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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?

#431

Post by bluefirebrand »

win311fwg wrote: post #298
bluefirebrand wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In addition to what the author discusses, I think skill-atrophy, stagnation due to complacency (i.e.: "why grow and learn if an agent can do it" mindset), and cognitive laziness are additional risks that come with overrelying on LLMs. Humans were meant to think. LLMs are a tool. I know it's a cliche but the old IBM adage holds very true today Machines should work, people should think Maybe that's part of the proble…

The decisions are important, but the understanding is that you define them as constraints. Which is what a segment of the software community, the upper class if you will, has always believed you should do, even before LLMs were a thing. The LLM simply becomes a constraint solver: machines do the work, people do the thinking. This is the challenge of the middle class developer. They aren't accustomed to working with c…

> They aren't accustomed to working with constraint thinking

That's one way to frame it I guess

I would frame it as "they have been abused by AGILE and impatient PMs into never actually taking time to do constraint based thinking or design"

It is impossible to think about constraints, or really do any proper engineering, if you are constantly "sprinting"

Edit: I also don't personally like engineering based on constraints. It feels like constructing a building based on where walls aren't allowed to go. I get that defining constraints and letting the software go is where a lot of useful emergent behavior lives, but I struggle a lot to think that way. Maybe I'm not wired right for software in the end

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

#432

Post by e2le »

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…

> Call me a gatekeeper if you want but, we ended up with a lot of people that just can't do the job.

Increasingly I am of the opinion that software engineering aught to be a licensed profession, similar to civil engineers, medical professionals, or lawyers. A board of peers to hold you accountable and a licence that can be revoked at any time. Additionally, legislation could be written to require such licensed individuals in safety critical roles.

I suspect the debate around AI assistance tools would be quite different if there was greater accountability for programmers and a constant threat of losing a licence.

If you brick millions of machines impacting hospitals and airports, you should probably never be trusted to write code again.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_CrowdStrike-related_IT_ou...

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

#433

Post by ponector »

swatcoder wrote: post #235
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…

> > bad engineers were always a liability > With AI, "bad" engineers can now amplify their "bad" engineering x10 across the organization. Yup, and that's going to be the comeuppance for a decade of aggresive overhiring. There are so many "bad engineers" filling the ranks now that in many teams and divisions there's not even anyone left around who can recognize them as such. This was already manifesting as a rapid dec…

It's all about the process and the organization. No one is pushing for quality, everyone needs more features.

>>a rapid decline in software quality

It's hard to expect anything else if budget for QA teams is reallocated to cover llm bills.

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

#434

Post by kian »

wwweston wrote: post #419
phil21 wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 giganti…

I also have a suspicion that people’s microdistributions of talents is underappreciated. Some people are good architects and average at algorithms. Some people are unusually good at debugging or QA. Some can spin out whole systems at an impressive speed that may not be a great long term fit for the larger system. And most businesses aren’t managed in a way that’s interested in adapting to the microshapes of personnel…

I think this is one of the beauties of AI -- filling in the gaps to help people make their microtalents shine.

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

#435

Post by platevoltage »

user00005 wrote: post #164

All of this is my fault. I decided to start learning programming about 6 years ago as a possible new career path. The universe was not going to have that so AI was created.

I came on the market right as the Covid hiring boom ended and started to fall apart. Fun times.

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

#436

Post by florianherrengt »

palmotea wrote: post #337
florianherrengt wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The supposed “10x engineer” may simply be someone stealing productivity from everyone around them. You measure the output of one person while ignoring the cost they impose on their team. If I generate 10 PRs in a day but three engineers now have to spend the next two days reviewing them, figuring out what I changed, correcting bad assumptions, debugging regressions and explaining why half of it needs to be redone, I…

FYI, your comment showed up as [dead] like you were banned until I vouched for it, but I don't see any reason for that. Just thought I'd let you know in case you want to follow up.

Thanks for letting me know. I had no idea. I’ll follow up with the moderators.

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

#437

Post by sublinear »

jasode wrote: post #413
sublinear wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 codebase…

>, but lines-of-business supported by CRUD apps are rarely simple from an engineering perspective. You misread my comment as some dig at CRUD LOB enterprise coders. I used to work on enterprise ERP code with 20000+ tables. Yes, I agree it definitely wasn't simple. Instead, I was responding to a very specific observation the gp made: he saw that both senior and junior devs were interchangeable when randomly assigning…

All engineers should be spending more time "planning" than "doing".

Even before LLMs, the coding tasks were less than 50% of the time spent on all my Jira boards in the past 15 years. It makes perfect sense that they are assigned based on available capacity. By the time the coding begins, it's already too late to worry about implementation.

You're right that small tasks are trivial enough to be assigned to anyone. That's the point. That's how it feels to work on the "good" projects regardless of complexity. Planning a complex project should result in more tasks, not harder tasks. Your epics and stories can sometimes vary in points, but your tasks should not. A primary goal of the planning phase is figuring out how to keep them as low as you can. The points stop being meaningless when you think this way. They tell you where things are too lumpy. You throw more planning time at those lumps.

If assigning to a senior produces better code, you're not spending enough time planning ahead.

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

#438

Post by stronglikedan »

e2le wrote: post #432
overgard wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Call me a gatekeeper if you want but, we ended up with a lot of people that just can't do the job. Increasingly I am of the opinion that software engineering aught to be a licensed profession, similar to civil engineers, medical professionals, or lawyers. A board of peers to hold you accountable and a licence that can be revoked at any time. Additionally, legislation could be written to require such licensed indivi…

> software engineering aught to be a licensed profession

Only in certain industries, where outcomes can hurt people in any way. There's opportunity to engineer software in just about every industry, but I don't think a widget vendor that wants to connect to a WMS should be compelled to hire licensed anything. Of course, licensed engineers should cost more too.

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

#439

Post by platevoltage »

mjr00 wrote: post #36

It's very true, you used to have to hire people you knew were not very good just to have warm bodies who could throw together widgets, minor bug fixes, etc. You still had to have a competent developer review what they did, which was annoying, but ultimately a time saver over doing it themselves. Now the competent developer can just run agents and do the same review process, except it's ~free (relative to human salari…

Well now you have lousy developers generating 1000 line PRs for their lousy colleague to approve while neither of them understand the code.

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

#440

Post by kian »

michaelrpeskin wrote: post #357
Syntaf wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally agree with your framing here, but that is also what I fundamentally consider "good" code -- it's code that solves the problem that your customers/business needs without making it _harder_ to solve the next problem. There are valid situations where the best code you can write is code you never look at and throw out the next month; there are equally valid situations where the best code is well thought through a…

Thanks for the wording on your first sentence there. I've been trying to figure out a way to get that thought expressed succinctly. I think with AI coding, what we call "good" code changes. Lots of abstractions really only exist to help load the context into the human brain so that they can solve the next problem. If an agent can just search and find all the places to make a change, or to duplicate code with small ch…

Using context always means there's less for something else, whether you're a human or a machine. Abstractions that localize reasoning and help load the context into a human brain are ideal for machines and humans alike.
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