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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?

#601

Post by sleight42 »

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…

I agree completely and have said similar. Yet this is what happens when supply tries to catch up to demand. There were not enough software chefs to keep up with the patrons appetites. We started minting more cooks. Instead of Culinary Institute of America candidates and autodidacts, we got what the customers wanted: people who would just churn out more.

Blame the patrons for demanding more with little care to the quality.

I mostly gave up on software development roles in business when the vast majority of developers and, particularly management and executives, made clear that they couldn't give a fuck about craftsmanship. It was just about shipping, good, bad or otherwise.

AI in software development predates on that appetite for MORE at any cost. When the business doesn't really care about quality, because, let's be honest, most don't, this is what you get. You get massive volumes of garbage.

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

#602

Post by dismalaf »

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…

Is the problem the self taught programmers or the people who would have gone the finance or law route in university doing CS and then not caring?

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

#603

Post by mcmcmc »

e2le wrote: post #432
overgard wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Call me a gatekeeper if you want but, we ended up with a lot of people that just can't do the job. Increasingly I am of the opinion that software engineering aught to be a licensed profession, similar to civil engineers, medical professionals, or lawyers. A board of peers to hold you accountable and a licence that can be revoked at any time. Additionally, legislation could be written to require such licensed indivi…

I think a more effective way of enforcing the licensing would be adding a cyber insurance requirement to sell software or internet services commercially to some threshold of users. Insurers could give a prime rate to licensed developers and offer a service to have their own engineers certify software from firms without credentials for a higher rate.

Direct licensing requirements from the state are prone to abuse via regulatory capture. Big or entrenched players can give to politicians who’ll change the rules in their favor, setting who needs a license and who can get one.

The profit maximizing incentive for insurance is a double edged sword, but if there’s a government backed insurer that just does the prime rate for licensed developers, the commercial market can build off that and fill in the gaps.

If you need a special license and insurance to drive a commercial truck on public roadways, why not the same for commercial traffic on the public internet? A good way to drive adoption from nontechnical folks could be something like the lock icon in the browser for TLS. Issue a domain cert for certified software, you can go to their website and confirm they are compliant right away. People are free to publish and use non-certified apps, they just won’t unless they have a reason to trust them.

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

#604

Post by rootusrootus »

antinomicus wrote: post #598
rootusrootus wrote: post #587

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.

So far my experience has been management shoving ai haphazardly down the throats of any semi technical person across the board, resulting in a fragmented hodgepodge of vibe coded frameworks and “ai apps” that pile on more requirements for more human attention to make those apps at least look superficially functional to management, than actual reductions in man hours saved by those vibe coded crApps. I believe wholehe…

So far I'm finding that in a good subset of my regular work Claude can be pretty useful and will speed me up. But I also drive it with a heavy hand. Strong expectations, I know what I want, what success looks like, and I steer it to give me that.

Conversely, the product guys I work with are adept at producing proof-of-concept tools that look really good. Fake data, runs entirely in a browser, but conveys their goals way more specifically than Balsamiq ever good. And I think this is a great use case for Claude.

But what ain't happening here is product guys producing code that would go directly into production. And even if it could, they're not in a position to provide tech support or debugging when it breaks, so they don't want to be in that position anyway.

Nobody can really predict the future very well, it seems, but my personal best guess is that we end up moving the boundaries of what we work on and how, but the need for humans isn't going to go down. As magic as LLMs look sometimes, I constantly run into reminders of how much it relies on how I phrase a prompt when it delivers any kind of answer. That influence really drives how satisfying the results are.

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

#605

Post by timr »

WalterBright wrote: post #596
timr wrote: post #569

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> He did so. He aced the test. He got the job with a huge offer. He agreed that the ROI was out of the park! ...and everybody clapped? I have news for you: passing an online leetcode is now so easy that an AI can do it. If you think you're catching the cheaters, you're just wrong. Leetcode was always a stupid test of competence, but it was cheap and it had a high true-negative rate, which filtered the riff-raff. That…

He went in for a monitored taking of the test.

