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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?

#471

Post by edukite »

Applejinx wrote: post #133
edukite wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just another 6 months bro, only another funding bro, I promise, all devs will be replaced bro I have stupid question here. Why they sell tokens instead of AI generated full application and AI fixes to your code without you needing a single dev?

Wait.

I'm 40yo. Do you know how long I'm waiting? Only taking for an account this newest hype I heard like 4x next year and the current progress is slowing significantly over last year. Even foundings are starting to back off

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

#472

Post by Manfrednotfunny »

edukite wrote: post #69
Manfrednotfunny wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a few years, it just might. If maintenance and security is fully automated and for small changes or a small feature you will only dump some spec document into your agent platform, for sure.

Just another 6 months bro, only another funding bro, I promise, all devs will be replaced bro I have stupid question here. Why they sell tokens instead of AI generated full application and AI fixes to your code without you needing a single dev?

Because of the current state of AI.

But the current state of AI is a very good indicator were it is going. Even if we don't achieve AGI, do you think AI in its current form will not be better in 5 or 10 years and we will have this solved a lot more/better than today?

Even with AI, you still need to design the software, test it, try it out, deploy it and scale it. An proper agentic platform still needs time to be build.

And the models need to be a little bit better and for that you want human feedback/reinforcement learning

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

#473

Post by akiselev »

Silhouette wrote: post #452
e2le wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

The problem with making programming a regulated profession is who gets to define the regulations. You are probably imagining that it would be expert developers with a track record of success. I would bet on it being the people who write lots of blog posts and books about programming and give lots of conference keynotes - whether or not those people have any evidence base to support their advocated policies or any per…

The important part of the professional certification like PE or MD is the liability that comes with it, which means that the professional has a lot more agency. A construction firm or hospital can't really force their professionals to do anything because the consequence is criminal prosecution (and a lot of legal liability for the employer).

Bring a software engineer into a courtroom as an expert witness, and the jury's eyes will glaze over. Bring in the PE who told their firm not to cut that corner, and the hammer comes down hard.

Even if the certification for software engineers starts as barebones as knowing what WASP is, it still provides an avenue for the feedback mechanism to work (the rules "written in blood"), so that the entire industry can study and learn from what happened, instead of this mess we have now, the peak of which is postmortem blog posts. Even now we have plenty of examples of regulatory frameworks where the regulations adapt to the field like the FDA where you've got a huge spectrum ranging from diagnostics to medical devices of which where are many classes, and drugs where every clinical trial can be tailored to the exact nature of the disease.

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

#474

Post by level87 »

It’s difficult to have spent a long time learning something, only for that thing to suddenly become accessible to anyone; something that was once scarce and valuable is now abundant and cheap.

There are still machinists doing things by hand, but for real production or prototyping, most will now use a 5-axis CNC machine. It still requires an operator of sorts, but much of the work that once required skilled manual machining is now done by CNC.

I think the same thing is happening here; it’s just that the transition is messy.

Give it five years, and how we get to the end result will not matter nearly as much as it does now. A messy codebase will be irrelevant, as it will be something managed and controlled by the LLM, written in a way optimised for itself, not for you or I.

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

#475

Post by edukite »

Manfrednotfunny wrote: post #472
edukite wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just another 6 months bro, only another funding bro, I promise, all devs will be replaced bro I have stupid question here. Why they sell tokens instead of AI generated full application and AI fixes to your code without you needing a single dev?

Because of the current state of AI. But the current state of AI is a very good indicator were it is going. Even if we don't achieve AGI, do you think AI in its current form will not be better in 5 or 10 years and we will have this solved a lot more/better than today? Even with AI, you still need to design the software, test it, try it out, deploy it and scale it. An proper agentic platform still needs time to be buil…

Yes, I don't think this will be a lot better. Newest Claude is barely better, same with the rest of the model. In the same time cost of training new models and running them is increasing so taking this in the account I don't think this'll even last 5y

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

#476

Post by jayGlow »

iLoveOncall wrote: post #42
declan_roberts wrote: post #12

Between AI and competing against the world with H-1B, it's really never been harder to get an entry or mid-level software engineering job. Which means our pipeline to senior engineer is completely broken.

There are 100K H1-Bs a year and 4 million grads a year in the US. Anyone who thinks H1-Bs are actually contributing to their inability to find a job is a moron.

only about 100k of those 4 million graduates are in computer science. more candidates applying for a limited number of jobs makes things more competitive and difficult for those applying understanding that doesn't make someone a moron.

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

#477

Post by florianherrengt »

barbazoo wrote: post #10
florianherrengt wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But now they can now move so fast that nobody has a realistic chance to stop them before the damage compounds. They get into a much deeper mess much faster.

We always talk about damage, what's the damage here?

Corrupted or lost customer data, security vulnerabilities, incorrect financial transactions, regulatory breaches, production outages, irreversible migrations, important product change effectively impossible without a full rewrite. Every feature takes longer, incidents take longer to resolve. Engineers spend their time fighting the codebase instead of building things, burn out and quit. I could go on forever.

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

#478

Post by NateEag »

e2le wrote: post #462
Silhouette wrote: post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with making programming a regulated profession is who gets to define the regulations. You are probably imagining that it would be expert developers with a track record of success. I would bet on it being the people who write lots of blog posts and books about programming and give lots of conference keynotes - whether or not those people have any evidence base to support their advocated policies or any per…

> You are probably imagining that it would be expert developers with a track record of success. I'll admit I am unsure how such individuals would be chosen. I imagine it would be prudent to learn what processes are used by other licensed professions when choosing such individuals. > who write lots of blog posts and books about programming and give lots of conference keynotes I do not think people who write blog posts…

> I would hope that any regulation is evidence driven.

Have you found existing regulation in any field that's evidence-driven?

My impression is that regulation is not made in a way that has much to do with evidence, but I would be delighted to be shown evidence I'm wrong.

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

#479

Post by florianherrengt »

timedude wrote: post #238
florianherrengt wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the people trying to understand the changes and guard quality are now considered the bottleneck, the answer isn’t that the reviewers need to move faster.

I wasn't saying that either

Then I’m not sure what you mean by calling them a bottleneck.

If the limiting factor is the rate at which experienced engineers can understand and validate changes, you have three options: generate less, find a genuinely better way to validate or accept lower quality.

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

#480

Post by scrapedface »

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…

Just because you CAN code doesn’t mean you SHOULD code.
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