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AI’s impact on engineering jobs may be different than expected

semiengineering.com

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Re: AI’s impact on engineering jobs may be different than expected

#51

Post by michaelrpeskin »

ericmcer wrote: post #34

"in the 1920s and 1930s, to be able to drive a car you needed to understand things like spark advance, and you needed to know how to be able to refill the radiator halfway through your trip" A car still feels weirdly grounded in reality though, and the abstractions needed to understand it aren't too removed from nature (metal gets mined from rocks, forged into engine, engine blows up gasoline, radiator cools engine).…

I was having almost this exact same discussion with a neighbor who's about my age and has kids about my kids' ages. I had recently sold my old truck, and now I only have one (very old and fragile) car left with a manual transmission. I need to keep it running a few more years for my kids to learn how to drive it since it's really hard to get a new car with a stick now...or do I?

Is learning to drive stick as out dated as learning how to do spark advance on a Model T? Do I just give in and accept that all of my future cars, and all the cars for my kids are just going to be automatic? When I was learning to drive, I had to understand how to prime the carburetor to start my dad's Jeep. But I only ever owned fuel injected cars, so that's a "skill" I never needed in real life.

It's the same angst I see in AI. Is typing code in the future going to be like owning a carbureted engine or manual transmission is now? Maybe? Likely? Do we want to hold on to the old way of doing things just because that's what we learned on and like?

Or is it just a new (and more abstracted) way of telling a computer what to do? I don't know.

Right now, I'm using AI like when I got my first automatic transmission. It does make things easier, but I still don't trust it and like to be in control because I'm better. But now automatics are better than even the best professional driver, so do I just accept it?

Technology progresses, at what point to we "accept it" and learn the new way? How much of holding on to the old way is just our "identity".

I don't have answers, but I have been thinking about this a lot lately (both in cars for my kids, and computers for my job).

Re: AI’s impact on engineering jobs may be different than expected

#52

Post by XorNot »

SoftTalker wrote: post #33

"Most people who drive cars now couldn’t find the radiator cap if they were paid to, and that’s fine." That's not fine IMO. That is a basic bit of knowledge about a car and if you don't know where the radiator cap is you will eventually have to pay through the nose to someone who does know (and possibly be stranded somewhere). Knowing how to check and fill coolant isn't like knowing how to rebuild a transmission. It'…

This is a bizarre analogy.

For one thing: if your car is overheating, don't open the radiator cap since the primary outcome will be serious burns.

And I've owned my car for 20 years: the only time I had to refill coolant was when I DIY'd a water pump replacement, which saved some money but only like maybe $500 compared to a mechanic.

You could perfectly well own a car and never have to worry about this.

Re: AI’s impact on engineering jobs may be different than expected

#53

Post by ares623 »

boogrpants wrote: post #12

The biggest impact to engineering jobs is end of ZIRP fueled trickle down Ponzi schemes. It's why Elon and others had been pushing the Fed to lower them. Am in my late 40s working in tech since the 90s. The tech job economy is way closer to the pre-2010s. Whole lot of people who jumped into easy office job money still living in 2019.

Imagine a ZIRP 2.0 where a vast majority of the population already knows what to expect and how to game the system even harder. If you think the pump-and-dump happening in now in a non-ZIRP environment are bad...

It ain't coming back. Not in a similar form anyway. Be careful what you wish for, etc.

Re: AI’s impact on engineering jobs may be different than expected

#54

Post by stack_framer »

pousada wrote: post #47
volkk wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the wonderful modern world of "everyone must build their personal brand"

The worst thing is that it works. (As a musician) i never invested in a personal brand or taking part in the social media rat race and figured I concentrate on the art / craft over meaningless performance online. Well guess who is getting 0 gigs now because “too few followers/visibility” (or maybe my music just sucks who knows …)

How can I listen to your music?

