"may no longer be a lifetime career"
60 years total so far
construction has what, 6k years
I'll get into that next.
Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career
571–580 of 809 posts
Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career
#572Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The AI is coming for that too. That may be true I’m not gonna say one way or the other, but if AI comes for that then almost all knowledge work is effectively dead, so all that’s left would be sales or physical labor.
The history of the last 250 years is inventing new professions as old ones are automated away. I expect that to continue.
It's happening, but theres no law of the universe that says it has to be 1:1. Why are you so confident in this regard? 250 years is a very small slice of human history and could easily be the outlier.
Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career
#573Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I really don't like this framing - it's hard to short a market at the best of times, let alone when governments have a vested interest in tech being too big to fail to compete in the global economic arms race - see Intel's stock in the past few months.
I agree with you both - undoubtedly there are still massive gains to be made with the frontier models we have today with tooling and iteration, yet I do not believe there's sufficient evidence to claim we are rolling towards AG/SI on an exponential curve, without some additional breakthroughs given the jagged edges and data used to train models being fundamentally linear
Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career
#574Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The AI is coming for that too. Yes, but if/when that happens, it won't just affect software engineers. An AI that can do that can replace any white collar worker. > People knocking out Jira tickets and writing CRUD webapps will end up with their livelihood often taken away. I'm not sure anyone is actually working on those. People talk about spending all day writing CRUD apps here, but if you suggest there are alrea…
>Yes, but if/when that happens, it won't just affect software engineers. An AI that can do that can replace any white collar worker. Yes. Yes, that's exactly what we're going to see, and more swiftly than people are generally comfortable with. What are we going to do with all those cubicle dwellers?
a new paradigm of 3 day work weeks. share the salary of the days off with those less automatable, and work to automate everyone.
I wish some sort of dicussion like this could happen where the workers of the world get to see some of the gains of a new technology more immediately.
If "the state" wants to maintain legitimacy and protect its citizenry (one of the primary promises of a state) to avoid a period of social unrest, the likes of which has been unheard of for several generations, I think something like this should at least be a part of the discussion.
Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career
#575Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree in principle, but I think the 2-5% estimate is extremely low. I could be sold on most developers spending ~25%, up to 40% of their time on code. But very few people are spending 2% of their time on it. Unless you're some sort of super senior staff / advisor to the CTO at a gigantic company, which has already placed you on rare terrain.
might be closer to accurate if the 2-5% is his estimate of the physical time spent making key-strokes
That's If you're reading this and that matches your experience as an IC SWE whose job is ostensibly developing software.. you're either trapped in a very atypical org, or you're heading for a PIP.
Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career
#576"We may be in the first generation of software engineers in the same position. If so, it’s probably a good idea to plan accordingly." He compares software engineers to pro athletes. What does it mean to plan accordingly? Start working with the mob to fix poker games? I don't know what "plan accordingly" means at all but it is a thought provoking statement.
Imagine AI had never happened, but you had set a personal goal to write your last line of code in exactly five years. You can manage coders, you can write a novel about coding, you can run a yoga school for coders. You just can't code anymore. What do you do?
I know nothing about professional sports other than what I learned from Jerry Maguire, in which Rod Tidwell says "I got a shelf life of ten years, tops. My next contract's gotta bring me the dollars that'll last me and mine a long time. Shit, I'm out of this sport in 5 years. What's my family gonna live on? Huh?" That's the sentiment.
Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career
#577> AI-users thus become less effective engineers over time, as their technical skills atrophy Based on my experience, I think this will prove more true than not in the long run, unfortunately. Professionally, I see people largely falling into two camps: those that augment their reasoning with AI, and those that replace their reasoning with AI. I’m not too worried about the former, it’s the latter for whom I’m worried.…
> Professionally, I see people largely falling into two camps: those that augment their reasoning with AI, and those that replace their reasoning with AI. I’m not too worried about the former, it’s the latter for whom I’m worried.
Related recent article posted on HN - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47913650
Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career
#578Earlier 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…
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Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career
#579Multiple 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…
This is a bit of glib answer. Most of the time is spent coding which encompasses typing, retyping, and retyping again. It also includes banging your head against the wall while trying to get one of your rewrites to work against and under-documented API. OP's formulation makes SWE sound like a purely noble enterprise like mathematics. It's more like an oil rig worker banging on pieces of metal with large hammers to ge…
> under-documented API
One wonders why AI hasn't replaced all those non-existent documentation writers yet.
Therein lies a clue to what the future holds.
Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career
#580Earlier quoted context omitted.
LLMs moved the moments of despair to PR reviews for me. It used to be that you could check on a junior dev occassionally throughout the day to make sure they're on the right track. Now you step away for 2 hours and they're raising a PR of bad code smell spaghetti and moving on to repeat their AI slopfest on the next task. It's getting hard to keep up with trying to teach new devs what bad code looks like. And I swear…
At some point there needs to be an uncomfortable conversation about how if all they’re doing is copy pasting everything they get from you into ChatGPT, you can do it yourself for much much cheaper.
how? management in most Tech companies are incentivizing them to do just that, so if you bring it up, they'll happily trot over to your manager to complain and then the uncomfortable conversation is you with management about why you're getting in the way of AI uptake by the team.