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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

#391

Post by camdenreslink »

incognito124 wrote: post #14
otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #6

It will be for those fixing AI slop software. (In fact, they might need several lifetimes.)

Why do people think there will be fixing AI slop software? I see that opinion here and there on HN. The cost of codegen is next to nothing. It makes no sense to spend large sums of money having an engineer fix something that could be generated over and over until gods of stochasticity come in your favour. We've entered a period of single-use-plastic software, piling up and polluting everything, because it's cheaper t…

If the AI slop software managed to get a user base, then you can't just throw it away and completely start over. You need to modify it in a way that is seamless for your users. If all code becomes single use, are users generating it for themselves? Do you think a dentist office will vibe code their own scheduling software?

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#392

Post by throwaway2037 »

strbean wrote: post #256
hateful wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure where I first heard this, but I say it to my team all the time: "Programming is thinking, not typing"

I know a an accomplished CS professor, ACM fellow, cited in Knuth's TAOCP (as well as being an easter egg!), who still hunt-and-pecks. In fact, hunt-an-pecks incredibly slowly . Seeing him type really reinforced this idea.

While this is a witty reply, most people are working on corporate CRUD apps. For us, I still follow Jeff Atwood's advice from a 2008 blog post: "We Are Typists First, Programmers Second" Ref: https://blog.codinghorror.com/we-are-typists-first-programme...

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#393

Post by doctorpangloss »

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…

In my community almost all problems are political. "Problem solving ability" matters if you are HFT, but everything else? Math can't tell you the best way to use land, educate a kid, what to pay for healthcare and how, how to prioritize biotech research, set a minimum wage, decide congressional maps, all sorts of stuff that actually I pay for or care a lot about. in fact I think you are totally misinterpreting what people are saying to you, you are 200% wrong: the 2-3% of your time spent coding was the valuable part, and your so called problem solving ability rarely solved any real problems.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#394

Post by yieldcrv »

Month 30 of software engineering disappearing in the next 6 months

I'm greatly anticipating the next Great Leap Forward™ with a publicly available Mythos or other new paradigm I can't currently imagine

but at the moment, agentic coding has made me busier than ever before, while its Product Managers, UX, QA, Data Scientists and DevOps that have disappeared from the teams I'm on - across multiple organizations - and I have to do all their work and make dashboards that I didn't have to make as well

All the projects that would have been cancelled by Q3 are being attempted in Q1, means more work

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#395

Post by somesortofthing »

Agent-assisted programming is fundamentally the skill of directing and supervising agents. I don't see any reason to believe that working a job where you direct and supervise agents will make you any worse at directing and supervising agents long term.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#396

Post by wiseowise »

KronisLV wrote: post #101
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. There are also those for whom that percentage is higher, let’s say 6-50%. > I understand things and then apply my ability to formulate solutions The AI is coming for that too. You might just be lucky to be in circumstances that value your contributions or an industry or domain that isn’t well represented in the training data, or problem spaces too complex for AI. Not everyone is, not ev…

[flagged]

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#397

Post by vips7L »

rayiner wrote: post #76
adjejmxbdjdn wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The argument is that “that’s what always happened in the past”. Which is true, but it’s true as long as it’s not true. The classic example of how drastically this kind of thinking can fail is Malthusian theory, that populations would collapse because food growth was linear while population growth was exponential. This was true for all of history until Malthus actually made this observation. At a mechanistic level, th…

> Which is true, but it’s true as long as it’s not true. It also isn't true. The story of the last 50 years has been that technology, especially computer and communications technology, has facilitated the concentration of wealth. The skilled work got computerized, or outsourced to India or China. That left U.S. workers with service jobs where they have much lower impact on P&L and thus much less leverage. In my field…

Healthcare really seems like the only safe direction anymore. They're needed and a human is still required to physically do it.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#398

Post by bmiedlar »

no_op wrote: post #274
KronisLV wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yes, about 2-5% of the time. There are also those for whom that percentage is higher, let’s say 6-50%. > I understand things and then apply my ability to formulate solutions The AI is coming for that too. You might just be lucky to be in circumstances that value your contributions or an industry or domain that isn’t well represented in the training data, or problem spaces too complex for AI. Not everyone is, not ev…

Even if AI advances continue, for quite a while there's likely still going to be the 'Steve Jobs' role. That is, even if AI coding agents can, in the future, replace entire teams of SWEs, competently making all implementation decisions with no guidance from a tech-savvy human, the best software will likely still involve a human deciding what should be built and being very picky about how, exactly, it should externall…

This matches what I'm seeing. I've been building software for a long time, but building more now with AI than I ever could with a traditional team. But the throughput that's helpful is from knowing what to build and what tradeoffs matter. The AI doesn't have that. It's a force multiplier on experience, not a replacement for it.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#399

Post by charlie90 »

BurningFrog wrote: post #195
LPisGood wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The AI is coming for that too. That may be true I’m not gonna say one way or the other, but if AI comes for that then almost all knowledge work is effectively dead, so all that’s left would be sales or physical labor.

The history of the last 250 years is inventing new professions as old ones are automated away. I expect that to continue.

Like doordashing and pokemon card reselling.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#400

Post by wiseowise »

ge96 wrote: post #194
LPisGood wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The AI is coming for that too. That may be true I’m not gonna say one way or the other, but if AI comes for that then almost all knowledge work is effectively dead, so all that’s left would be sales or physical labor.

I wonder though, can AI make the next JS framework. I mean that in sincerity, there was the leap from jQuery to React for ex. If an AI only knows jQuery and no one makes React, will React come out of AI.

It can't. Framework hierarchy is largely based on social structure, rather than pure technical merit. Otherwise React would've been displaced long time ago.
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