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The ladder is missing rungs – Engineering Progression When AI Ate the Middle

negroniventurestudios.com

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Re: The ladder is missing rungs – Engineering Progression When AI Ate the Middle

#41

Post by drzaiusx11 »

indoordin0saur wrote: post #4
Esophagus4 wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah… > For tasks that would take a human under four minutes—small bug fixes, boilerplate, simple implementations—AI can now do these with near-100% success. For tasks that would take a human around one hour, AI has a roughly 50% success rate. For tasks over four hours, it comes in below a 10% success rate Opus 4.6 now does 12hr tasks with 50% success. The METR time horizon chart is insane… exponential progression.

Really depends on what you're working in. For me, I work with a lot of data frameworks that are maybe underrepresented in these models' training sets and it still tends to get things wrong. The other issue is business logic is complex to describe in a prompt, to the point where giving it all the context and business logic for it to succeed is almost as much work as doing it myself. As a data engineer I still only fin…

Just anecdotal but I work on some fairly left field service architectures; today it was a highly parallelized state machine processor operating on an in-house binary protocol.

Opus 4.6 had no issue correctly identifying and mitigating a hairy out-of-order state corruption issue involving a non-trivial sequence of runtime conditions from thrown errors and failed recoveries. This was simply from having access to the code repository and a brief description of the observed behavior that I provided. Naturally I verified it wasn't bullshitting me, and sure enough it was correct. Impressive really, given none of the specifics could have been in its training set, but I guess we're finding that nothing really is "new", just a remix of what's come before in various recombinations.

Re: The ladder is missing rungs – Engineering Progression When AI Ate the Middle

#42

Post by alephnerd »

xboxnolifes wrote: post #36
ngburke wrote: post #7

Spot on. All those years of slinging code and debugging gave me and others the judgement and eye to check on all the AI generated code. I now wonder often about what hiring looks like in this new era. As a small startup, we just don't need junior engineers to do the day to day implementation. Do we instead hire a small number of people as apprentices to train on the high level patterns, spot trouble areas, develop go…

> As a small startup, we just don't need junior engineers to do the day to day implementation. > Do we instead hire a small number of people as apprentices... Are you not just re-describing what a junior engineer is? Someone with potential you hire to have them learn and grow on your team? I don't understand what is different. Pre-LLM, companies seemingly expected juniors to know a ton about coding. Post-LLM they'll…

> Are you not just re-describing what a junior engineer is?

Basically, the salary expectations are out of whack for expected output.

The 25th and 50th percentile TC for an entry level SWE in the US are $100K and $140K respectively [0].

Meanwhile, the 90th percentile TC for an entry level SWE in Canada is US$115K [1] and US$120K [2] in the United Kingdom.

Why should I hire an entry level CS major from Sacramento State or UMass Dartmouth when I can hire a UWaterloo/UBC or Oxbridge/Imperial CS grad who is guaranteed to have done multiple internships?

CoL is the same in most of US Canada, and UK if not more expensive in Canada+UK. And the excuse of "healthcare" doesn't hold either - both Canadian and American employees pay the same in healthcare fees and benefits, even including COBRA during a layoff or an ACA plan. And increasingly in the UK, our PortCos have started offering private healthcare plans becuase of NHS issues.

What is happening is globally, new grad hiring will be significantly reduced with hiring occuring at target programs where curricula and student quality is already well understood.

On the other side of the bell curve, the bottom half of apprentices globally will be trained by Accenture/Deloitte/PWC or WITCH or FPT type companies who tend to pay bottom barrel new grads around $6K TC starting salaries (which is roughly the same one could earn farming or as an automation engineer on a factory line in India, the Philippines, or Vietnam) but force them to study on the job at their education and university programs and will merge their output with GenAI platforms.

The kind of organization that viewed software as a loss leader before AI still doesn't have an incentive to hire internally even with AI. Meanwhile, companies who view software as critical to their operations will continue to expand GCCs and pick-and-choose the top tier of talent to incubate internally.

IF you are a new grad in North America, this means you need to move to a Tier 1 tech hub like SF or NYC ASAP - these are the only hubs with the right density of talent and self sustaining software hiring markets that can ensure you will find your next job if you get laid off or need to find an entry level role.

IF you are a new grad and already have a role - UPSKILL ASAP. A decently regarded online MSCS like GT or UT Austin doesn't cost more than $10K total, and other programs like UIUC's MCS or Dartmouth's MEng cost in the $20k-40k range in their entirety which is worth it. Additionally you will have to self-skill in your free time as well.

[0] - https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/levels/entry-leve...

[1] - https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/levels/entry-leve...

[2] - https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/levels/entry-leve...

