Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career • Hacker News Board

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#691

Post by throw234234234 » Tue, May 12, 2026, 5:27 AM UTC

jmyeet wrote: post #492

bborud wrote: post #67

Multiple 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…

This an example of survivor bias dressed up as general advice that doesn't consider the entire ecosystem. And we need look no further than what's happened in Hollywood with writing in particular. The general progression of a Hollywood writing career is from PA (production assistant), which often starts off as a volunteer "intern" position, to writer's assistant. Assistant here usually means doing any meanial task any…

If the industry is to shrink this is the best way it can. Stop people entering while they are young and can pivot into something with better returns. Keep the experienced people who are older and may find it harder to pivot and had some "good days" to help them ride them through these bad times. I've seen similar dynamics in other industries as they slowly die/move on (e.g. manufacturing, niche trades, etc). A slow decline is better than a boom/bust. If it ends up that we need software engineers later training is an easier problem than mid career death for the juniors in a few years time.

Eventually the market finds a new equilibrium of staff to demand ratio. You prefer that happen sooner so people don't make bad investments of their time (e.g. studying the wrong course based on inaccurate market signals).

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#692

Post by mawadev » Tue, May 12, 2026, 5:34 AM UTC

AllanSavageDev wrote: post #466

nomel wrote: post #443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The perspective here is "lifetime career", so you need to project out 30 years here, for a meaningful argument. I think, much sooner than that, you'll have AI pumping out practically complete implementations that meet the requirements of function , set by the people who desire that function. THOSE people will be the developers, and will be more akin to technical "creatives", more on the product side, than the develop…

Someday people are going to get tired of "programming in English" with prompts, getting inaccurate output, etc and someone is going to invent a higher level kind of CODE that allows the user to directly specify the actions the computer should take to solve the problem. Later someone will invent a kind of tooling that COMPILES these CODES into a runnable thing skipping the prompt part all together. It might be called…

I think we can call it Claude++ or short C++

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#693

Post by vintermann » Tue, May 12, 2026, 5:56 AM UTC

dasil003 wrote: post #479

7e wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you’re spending time thinking and not experimenting, then it’s because experimentation is expensive. With an LLM you don’t have to try to predict a complex system in advance, experiments are so cheap to can just converge to a solution directly. None of this pontificating; it’s really not that useful anymore.

This is very naive and reductive thinking. Experiments have a cost, you really have to think carefully about what you are trying to learn. Even when code is cheap, traffic and time are still huge constraints, and you better make sure your hypothesis actually makes sense for your goals, because AI is more than happy to fill in the blanks with a plausible but completely wrong proposal. More broadly, it's well understoo…

Even writing code the good old way, of course we experiment. I remember the old rule "Plan to throw away the first one. You will anyway." But then there's the "second system effect" where the second system is supposedly always overengineered and trying to take every possibility into account.

And then there's the times when the quick sloppy poc you planned to throw away gets forced into production and is still impossible to change ten years down the road.

AI makes all these problems so much less painful.

I worked at a company which had a huge monolithic ERP system (their product, to be clear) with no good separation between the GUI layer and presentation layer. The GUI was also dependent on an ancient version of the Borland C++ compiler. They put in a humongous effort to move to a slightly more modern UI library, and a client server architecture.

However, someone had decided that messages in xml or json were too inefficient, they already had performance issues. So they went with a binary message protocol of their own design - with no features for protocol update. Everything communicating with the server had to be on exactly the same version, or it would throw an error. So of course they very, very rarely updated the protocol.

I think the best help of AI will be to clean up such real life messes of soul-crushing architectural regrets. Will it do it perfectly, certainly not, but I wouldn't do it perfectly myself either if I was forced to do it - and I'd take a hell of a lot more time to do it.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#694

Post by vips7L » Tue, May 12, 2026, 6:22 AM UTC

upupupandaway wrote: post #562

vips7L wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Healthcare really seems like the only safe direction anymore. They're needed and a human is still required to physically do it.

My wife is a nurse and keeps in touch with her school professors. They said that the number of people flooding into healthcare careers is more than most colleges can handle, and is starting to cause supply glut in some roles.

If I was younger it’s what I would do tbh. Engineering, CS, and anything else white collar has such a foggy future right now. No chance would I risk going into something that might have wages suppressed or mass lay offs within a decade. And honestly 3 twelve hour shifts doesn’t sound that bad compared to 5 days a week of corporate bullshit.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#695

Post by throwaway2037 » Tue, May 12, 2026, 6:29 AM UTC

hatthew wrote: post #332

sefrost wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only 5% of your time is spent writing code? That sounds like a low estimate for most software engineers I work with. May I ask if you could estimate how you spend the other 95% of the time?

