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I don't know if my job will still exist in ten years

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Re: I don't know if my job will still exist in ten years

#51

Post by tehlike »

Building is half the battle. Knowing what to build is the other half.

Most IC6/7+ would not code anyways - in fact a friend of mine said "we had our own agents we just called them IC4/5" - which was ironic but funny.

I am curious if we would ever get a new programming language like rust or go, without this creativity.

In a way, we have different products that does more or less same things (postgres vs mysql for example). The reason is there's difference of thought in the process. I doubt this will go away.

Re: I don't know if my job will still exist in ten years

#53

Post by suzzer99 »

xyzal wrote: post #47
suzzer99 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If software engineering goes extinct, a ton of other white-collar jobs will go with it, and we could be in an intractable depression.

No other profession has such a corpus of free training data available.

Marketing content creator and translator. But they're already half-extinct.

Re: I don't know if my job will still exist in ten years

#54

Post by rkuodys »

Insanity wrote: post #4

In “Ask HN style”, let’s say that software engineering does go extinct in the next X years, what would you do? I’ve thought about psychology. I know LLMs can work as pseudo-therapists but I feel like that’s a field where the human connection / human element will remain important.

I think its somewhat comparable to cutting grass in the cities.

It was manual labour first. Then there were teactors. Now robots join in - does that mean that personel cutting grass is obsolete? No , you need all of them. That means that city becomes nicer.

With software and AI I somehow feel the same will happen. How many features have you skipped just because it would help some niche set of users and PM or Management would not approve the spending. It is low priority. Or bugs that were annoying but financially not bringing much value.

I hope switching some work to AI , some companies will capture opportunity to make software better while others will make the same software cheaper

Re: I don't know if my job will still exist in ten years

#56

Post by hwhshs »

FirstClassTree wrote: post #35

You have many errors and I personally find the writing style pretentious. For example: Software engineer role is about automating people -> often not. That just indicates lack of rigor. Also, if so. Who will make the ai automate people? GOD? People think poorly understood theory and gradient descent will produce God.

Jevons "paradox" says as things get cheaper demand goes up. It is kinda how we got modern AI rather than just faster and faster paper form replacements.

Re: I don't know if my job will still exist in ten years

#58

Post by georgemcbay »

wvxf wrote: post #25
suzzer99 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If software engineering goes extinct, a ton of other white-collar jobs will go with it, and we could be in an intractable depression.

I know a lot of people working across portfolio management and tax accounting. Nobody I know of is using LLMs much and frankly their management has started to back-off pushing it more in the workplace. LLMs suit some jobs more than others. Its quite possible SWE's are the only profession massively affected - whether that means a evolution of the role or decline/death is another question.

> I know a lot of people working across portfolio management and tax accounting. Nobody I know of is using LLMs much and frankly their management has started to back-off pushing it more in the workplace.

I could say the same thing for software engineers I know as recently as the middle of last year, things can change very quickly.

Up until about December 2025 the fact that LLMs would replace us all (SWEs) was the punchline to a joke for most working developers I know. But most of the ones I know aren't laughing anymore, unless its a nervous laugh.

LLMs may (likely will) disrupt software developers first, but I don't think we are particularly unique and I don't see any reason why the same risks won't spread to virtually all knowledge work, especially if executives in those fields see a significant amount of SWEs being replaced by LLMs as an initial test case.

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