Writing code was never the job. Creating value was the job -- coding was just how to implement that goal.
I shudder to think of anyone in the industry this would be mind-opening to
AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?
401–410 of 659 posts
Re: AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?
#402Earlier quoted context omitted.
This has less to do with bad engineers than bad policies and procedures. You don't performance test before shipping to prod? you get what you get.
Startups have limited resources, we prioritize the best we can. As a staff engineer it's my responsibility to bring this to my company, but it's not an overnight process.
From this argument, it sounds like your company is making a rational choice to go with what you’re seeing. Even if you don’t like it.
Re: AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?
#403> 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…
"One bad programmer can easily create two new jobs a year."
-John Cook
Re: AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?
#404This blog conflates productivity with expertise. Are LLMs rewarding experienced developers with tons of productivity gains? Yes. Are LLMs actively degrading their expertise of understanding code? Also yes. This article has made the implicit assumption that the top quartile of engineers are immune from skill decline. They're not. If you're an engineer who increasingly outsources the planning, writing, and analysis of…
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Re: AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?
#405> 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 hotsh…
I agree. Why is everyone so hard on everyone else? Look at the outages Anthropic and OpenAI have had. They aren't hiring stupid people but they can't seem to go a week without major platform instability. And you can't even argue that it's because of high load because all of these engineers have worked at Facebook, Meta, etc. They are seasoned veterans that should be able to build resilient systems.
Re: AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?
#406> 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'm not sure if it's replacing the middle class of software engineering, but I do feel it's generally true that the static approaches to middle class software engineering are evolving quicker than people are keeping up. Hopefully when there's bad devs, there's a bit less making a mess where someone doesn't know better and as a result some amount of average or general best practices start happening. This can be true n…
Despite the title this article doesn't seem to be saying anything about the "middle class".
Re: AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?
#407> 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…
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.
If those bad engineers are in a very well defined box. Give bad engineers greenfield and watch it implode
Re: AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?
#408I think the worst part is that some companies may be okay with it. They will pay attention only when it's messed up beyond repair. And it’s possible that fixing it will be a task for more advanced models, not humans. Do they win or lose at the end of this martingale? I am not sure
Re: AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?
#409Earlier quoted context omitted.
I do have a genuine question though: what value are you adding at that point? If you don’t understand the system, don’t know what the code is doing and you’re mostly prompting an LLM to make the decisions and implementation for you, what exactly is your contribution? The ability to operate the tool isn’t much of a moat if everyone else has access to the same tool. I don’t review assembly produced by a compiler becaus…
Do you think it's impossible for someone to have a 25K line PR / diff but not know what's going on in the system? I ask because I've pushed some of this to the limit in my own testing and when I get the right building blocks / primitives in place in the repo, I'm able to get plans written in a way where I don't just describe what I want but specifically mention outcomes, verifications, constraints, etc. that utlimate…
For the vast majority of 25K-line PRs, especially AI-generated ones, I would bet money that the person opening it does not actually understand all of it.
If you genuinely understand the resulting system, then that's fine. That’s not the behaviour I’m criticising.
Re: AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?
#410Earlier quoted context omitted.
Exactly. For most of my career, bad engineers (or juniors who were earnestly learning) would struggle to even create output that compiled, let alone ran. And it would take them a long time to implement something poorly. So the blast radius from their incompetence would be limited. Today, a bad engineer can churn out ten thousand lines of garbage that actually compiles and runs, before my first cup of coffee. If not o…
If your company has bad engineers cranking out 10,000 line PRs your engineering culture and product was already bad, I guarantee it.
In the before times, a small dedicated team could hold back against bad engineering culture and intentional enshittification. Now the balance has changed.