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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?

#581

Post by cardy31 »

mikert89 wrote: post #15
declan_roberts wrote: post #12

Between AI and competing against the world with H-1B, it's really never been harder to get an entry or mid-level software engineering job. Which means our pipeline to senior engineer is completely broken.

I think the field is basically over as a long term career unless you are truly exceptional. It will become very easy to build most software, and the upper end will be filled with the top people in the country/from abroad. Wages are certainly going down for most software roles

People started saying this several years ago and yet it hasn’t really come to pass.

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

#582

Post by SchemaLoad »

jnpnj wrote: post #138
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've seen a subtler variant of that. Since 2025 winter model improvements, low quality developers can now commit somehow decent stuff more regularly, but as before, they still don't own the solution space independently. LLM output is now larger than what they can envision and cracks will simply happen further away, only to be discovered by someone else later. It's strange everything changes so nothing changes phenome…

Most vibeslop these days is superficially good in that it has unit tests, compiles, passes the style guide, but it's bad on a macro level in that it makes the system more complicated, ignores the wider design of the app, implements what the prompter asked for and not what the app actually needed, etc.

I'm seeing a bad pattern of vibeslop being used to solve the immediate complaint of the user without stepping back and reconsidering things from a product perspective. Just add another conditional statement to make this very specific scenario the user complained about work the way they want.

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

#583

Post by myth2018 »

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…

This.

For a certain class of professionals, slowness is a kind of superpower able to restrain their damage. LLMs have turned off those guardrails.

On one hand, I'm not fully surprised -- LLMs are powerful tools, but of course they can be misused. On the other hand, I'm impressed by how fast things are deteriorating in some shops. At my job they got encouraged, over-confident even, to finally do some long-awaited major overhaul in the code base. I'm genuinely concerned about our ability to continue maintaining this mess in the mid and long-term.

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

#584

Post by mikert89 »

cardy31 wrote: post #581
mikert89 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the field is basically over as a long term career unless you are truly exceptional. It will become very easy to build most software, and the upper end will be filled with the top people in the country/from abroad. Wages are certainly going down for most software roles

People started saying this several years ago and yet it hasn’t really come to pass.

it certainly has, SWE wages have dropped and continue to do so

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

#585

Post by Silhouette »

coderenegade wrote: post #563
Silhouette wrote: post #517

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

In my experience, good software engineers are often better "engineers" than those working in more physical disciplines, because they get a lot more practice. But traditional engineers have a far better culture when it comes to testing and validation. Since the cycle time is longer, and the cost of mistakes is higher, analysis and testing are generally baked in from the beginning. In software, it's easier to skip that…

In my experience this works both ways too. Good engineers working on physical projects have picked up on some of the useful practices that good software developers have adopted for maintaining progress in the face of ambiguous requirements until they can be clarified and allowing as much flexibility as possible without necessarily compromising quality in the meantime. I believe these relationships can be summarised as something like "Good people keep open minds and learn from what has worked well for others".

The problem for regulating software development is still who gets to formally determine who the "good" people are. This kind of thing should clearly be objective and evidence-based but what useful evidence do we have available?

In physical engineering disciplines there are often clearly evident problems if something was built without being adequately specified by the responsible engineers. In a disastrous case a bridge might literally fall down but you're also going to see that a bridge wasn't designed properly if it's distorting in ways it shouldn't under loads that it should be able to support. There are lots of experienced engineers who have proven records specifying buildings or planes or ships that need to not break using established and peer reviewed techniques.

In software we can all agree catastrophic failures that result in loss of life or half the Internet going down are obviously bad. For something controlling a life-saving medical device or the launch authorisation system for the nuclear missiles we can probably all agree that the answer to what quality level we want in the software is "the best quality we can achieve". But those systems have unusually serious consequences if anything ever goes wrong and probably also very high development budgets that can justify such an extreme position on quality. In general we don't have clearly defined levels of software where different trade-offs between cost and risks and other factors might be considered reasonable and acceptable. Nor do we have well tested and universally accepted standards for how to reliably achieve a specified quality level.

