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Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

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Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#601

Post by bsder »

hibikir wrote: post #237

In my experience, it's been the complete opposite. The very experienced engineers that are actually willing to use top of the line tooling are much better than they were before, including those that are over 40, and over 50. Part of the practical degradation of traditional programmers over time has always been concentration and deep calculation, just like in chess. The old chess player knows chess much better than a…

> Part of the practical degradation of traditional programmers over time has always been concentration and deep calculation, just like in chess.

I don't know if I agree that this is the bottleneck.

What I can agree on is that as I have aged I now simply REFUSE to learn programming knowledge that has a half-life.

Phone programming? Nope. Front-end web programming framework? Oh, hell, no. Build system of the month? Piss right off. etc.

AI lets me fill in that kind of programming with "acceptable" (read: super crappy but I didn't have to think about it) results because that code won't exist in 5 years anyway due to its half-life.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#602

Post by bluefirebrand »

jhrmnn wrote: post #476
kypro wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, it's not necessarily true that there will be other great careers available. This seems to just be an assumption people are making. Of course, there are jobs that will still require human labour for some time yet, but in reality a lot jobs that require physical human labour are now done in other parts of the world where labour is cheaper. Those which cannot be exported like plumbing or waitressing only have limi…

When no work is safe from mechanization, surely the value of labor wrt capital must fall, and the societal pressure on redistribution will rise. The ultimate outcome of technological progress is either extreme inequality or massive redistribution

> the societal pressure on redistribution will rise.

And then we'll see if the wealthy and powerful people will just send automated killer drones after the poors, because culling us would be more preferable than sharing their wealth

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#603

Post by therealdrag0 »

mikestew wrote: post #73
HighGoldstein wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Haven't most people looked around and asked themselves where are all the 50+ engineers? They basically don't exist in large numbers. I'm not discounting ageism in the industry, but how popular of a career was it 30+ years ago compared to now?

In 1996? Software development was the hot ticket to upper middle class in the early 80s when I was a recent CS grad, and I was already working with people who were in it for the money. By the late 90s, if you could spell “HTML”, you were making decent money as a web developer. This all came crashing down during the Dot Bomb collapse, but SW has been pretty popular for most of my career, and it just continued to get m…

In 1981 there was 15k cs grads, in 2019 there was 90k (and many non-traditional too).

You’ll also find that engineers are sorted (by self or not) into different companies. I’ve worked at companies where 75% of engineers were over 40, and I’ve worked at places with the opposite.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#604

Post by FpUser »

bborud wrote: post #67

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 ca…

I think similarly. To me value of the "programmer" is not "I love Rust", "I am React expert" etc. That "love" is for sure replaceable.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#606

Post by avador »

dasil003 wrote: post #479
7e wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you’re spending time thinking and not experimenting, then it’s because experimentation is expensive. With an LLM you don’t have to try to predict a complex system in advance, experiments are so cheap to can just converge to a solution directly. None of this pontificating; it’s really not that useful anymore.

This is very naive and reductive thinking. Experiments have a cost, you really have to think carefully about what you are trying to learn. Even when code is cheap, traffic and time are still huge constraints, and you better make sure your hypothesis actually makes sense for your goals, because AI is more than happy to fill in the blanks with a plausible but completely wrong proposal. More broadly, it's well understoo…

I think you and 7e are both right. Being able to iterate some N orders of magnitude quicker is a big deal. This doesn’t eliminate design and UX. Rather, it merges it with high iteration speed to produce a form of “play”.

“Play” is what produced at least two (likely more) generations of attentive (and therefore competent) programmers. The hype around LLMs is painful, yes, but attentive human minds will ultimately bust through it.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#607

Post by leptons »

roncesvalles wrote: post #419
ecocentrik wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Glib is called for. The amount of information asymmetry that's still on the table as vibe coders and vibe engineers and vibe doctors emerge is staggering. Professional experience is still incredibly valuable. Most software developers might spend more than 6% of their time coding but no senior developers are banging their heads for hours over typos. https://www.youtube.com/shorts/xBilK3gT5e0

These days nobody bangs their heads over typos. LLMs evaporated 90% of the "moments of despair" when you have an error and googling it isn't helping, or googling it made you realize you have to read 30min of documentation. Coding is a joy now. LLMs shaved off all the rough edges.

LLMs create typos in the code they create all the time. Claude 4.7. Maybe you are using some next-gen super-AI nobody else has? Or you're just lucky.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#608

Post by Tesl »

malfist wrote: post #286
cromka wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We've literally just started, what "over and over" do you refer to?

I've been told the past four years that AI is coming for my job. And thats just not true. Its no closer to that than it was 4 years ago.

I mean this is just fingers-in-your-ears "LA LA LA I CAN'T HEAR YOU!!" stuff.

I still have a job so AI hasn't taken that yet. But the suggestion it's "no closer" is ridiculous. At least in my life/career/office this last 12 months seems to have been a real inflection point in how AI is being used for software development.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#609

Post by lambdas »

atleastoptimal wrote: post #593
bborud wrote: post #67

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 ca…

LLMs also can “understand things and apply their ability to formulate solutions”. There is nothing that will inherently limit AI from doing all knowledge work (and all physical work once robotics is good enough). Of course developers could just move up the “next level of abstraction” and become managers of agents who write the code, but eventually AI becomes a better manager of agents than even the best humans, at wh…

> There is nothing that will inherently limit AI from doing all knowledge work

Resources is one. Energy, water, cost. There seems to be diminishing returns in intelligence at the moment, whilst power and memory usage continues to go up.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#610

Post by engineer_22 »

bborud wrote: post #67

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 ca…

Engineering in a nut shell... What did we do before computers??? Halls full of draftsmen...
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