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Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

seangoedecke.com

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Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#61

Post by harimau777 »

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #52
harimau777 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My concern would be whether creating that software pays enough to keep up with skyrocketing costs of living. In the past, the jobs created by automation have generally been lower paid with less autonomy.

> My concern would be whether creating that software pays enough to keep up with skyrocketing costs of living. You might need to relocate to a place with much lower costs of living. This was the idea behind remote working discussed during COVID-19 times: - the company can pay less money because the employee is living at a much cheaper place than the expensive city where the company is located - on the other hand, eve…

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Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#62

Post by ahartmetz »

harimau777 wrote: post #20

I keep reading about how AI will be fine because people can just retrain for different careers. However, I never read what those careers are or who is going to pay for retraining. I certainly don't have the money or time to go back to college and start a new career at the bottom.

The second part seems obvious to me: the ones who are getting retrained. If it's some kind of formal education, depending where you are, maybe the state at least for part of it.

Education in what, though? No idea. And if there was one answer, and it's true that there will be fewer software developers, you'd likely be competing with many people for few jobs.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#63

Post by [deleted] »

giobox wrote: post #36

Anecdotally, it feels like something materially changed in the US software hiring market at the start of this year to me. It feels like more and more businesses are taking a wait and see approach to avoid over-investing in human capital in the next few years. It also feels like the hiring "signal", which was always weak before, is just completely gone now, when every job you do advertise receives over 500 LLM written…

[deleted]

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#64

Post by aleph_minus_one »

harimau777 wrote: post #61
aleph_minus_one wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My concern would be whether creating that software pays enough to keep up with skyrocketing costs of living. You might need to relocate to a place with much lower costs of living. This was the idea behind remote working discussed during COVID-19 times: - the company can pay less money because the employee is living at a much cheaper place than the expensive city where the company is located - on the other hand, eve…

[flagged]

> Unfortunately, in America places with low cost of living are generally, to put it diplomatically, unpleasant places to live.

This will change for the better if more and more educated people relocate there.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#65

Post by aleph_minus_one »

mariopt wrote: post #39

Why are we upvoting this? Virtually, the entire blog is about AI with a ridiculous publishing rate ( https://www.seangoedecke.com/page/5 ), funny how I can look at this site HTML and know right away it was done with AI. Can we stop upvoting vibe published articles? The arguments are flawed and don't even make sense to anyone who does software

> Why are we upvoting this?

Because people want to discuss about the topic of the headline.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#66

Post by Natfan »

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #52
harimau777 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My concern would be whether creating that software pays enough to keep up with skyrocketing costs of living. In the past, the jobs created by automation have generally been lower paid with less autonomy.

> My concern would be whether creating that software pays enough to keep up with skyrocketing costs of living. You might need to relocate to a place with much lower costs of living. This was the idea behind remote working discussed during COVID-19 times: - the company can pay less money because the employee is living at a much cheaper place than the expensive city where the company is located - on the other hand, eve…

but moving to a lower COL area can reduce that amount of public and private services one gets access to, no? network connectivity will, for example, likely be worse out in the sticks

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#67

Post by bborud »

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 can do that!
  - So why aren't you?
The developers who still think their job is about writing code will perhaps not have a job in the future. Brutal as it may sound: I'm fine with that. I'm getting old and I value my remaining time on the planet.

Business owners who think they can do without developers because they think LLMs replace developers are fine by me too. Natural selection will take care of them in due course.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#68

Post by GrinningFool »

huani wrote: post #41
torben-friis wrote: post #15

Unless I'm missing something, there's an obvious logic issue here. If we truly need to sacrifice our skill to be productive by using LLMs that atrophy us, then the only devs that have a limited lifespan are us. The next ones won't have a skillset to atrophy since they won't have built it through manual work. Also, I hereby propose to publicly ban the "LLMs generating code are like compilers generating machine code" a…

why is the LLM-compiler analogy flawed? Is it only because LLM output is non deterministic?

Because you don't have to coax, trick, or guide your compiler into doing the right thing.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#69

Post by djeastm »

harimau777 wrote: post #20

I keep reading about how AI will be fine because people can just retrain for different careers. However, I never read what those careers are or who is going to pay for retraining. I certainly don't have the money or time to go back to college and start a new career at the bottom.

At least in the US, the only major non-AI growth field seems to be healthcare to deal with the swell of baby boomers living longer than people have before.

But if we're waiting to be paid to retrain there, I wouldn't hold our collective breath.

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