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

#586

Post by SchemaLoad »

a2ff6eeb0 wrote: post #98
scronkfinkle wrote: post #52

I think of it more as "the automation of the stackoverflow engineer". In enterprise software, there has always just been a non-negotiable large volume of code that was required to be written. This has traditionally been offloaded by having seniors do the hard thinking then distill it into a jira ticket which could be handed off to an engineer that'd actually write the code and punch every hiccup into google along the…

I think AI is getting pretty good at generating the tickets as well. Not amazing, but it feels like ticket generation today is where code generation was a year ago. I wonder if there's an agent harness that would work well for requirements gathering.

This is what the managers at my company think. But it ends up generating a wall of slop. I always end up scrolling to the bottom and looking for the original customer email or product request that was used to generate the ticket above.

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

#587

Post by rootusrootus »

Do we yet have actual, irrefutable evidence of SWE job losses attributable to successful implementation of LLM coding agents? They've been around long enough and management has been horny enough about the whole thing long enough that we should be able to point to some notable examples.

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

#588

Post by Silhouette »

groundzeros2015 wrote: post #579
Silhouette wrote: post #552

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I appreciate your positivity. However it is difficult to reconcile your argument with the reality that executives at tech companies frequently behave in ways that satisfy the investors but clearly do not produce good results for the people using their technology. Indeed in numerous cases today the technology is openly hostile to its own users' interests. The regulations are there to protect the users (or customers or…

What would credentialing software engineers do to curtail leadership incentive problems? Hardware technology jobs have some of these credentials and are part of that system.

What would credentialing software engineers do to curtail leadership incentive problems?

The same as in other regulated professions. It would give the people on the front line who can see the consequences of the corner cutting an effective right to say "No, we're not doing this user hostile thing". This would be a significant barrier because it wouldn't be legal to ship software without the required professional approval and the professionals would be heavily incentivised not to sign off any corner cutting because they would be personally and professionally responsible for any adverse consequences if they did.

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

#589

Post by SchemaLoad »

dominotw wrote: post #116
scronkfinkle wrote: post #52

I think of it more as "the automation of the stackoverflow engineer". In enterprise software, there has always just been a non-negotiable large volume of code that was required to be written. This has traditionally been offloaded by having seniors do the hard thinking then distill it into a jira ticket which could be handed off to an engineer that'd actually write the code and punch every hiccup into google along the…

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

In my experience it's always the permissions system where messy real world business has to be translated in to SQL that doesn't lock up the system when some program admin added to 200 teams tries to load the index page.

"What can this user see" has always been a very complex question in every crud app I've worked on.

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

#590

Post by ElProlactin »

jselysianeagle wrote: post #463
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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…

> For one, the industry never did professionalize to begin with, certainly not in the way accountants, lawyers etc did.

"Professionalize" is an interesting way to frame this. As Milton Friedman argued, occupational licensure is almost always pursued by the practitioners rather than consumers. The licensing boards are mostly run by practicing lawyers and CPAs, so you have practicing lawyers and CPAs determining who can compete with them. So what you get are cartel-like bodies.

Most people don't know the histories of how these professions came to be what they are today in the US. If you take 15 minutes to read up on it, it leaves little doubt what the intentions are and how much consumers have been screwed.

> We never had any real body that could certify proficiency, which is what contributed to companies having to resort to leetcode and other such styles of interviewing.

Except that basically everyone in the industry knows that leetcode doesn't test real-world proficiency. It's equally dubious to believe that some sort of body (ostensibly run by practicing software developers) would be able to come up with a means to certify proficiency.

Incidentally, many of the outfits "looking to cash in on students looking to get a 6-figure job" placed a heavy emphasis on teaching their students how to interview, not how to be proficient.

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