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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?

#521

Post by SauciestGNU »

cdud3 wrote: post #344
florianherrengt wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The supposed “10x engineer” may simply be someone stealing productivity from everyone around them. You measure the output of one person while ignoring the cost they impose on their team. If I generate 10 PRs in a day but three engineers now have to spend the next two days reviewing them, figuring out what I changed, correcting bad assumptions, debugging regressions and explaining why half of it needs to be redone, I…

> You can make your own numbers look incredible while reducing the throughput of the entire team. Taken how some companies award promotions and bonus this is actually a double win. You not only improve your own numbers but also make this of your competition worse! /s

I just left a backstabby stack ranked company and so many people were sabotaging colleagues or teams they were in competition with. AI psychosis has been enabling terrible management practices as well as terrible engineering practices.

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

#522

Post by zabriel_goss »

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…

I understand your point and ultimately agree with the systemic problems here.

And, as a "Learn to Code" guy who's had a successful and interesting career filled with self-study and continual improvement, I'll call you a gatekeeper.

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

#523

Post by groundzeros2015 »

toss1 wrote: post #515
groundzeros2015 wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

I don’t know if that’s true. More schooling does not mean more trustworthy or careful doctors. And I suspect some negative trait selection.

Milton Friedman wrote a PhD dissertation on the topic of medicine that I invite you to take a look at.

> than if nothing were done.

The alternative is not to invite people who have no experience to build bridges or perform surgeries.

There are no credentials to work at Google. But you’ll find very skilled and capable people running large projects.

Investors want capable people. Those people are vetted through their reputation in their professional circles.

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

No. But I would like to drive over bridges from people with 30 years of bridge building experience over a 4-7 year degree.

If you live in Europe you drive over bridges built without credentials all the time.

> Credentialing RAISES the skill floor.

Correct. That’s my mistake.

The point is if cut off the bottom 20th percentile the field doesn’t get much better. Those people aren’t trusted leaders anyway.

You do however lose a significant amount of upside. Including countless top performers from non traditional backgrounds, which is characteristic of computer hackers.

You can maybe argue that the general public, unlike a corporation is not capable of vetting their own doctor, so the government classified those options for them. And that’s reasonable. But that does not apply at all to software engineers who don’t solicit public work.

I have all the traditional credentials and this is not a projection of my own career.

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

#524

Post by abustamam »

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…

I'm a bootcamp graduate, 10 years of experience. My mentor is a bootcamp graduate. I've worked with him for most of my career and he is a very experienced systems engineer, often mentoring and coaching folks with masters degrees in CS. Together, with a lot of other team members of course, with him being the principal engineer, we've exited multiple companies. We were both fortunate to have mentors earlier in our careers.

I've interviewed many bootcamp graduates. You're right. Many of them can't do the job. We don't hire those guys. But that begs the question - what companies are hiring incompetent people?

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

#525

Post by iLoveOncall »

throw-the-towel wrote: post #67
iLoveOncall wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Can't help but laugh that even Amazon has someone who defends its honour.

I don't care at all about defending Amazon, I'm just correcting a completely false statement about H1-B visas, and answering a guy who claims something about big tech while myself being in big tech? I guess reading comprehension is just disappearing with LLMs.

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

#526

Post by sirsinsalot »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #414
overgard wrote: post #375

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…

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…

Four MONTHS?!

Most of the dolts I interviewed in the UK had a 6 week bootcamp behind them and called themselves "JavaScript Experts". No joke.

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

#527

Post by scj »

ivanmontillam wrote: post #339
butlike wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A hackathon for performance improvement screams to me "you'll be re-interviewing for your own job." I don't foresee this going well for the company. Best case scenario: you wildfire churn all the chaff engineers which limits the company's throughput until they're rehired... with no expectation the new hires will be any better. You also lose A LOT of domain experience and are self-inflicting brain drain. I'd try and p…

> A hackathon for performance improvement screams to me "you'll be re-interviewing for your own job." Not necessarily, great engineers do also ship temporary code they didn't have the time to trim. Our process is of 1) make it work, 2) make it right and 3) make it fast; not necessarily that engineer had time for the 3rd step.

The older I get, the more I feel that #3 should be "make it work well". Where the definition of "well" can be situationally interpreted.

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

#528

Post by deaton »

mikert89 wrote: post #354
kakacik wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It won't be photoshop then. It will be shitty, buggy clunky app that costed a (major) fraction to develop but it will also earn a fraction. Companies like MS can afford this ie with Office suite but patience of markets and customers can allow them to go only so far, if ie Excel becomes semi-useless thats the end of Office and big cash cow for M$ (I'd say about time, that monopoly is not good for consumers at all). Th…

This is cope, ai coding agents will follow the path of self driving cars. They will be watched with extreme caution, but will slowly but surely expand outwards. Eventually manually writing code will be considered a dangerous/bug introducing act

I've yet to see this apply with self-driving cars.

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

#529

Post by SauciestGNU »

burningChrome wrote: post #334
butlike wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tell me how to paradigm shift careers and I'll get out of your hair and stop shipping uninspired features. But, right now I'm paralyzed with fear in how to make a successful career switch without starting from literally "new grad level." I have wisdom, so it doesn't feel like I should have to start at the bottom rung again. Egotistically, I don't even mind, it's just the salary hit that would be the main issue. Maybe…

>> Egotistically, I don't even mind, it's just the salary hit that would be the main issue. This is whare I am right now. Even senior positions have dropped 50-60K in range so I've effectively priced myself out of a lateral move because I would be taking a massive hit in salary for the same role I'm doing now. I'm currently at a company that continues to lay people off in lieu of offshore talent and AI. I'm stuck in…

I've decided to take that salary hit. I want to stay an IC and work somewhere that doesn't effectively require a 996 schedule to keep up with openclaw slop for PR count stack ranking purposes. It really depends on your financial situations, but I've seen the human cost of very high compensation jobs on myself and some things are worth more than money.

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

#530

Post by bossyTeacher »

florianherrengt wrote: post #132
dominotw wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what is so 'hard thinking' about building a crud app

Nobody is getting paid significant money just to build a simple CRUD app. Even before AI. Companies pay experienced engineers because the supposedly simple CRUD sits inside a messy real system with years of business rules, constraints, integrations and bad decisions have consequences.

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