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Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

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Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#531

Post by suls »

koonsolo wrote: post #478
bel8 wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But when a senior can do the job of 6 coworkers, what do you suppose will happen to the coworkers? In farming, those who were replaced by tractors did not keep their jobs. What is different now?

There are jobs with limited work, and jobs with unlimited work. Since your farming land is limited, after the job is done, there is no more work. For software projects, there is always more work to do. It's an arms race between competitors. Imagine you fire developers to maintain your speed, and your competitor keeps their people to go faster. Good luck to you!

Great way of putting this. I certainly feel like this in smaller companies where each action (or inaction) has a direct consequence on the profitability.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#532

Post by jimbokun »

ecocentrik wrote: post #493
pear01 wrote: post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an interesting answer for questions about human agency and accountability/personhood questions but I don't see how it leads to increased confidence in the role of human as SWE. If LLMs get good enough, one might be tempted to ask so what if most humans can't understand the output? Human civilization has by and large been a constant exercise in us collectively accomplishing more and more while individually com…

We don't need as many hunters because we've domesticated sources of meat. We still need ranchers, butchers... an entire supply chain to get meat to consumers. We didn't remove humans from the loop, we just created specializations. Software specialization might look very different in 10 years but I doubt that technically specialized humans will be completely removed from their professions. We might not be carrying bow…

The software specialists may be replaced entirely by subject matter experts.

No need for specialized commercial software, if everyone can just explain to the computer what they want in English.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#533

Post by jimbokun »

pear01 wrote: post #489
npodbielski wrote: post #482

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you really want to live in a world when nobody understand software that manages nuclear power plant? Or medical devices? Or financial software? Or radio transceivers firmware? Even something so boring like databases not understood could lead to disastrous effects if this would be the government database for managing people IDS. Hmm even if this would be working fine for years what would happen if bad actor would i…

We live in a world with nuclear weapons. Somehow we all cope and get up every morning. I think you are missing the point - the world is already grim. It always has been. What about human affairs say in the last century alone makes you think human oversight is some panacea? The impetus for civilization was not some innate desire for financial systems or medicine. It was not having other humans murder you. The Leviatha…

At least we have people who understand the technology underlying nuclear weapons!

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#534

Post by pear01 »

datsci_est_2015 wrote: post #522
pear01 wrote: post #506

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There may be gains to be had in such emergence but that is not where I see the gains in the next five years. Those gains will be made by connecting LLMs more robustly with formal reasoning, which computers are already very good at. Continued iteration on connecting these right/left brain faculties could then lead to further emergence down the line. The present notions of harnesses, structured output or looping in the…

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, not the opposite. There’s no current evidence to suggest limitless progress, or even superlinear progress with regards to compute and energy. My guess would be sub linear or even logarithmic progress vs. linear growth in compute and energy, as that’s how most physical systems behave.

No one said unlimited progress. Let's not revert to straw man claims.

If you think the potential of LLMs is overblown feel free to short the market. I don't pretend to know the future. But if I may, I don't think you are framing the debate in the correct terms. Evidence is an important facet of human affairs. So is risk. Best of luck with your predictions.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#535

Post by ncruces »

roncesvalles wrote: post #419
ecocentrik wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Glib is called for. The amount of information asymmetry that's still on the table as vibe coders and vibe engineers and vibe doctors emerge is staggering. Professional experience is still incredibly valuable. Most software developers might spend more than 6% of their time coding but no senior developers are banging their heads for hours over typos. https://www.youtube.com/shorts/xBilK3gT5e0

These days nobody bangs their heads over typos. LLMs evaporated 90% of the "moments of despair" when you have an error and googling it isn't helping, or googling it made you realize you have to read 30min of documentation. Coding is a joy now. LLMs shaved off all the rough edges.

They created other kinds of despair.

A year ago I would've told my boss “can't be done” about my work today. I'd tell him to get me the right person to talk to (our partner, not an alien) who could give me some insight into what the hell I'm supposed to be doing to consume their API. Or to at least explain why it is that this can't be done.

Nowadays, I spent a couple of weeks reverse engineering their terrible ideas. Yeah, it worked. But it's a complete waste of my time, and tokens, energy, chips and RAM. And worst of all, it will lead to a terrible design.

That will work, but will eventually colapse under its own weight, as we use our increased power to increase our sloppiness and take it a little further. Because we can manage it. For now.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#537

Post by aleph_minus_one »

Aurornis wrote: post #309
aleph_minus_one wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Software engineers didn’t just disappear after age 40. At the end of the 90th and beginning of the 00th ("dotcom bubble") it was a common saying that if as a programmer, when you are 30 or 40, you don't have a very successful company (and thus basically set for life), you basically failed in life; exactly because "everybody" knew that programming is a "young man's game" (i.e. you likely won't get a programming job…

> At the end of the 90th and beginning of the 00th ("dotcom bubble") it was a common saying that if as a programmer, when you are 30 or 40, you don't have a very successful company (and thus basically set for life), you basically failed in life; This wasn't common anywhere except for maybe the Silicon Valley bubble. The rest of the US and even the world could see that not having a very successful company of your own…

> > At the end of the 90th and beginning of the 00th ("dotcom bubble") it was a common saying that if as a programmer, when you are 30 or 40, you don't have a very successful company (and thus basically set for life), you basically failed in life;

> This wasn't common anywhere except for maybe the Silicon Valley bubble.

This was a very common sentiment even in Germany at this time.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#538

Post by antihipocrat »

antonvs wrote: post #503
datsci_est_2015 wrote: post #464

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The word “incorporate” is doing some very heavy lifting in your assertion. These LLMs already have access to the whole corpus of architectural knowledge and software best practices, and yet they’re unable to reliably implement those best practices. Why not? Why do they often make completely unintuitive decisions, even when repeatedly prompted to ask clarifying questions?

> Why do they often make completely unintuitive decisions Most likely because you haven't constrained their behavior in your prompt. You're making the assumption that they "understand" that using best practices is what you want. You have to tell them that, and tell them which practices they should use.

Senior developers know what behavior to constrain.

If incorrect LLM output is a prompt issue then demand for experienced developers will remain, and demand may actually increase as time passes.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#539

Post by maerF0x0 »

Ageism is alive and well in our industry.

People need to learn the difference between fluid intelligence and crystalized intelligence.

People need to hear that startup success is maximal when the founders are older, not younger. VCs chasing youth are statistics deniers.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#540

Post by maerF0x0 »

kixiQu wrote: post #170

> If you work in construction, you need to lift and carry a series of heavy objects in order to be effective. But lifting heavy objects puts long-term wear on your back and joints, making you less effective over time. Construction workers don’t say that being a good construction worker means not lifting heavy objects. They say “too bad, that’s the job”. My parents were both construction workers. There is an understan…

Also worth noting that, so long as it's reasonable, lifting heavy objects makes you stronger, whereas the current hypothesis on using AI is approximately the opposite.
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