621–630 of 656 posts
The eloquence with which this point gets (repeatedly) made is continuing to improve each next time I read it. However, I still feel like we haven't nailed it. That is, we are not yet at the "aphorism" stage of the discourse (e.g. "the medium is the message", "you ship your org chart", "9 mothers can't make a baby in a month"), in which the most pointed version of this critique packs a punch in just a few words that r…
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Tell them no. Thats what I do. I have rejected multiple PRs that were too large and lacked proper design or alignment upfront. With code being so cheap, rejecting it should be just as cheaper. Set cultural standards that devs need to review their code before asking for reviews. Etc etc
I don't think it has the effect you think it has. No-one takes a rejection personally anymore since it's so easy to just tell an AI to fix the comments. So a rejection does not make them rethink like it would have back in the day.
Of course this has to be done by people with seniority who are respected. If you don’t have that you’re in a loosing battle.
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Tell me where these mythical jobs that won't leave me broke as shit and that I'll enjoy are. I'm very much a humanities person, and it was already a sad tragicomedy of a sphere before AI hit the ground. It's probably even more dire now, let's be real. And I don't have the personality for running a start-up or any company, unfortunately. I'm extremely risk-averse and withdrawn. If I really had no other choice, I'd pro…
I think you hate life in general more than just your job. Anyway statistician, accountant, teacher, are indeed jobs, and I assure you they aren't found living on the streets.
Well, yeah, I do. I don't even have a good reason to, I'm just fundamentally incomplete and wrong.
>Anyway statistician, accountant, teacher, are indeed jobs, and I assure you they aren't found living on the streets.
That's true, I suppose. It's too late now, though. I'd have to start from scratch and probably go to college again, which I fucking despised and I wanted everyone around me dead.
I like to whine, but this career was the least bad choice. I just wish there were good ones.
> If the job were mainly about producing syntactically valid code, then of course A.I. would be on a direct path to replacing large parts of the profession. But that was never the highest-value part of the work. The value was always in judgment. > The valuable engineer is the one who sees the hidden constraint before it causes an outage. The one who notices that the team is solving the wrong problem. The one who redu…
This has happened in other industries before. Drafting for example when CAD arrived. Entry level wasn't "can draw, willing to learn" anymore, but demanded high domain understanding. So the pathway became compressed learning through study, and field exposure. Study of senior drafter "red lines": what and why they changed the initial drawing, RFI response etc. Reverse engineering good work. Failed design studies etc. S…
Huh? This is exactly what almost everyone does
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I wish people would stop pretending that agentic coding and elevated thinking arent mutually exclusive. Theres way too much money on this hype train now though to point out the emperor isnt wearing any clothes and way too many people who always did think that "boilerplate spew" (the one thing AI really does well) is a valid form of programming rather than a shortcut to tech debt.
All this stuff is proving to me one thing: we don’t need to get better at producing stuff faster. We need to get better at producing the right stuff. Right stuff meaning getting better at project selection. I guarantee a firm that is really good at project selection with hand written code will annihilate a firm that is full of agentic engineers. And frankly I hope the outcome is that all those who went all in on agen…
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I dont understand why software engineers insist on keeping the craftsmanship aspect of writing code. Compare to other engineering disciplines, like civil engineering. Engineering was never about going in the field yourself to build things with your own hands. You can become a great civil engineer without building bridges that fail yourself. To me it doesn’t matter that the thing I design is built with a crane or AI.…
Because many aren't software engineers, they are brick layers. To be comparable, they would have to go through the same university degree and professional certification, instead of doing a JavaScript training and call themselves software engineers instead of coders. They are getting the blueprints from architects and senior devs, and putting those bricks into place, and carrying buckets.
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I dont understand why software engineers insist on keeping the craftsmanship aspect of writing code. Compare to other engineering disciplines, like civil engineering. Engineering was never about going in the field yourself to build things with your own hands. You can become a great civil engineer without building bridges that fail yourself. To me it doesn’t matter that the thing I design is built with a crane or AI.…
There's a false equivalency between software engineering and civil engineering here, in my opinion. I would argue that the craftsmanship SWEs see in their work stems from a necessity to be novel in order to truly make something worth putting out into the market. "Oh, you're making an app that tracks heartrate/makes music/provides driving directions? Why wouldn't the user just use ?" There's no real merit to making cl…
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Because many aren't software engineers, they are brick layers. To be comparable, they would have to go through the same university degree and professional certification, instead of doing a JavaScript training and call themselves software engineers instead of coders. They are getting the blueprints from architects and senior devs, and putting those bricks into place, and carrying buckets.
Thanks I think that explains part of the misunderstanding: I’m from a country where engineer is a regulated title, you can’t call yourself a software engineer if you indeed didn’t go through a comparable certification to a civil engineer.
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I'm gonna strongly +1 on this. Most of the "Software Engineering" curricula I've seen is catered towards "getting a job as a programmer", and is mostly focused on languages, frameworks and outdated processes. As an engineer in another discipline, there's no engineering there. I would rank like this: Computer Science > Self Taught > Software Engineering.
I remember people in college bragging that they're learning Angular. I was like, is this an engineering or physics thing, angular dynamics? No, it's a web framework with a ton of boilerplate that my LLM deals with now.
I even saw a "post-grad in React" lately.
Backend-wise it's the same, it comes and goes with fashion and whatever company has influence in the university recommends.