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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?

#611

Post by BrenBarn »

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…

> The problem is that worked when the industry was mostly composed of people that were implicitly interested in this stuff, but the people that just got in it for a paycheck don't have that motivation

That is a problem whenever people do things for money. It suggests that a big problem with our society is people are encouraged (in some cases effectively forced) to want money too much.

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

#612

Post by toss1 »

groundzeros2015 wrote: post #579
Silhouette wrote: post #552

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I appreciate your positivity. However it is difficult to reconcile your argument with the reality that executives at tech companies frequently behave in ways that satisfy the investors but clearly do not produce good results for the people using their technology. Indeed in numerous cases today the technology is openly hostile to its own users' interests. The regulations are there to protect the users (or customers or…

What would credentialing software engineers do to curtail leadership incentive problems? Hardware technology jobs have some of these credentials and are part of that system.

More credentialing and requirements would do plenty to curtail leadership incentive problems. First, as the sibling points out, it gives the licensed engineer a solid ground to stand on when refusing a stupid leadership order — "I'm not going to lose my license for that stupid idea", and a serious incentive to do so, as well as solid job prospects if he does get canned for it (because there's a limited pool of credentialed engineers).

You glibly say "More schooling does not mean more trustworthy or careful doctors.". Yet the schooling and credentialing clearly cuts off huge numbers of would-be doctors who never pass the exams, never graduate med school, or never even get into med school, or decide it is too difficult in the first place. In the software realm, those people just go to some boot camp and they're off to the races...

Another huge aspect of credentialing is required ongoing education, which REQUIRES physicians and engineers to take updated continuing education just to maintain their license. This again continuously improves the talent pool.

And, if your main concern is that they be "more trustworthy or careful", credentialing also helps that by finding the worst, least trustworthy and careful and cancelling their license, so they are NOT doctors anymore. The untrustworthy or careless SWE just gets a new job to ruin stuff elsewhere, probably taking one from the actual good engineer because their talent is not engineering, but bullshitting.

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

#613

Post by abnercoimbre »

rayiner wrote: post #151

Technology has been doing this for decades. I think a lot of our "K shaped economy" discourse is about the bifurcation of the upper middle class creating downwardly mobile educated young people. Nobody in my wife's immediate family finished college. She and all of her cousins are quite indisputably better off than their parents. My father in law drove a forklift at a soup factory. My sister in law is studying to be a…

> It's had a huge impact on the petit bourgeoisie.

I always heard it as "petty" bourgeoisie and was a bit confused. Now I get it.

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

#614

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

arcboii92 wrote: post #557
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole "learn to code" and software bootcamp craze always baffled me. Like what other profession markets themselves as "Hey, our job is so easy that any schmuck off the street can enter the career with 4 months of training." Practically every other job I can think of at a similar salary level has entrance requirements (e.g. grad school admissions exams), extensive and expensive training, a lengthy apprenticeship p…

I've said "code was always the easy part" recently so I should probably explain where I'm coming from. I think the practice of software engineering includes that "understanding of the relationship between code, business, people and teams" you mention, which essentially boils down to the ability to skillfully design a system - regardless of whether it's a big cloud-based web application or a tiny cli tool for use with…

Sure, I'm not saying design is easy either, but even if you have detailed user requirements, a fully spec'ed out UI, and some general technical requirements, translating that to (working) code is still really, really difficult.

I used to do a lot of interviews in my previous career, and I can't tell you the number of times I'd be interviewing someone who could talk a good game, but the second it got to writing code, if the world depended on them being able to write a simple correct loop, we'd all be dead. I know everyone shits on Lee code, and I agree the "brain teaser-y" nature of it doesn't often match real world development, but often times I'd tell folks almost exactly what the code needed to do, in English, and they still couldn't translate that to sensible code.

Last side note, when this topic comes up I feel some folks are really biking it down to the absurd "typing was never the hard part". Well, yeah, sure. But actually writing correct, maintainable, well-structured code is (was?) very much at least one of the hard parts.

