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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?

#511
post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a side note; There is plenty of useful math that many people need (or would benefit from) in the real world. Much math curricula is arguably poorly aligned to needs, as it emerged from various historical flukes of design-by-committee. Popular math curricula is not perfect by any means. I recommend looking at high school or college textbooks and considering whether it is well prioritized.

In principle I agree with you. The missing part of mathematics education, IMO, would be to focus more into developing the intuition of what something means, instead of the current focus on getting some (numeric) results.

That was one of the biggest changes that happened with common core. Common core itself didn't really mandate this, but it took a reset of the curriculum to insert the new ideas like an emphasis on intuition rather than rote arithmetic.

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

#512
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…

This sounds like a terrible idea. Do people need license to draw a picture or write a song? Why would we restrict other creative work in this way?

>Why would we restrict other creative work in this way?

Because it isn't creative work. Software underpins payment processors, medical services, emergency alerts, infrastructure. In the UK not long ago a ransomware attack took the healthcare system offline and surgeries had to be postponed. in 2021 the Colonial Pipeline attack took 50% of the US East Coast's oil supply offline. The entire German train system died a few weeks ago for half a day because of a software bug.

People's entire communication is in digital services, all of their private data, the economy grinds to a halt or national security is impacted monthly now by either deliberate attacks or just bugs.

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

#513
post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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…

> software engineering aught to be a licensed profession, similar to civil engineers, medical professionals, or lawyers.

My experience with civil engineers and lawyers is many of them aren't worth spit. Licensing is not a magical cert that proves competence.

BTW, if you hire a lawyer in WA state, be sure to ask if they passed the bar. The state has been licensing lawyers who don't pass it.

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

#514

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The decisions are important, but the understanding is that you define them as constraints. Which is what a segment of the software community, the upper class if you will, has always believed you should do, even before LLMs were a thing. The LLM simply becomes a constraint solver: machines do the work, people do the thinking. This is the challenge of the middle class developer. They aren't accustomed to working with c…

> They aren't accustomed to working with constraint thinking That's one way to frame it I guess I would frame it as "they have been abused by AGILE and impatient PMs into never actually taking time to do constraint based thinking or design" It is impossible to think about constraints, or really do any proper engineering, if you are constantly "sprinting" Edit: I also don't personally like engineering based on constra…

> "they have been abused by AGILE [...]"

That's ironic given that some of the Agile Manifesto signatories are some of the biggest proponents of constraint-based development. While the Principles behind the Agile Manifesto is not prescriptive, I am not certain you could, in practice, even satisfy many of the principles without constraint-based development.

> I also don't personally like engineering based on constraints. It feels like constructing a building based on where walls aren't allowed to go.

Engineering is all about constraints. That you then shift to talking about constructing a building is curious as it would be atypical for an engineer to work on constructing a building. The engineer's role in building constriction is typically only in defining the constraints. Construction crews, made up of an entirely different group of people, then construct the building within the constraints set. "Constructing a building based on where walls aren't allowed to go" is essentially how buildings are usually constructed. It is an interesting parallel as the LLM is somewhat like the construction crew, which is something software hasn't really had before in any kind of big way.

Engineer gets thrown around pretty loosely in the world of software, but elsewhere, especially in places where failure can cause serious harm, someone who constructs a building by applying judgment, experience, and craftsmanship as they go would be considered an artisan, craftsman, or something to that effect rather than an engineer. That seems closer to the world you like to live in. There is nothing wrong with being a craftsman, of course, but the economic fit is becoming less clear as the industry matures. Which is something that seems par for the course. The early days of building construction was also dominated by craftsmen but as it matured engineers became dominant.

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

#515
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…

Credentialing lowers the skill floor and increase every other kind of friction. Civil engineering or medicine is hardly a desirable career model to follow. Btw doctors make mistakes that kill people all the time. It’s a top 3 cause of death in the US AND they often keep their jobs.

>>doctors make mistakes that kill people all the time

Yes, but they make a lot FEWER such mistakes than would people who could not pass the exams and maintain a license.

The standard is not perfection; the standard is as good as practical and better than if nothing were done. Medical licensing definitely meets both of those criteria. Unless you are arguing that anyone who takes a ten-week "Medical Bootcamp" is ready to be a surgeon you would trust to operate on you or your children?

Would you also be happy to commute to work over a bridge designed by someone with a 10-wk bootcamp in civil engineering?

You have it exactly backwards — Credentialing RAISES the skill floor. It does not raise it to perfection, and "Certificates" in the computing industry are a joke, but real medical or engineering credentials certainly raise the floor higher than the software floor

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

#516

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I tried to get a job back then but never could. Its wild to read to me that it was 'sink or swim' back then. Nobody wanted to hire a junior. So I never became a SWE and it was my passion since 14. Now I just don't care and too much time has passed.

When? The specific years and locations matter greatly, there's always been a boom and bust aspect to it.

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

#517

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…

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 jur…

I have been a professional software developer for decades and worked in several roles where quality and security were at a premium but I have no idea what you mean by WASP. And yet you described it as "barebones" - an interesting illustration of the problem here. Real engineers have many years seeing the hard way what actually works. In software we don't have that kind of consistency and shared understanding of how to reliably get good results yet.

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

#518

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What was he doing? Showing them that bad code will make them feel hotter?

Busy servers generate more heat. Inefficient code makes servers busier. There’s a real physical outcome for bad performance code at scale. But you don’t really want lots of idle or underused servers, aside from burst capacity management. So if they universally and consistently wrote more efficient code I’d expect a smaller datacenter. Full of still busy servers but just less of them.

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

#519

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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." For one, the industry never did professionalize to begin with, certainly not in the way accountants, lawyers etc did. We never had any real body that could certify proficiency, which is what contributed to companies having to resort to leetcode and other such sty…

> We never had any real body that could certify proficiency Good! > having to resort to leetcode and other such styles of interviewing Such test filter out the obvious frauds.

> Such test filter out the obvious frauds.

if you need garbage like leetcode to filter out "obvious frauds" you got a whole lot of problems in your company/team/...

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

#520

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law

Moore's Law covers transistors, not LLMs.

Moore's Law hasn't covered transistors in quite some time.

We get about 10% YoY now, which is actually impressive, but not even close to the past experiences. Computing power used to take 18 months to double, and was being attacked at a bunch of different angles.

Now we are literally out of tricks, to the point where we had to undo some of those tricks because they were fundamentally flawed, and it takes 100x the engineering investment to get that 10% YoY, or sometimes only every other year, and that isn't going to continue for much longer.

We can't increase clock speed much. We can't increase density much. We are out of clever tricks. It takes an entire earth's worth of human talent just to produce the machine that produces the chips. How the hell are people still insisting that computing power continues to follow Moore's Law?

Several of the limits we've hit are fundamental matters of physics.

Meanwhile, LLMs ask for orders of magnitude more compute than is cheap and cheerful right now. Do we even have a single order of magnitude left for compute?

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