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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

#561

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

evilduck wrote: post #307
hjort-e wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes you feel that a complex frontend would be easier for AI than a non-CRUD backend system?

Hubris. I don't mean this as a snarky jab. It's coming for anything software. I've used AI to accomplish front end development and reverse engineer proprietary USB hardware dongles in C, then rewriting the C into Rust to get easy desktop GUIs around it. Backend APIs, systems programming, embedded programming, they all seem equally threatened it's just a matter of time. Front end is easy to see in the AI web front end…

There's rather a big difference between reverse engineering already working code and forward(?) engineering working code from nothing so that confidence seems misplaced.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#562

Post by upupupandaway »

vips7L wrote: post #397
rayiner wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Which is true, but it’s true as long as it’s not true. It also isn't true. The story of the last 50 years has been that technology, especially computer and communications technology, has facilitated the concentration of wealth. The skilled work got computerized, or outsourced to India or China. That left U.S. workers with service jobs where they have much lower impact on P&L and thus much less leverage. In my field…

Healthcare really seems like the only safe direction anymore. They're needed and a human is still required to physically do it.

My wife is a nurse and keeps in touch with her school professors. They said that the number of people flooding into healthcare careers is more than most colleges can handle, and is starting to cause supply glut in some roles.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#563

Post by calderwoodra »

jhrmnn wrote: post #367
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?

Nothing, it’s that same story again. Industrialization turned peasants to blue collar workers by mechanizing agriculture. Then blue collar workers were turned to white collar workers by mechanizing all manual labor. Now AI is coming for white collar workers by mechanizing intellectual labor. The big question is what will white collar workers turn into.

They'll all turn in to "the managerial class". That's the higher order function that requires high judgement, low frequency work (unlike developers, data entry, designers, BDRs, compliance, etc.)

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#564

Post by ecocentrik »

pear01 wrote: post #510
ecocentrik wrote: post #493

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Ranchers, butchers... and factory farms. Most meat Americans consume have had very little interaction with a person until they are being devoured on the plate. I appreciate your points. I agree with you that not all "technically specialized humans will be completely removed" but let's not pretend the comparison is going from a caveman with a spear to a cowboy with a lasso. If you concede it is likely to be very diffe…

Now you're arguing against your own analogy? Hunter was ubiquitous position in human society prior to the domestication of animals. 50% of the workforce in hunter-gather societies. Today, 12 millennia after the domestication of wildlife, that number is down to 9-14% of the global workforce dedicated to the production, distribution, processing, sales of meat (not including cooked food) according to opus.

Considering that only 1% of the US workforce was a software engineer I expect similar workforce optimization to occur in software engineering specializations over the next 12,000 years. /s But seriously, it's never going to zero.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#565

Post by megous »

GolfPopper wrote: post #447
7e wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you’re spending time thinking and not experimenting, then it’s because experimentation is expensive. With an LLM you don’t have to try to predict a complex system in advance, experiments are so cheap to can just converge to a solution directly. None of this pontificating; it’s really not that useful anymore.

And before long you have a solution that is made up of a thousand pieces of spaghetti that neither you nor anyone else understands. And when your solution becomes too brittle to use, cannot be maintained, or fails catastrophically, then what? Just hope that's someone else's problem?

You actually get what you ask for. And you can ask for anything, vaguely or not.

You'll end with spaghetti if you'll play a bad manager and only ever allocate time for new features and never for cleanups.

You can go through code, add REFACTOR comments based on your tastes and thoughts, and get your result and iterate to your heart's wishes. You just don't need to do the direct code typing.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#566

Post by skydhash »

Animats wrote: post #448
malfist wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no shortcut to understanding. No one can understand things for you

They can make it unnecessary for you to understand. Consider hash tables. Nobody implements a hash table by hand any more. I've written some, but not in this century. Optimal hash table design is a specialist subject. Do you know about robin hood algorithms? Changing the random number generator's seed to discourage collision attacks? A basic hash table starts to slow down around 70% full. Modern hash tables can get a…

> That's not AI. That's solving the problem and putting it in a black box. That's how technology progresses.

The key word is solving. Meaning someone, after coming up with the solution, has taken times to prove that it works well in all usual and most extreme cases. With their reputation on the line.

That’s why you trust curl, ffmpeg, Knuth’s books,… but you don’t trust random cat on the internet. We don’t trust AI and the cost to review its output is not a great tradeoffs compared to just think and solve the problem.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#567

Post by codemog »

bborud wrote: post #67

Multiple times per week I have the same conversation. It goes something like this: - AI will make developers irrelevant - Why? - Because LLMs can write code - Do you know what I do for a living? - Yes, write code? - Yes, about 2-5% of the time. Less now. - But you said you are a developer? - I did - So what do you do 95-98% of the time? - I understand things and then apply my ability to formulate solutions - But I ca…

Anyone read posts like this and picture someone who doesn’t actually do anything all day besides posture in meetings? Probably with a super inflated title and salary.

I doubt this is what the OP does, but there’s tons of developers like what I described and they seem actively proud at not actually building anything and playing politics all day.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#568

Post by beej71 »

bborud wrote: post #67

Multiple times per week I have the same conversation. It goes something like this: - AI will make developers irrelevant - Why? - Because LLMs can write code - Do you know what I do for a living? - Yes, write code? - Yes, about 2-5% of the time. Less now. - But you said you are a developer? - I did - So what do you do 95-98% of the time? - I understand things and then apply my ability to formulate solutions - But I ca…

> I'm getting old and I value my remaining time on the planet.

It's an interesting sentiment. I, too, am getting old and value my remaining time on the planet, and so I code by hand every chance I get. :) Luckily I'm in a position to be able to do that.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#569

Post by magarnicle »

Even if a manager can just conjure the software they want instantly using AI, they are still going to prefer having a nerd to manage it for them - to know how to prompt engineer or even just organise it all.

It might not look much like software engineering, but it's still going to be nerd stuff that most people don't want to bother with.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#570

Post by xboxnolifes »

topherPedersen wrote: post #426

It's been absolutely astonishing to see software developers pick software development as the first profession to attempt to automate away. Couldn't you geniuses have picked any other profession to start with? And it's not just the developers at Anthropic & OpenAI, even at my own company, the rockstar developers were the first to try and automate away all of the software development jobs at our company.

Software development is not the first profession that has been automated away by programmers...
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