Sure, sure. So now we have the worst of all possible worlds: an expensive interview process where the candidate has to be onsite, and a stupid evaluation mechanism that doesn't at all reflect real-world job requirements. And in exchange for the inconvenience of an in-person interview, the candidate gets treated like a number and is met with a stupid memorization gauntlet that tests a skill that quite literally will never be used again now that we have AI. Sounds great.

Man, there are times when I really hate this industry.

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

#606

Post by ebb_earl_co »

SoftTalker wrote: post #287
ebb_earl_co wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lots of (most?) programming languages are 0-indexed so it feels natural for software developers and our ilk.

Not really. 0-based indexing is different from counting and starting with 0 in a counting context is weird. Would you ever say a set has zero elements when it actually contains a single element?

It's a remarkable coincidence that I'm reading the book The Nothing that Is: A Natural History of Zero by Robert Kaplan, and this passage on page 96 seems precisely relevant to this situation:

"""A Roman idiosyncrasy about counting reinforced this avoidance. The 360 degrees of longitude, for example, were always measured from the vernal equinox, which lies in the zodiacal sign of Aries. This should be zero degrees, 0°. It was common, however, to call it instead 'the first degree', Aries 1°, as Pliny did around 60 AD, upsetting his calculations and those of many who followed him. It amounts to this: if you lay out four marks on the ground and step from the first to the last, have you taken three paces or four? Clearly three; yet four marks were involved. To get the right answer it helps to call the starting-line 'zero'; then the number at the mark you step on will correspond to the number of your steps. But the Romans counted so that three days after Sunday was Tuesday; the Italian for the fifteenth century is the quattrocento — and all of us still call the two steps in music from C to E a major third, taking the number from the three tones involved."""

I wouldn't say that the set that has one element, labeled 0, _has_ zero elements; it has one element with the label 0. Right?

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

#607

Post by singpolyma3 »

Barrin92 wrote: post #512
singpolyma3 wrote: post #491

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sounds like a terrible idea. Do people need license to draw a picture or write a song? Why would we restrict other creative work in this way?

>Why would we restrict other creative work in this way? Because it isn't creative work. Software underpins payment processors, medical services, emergency alerts, infrastructure. In the UK not long ago a ransomware attack took the healthcare system offline and surgeries had to be postponed. in 2021 the Colonial Pipeline attack took 50% of the US East Coast's oil supply offline. The entire German train system died a f…

Then license healthcare systems, payment processors, etc. Not humans

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

#608

Post by bdangubic »

timr wrote: post #605
WalterBright wrote: post #596

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He went in for a monitored taking of the test.

Sure, sure. So now we have the worst of all possible worlds: an expensive interview process where the candidate has to be onsite, and a stupid evaluation mechanism that doesn't at all reflect real-world job requirements. And in exchange for the inconvenience of an in-person interview, the candidate gets treated like a number and is met with a stupid memorization gauntlet that tests a skill that quite literally will n…

> Man, there are times when I really hate this industry.

Or as I'd like to call it - Wednesday :)

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

#609

Post by omosubi »

I forget the economics term for this but doesn't an improvement in tools result in little net change because everyone across the industry is given effectively the same leg up? Doesn't this mean that things will mostly stay the same employment wise? Most people aren't 10x engineers even with agents. Certain things are true: most products need someone on call 24/7, a group of people who know how to support a product (with varying degrees of knowledge), someone who plans what to build, someone who builds it (usually different people), inefficiencies in communication, etc. at least at the company I work for, agents have all largely improved these things, but by no means eliminated them. So it seems like things will largely be the same. There are only so many incredible engineers out there. They'll become more and more valuable but they were valuable pre ai. It's not like the industry will consolidate to only amazing engineers.

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

#610

Post by BrenBarn »

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…

> With AI, "bad" engineers can now amplify their "bad" engineering x10 across the organization.

This is why I don't have any patience for the people who say "but AI is so powerful! we can do so much!" It amplifies the bad stuff more than the good stuff, so it's a net negative.

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