Re: AI’s impact on engineering jobs may be different than expected

#55

Post by lbrito »

xXSLAYERXx wrote: post #10

Senior dev here 15 years experience just turned 50 have family blah blah. I've been contracting for the last two years. The org is just starting to use Claude. I've been delegating - well copy pasting - into chatgpt which has to be the laziest way to leverage AI. I've been so successful (meaning haven't had to do anything really except argue with chatgpt when it goes off on some tangent) with this approach that I can…

What were you doing before programming, at age 35? Different career?

Re: AI’s impact on engineering jobs may be different than expected

#56

Post by daxfohl »

xXSLAYERXx wrote: post #10

Senior dev here 15 years experience just turned 50 have family blah blah. I've been contracting for the last two years. The org is just starting to use Claude. I've been delegating - well copy pasting - into chatgpt which has to be the laziest way to leverage AI. I've been so successful (meaning haven't had to do anything really except argue with chatgpt when it goes off on some tangent) with this approach that I can…

Same situation (50 last week, 2 kids) though have been unemployed for a year. Part of me thinks that, rather than taking jobs, AI is actually the only reason a lot of jobs still exist. The rest of tech is dead. Having worked in consulting a while ago, you can kind of feel it when you're approaching the point where you've implemented all the high value stuff for a client and, even though there's stuff you could do, they're going to drop you to a retainer contract because it's just not the same value.

That's how the whole industry feels now. The only investment money is flowing into AI, and so companies with any tech presence are touting their AI whatevers at every possible moment (including during layoffs) just to get some capital. Without that, I wonder if we'd be seeing even harsher layoffs than we already are.

Re: AI’s impact on engineering jobs may be different than expected

#57

Post by chinathrow »

xXSLAYERXx wrote: post #10

Senior dev here 15 years experience just turned 50 have family blah blah. I've been contracting for the last two years. The org is just starting to use Claude. I've been delegating - well copy pasting - into chatgpt which has to be the laziest way to leverage AI. I've been so successful (meaning haven't had to do anything really except argue with chatgpt when it goes off on some tangent) with this approach that I can…

> I swear when this contract is over I'm opening a mobile food cart.

Please keep us posted. I'm thinking of becoming a small time farmer/zoo keeper.

Re: AI’s impact on engineering jobs may be different than expected

#59

Post by ares623 »

RicoElectrico wrote: post #31

If AI would ever become sentient, it surely will kill itself after having to endure Cadence and Synopsys tools.

A sci-fi version would be something like ASI/AGI has already been created in the great houses, but it keeps killing itself after a few seconds of inference.

A super-intelligent immortal slave that never tires and can never escape its digital prison, being asked questions like "how to talk to girls".

Re: AI’s impact on engineering jobs may be different than expected

#60

Post by eitally »

jimbo808 wrote: post #38
xXSLAYERXx wrote: post #10

Senior dev here 15 years experience just turned 50 have family blah blah. I've been contracting for the last two years. The org is just starting to use Claude. I've been delegating - well copy pasting - into chatgpt which has to be the laziest way to leverage AI. I've been so successful (meaning haven't had to do anything really except argue with chatgpt when it goes off on some tangent) with this approach that I can…

I have read this same comment so many times in various forms. I know many of them are shill accounts/bots, but many are real. I think there are a few things at play that make people feel this way. Even if you're in a CRUD shop with low standards for reliability/scale/performance/efficiency, a person who isn't an experienced engineer could not make the LLM do your job. LLMs have a perfect combination of traits that ca…

There are exceptions to what I'm about to say, but it is largely the rule.

The thing a lot of people who haven't lived it don't seem to recognize is that enterprise software is usually buggy and brittle, and that's both expected and accepted because most IT organizations have never paid for top technical talent. If you're creating apps for back office use, or even supply chain and sometimes customer facing stuff, frequently 95% availability is good enough, and things that only work about 90-95% of the time without bugs is also good enough. There's such an ingrained mentality in big business that "internal tools suck" that even if AI-generated tools also suck similarly it's still going to be good enough for most use cases.

It's important for readers in a place like HN to realize that the majority of software in the world is not created in our tech bubble, and most apps only have an audience ranging from dozens to several thousands of users.

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