Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I don't know if my job will still exist in ten years

seangoedecke.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 132 posts

Re: I don't know if my job will still exist in ten years

#61

Post by vishnugupta »

tehlike wrote: post #51

Building is half the battle. Knowing what to build is the other half. Most IC6/7+ would not code anyways - in fact a friend of mine said "we had our own agents we just called them IC4/5" - which was ironic but funny. I am curious if we would ever get a new programming language like rust or go, without this creativity. In a way, we have different products that does more or less same things (postgres vs mysql for examp…

> we had our own agents we just called them IC4/5

This is what bugs me the most. Those who are now at IC6/7 rose through the daily grind of coding and debugging from L1. But now that those jobs are getting automated how will someone rise to IC6!!? It’s as if first 10 rungs of a ladder are missing and only someone with an exceptionally good athleticism can jump up and start from 11th rung.

I think in the coming decades we will see IKEA effect in woodworking. Like it’s extremely easy to build cheap furniture whose individual parts are really compressed papers. There’s hardly any good carpenters left to do the real wood carpentry. Those who are left will cost a bomb (rightly so) and can only be afforded by rich people.

Re: I don't know if my job will still exist in ten years

#62

Post by wincy »

jjmarr wrote: post #22
Insanity wrote: post #4

In “Ask HN style”, let’s say that software engineering does go extinct in the next X years, what would you do? I’ve thought about psychology. I know LLMs can work as pseudo-therapists but I feel like that’s a field where the human connection / human element will remain important.

Realistically, I would die. A condo costs $2500/month so I will either be homeless and freeze to death or be euthanized. Maybe I'm a contrarian but I don't think there's hope for anyone that doesn't control resources.

Don’t worry, pitchforks and torches are still cheap.

Re: I don't know if my job will still exist in ten years

#63

Post by Tade0 »

Insanity wrote: post #4

In “Ask HN style”, let’s say that software engineering does go extinct in the next X years, what would you do? I’ve thought about psychology. I know LLMs can work as pseudo-therapists but I feel like that’s a field where the human connection / human element will remain important.

Accounting. In my region tax law can suddenly change outside of the usual annual update cycle and, like everywhere, is riddled with edge cases and unclear interpretations.

Most importantly there's often a period of general uncertainty and adoption, during which the new law is already in force, but LLMs will rely on whatever there was previously.

Most people find this job stressful and boring, but the same can be said about software engineering. Regular people pay money to have it dealt with.

Overall I think there will always be demand for handling the messiness of the real world and humans have the upperhand here because they learn as they go, not via release cycles costing a sizeable sum and taking months.

Re: I don't know if my job will still exist in ten years

#64

Post by hbogert »

I just saw a merge request created with Claude from a colleague without software engineering background. Let's just say I will have more work to do than less.

Software validation was always the interesting part vs software verification. Validation asks the question, did you build what was actually necessary?

Re: I don't know if my job will still exist in ten years

#65

Post by beej71 »

I don't see demand dropping in the medium to long term. Businesses like to grow, and two devs with AI are better than one. And one dev with AI is better than one non-dev with AI.

The job is changing, and I don't like it in many ways, but there we go. It's not the first time new tech has nuked my dev job and I had to change.

I have personal projects that I hand-code, and personal projects I hand to Claude. Depends on how boring the project is. If it's stuff I've already solved a bunch of times, I hand it off. If I have room for good learning, I code it myself.

Re: I don't know if my job will still exist in ten years

#66

Post by bulbar »

georgemcbay wrote: post #58
wvxf wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know a lot of people working across portfolio management and tax accounting. Nobody I know of is using LLMs much and frankly their management has started to back-off pushing it more in the workplace. LLMs suit some jobs more than others. Its quite possible SWE's are the only profession massively affected - whether that means a evolution of the role or decline/death is another question.

> I know a lot of people working across portfolio management and tax accounting. Nobody I know of is using LLMs much and frankly their management has started to back-off pushing it more in the workplace. I could say the same thing for software engineers I know as recently as the middle of last year, things can change very quickly. Up until about December 2025 the fact that LLMs would replace us all (SWEs) was the pun…

There are still a few quantum leaps needed. I have had great results with Opus 4.6, in particular in green field. But it behaved real messy in some professional real life projects. It seems you also need to tell it very specifics things some times but for that you need to do a software developer in the first place.

We'll see.

Re: I don't know if my job will still exist in ten years

#67

Post by vages »

darth_avocado wrote: post #41
suzzer99 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If software engineering goes extinct, a ton of other white-collar jobs will go with it, and we could be in an intractable depression.

There’s a reason AI is banned in Dune and Warhammer 40K

While I see your point, I think AI may be banned in those universes for the same reason that time-travelling devices tend to be written out of sci-fi and fantasy: Stories are better without them. (If one counts the ever unfolding history of the world as a story, my counter-point actually validates your original point. Touché.)

Re: I don't know if my job will still exist in ten years

#68

Post by jjmarr »

SirMaster wrote: post #43
jjmarr wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Realistically, I would die. A condo costs $2500/month so I will either be homeless and freeze to death or be euthanized. Maybe I'm a contrarian but I don't think there's hope for anyone that doesn't control resources.

You would die rather than move somewhere cheaper? What an odd take. I live in the midwest and pay $700/mo for a perfectly fine apartment in a clean and safe suburb.

I live in Canada so housing is uniformly expensive unless you live super rural.

Best choice would be moving up north and slaving in a mineral mine along with everyone else that lost their jobs. Like the 1920s.

I don't see myself being qualified for such a role since I am too short and don't have the physical leverage.

Re: I don't know if my job will still exist in ten years

#69

Post by Tade0 »

> In 2026, I’m not sure the software engineering industry will survive another decade.

Due to a text predictor?

I'm a daily user of the most recent Claude and while it's amazing at presenting other people's knowledge and reducing cognitive load by filling in the gaps, it's still just a machine that predicts text and that is a limitation which won't be overcome in this generation of such tools which, including research demonstrations, are close to a decade old already.

To me the main issue is that investors are not aware of these limitations and will keep pouring money into this way beyond everyone's breaking point. But really that's a failing of the world's economic system, which relies too much on their whims.

Re: I don't know if my job will still exist in ten years

#70

Post by ffsm8 »

Tade0 wrote: post #63
Insanity wrote: post #4

In “Ask HN style”, let’s say that software engineering does go extinct in the next X years, what would you do? I’ve thought about psychology. I know LLMs can work as pseudo-therapists but I feel like that’s a field where the human connection / human element will remain important.

Accounting. In my region tax law can suddenly change outside of the usual annual update cycle and, like everywhere, is riddled with edge cases and unclear interpretations. Most importantly there's often a period of general uncertainty and adoption, during which the new law is already in force, but LLMs will rely on whatever there was previously. Most people find this job stressful and boring, but the same can be said…

If LLMs can handle software engineering well enough to no longer need engineers, accounting will be solved by the same model version.

Seriously if the future manifests, all of these standard effort based jobs would become redundant...

The issue with outdated information is way overstated, it'd just add the current rules to the context when evaluating and be done with it. We're already at 1 million context size... That's enough for a lot of rules - and the number will likely go higher as time progresses

Post reply on HN