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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

#441

Post by kibwen »

roncesvalles wrote: post #419
ecocentrik wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Glib is called for. The amount of information asymmetry that's still on the table as vibe coders and vibe engineers and vibe doctors emerge is staggering. Professional experience is still incredibly valuable. Most software developers might spend more than 6% of their time coding but no senior developers are banging their heads for hours over typos. https://www.youtube.com/shorts/xBilK3gT5e0

These days nobody bangs their heads over typos. LLMs evaporated 90% of the "moments of despair" when you have an error and googling it isn't helping, or googling it made you realize you have to read 30min of documentation. Coding is a joy now. LLMs shaved off all the rough edges.

> LLMs evaporated 90% of the "moments of despair"

And then condensed an equal quantity of despair out of the ether via confident confabulations.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#442

Post by WorldMaker »

anon84873628 wrote: post #354
WorldMaker wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> max out at "knowing everything" LLMs know nothing but are great at giving the illusion that they know stuff. (It's "mansplaining as a service"; it is easier to give confident answers every time, even if they are wrong, than to program actual knowledge.) Even your first case seems wildly optimistic. The second case is a lot of "maybes" and "we don't know how but we might figure it out" that seems like a lot to bet a…

I'm skeptical of LLM "reasoning" but they sure as hell know a lot. That's what the embeddings are: a giant semantic relationship between concepts.

Embeddings are still mostly just vectors into n-dimensional K-means clusters. It isn't "knowing" two things are related and here's the evidence, it is guessing two things are statistically likely to be related, based on trained patterns, and running with it without evidence.

It has no "semantic understanding" as we would define it. It's just increasingly good at winning cluster lotteries because we've increased the amount of training data to incredible heights.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#443

Post by nomel »

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…

The perspective here is "lifetime career", so you need to project out 30 years here, for a meaningful argument.

I think, much sooner than that, you'll have AI pumping out practically complete implementations that meet the requirements of function, set by the people who desire that function. THOSE people will be the developers, and will be more akin to technical "creatives", more on the product side, than the developer side.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#444

Post by ozim »

woeirua wrote: post #51

Was it ever a lifetime career? Haven't most people looked around and asked themselves where are all the 50+ engineers? They basically don't exist in large numbers. Ageism is real in this industry. You either save up enough money to retire early, switch into management, or get forced out of the industry eventually. AI is just accelerating the trend. I see very few junior engineers resisting AI. I see a LOT of staff+ e…

I think you missed the part where there were much much less software devs/engineers earlier.

Year after year it was just much more new people joining as things got easier and more accessible.

Now you see 40 or 50 year olds far and between where most guys I see are in their 30s. Ones that are 60 yo diluted in the sea of new entrants.

Ageism didn't came from the top it just happened with flood of young employees, there is just social dynamics where you might get 40yo not being a manager getting along with bunch of 25yolds but that's going to be an exception not the rule.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#445

Post by rhubarbtree »

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…

If you’re a developer and you’re writing code 2% of your time pre-Claude, that’s 9 minutes a day, you will and should be fired.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#446

Post by overfeed »

dkersten wrote: post #297
eska wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try to write a design doc before you implement something (which people find they need to do for LLMs to work at all anyway). You’ll find that you spend much less time actually writing code. Write proper API documentation laying out the assumptions and intent, generate some good API docs, write a design and architecture document (which people find they need for LLMs to work at all anyway). You’ll find that you spend a…

> which people find they need to do for LLMs to work at all anyway Everything we have to do for AI to function well, would help humans to function better too. If you take the things for AI, but do them for humans instead, that human will easily 2x or more, and someone will actually understand the code that gets written.

