I love coding. AI does the boring bits. I still get to do the fun bits.
Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career
661–670 of 809 posts
Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career
#662I keep reading about how AI will be fine because people can just retrain for different careers. However, I never read what those careers are or who is going to pay for retraining. I certainly don't have the money or time to go back to college and start a new career at the bottom.
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…
One way it seems different today is that wealth inequality is already quite high in the US. Even if AI delivers massive productivity gains the windfall is only likely to be more concentrated. When manufacturing was outsourced at least median housing wasn't 7x median income.
I'm curious what you mean by prepare, to have savings?
Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career
#663I keep reading about how AI will be fine because people can just retrain for different careers. However, I never read what those careers are or who is going to pay for retraining. I certainly don't have the money or time to go back to college and start a new career at the bottom.
At least in the US, the only major non-AI growth field seems to be healthcare to deal with the swell of baby boomers living longer than people have before. But if we're waiting to be paid to retrain there, I wouldn't hold our collective breath.
Probably many legally protected professions such as medicine and law will continue to be okay. There's a cap imposed on the number of residency positions that will keep those jobs scarce.
Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career
#664Earlier quoted context omitted.
The argument is that “that’s what always happened in the past”. Which is true, but it’s true as long as it’s not true. The classic example of how drastically this kind of thinking can fail is Malthusian theory, that populations would collapse because food growth was linear while population growth was exponential. This was true for all of history until Malthus actually made this observation. At a mechanistic level, th…
> The classic example of how drastically this kind of thinking can fail is Malthusian theory, that populations would collapse because food growth was linear while population growth was exponential. This was true for all of history until Malthus actually made this observation. Malthusian observation can still be true...It only has to be true once, and the only reason people say it isn't right now is due to industrial…
> "the only reason .. industrial fertilizers"
canned food, tractors, combine harvesters, mechanical refrigeration, freezers, chilled trucks, ocean liners, aircraft, antibiotics for farm animals, milking machines, genetically modified crops, satellite/computer weather prediction, modern pesticides, Pasteurization, vitamin and mineral fortification...
Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career
#665Earlier quoted context omitted.
> because it is actually a statistical machine with context limit. So are humans. Machines have surpassed humans by magnitudes in many capabilities already (how many billion multiplications can you do per second?) And I argue that current LLMs have surpassed many of my capabilities already. For example GPT/Opus can understand and document some ancient legacy project I never saw before in minutes. I would take a week+…
> So are humans. AI advocates are _way_ too confident about the nature human cognition. Questions that have been debated by philosophers and cognitive scientists for decades are now "obvious" according to you people, though you never provide any argument to support your statements.
Are you suggesting a non-physical reason for human cognition?
Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career
#666Earlier quoted context omitted.
where did the excess labor force suddenly materialize in covid.
Anecdotally, our firm's Covid hires were just okay. The recent hires are better. So my hunch is the weaker CS candidates were able to get jobs back during Covid, while today, they are left out.
> So my hunch is the weaker CS candidates were able to get jobs back during Covid, while today, they are left out.
Does this mean that your assertion is that "people currently unable to get a job are weak CS people"?
Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career
#667The final verdict that software engineers wont exist x years from now is a bit contrived. Today, my team is looking to hire an AI software engineer. I reached out to my close group of developer friends to gauge interest only to find out that each one of them is ALSO trying to find/hire software engineers, all looking for this new "paradigm" of programming knowledge. Maybe how the role itself looks different today than it did 5 years ago but it seems like every company is trying to accelerate their development and finding new opportunities that didn't exist before the AI craze.
More than anything, I believe that AI is pushing out those who enjoyed the ~act~ of programming more than the product being delivered itself. Mostly because those individuals might have the hardest time adopting this new way of getting things done.
And honestly, I feel for them. Coding has always felt like an art form to me. Nothing feels better than someone commenting on the elegance/beauty of something youve written.
Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career
#668Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wake me up when a peer reviewed study finds even a 2X increase in senior developer productivity
I have no idea how you could even measure that w/o influencing the outcome.
If the claim isn't falsifiable, than you can't do science. If you can't disprove a 2X multiplier how are you going to prove a 6X? 1000X? What's stopping the next hype man from claiming a billion X multiplier?
Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career
#669Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Sure, sure. And my CEO believes the singularity happened in Q1. Doesn't make it true
Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career
#670Multiple 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…
> Natural selection will take care of them in due course.
or you.