Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The next two years of software engineering

addyosmani.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 403 posts

Re: The next two years of software engineering

#41

Post by osigurdson »

>> The skillset is shifting from implementing algorithms to knowing how to ask the AI the right questions and verify its output.

The question is, how much faster is verification only vs writing the code by hand? You gain a lot of understanding when you write the code yourself, and understanding is a prerequisite for verification. The idea seems to be a quick review is all that should be needed "LGTM". That's fine as long as you understand the tradeoffs you are making.

With today's AI you either trade speed for correctness or you have to accept a more modest (and highly project specific) productivity boost.

Re: The next two years of software engineering

#42

Post by layer8 »

BoiledCabbage wrote: post #19
HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. 1) Senior developers are more likely to know how to approach a variety of tasks, including complex ones, in ways that work, and are more likely to (maybe almost subconsciously) stick to these proven design patterns rather than reinvent the wheel in some novel way. Even if the task itself is somewhat novel, they will break it down in familar ways into familar subtasks/patterns. For sure if a task does requ…

> in the early 80's, a time when you basically had to invent everything from scratch, so certainly there is no mental block to having to do so, and I'm aware there is at least a generation of developers that grew up with stack overflow and have much more of a mindset of building stuff using cut an paste, and less having to sit down and write much complex/novel code themselves. I think this is really underappreciated…

No, the negative feelings about LLMs are not because they are new territory, it’s because they lack the predictability and determinism that draw many people to computers. Case in point, you can’t really cleverly “hack” LLMs. It’s more a roll of the dice that you try to affect using hit-or-miss incantations.

Re: The next two years of software engineering

#43

Post by wefzyn »

ch4s3 wrote: post #34

> junior developer employment drops by about 9-10% within six quarters, while senior employment barely budges. Big tech hired 50% fewer fresh graduates over the past three years. This study showing 9-10% drop is odd[1] and I'm not sure about their identification critria. > We identify GenAI adoption by detecting job postings that explicitly seek workers to implement or integrate GenAI technologies into firm workflows…

AI became very popular suddenly. This is something that wasn't in anyone's budget. I believe cost savings from hiring freezes and layoffs are to pay for AI projects and infrastructure.

Re: The next two years of software engineering

#44

Post by garbawarb »

ch4s3 wrote: post #40
garbawarb wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hiring was booming until about 2020 though.

The TCJA change (of 2017) went into effect in 2022, I should have been more clear.

I didn't know that but that makes perfect sense. A lot of layoffs and outsourcing coincided with that. Are there any signs it'll be reintroduced?

Re: The next two years of software engineering

#45

Post by ch4s3 »

wefzyn wrote: post #43
ch4s3 wrote: post #34

> junior developer employment drops by about 9-10% within six quarters, while senior employment barely budges. Big tech hired 50% fewer fresh graduates over the past three years. This study showing 9-10% drop is odd[1] and I'm not sure about their identification critria. > We identify GenAI adoption by detecting job postings that explicitly seek workers to implement or integrate GenAI technologies into firm workflows…

AI became very popular suddenly. This is something that wasn't in anyone's budget. I believe cost savings from hiring freezes and layoffs are to pay for AI projects and infrastructure.

Right so you shift budget away from other things. The “study” looked at ai integration job listings. You have to budget those.

Re: The next two years of software engineering

#46

Post by ch4s3 »

garbawarb wrote: post #44
ch4s3 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The TCJA change (of 2017) went into effect in 2022, I should have been more clear.

I didn't know that but that makes perfect sense. A lot of layoffs and outsourcing coincided with that. Are there any signs it'll be reintroduced?

It was late last year.

Re: The next two years of software engineering

#47

Post by xboxnolifes »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #22
kibwen wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Despite what completely uninformed people may think, the field "computer science" is not about software development. It's a branch of mathematics. If you want an education in software development, those are offered by trade schools.

What I want is for universities to offer a degree in Software Engineering. That's a different field from Computer Science. You say that belongs in a trade school? I might agree, if you think trade schools and not universities should teach electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, and chemical engineering. But if chemical engineering belongs at a university, so does software engineering.

Many do. Though, the one I'm familiar with is basically a CS-lite degree with software specific project design and management courses.

Glad I did CS, since SE looked like it consisted of mostly group projects writing 40 pages of UML charts before implementing a CRUD app.

Re: The next two years of software engineering

#48

Post by michaelsalim »

tibbar wrote: post #27
sys_64738 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A CS degree is there to teach you concepts and fundamentals that are the foundation of everything computing related. It doesn't generally chase after the latest fads.

Sure, but we need to update our definitions of concepts/fundamentals. A lot of this stuff has its own established theory and has been a core primitive for software engineering for many years. For example, the primitives of cloud computing are largely explained by papers published by Amazon, Google, and others in the early '00s (DynamoDB, Bigtable, etc.). If you want to explore massively parallel computation or contai…

I do agree that the scale has expanded a lot. But this is true with any other fields. Does that mean that you need to learn everything? Well at some point it becomes unfeasible.

See doctors for example, you learn a bit of everything. But then if you want to specialise, you choose one.

Re: The next two years of software engineering

#50

Post by hooverd »

BoiledCabbage wrote: post #19
HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. 1) Senior developers are more likely to know how to approach a variety of tasks, including complex ones, in ways that work, and are more likely to (maybe almost subconsciously) stick to these proven design patterns rather than reinvent the wheel in some novel way. Even if the task itself is somewhat novel, they will break it down in familar ways into familar subtasks/patterns. For sure if a task does requ…

> in the early 80's, a time when you basically had to invent everything from scratch, so certainly there is no mental block to having to do so, and I'm aware there is at least a generation of developers that grew up with stack overflow and have much more of a mindset of building stuff using cut an paste, and less having to sit down and write much complex/novel code themselves. I think this is really underappreciated…

an unexplored wilderness that you pour casino chips into (unless you're doing local model stuff yea yea)
Post reply on HN