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

#615

Post by johnnyanmac »

tossandthrow wrote: post #371
ryandrake wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It will become very easy to build most software We keep hearing this, but where is the Photoshop killer written by a gas station attendant? Where is the PayPal alternative written by a retired nurse? Over and over we're told that software is now trivial to write, and Claude is evidently writing some billions of lines of code a day, but where are the results? Where is the vibe coded app toppling the legacy hand-code…

My non technical wife asked ai to brush up the photo for her cv. Ai did that with whatever cli tools were available and what it would write itself. Ai is not a faster horse. It is a phase shift. We won't see a gas station clerk write photoshop because we won't need a photoshop.

Doesn't really answer the question. The relevant question with your example is "where is your wive's new business of brushing up other people's photos?"

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

#616

Post by NateEag »

decimalenough wrote: post #495
NateEag wrote: post #478

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I would hope that any regulation is evidence driven. Have you found existing regulation in any field that's evidence-driven? My impression is that regulation is not made in a way that has much to do with evidence, but I would be delighted to be shown evidence I'm wrong.

Aviation comes to mind. Most aviation regulations exist because people died. It's hardly a perfect system, but the problem is mostly that it's too conservative and risk aware, making it difficult to impossible to innovate and ignoring the risk this creates. (The world's most popular light aircraft is the 1950s-vintage Cessna 172, mostly because it's impossibly slow and costly to get a reasonably priced modern competi…

Thank you for the data point. I guess I had overlooked that.

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

#617

Post by johnnyanmac »

bossyTeacher wrote: post #544
tossandthrow wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My non technical wife asked ai to brush up the photo for her cv. Ai did that with whatever cli tools were available and what it would write itself. Ai is not a faster horse. It is a phase shift. We won't see a gas station clerk write photoshop because we won't need a photoshop.

> We won't see a gas station clerk write photoshop because we won't need a photoshop. 100% agree. People are looking at the future through the lenses of the current paradigm just like when people from the past imagined the future (our present) in a way which we now find hilarious. Most of the time, the future doesn't bring developments which improve an action in a scalar way (faster, shorter, stronger, etc) but inste…

And the issue here is that this future is bringing fundamental change to the nautre of labor without overriding the need for compensation in order to house and feed the populace. Hence the rejection.

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

#618

Post by voidhorse »

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…

Eh, not all software engineering is made equal.

To work on engineering real time communications systems, banking systems, or transit systems and low level infrastructure, you definitely need some chops. To design and build out core network infra at the web giants, chops also certainly required.

To build out a basic crud app, pwa, or the next feature in the massive products that major companies ship? Yes you need some understanding but it really isn't that difficult or onerous. TBH if you ask me the profession always had a problem where the term "engineer" was a tad over applied. The boot camps are mostly churning out people who can write basic apps, not (hopefully) anyone being placed into a a senior IC and systems design role.

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

#619

Post by confidantlake »

ryandrake wrote: post #142
mikert89 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the field is basically over as a long term career unless you are truly exceptional. It will become very easy to build most software, and the upper end will be filled with the top people in the country/from abroad. Wages are certainly going down for most software roles

> It will become very easy to build most software We keep hearing this, but where is the Photoshop killer written by a gas station attendant? Where is the PayPal alternative written by a retired nurse? Over and over we're told that software is now trivial to write, and Claude is evidently writing some billions of lines of code a day, but where are the results? Where is the vibe coded app toppling the legacy hand-code…

Software wins because of the sales team and the network effects. You could already create a better twitter or facebook that no one would use long before llms.

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

#620

Post by johnnyanmac »

mikert89 wrote: post #354
kakacik wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It won't be photoshop then. It will be shitty, buggy clunky app that costed a (major) fraction to develop but it will also earn a fraction. Companies like MS can afford this ie with Office suite but patience of markets and customers can allow them to go only so far, if ie Excel becomes semi-useless thats the end of Office and big cash cow for M$ (I'd say about time, that monopoly is not good for consumers at all). Th…

This is cope, ai coding agents will follow the path of self driving cars. They will be watched with extreme caution, but will slowly but surely expand outwards. Eventually manually writing code will be considered a dangerous/bug introducing act

>They will be watched with extreme caution

We're doing a great job of that right now, aren't we?

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