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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?

#441

Post by mrguyorama »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #414
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…

The whole "learn to code" and software bootcamp craze always baffled me. Like what other profession markets themselves as "Hey, our job is so easy that any schmuck off the street can enter the career with 4 months of training." Practically every other job I can think of at a similar salary level has entrance requirements (e.g. grad school admissions exams), extensive and expensive training, a lengthy apprenticeship p…

I mean, the obvious thing is that the "learn to code quick, code bootcamps!" drive was driven by connected people who were, as they are now, attempting to drive down the cost of software development.

Management types really really really loathe software developers for making good money, and have spent decades now jumping at any advertisement that suggests it can undercut the salary of your current crop of engineers.

Devaluing software developers has always been the point. Whether you take the cynical view of "They resent us for being expensive" or the apathetic view of "Capitalism simply wants to eliminate any and every cost by definition"

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

#442

Post by groundzeros2015 »

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…

Credentialing lowers the skill floor and increase every other kind of friction.

Civil engineering or medicine is hardly a desirable career model to follow.

Btw doctors make mistakes that kill people all the time. It’s a top 3 cause of death in the US AND they often keep their jobs.

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

#443

Post by platevoltage »

b40d-48b2-979e wrote: post #169
cbg0 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually "AI spending" is the new "lines of code" metric.

Too real. I got DMed by management recently asking if I was anti-AI because I had the lowest spend on the team as the lead, y'know, the one that has to review all the slop my peers are generating.

That is rough, and downright embarrassing. What is happening in this industry?

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

#444

Post by truckyday »

Aurornis wrote: post #110
doctorwho42 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again, this ignores the second order effect of entirely gutting the personnel pipeline that is required to create new senior devs... So without a training pipeline to provide experience to jr. Devs, in 15 years we will be hurting for senior devs to replace all the graybeards. Kind of like the fortran crisis of the last decade or so.... Just across an entire industry that supports every other industry....

> Kind of like the fortran crisis of the last decade or so.... I’m convinced the only reason there’s a Fortran crisis is because nobody wants to work on Fortran or make a career out of it. Has nothing to do with willingness to hire juniors. Good luck finding promising juniors who survey their career opportunities and decide that Fortran is a good technology for building their resume.

> I’m convinced the only reason there’s a Fortran crisis is because nobody wants to work on Fortran or make a career out of it.

Most jobs involving Fortran I see are not looking for a programmer, software developer, etc. They're looking for a PhD scientist in whatever scientific/engineering domain they're in who can work on Fortran code. They almost exclusively want domain experts, excluding most juniors anyway.

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

#445

Post by happytoexplain »

api wrote: post #182
dgellow wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hate that framing because it glosses over what makes AI distinct from other technology. Pretty much anything can be used as a tool, that’s not an interesting aspect of AI. However standard tools do not take decisions on behalf of the user, they do not apply judgement. They come with assumptions and constraints that make some decisions more likely to be made. But the whole thing about LLMs is that they apply judgeme…

If you go back in time and imagine yourself in 1950, would you have said that about computers in general? Yes their decisions are the result of pre programmed heuristics, but to the operator that can feel as opaque as AI. In fact in the early days of computing AI was used to refer to a broader swath of what we now call heuristics and machine learning. Is a very sophisticated computer driven adaptive control system ma…

>If you go back in time and imagine yourself in 1950, would you have said that about computers in general?

I'm not the parent, but personally, no, I don't believe so.

I always appreciate the "it's like past changes" thought when things change, but in my opinion, this one simply isn't. It's notably different both quantitatively and, critically, qualitatively, than all previous increments in computers/software. This is much more lateral than punch cards -> assembly -> compilers -> frameworks.

Also, regardless of that thought, the "it's like past changes" argument relies on a false implication: That all changes that survive are "good" in the broad sense. Many changes often persist simply because they are inevitable - not because they are good. They have both good and bad parts, and it's subjective as to which side it leans towards.

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

#446

Post by florianherrengt »

jdw64 wrote: post #364
florianherrengt wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The industry doesn’t really owe people opportunities. Even if you think it should, that’s not how companies are going to behave.

That is an incredibly short sighted view. By acting this way, the industry is essentially selling its future for short term gains. A systemic reduction in the number of people capable of maintaining systems directly correlates with an inevitable collapse in overall software quality. The perspectives of market advocates often stop at this short sighted level. In reality, their modeling is incredibly simplistic. I will…

[dead]

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

#447

Post by truckyday »

WarmWash wrote: post #86
dauertewigkeit wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For some reason people never mention this, but aren't there also much more people graduating with CS degrees than ever before?

Pretty much no other engineering field made sense to go into for about a decade. Even kids who did go EE, Mech E, or even Chem E ended up taking software jobs. The pay, benefits, and work/life balance of SWE just absolutely obliterates everything else. Or did at least

Exactly why it's got to be broken now

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

#448

Post by [deleted] »

soperj wrote: post #252
Shorel wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That really sounds like the kind of people who will complain in university about being forced to study calculus. Natural consequence: Then they never grasped the concept of computational complexity. O(n) Vs O(n²)? They have n, what's the difference? Python is fast enough. The only thing that matters is shipping features fast! Features! Our competitor will have this next week, we need to write code fast, everything el…

computational complexity was never part of calculus. Calculus is the math of continuous change.

[deleted]

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

#449

Post by nkrisc »

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…

But how many of those bootcamp people actually went on to get software jobs? One of the big criticisms of that whole phenomenon that I recall is that people were graduating them and then were unable or unprepared to actually get a job in the industry?

So how many people "learned to code" and then ended up back on non-software related careers?

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

#450

Post by WorldMaker »

soperj wrote: post #252
Shorel wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That really sounds like the kind of people who will complain in university about being forced to study calculus. Natural consequence: Then they never grasped the concept of computational complexity. O(n) Vs O(n²)? They have n, what's the difference? Python is fast enough. The only thing that matters is shipping features fast! Features! Our competitor will have this next week, we need to write code fast, everything el…

computational complexity was never part of calculus. Calculus is the math of continuous change.

Big O notation predates Computational Complexity. It was originally used to guesstimate asymptotic behavior (limits as they approach infinity). The related Little o notation (even more specifically limits of already large values as they approach infinity) is directly related to early attempts at defining differentiation and differentiability and still sometimes show up in Calculus next to derivatives to explain how derivatives work.

The visual interpretation/intuition of Big O notation can be a useful way to build a visual intuition of what a function's derivative and integral "shapes" may look like, so some Calculus books teach Big O notation, too.

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