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AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?

blog.florianherrengt.com

61–70 of 698 posts

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

#61
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…

Ironically, AI mitigates bad developers quite a bit. The architecture/design is coming from above bad devs (in a functional org), and AI tends to write less sloppy code than bad devs, and test/validate it more rigorously.

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

#62

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…

... And Django and React removed ("stole the jobs from under") the engineers handcrafting html and jQuery web pages/apps.

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

#63
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…

What is A&D? Shouldn't it have been defined in your comment?

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

#64
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only if you run out of things to write. Is your back log ever empty?

Maintenance will be forever. Tax laws change annually, so the payroll app will never stop being updated.

I don't accept that argument. As I see it, laws should be structured as data rather than code, using a clean non-Turing-Complete DSL for any embedded logic and calculations. Maybe there would still be occasional situations when new software features are needed, but it should be a rare occurrence rather than on every new change.

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

#65

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…

>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 way.

This is the theory, but I’ve never worked anywhere (and I’ve worked at a lot of places over 20 years) that actually did it like that in practice.

What tends to happen is that the EMs and PMs look at who’s free and give that person the task. This means that sometimes you get a senior leading a simple project and sometimes you get a junior leading/designing a complex project (usually with help from a very minorly technical PM).

Then the senior/staff/principal (often on a different “special” team) gets pulled in at the last minute to rescue the project.

If your company is highly product driven, you’ll often find that the juniors end up leaving projects more often than not because they will tell the PM exactly what they want to hear.

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

#66
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…

Ironically, AI mitigates bad developers quite a bit. The architecture/design is coming from above bad devs (in a functional org), and AI tends to write less sloppy code than bad devs, and test/validate it more rigorously.

Jury is still out here

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

#67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

have you been inside a big tech company? there arent many american fresh grads working there, its mostly foreign

[flagged]

Can't help but laugh that even Amazon has someone who defends its honour.

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

#68
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…

Maybe those engineers that don't care about making their solution _good_ are actually the good engineers, have you ever thought about that??? There are exceptions where quality really matters but most software shops build CRUD web apps where it's not really a good characteristic to obsess over the cleanest and most elegant details, instead you need to get the stuff the customer wants done!

I for one tend to care less about the minutiae of solutions implemented by AI as long as it gets the job done, I do care about architecture and design decisions and correctness and I have ways to steer and verify these when working with LLMs but I couldn't care less about it writing "good" code. Bad engineers also produce better results with AI at least when they're working in established frameworks, AI doesn't really need a lot of high level architecture input when designing or building a web app with a common stack, so as long as you're not working on something that's completely novel I don't think it will make a strong difference.

Maybe designers think the same way about the AI generated web designs I have Claude Code do for me but to be honest I don't care, I just know that before this tool existed it would have taken me weeks or months to come up with a good design and I would have to rely on prefabricated UI libraries and stuff like that or pay a designer tens of thousands of USD to make one for me, now I can get a (for me and my customers) perfectly acceptable and professional design within a few hours. So maybe I'm also a bad designer that amplifies my bad design taste 10x in my company, but the fact is the stuff ships and makes money and the customer is happy! And I can tell you customers or users don't give a shit about how good your code is, they only care if the software works and does what they want!

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

#69
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only if you run out of things to write. Is your back log ever empty?

In a few years, it just might. If maintenance and security is fully automated and for small changes or a small feature you will only dump some spec document into your agent platform, for sure.

Just another 6 months bro, only another funding bro, I promise, all devs will be replaced bro

I have stupid question here. Why they sell tokens instead of AI generated full application and AI fixes to your code without you needing a single dev?

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

#70

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.

What if the new entry level is what we consider senior today? Isn't it possible today to obtain entry/mid level skills with LLMs? I wonder if things will shift more in that direction.
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