AI is removing the middle class of software engineering? • Hacker News Board

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

#681

Post by sgarland » Thu, Aug 13, 2026, 1:39 AM UTC

ElProlactin wrote: post #590

jselysianeagle wrote: post #463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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." For one, the industry never did professionalize to begin with, certainly not in the way accountants, lawyers etc did. We never had any real body that could certify proficiency, which is what contributed to companies having to resort to leetcode and other such sty…

> For one, the industry never did professionalize to begin with, certainly not in the way accountants, lawyers etc did. "Professionalize" is an interesting way to frame this. As Milton Friedman argued, occupational licensure is almost always pursued by the practitioners rather than consumers. The licensing boards are mostly run by practicing lawyers and CPAs, so you have practicing lawyers and CPAs determining who ca…

I, for one, am extremely happy that electricians and plumbers have to be licensed.

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

#682

Post by singpolyma3 » Thu, Aug 13, 2026, 1:39 AM UTC

Barrin92 wrote: post #629

singpolyma3 wrote: post #607

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

you license both. When you go in for surgery your hospital is accredited and the surgeon who operates on you is licensed. I don't even understand what you're trying to argue, you're okay with being operated on by a guy they found on craigslist as long as the hospital has a license? We should bridges let bridges be built by engineers who took a few courses on Khan Academy? Of course professionals themselves need to be…

We weren't talking about doctors, but about coders writing utility apps being a different thing than payment processors

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

#683

Post by nick__m » Thu, Aug 13, 2026, 1:41 AM UTC

akiselev wrote: post #473

Silhouette wrote: post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with making programming a regulated profession is who gets to define the regulations. You are probably imagining that it would be expert developers with a track record of success. I would bet on it being the people who write lots of blog posts and books about programming and give lots of conference keynotes - whether or not those people have any evidence base to support their advocated policies or any per…

The important part of the professional certification like PE or MD is the liability that comes with it, which means that the professional has a lot more agency. A construction firm or hospital can't really force their professionals to do anything because the consequence is criminal prosecution (and a lot of legal liability for the employer). Bring a software engineer into a courtroom as an expert witness, and the jur…

Wasp the defunct PL group from washington.edu or wasp as in owasp or something else entirely?

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

#684

Post by sgarland » Thu, Aug 13, 2026, 1:42 AM UTC

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…

Your analogy to baking makes no sense. At best, compiling would be like putting a cake in the oven. Making the cake is coding.

> ovens are non-deterministic

Uhhh… no? Modulo calibration drift, they will get to and hold a commanded temperature for as long as you tell them to. The ambient humidity and temperature in your house / bakery may differ - which can absolutely affect some foods - but ovens are pretty binary.

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

#685

Post by ChrisMarshallNY » Thu, Aug 13, 2026, 1:43 AM UTC

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…

> not enough interest to make what they ship _good_.

I know this happens, but don’t really understand it.

In my experience, quality hits usually resulted from external pressure (bad managers, trade show-driven schedules, etc.). I always wanted to do better.

Now that I’m retired, I take the time to really get Quality right. LLMs have helped (but they need close watching).

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

#686

Post by scorpioxy » Thu, Aug 13, 2026, 1:44 AM UTC

sirsinsalot wrote: post #526

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…

Four MONTHS?! Most of the dolts I interviewed in the UK had a 6 week bootcamp behind them and called themselves "JavaScript Experts". No joke.

I was once commissioned to teach such a "bootcamp". It was a 4-months duration but 1 day a week. So something like 2-4 weeks total duration. I found out that the students were promised that this was enough to get them a job doing software development and were disappointed when I told them it wasn't. So towards the end, I took some time to explain what was missing and why it will take MUCH longer to even just learn the basics. The organizers were not happy at all that I did that.

To be fair, there were a bunch of students that did listen and worked hard on their assignments and projects and went on to integrate what they learned into their chosen profession and progressed in their jobs. I was very proud of that bunch.

Surprisingly, I wasn't asked by the organizers to teach again. It also didn't help that midway I was asked to switch from teaching web development to machine learning and they didn't really like it when I said "but those are two very different things".

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

#687

Post by ChrisMarshallNY » Thu, Aug 13, 2026, 1:48 AM UTC

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #414

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…

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…

My experience:

You can learn a new language, in a couple of weeks, if you’re experienced.

But you’re gonna have a heavy accent.

Learning the language without an accent, takes years, no matter how good you are.

There’s always stories of apocryphal John Henry types, but I’ve never actually met one, and I’ve worked with some pretty sharp characters.

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

#688

Post by sgarland » Thu, Aug 13, 2026, 1:49 AM UTC

voidhorse wrote: post #618

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…

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…

As someone who works in fintech, I assumed the same; alas, I was wrong.

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

#689

Post by ltsui » Thu, Aug 13, 2026, 1:55 AM UTC

I thought this was a good read. From my experience and to my dismay, what is considered a "good" or "bad" engineer/developer can be surprisingly subjective. I completely agree that an engineer should never submit a massive PR and instead break the work down, question, and understand the AI-generated code. I also agree that any reviewer should push back on being asked to review that and request the PR to be divided up. Unfortunately, what I've seen happen is that someone else with more power in the organization might find that PR fine and approve it and management might be raving about how good (fast) said engineer is. Those weird bugs which appear down the road get offloaded to other engineers.

Faced with that situation repeatedly, most people would find it sensible to resign. Which leads me to another point: if you leave, it will likely be difficult to land another job assuming that companies will impose a ridiculous interview process in fear of a bad hire which will be increasingly expensive as the author argues.

I realize that this is nothing new, but if there are fewer middle-class engineering roles, then I expect that these existing problems to become amplified.

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

#690

Post by sgarland » Thu, Aug 13, 2026, 1:55 AM UTC

dcrazy wrote: post #329

notakio wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I worked at a particular fruit company in Cupertino, my boss had been asked repeatedly by the developer teams to provide a tour of the data center we'd recently finished building out, which housed the servers their code ran on. He gave them a lengthy, grueling, hyper-detailed tour of the entire facility, encompassing the HVAC systems, electrical systems, network and computing systems, finishing with about 20 min…

What did the software engineers hope to learn from this tour?

Because hardware is cool.

I’m personally of the opinion that everyone who works in software should have to rack a server and bootstrap it. Physically mount it, cable it, and get the *nix distribution of your choice running on it, serving Hello, World.

Everywhere I’ve worked, there is a marked difference in the quality of engineers who had played with hardware - even those who merely had expressed interest in it, and maybe had an RPi - and those who had not. There is something about physically touching the thing that runs your code that makes you better at it. Maybe it’s a correlation between “wants to play with something unnecessary but adjacent” and “curious enough to ask why more frequently,” but I swear, it exists.