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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

#671

Post by esafak »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #315
ex-aws-dude wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who said you need to trust it? Reviewing code is still way faster than writing code.

> Reviewing code is still way faster than writing code. Writing code results in a much better understanding of the code than reviewing it In fact I would say that in large complex codebases, in order to develop the same understanding of what the code is doing might actually take longer than writing it from scratch would have

But it's written to your spec; there should be no surprises!

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#673

Post by [deleted] »

FrankRay78 wrote: post #523
arcboii92 wrote: post #487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLMs moved the moments of despair to PR reviews for me. It used to be that you could check on a junior dev occassionally throughout the day to make sure they're on the right track. Now you step away for 2 hours and they're raising a PR of bad code smell spaghetti and moving on to repeat their AI slopfest on the next task. It's getting hard to keep up with trying to teach new devs what bad code looks like. And I swear…

Write a damn good automated review agent that runs against their PRs before even looking at them… works well for me!

[deleted]

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#674

Post by badc0ffee »

srj wrote: post #663
djeastm wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There are plenty of law grads unable to find work in their field.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#676

Post by moezd »

This should be repeated ad nauseaum: Just because CNC tooling is available, you wouldn't get rid of your wood/metal workers. You give them more scoped tasks, expect them to finish sooner with more standardized output, and... you let them experiment a bit on the side. Perhaps not with industry grade tooling unless they want to pay for fancy tooling, but like DIY, and then, you lure nontechnical people in by telling them how much you can save with DIY. Of course it doesn't matter to no techies that some of the finishes they want are truly gruesome handiwork, but hey, they are a part of the DIY community now!

That's the way. Anything else shows that they don't know how modern economy works. And let's admit it, as a bunch of IT/software people here we are terrible at this.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#677

Post by pear01 »

ecocentrik wrote: post #564
pear01 wrote: post #510

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ranchers, butchers... and factory farms. Most meat Americans consume have had very little interaction with a person until they are being devoured on the plate. I appreciate your points. I agree with you that not all "technically specialized humans will be completely removed" but let's not pretend the comparison is going from a caveman with a spear to a cowboy with a lasso. If you concede it is likely to be very diffe…

Now you're arguing against your own analogy? Hunter was ubiquitous position in human society prior to the domestication of animals. 50% of the workforce in hunter-gather societies. Today, 12 millennia after the domestication of wildlife, that number is down to 9-14% of the global workforce dedicated to the production, distribution, processing, sales of meat (not including cooked food) according to opus. Considering t…

No one said it's going to zero. It doesn't have to go to zero for lives to change. Would you rather be a cowboy or a factory farmer? The latter are some of the least desirable jobs in the entire world. The fact that millions of people still do them isn't the point in your column you think it is.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#678

Post by anon84873628 »

WorldMaker wrote: post #442
anon84873628 wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm skeptical of LLM "reasoning" but they sure as hell know a lot. That's what the embeddings are: a giant semantic relationship between concepts.

Embeddings are still mostly just vectors into n-dimensional K-means clusters. It isn't "knowing" two things are related and here's the evidence, it is guessing two things are statistically likely to be related, based on trained patterns, and running with it without evidence. It has no "semantic understanding" as we would define it. It's just increasingly good at winning cluster lotteries because we've increased the a…

Can you explain how you "know" two things are related? If I ask you the similarities between a cat and a dog, is your answer based solely on an understanding of their genetic phylogeny and how those genes express traits?

Grouping vectors in concept space is exactly how you create semantic understanding. The proof is in how good they are at creating semantically valid text. The fact that it took massive amounts of data is irrelevant. That just shows how much knowledge is encoded in all our language. It takes humans a ton of training to know things too.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#679

Post by rTX5CMRXIfFG »

i_love_retros wrote: post #620
steve_adams_86 wrote: post #585

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work with people who generate solutions without really looking at what was produced (group A). They click around the app or run some tests and decide if they're content with the result, then ship it. You can see Claude's fingerprints all over the PR and it's safe to assume they didn't change much of anything. Then I have coworkers who work through the problems, build harnesses to test the changes and verify results…

Bro group B might as well write the code themselves. this is getting silly

Dear god no, I actually want AI to write the code that integrates my unit-testable abstractions into the existing spaghetti. I don’t care how it does it, the thing just needs to work. The moron that wrote the mess didn’t care enough to begin with, why should I? But all work moving forward must only be made of the good stuff

Not silly

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#680

Post by [deleted] »

snozolli wrote: post #352
vga1 wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>bosses The AI is coming for those too.

Something like five to ten years ago, when AI hype was starting to hit media, one of the claims was that AI would come for middle-management first. Since middle-management can generally be described as collecting information from underlings and reporting information to upper management, their work was supposed to be easy to automate with AI. As far as I can tell, this hasn't proven to be true at all, and we software…

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