

- if it is true that AI enhances our abilities it just means the goal posts move of what was expected for each level

- the complexity ceiling will rise for the level a superstar or a company is capable of maintaining, meaning there will still be stratified complexities for the mid levels of old to handle, it might just be higher than before

- counter intuitively but time and again increased software creation more often than not increases demand for more software rather than decreases

if the world decides it has no more problems to solve with software, then we are in trouble. i don't think that is happening anytime soon.

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

#386

Post by phil21 »

overgard wrote: post #375
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 th…

Or it’s just the largely self-taught intrinsically curious autodidact developers and engineers have always been 10x and the “average” person in it for the paycheck is really what a 1xer has always actually been.

I think the industry highly skewed towards the former back in the 90s (and earlier!) when I first entered it. There certainly were vast differences between the best and the worst, but nothing like the gigantic gulf there is today between say a competent kernel driver developer who can get code mainstreamed into Linux vs. a boot camp style disinterested frontend dev who leet coded and brute forced themselves into a FAANG job.

Working closely with other white collar “generic” jobs and the folks who just show up each day and are not interested in the fundamentals at all make me believe this is kind of the baseline for most industries.

Most folks are in it for the money and are happy to just be good enough to not be fired. Since most middle management is utterly incompetent at performance management the results tend to not be great for pretty much the entire corporate white collar industries. A stellar manager though really stands out in such situations, but they are so rare many won’t work for or with one their entire career.

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

#387

Post by stefan_ »

nwatson wrote: post #130
esafak wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only if you run out of things to write. Is your back log ever empty?

I'm hopeful that software will be applied in new areas where it was too costly before, with AI help it will be possible. Software will be cheaper, even more prevalent, lower quality in since respects, but SW engineering will still be a viable career.

There are really a ton of fields where people have done an absolutely terrible job of properly using the advantages of software, even pre AI. Like, even today there are people manually drawing footprints in PCB design software, manually determining what pins carry differential signals, manually forgetting to swap RX and TX lines.. except for the functions they absolutely had to have a computer do, they forgot to move out all the drudgery and footguns and continue operating in "PDF space". It's embarrassing for a profession that is supposedly made of engineers.

PDF space is still more advanced than the people typing into "word processors" however. Making software to emulate letters was such a massive mistake for the trajectory of computing, it let people effortlessly "adopt computers" by making a digital facsimile of their terrible analog processes. Only with AI we now have the ability to digest all this unstructured mess.

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

#388

Post by FrustratedMonky »

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…

This is great.

We now need to talk about the 10xBad engineer.

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

#389

Post by butlike »

burningChrome wrote: post #334
butlike wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tell me how to paradigm shift careers and I'll get out of your hair and stop shipping uninspired features. But, right now I'm paralyzed with fear in how to make a successful career switch without starting from literally "new grad level." I have wisdom, so it doesn't feel like I should have to start at the bottom rung again. Egotistically, I don't even mind, it's just the salary hit that would be the main issue. Maybe…

>> Egotistically, I don't even mind, it's just the salary hit that would be the main issue. This is whare I am right now. Even senior positions have dropped 50-60K in range so I've effectively priced myself out of a lateral move because I would be taking a massive hit in salary for the same role I'm doing now. I'm currently at a company that continues to lay people off in lieu of offshore talent and AI. I'm stuck in…

Interesting. Thanks for that last anecdote. I feel you on the weird state of purgatory. I'm confident we'll find a path forward, though. Gotta keep your head up

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

#390

Post by sublinear »

jasode wrote: post #137
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…

>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 and PMs look at who’s free and give that person the task. The gp you replied to qualified it with "enterprise software" (LOB, CRUD, etc aka "cost center") so your observations where senior -vs- junior engineers being more fungible can…

> There's also a spectrum of hard-to-easy in enterprise software but it's much more narrow than engineering code bases.

I'm not going to bang this drum too much, because it's been done to death for well over a decade, but lines-of-business supported by CRUD apps are rarely simple from an engineering perspective. Much of that engineering is in the decisions made outside the codebase, or spread across multiple codebases. If you're looking for the one obviously brilliant line of code to tip your fedora to while sipping your snifter of wine, you're not gonna find it. In fact, "clever" code like that is rightfully and instantly rejected as cowboy code.

By your reasoning, civil engineering isn't "real" engineering like aerospace cuz they don't build things that go really really fast and shoot out fire and stuff. Also, there's like too many responsibilities delegated out. Like, man, I only wanna talk to the guys who put the rockets on the thing. Everyone else are just overpaid slackers that smooth talked their way! They're gonna get replaced by AI! Mark my words!

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