Re: The ladder is missing rungs – Engineering Progression When AI Ate the Middle

#43

Post by hapticmonkey »

torben-friis wrote: post #22
ngburke wrote: post #7

Spot on. All those years of slinging code and debugging gave me and others the judgement and eye to check on all the AI generated code. I now wonder often about what hiring looks like in this new era. As a small startup, we just don't need junior engineers to do the day to day implementation. Do we instead hire a small number of people as apprentices to train on the high level patterns, spot trouble areas, develop go…

Here's a depressing take. Most places I worked at, seniors were expected to do the junior work, only faster. All the actual senior stuff (architecture, refactoring,code quality, you name it) is usually done either against management or as a concession to humor the devs. Now that our ability to go fast has been supercharged, I suspect we're just going to see a massive lowering of quality across everything. We seem to…

I don’t think this is limited to coding. We’ll eventually see it across all products and services. It’s just a matter of how much customers are willing to accept.

Re: The ladder is missing rungs – Engineering Progression When AI Ate the Middle

#44

Post by FuckButtons »

mitthrowaway2 wrote: post #16
datadrivenangel wrote: post #8

Demand for software is large and as the cost goes down we'll want more of it, so there will be demand to keep training people.

Maybe. Depends on how good the substitute is. Demand for number crunching went up as costs went down, but nobody is training human "computers" anymore.

I don’t know that those people were exactly out of a job though, they didn’t do that job, but I find it hard to believe that any of the people solving orbital mechanics by hand wound up with nothing to do but twiddle their thumbs for the remainder of their lives. Similarly, I don’t know that there’s any realistic prospect, even if ai winds up writing all the software, that there wont also be incentive to have people that also understand it.

Re: The ladder is missing rungs – Engineering Progression When AI Ate the Middle

#45

Post by FromTheFirstIn »

orangecoffee wrote: post #24
waterTanuki wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When your senior developers retire, and if the LLMs haven't caught up to their level by that time, where do you think new senior developers will come from?

The response I get offline is that there's millions of seniors right now that can last a couple decades.

I don’t know about the rest of them, but my rates keep going up. And the more I read takes like this the more I ask for

Re: The ladder is missing rungs – Engineering Progression When AI Ate the Middle

#46

Post by FromTheFirstIn »

quantummagic wrote: post #37

Digital technology has been gutting other fields for decades. For a few examples, we have lost the ladder that trained people as Linotype Operators/Typesetters, Photographic Lab Technicians, Legal Research Associates, Dictation Typists and Stenographers, etc. All which could lead to higher skilled and higher paid jobs. We didn't care until the same process came knocking on the door for us.

All of those are examples where technology replaced the core skill completely. In the age of digital photography and printers I can run a Photo Booth without worrying about the specific techniques of photographic lab technicians. LLMs aren’t replacing the core skill of engineering, because the core skill isn’t writing code, it’s articulating complex systems.

Re: The ladder is missing rungs – Engineering Progression When AI Ate the Middle

#49

Post by tdeck »

torben-friis wrote: post #22
ngburke wrote: post #7

Spot on. All those years of slinging code and debugging gave me and others the judgement and eye to check on all the AI generated code. I now wonder often about what hiring looks like in this new era. As a small startup, we just don't need junior engineers to do the day to day implementation. Do we instead hire a small number of people as apprentices to train on the high level patterns, spot trouble areas, develop go…

Here's a depressing take. Most places I worked at, seniors were expected to do the junior work, only faster. All the actual senior stuff (architecture, refactoring,code quality, you name it) is usually done either against management or as a concession to humor the devs. Now that our ability to go fast has been supercharged, I suspect we're just going to see a massive lowering of quality across everything. We seem to…

I unfortunately agree with this. Look how many senior engineers are already abdicating using their "judgement and eye to check on all the AI generated code" in favor of leaving an agent running all night and maybe skimming through 30k lines in the morning.

Re: The ladder is missing rungs – Engineering Progression When AI Ate the Middle

#50

Post by lovich »

alephnerd wrote: post #42
xboxnolifes wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As a small startup, we just don't need junior engineers to do the day to day implementation. > Do we instead hire a small number of people as apprentices... Are you not just re-describing what a junior engineer is? Someone with potential you hire to have them learn and grow on your team? I don't understand what is different. Pre-LLM, companies seemingly expected juniors to know a ton about coding. Post-LLM they'll…

> Are you not just re-describing what a junior engineer is? Basically, the salary expectations are out of whack for expected output. The 25th and 50th percentile TC for an entry level SWE in the US are $100K and $140K respectively [0]. Meanwhile, the 90th percentile TC for an entry level SWE in Canada is US$115K [1] and US$120K [2] in the United Kingdom. Why should I hire an entry level CS major from Sacramento State…

I remember in college when we got taught that early economists thought capitalism and increasing productivity from innovation would lead to less work and effort needed from people and not more.

It must have been nice to be that optimistic and not having to see how it’s actually playing out.

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