In no particular order - Meetings - Reading papers - Understanding legacy code - Reading internal news - Ad hoc chats with coworkers - Writing docs - Editing configs - Thinking about solutions - Slacking off - Analyzing results - Testing code - Reviewing PRs - Understanding others' ongoing projects

    > Slacking off

I laughed when I read this, but there is something to it. I like to say "intellectual relaxation" or take a break. Sometimes getting up from your desk to do some mindless admin task like photocopy a document for HR can free up your mind. If we were line workers at a factory, this would be mandated breaks. Business/Financial newspapers and factory executives love the old quote: "With robots, they never need a break, never need holiday, and can work 24x7." With the advent of agentic LLMs, a tiny fraction of that reality is leaking into the white collar world.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#696

Post by bel8 » Tue, May 12, 2026, 6:46 AM UTC

leptons wrote: post #613

bel8 wrote: post #243

Earlier 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+…

>Machines have surpassed humans by magnitudes in many capabilities already (how many billion multiplications can you do per second?) Do you have any idea how many calculations it takes for a human to put a ball through a hoop while running across a court? It could be millions or billions in a second. Manifesting consciousness, coordinating body movements, and everything else all at the same time takes calculations. Y…

I agree we do some marvelous things in sports but if we extrapolate from this table tennis robot, it's clear machines can/will do just as well there too:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVEzgYxDdrc

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#697

Post by snvzz » Tue, May 12, 2026, 6:52 AM UTC

kasey_junk wrote: post #592

bborud wrote: post #67

Multiple 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…

On one of my very first jobs in around 2000 I got paired with a much more experienced software engineer. He’d been a pro since the early 70s. I was stoked to learn from him. On like my fourth day he said “now I’m going to teach you the thing that helped me the most in my career…” I waited, ready for the received wisdom. And he said “always number your punch cards so if you drop them they will be easy to put back into…

That conversation seems like he was covertly teaching you about linked lists.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#698

Post by snvzz » Tue, May 12, 2026, 6:53 AM UTC

didgetmaster wrote: post #651

avador wrote: post #611

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Order of operations: Make it work. Make it right. Make it fast.[0] [0]: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

Unfortunately, too many developers (especially in the AI era) stop after the first item.

Stop... short of.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#699

Post by dkersten » Tue, May 12, 2026, 7:07 AM UTC

overfeed wrote: post #446

dkersten wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> which people find they need to do for LLMs to work at all anyway Everything we have to do for AI to function well, would help humans to function better too. If you take the things for AI, but do them for humans instead, that human will easily 2x or more, and someone will actually understand the code that gets written.

> If you take the things for AI, but do then for humans instead, that human will easily 2x or more, and someone will actually understand the code that gets written This only works on high-trust teams and organizations. A lot of AI productivity gains are from SWE putting the extra effort because the results will be attributed to them. Being a force-multiplier for others isn't always recognized, instead, your perfomanc…

Ah… that’s a reasonable point. Yes, the difference between a high-trust team and what you described is night and day. I suppose for those situations there’s a much bigger incentive to just throw AI at it, which explains why the big corporates love AI.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#700

Post by conductr » Tue, May 12, 2026, 7:29 AM UTC

ehnto wrote: post #688

Lord_Zero wrote: post #648

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah so most of my friends who are dealing with spike in outsourced devs in their work environments are cleaning up the AI slop churned out by offshore people who are slinging code and getting the business requirements all wrong. Their jobs are now to clean up the mountains of code coming in from people who don't really get the problems they are being asked to solve.

Outsourcing seems to come in cycles, where it's tried, fails due to communication issues (resulting in quality issues), then things get inhoused again. I do think there is some opportunity for AI to smooth out the communication aspect, but I think what we will actually see is larger volumes of poorly guided work coming through for each feature. The AI does not fix the lack of deep systems understanding which is why i…

I’ve had a lot of success in past with the Apple approach. I design and architect locally but build it overseas. I think AI and the post-WFH office work culture really helped executives get over the hump / learn to make decisions and lead without being in the same physical space daily. Also, feel like the communication gap is largely a solved problem at this point. It is incredibly common to find English speakers in this profession from any country. The trick is learning to project management. At times, you simply just give the person objective instructions of what to build and the exact rendering and color palette. Or the exact packages you they can use as dependencies. But largely the world communicates together much better than the previous wave of outsourcing.