To the headline: Yep, and for false reasons they'll have to pay for later, alas.
AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?
501–510 of 690 posts
Re: AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?
#502Earlier quoted context omitted.
This 100%. I just requested a hackathon for performance improvement (might be wasted effort). We are pushing tons of code and now our CPU usage has grown exponentially over the past year because the bad engineers just ship whatever Claude gives them and do not think about the consequences. Our biggest consumer of CPU right now is HTTP connection churn because engineers are creating new clients every request we handle…
The actual issue is not the "bad" engineers but the bad organization. While people are allowed to push and merge whatever crap is generated there is no point to do otherwise. Even if you do care about performance, "good" code your teammates don't and close more tickets and are better by many metrics. If you are closing one ticket per week with "good" code but your teammate does three with "bad" code - it's actually y…
It means the company is measuring the wrong thing.
I would much rather have someone on my team who ships less but whose work I can trust than someone much faster whose changes leave me wondering what problems we’re going to discover later.
And when production breaks (and it will), I need the person who made the change to actually understand it well enough to help fix it, instead of showing up with no idea what is going on.
You can obviously be an asshole about how you do it but I don’t think pushing back makes someone toxic.
You need to be flexible and compromise when the business trade-off makes sense. But you also need a backbone. If you think something is going to cause real problems, bringing it up is part of the job.
Re: AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?
#503Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why would anyone get rich doing something easy?
Because the companies everyone claims are now obsolete are making a lot of money still doing the supposedly obsolete things?
Many of those companies like duolingo have already collapsed in stock price with YoY growth dropping off a cliff. It is happening, it just isn't instant.
Re: AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?
#504Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Good code apparent doesn't matter. Most software doesn't have real repurcussions for being bad. You just get a shittier oncall which doesn't seem to matter to some people
The people who have to fix the mess and the people who created it are two different groups of people.
Re: AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?
#505> 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…
> With AI, "bad" engineers can now amplify their "bad" engineering x10 across the organization. It's even worse than that. We've got a CEO who has suddenly learned how to vibe code and the stuff he's coming up with is... kind of horrendous. He's coming up with new "products" and proclaiming them the next big thing for us to work on and we're kind of over here scratching our heads asking who would want this? Who would…
It would be funny but sadly our CEO is also vibe coding all days (with AI I have so much free time!), forcing everyone in the company to use his vibe coded product.
Oh and he's altering course from the previous "AI only where it makes sense" to "everyone should code, even the sellers" and "AI is not optional, we're an AI first company".
Talk about drinking the Kool-Aid...
Re: AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?
#506hahah this is all well and good until the 20k+ line a day person is considered the good engineer, based on kpis alone. Your VPs aren't reading any of that.
Bonne chance fired senior!
I have depicted you as the 100 line a day weakling, and myself as the 20k+ line chad.
The systems at bigcos are too ruthless to risk gambling your career on this kind of reasoning which you have no recourse to. Best to start small teams and destroy them from the outside.
Re: AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?
#507> 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…
> With AI, "bad" engineers can now amplify their "bad" engineering x10 across the organization.
and
> I don't subscribe to the idea that AI generated code is fundamentally bad, just that people lack the right skills today to wrangle agents into writing good code.
those people who lack the right skills today – are they the bad engineers you'd mentioned previously?
Re: AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?
#508Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.…
> Management types really really really loathe software developers for making good money
Of course. I bet you loathe having to spend $70,000 to buy a nice car, too!
> Capitalism simply wants to eliminate any and every cost by definition
You could look up what life was like under Soviet communism. Me, I prefer capitalism.
Re: AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?
#509Between 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.
Even the senior, staff, and principal levels are a wild gamble where you're lucky to get any acknowledgment after applying, even with a strong profile.
Re: AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?
#510> Good engineers have become more valuable because AI lets them move much faster. They don't need as many people around them just to do the implementation work anymore. This would be true if the goal was to get good working code faster. But the actual goal is to get any code faster. So, in reality, it doesn’t matter whether you are a good or a bad engineer. It just amplified how good you are at manipulating the hirin…
[dead]