> If you take the things for AI, but do then for humans instead, that human will easily 2x or more, and someone will actually understand the code that gets written

This only works on high-trust teams and organizations. A lot of AI productivity gains are from SWE putting the extra effort because the results will be attributed to them. Being a force-multiplier for others isn't always recognized, instead, your perfomance will likely judged solely on the metrics directly attributed to you. I learned this lesson the hard way by being idealistic, and overestimating the level of trust that had been built after joining a new team. Companies pay lip service to software quality, no one gives a shit if your code has the lowest SEV rates.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#447

Post by GolfPopper »

7e wrote: post #437
estebank wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of the time is spent figuring what the right thing to do is, not writing the implementation. Sometimes the process of writing the implementation surfaces new considerations about what the right thing is, but still, producing text to feed to a compiler is not the bulk of the work of a software engineer. It is to unearth requirements and turn them into repeatable software.

If you’re spending time thinking and not experimenting, then it’s because experimentation is expensive. With an LLM you don’t have to try to predict a complex system in advance, experiments are so cheap to can just converge to a solution directly. None of this pontificating; it’s really not that useful anymore.

And before long you have a solution that is made up of a thousand pieces of spaghetti that neither you nor anyone else understands. And when your solution becomes too brittle to use, cannot be maintained, or fails catastrophically, then what? Just hope that's someone else's problem?

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#448

Post by Animats »

malfist wrote: post #278
coldtea wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AI can be an enormous accelerator for the time I'd normally spend writing lines of code by hand, but it doesn't really help with the rest of the work: - Understanding the problem - Waiting for the build system and tests to run - Manually testing the app to make sure it behaves as I'd like - Reviewing the diff to make sure it's clear - Uploading the PR and writing a description - Responding to reviewer feedback What…

There is no shortcut to understanding. No one can understand things for you

They can make it unnecessary for you to understand.

Consider hash tables. Nobody implements a hash table by hand any more. I've written some, but not in this century. Optimal hash table design is a specialist subject. Do you know about robin hood algorithms? Changing the random number generator's seed to discourage collision attacks? A basic hash table starts to slow down around 70% full. Modern hash tables can get above 90% full before they have to expand.

Who keeps Knuth's Fundamental Algorithms handy any more? I own both the original edition and the revised edition. They're boxed up in the garage. I once read that book cover to cover. That was a long time ago.

That's not AI. That's solving the problem and putting it in a black box. That's how technology progresses.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#449

Post by ravenstine »

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…

This answer makes two big assumptions that haven't been proven out yet.

- Understanding code without writing it is as viable as understanding code that you've worked with directly or indirectly

- Businesses care that you understand code

I really doubt the first one. Traditionally, understanding a code base in large part came from working with it intimately and building that muscle memory. The idea that understanding code by reading it is as good as understanding it from writing it, in my opinion, is not realistic.

Whether businesses care that their engineers (which they are increasingly viewing as monkeys at LLM typewriters) to understand the code remains to be seen. I don't think they particularly care whether their code runs slow and is buggy so long as it works just enough to churn out features and continue to pull income.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#450

Post by arandomhuman »

pear01 wrote: post #389
doug_durham wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a bit of glib answer. Most of the time is spent coding which encompasses typing, retyping, and retyping again. It also includes banging your head against the wall while trying to get one of your rewrites to work against and under-documented API. OP's formulation makes SWE sound like a purely noble enterprise like mathematics. It's more like an oil rig worker banging on pieces of metal with large hammers to ge…

Let's also not forget a lot of the market edge of SWEs comes in knowing how to navigate these parts. The fact you needed to be reasonably fluent in a language was already a barrier to entry which meant in better times new grads could earn six figures at their first job just for putting in that effort. Maybe you will still be needed. That is one question. How well you will be paid and treated when the barrier to entry…

The barrier to entry to generating code may be "I can think", but the barrier to entry for solving hard, distributed/multi-faceted engineering problems still remains quite high - agents can't really do this still to a decent level of efficacy reliably.

The progress models have made in the last 5 years aren't convincing me they'll bridge that gap too soon, although I can see how some people are convinced by how decent agentic harnesses make things. I know it's really easy to get very hyped with the current state of the technology, but try to have a bit of skepticism.

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