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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

#471

Post by taurath »

kibwen wrote: post #441
roncesvalles wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Equal? No, no no no. Upper management is making PoCs that promise to solve longstanding multi year learnings of tradeoffs and solution balancing, and setting goals based on that. We are heading to a cliff and everyone is going to learn what happens when you replace already vulnerable foundation pillars with pig iron.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#472

Post by pear01 »

datsci_est_2015 wrote: post #464
pear01 wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is temporary. What is the SKILL.md equivalent going to be in five years? In ten? You don't already see a pattern emerging around solutions to encode that "professional experience" into the tools themselves? These LLMs can already incorporate our entire cultural corpus yet your "professional experience" is the threshold they won't cross?

The word “incorporate” is doing some very heavy lifting in your assertion. These LLMs already have access to the whole corpus of architectural knowledge and software best practices, and yet they’re unable to reliably implement those best practices. Why not? Why do they often make completely unintuitive decisions, even when repeatedly prompted to ask clarifying questions?

To be clear by that and "cultural corpus" I meant their skill with natural languages. It is well known for instance that early LLMs were curiously better at composing sentences in English than doing basic math.

Regarding such formal reasoning we have already seen marked improvement in the last year or two alone. The question is how this weighs on your prediction re their capabilities in the next two, five, ten, etc years.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#473

Post by r_lee »

scj wrote: post #299
ge96 wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder though, can AI make the next JS framework. I mean that in sincerity, there was the leap from jQuery to React for ex. If an AI only knows jQuery and no one makes React, will React come out of AI.

A thought experiment: When all practical software is only written by AIs, will the AIs use goto? What will the programming language of AIs look like? My bet is something _like_ assembly, but not assembly. That being said, I think humans will still program for fun. Just like we paint portraiture in a world with cameras.

I think it won't be like assembly, because it takes more information vs building blocks that have more dense information in them, kind of like how we use libraries and frameworks

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#474

Post by cduzz »

sleight42 wrote: post #409
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…

This is far more true for junior and perhaps mid-career engineers, unless you're working in an extremely well-defined problem space (* see below). When working as a SWE, the longer I did it (~30 years) more of my time was spent understanding the problem, the edge cases, how to handle the edge cases, how to do all of it affordable, on time, and within budget. That's engineering. What you're describing is "writing code…

I'm going to mix my metaphors a bit here...

There's the saying "Any idiot can build a bridge; it takes an engineer to build a bridge that barely stands."

To put this another way, any idiotic LLM can write code. It takes a person with domain experience to understand what code to write, rewrite, or not write.

I've seen lots of organizations hollow out their internal competence in favor of outsourcing the skills. LLMs are the ultimate expression of that. There are people who say "you need to have people in your organization who understand how things work because they're the ones who solve problems!" and there are other people who say "focus on your core competencies! These problems you're worried about aren't your core competencies, so get rid of those experts, they're expensive and annoying; we can just sign a contract with an organization that'll know things for us."

At some point we all will identify exactly how much "seed corn" you need for the next season. We'll figure that out because we're starving, but at least we'll all know.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#475

Post by gchamonlive »

GolfPopper wrote: post #447
7e wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Refactoring is cheap too, but you have to read your code and know when to stop and ask the agent to refactor, rewrite, adopt or change libs, fix issues presented by linters and code quality scanners, change abstractions and rethink the architecture.

It's never been easier to replace chunks of code with sane software patterns, but you have to have a feel for those patterns. And also understand what's under the hood.

You folks speak like the only function of the agent is to spit code and features. Get a grip and treat your deliverables with care, otherwise you only have yourself to blame, not the AI.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#476

Post by jhrmnn »

kypro wrote: post #86
harimau777 wrote: post #20

I keep reading about how AI will be fine because people can just retrain for different careers. However, I never read what those careers are or who is going to pay for retraining. I certainly don't have the money or time to go back to college and start a new career at the bottom.

Also, it's not necessarily true that there will be other great careers available. This seems to just be an assumption people are making. Of course, there are jobs that will still require human labour for some time yet, but in reality a lot jobs that require physical human labour are now done in other parts of the world where labour is cheaper. Those which cannot be exported like plumbing or waitressing only have limi…

When no work is safe from mechanization, surely the value of labor wrt capital must fall, and the societal pressure on redistribution will rise. The ultimate outcome of technological progress is either extreme inequality or massive redistribution

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#477

Post by a10c »

GolfPopper wrote: post #447
7e wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

That's the point. Your prototype doesn't need to be pretty. It just needs to prove that the value is there for it to be made pretty.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#478

Post by koonsolo »

bel8 wrote: post #255
hibikir wrote: post #237

In my experience, it's been the complete opposite. The very experienced engineers that are actually willing to use top of the line tooling are much better than they were before, including those that are over 40, and over 50. Part of the practical degradation of traditional programmers over time has always been concentration and deep calculation, just like in chess. The old chess player knows chess much better than a…

But when a senior can do the job of 6 coworkers, what do you suppose will happen to the coworkers? In farming, those who were replaced by tractors did not keep their jobs. What is different now?

There are jobs with limited work, and jobs with unlimited work.

Since your farming land is limited, after the job is done, there is no more work.

For software projects, there is always more work to do. It's an arms race between competitors. Imagine you fire developers to maintain your speed, and your competitor keeps their people to go faster. Good luck to you!

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#479

Post by dasil003 »

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.

This is very naive and reductive thinking. Experiments have a cost, you really have to think carefully about what you are trying to learn. Even when code is cheap, traffic and time are still huge constraints, and you better make sure your hypothesis actually makes sense for your goals, because AI is more than happy to fill in the blanks with a plausible but completely wrong proposal.

More broadly, it's well understood that experiments are not a replacement for design and UX. Google is famously great at the former and terrible at the latter. Sure the AI maxxers will say the machines are coming for all creative endeavours as well, but I'm going to need more evidence. So far, everything good I've seen come from AI still had a human at the wheel, and I don't see that changing any time soon.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#480

Post by geodel »

JohnMakin wrote: post #251
sibeliuss wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even clearer, if you don't adapt to the changes taking place in the field there might not be a future for you. Its not about age, it is about attitude and flexibility (which are, admittedly, issues when getting older). In other words, if you want to continue stubbornly typing out code by hand, the person right over there has already mastered agentic tooling and is doing vastly more than you, more quickly, and with gr…

I see what you're getting at, but if it's not about age, why use an age related analogy? I probably should have amended my first statement in this thread is that it sounds ageist, if even implying that the people who will refuse to adapt will be older. This day is already here, people are already adapting to this. He seemed to frame it as the current young 20's career people will have this limited timeframe of produc…

Age analogy is fine because unlike few who are deep into technology and latest changes in the field (which btw are over represented on this site) for most IT developers age => experience without actually improving skills.

As I interview lot of people for typical Enterprise IT jobs even at 20 years of experience they do seem to not know much beyond what they learned in first few years.

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