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AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?

blog.florianherrengt.com

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

#691

Post by beardbandit »

everfrustrated wrote: post #550
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…

A large amount of programmers are hired just building crud apps. Display data from a database and write it back with a validation. Etc. There is very little innovation going on. And most companies do everything they can to stick to standard patterns, technologies etc where all the risk is removed and known in advance. Often "good" programmers are worse - they over complicate the architecture, go off on tangents, try…

Out of every single reason given for why the bootcamp era was justified the only one I believe is that there was so much focus on it because bigger players wanted to flood the market with cheap supply and drive salaries downward.

This is not any different with offshoring before, and AI now.

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

#692

Post by n0rand0 »

overgard wrote: post #375
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…

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…

[dead]

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

#693

Post by oliculipolicula »

jdw64 wrote: post #364
florianherrengt wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The industry doesn’t really owe people opportunities. Even if you think it should, that’s not how companies are going to behave.

That is an incredibly short sighted view. By acting this way, the industry is essentially selling its future for short term gains. A systemic reduction in the number of people capable of maintaining systems directly correlates with an inevitable collapse in overall software quality. The perspectives of market advocates often stop at this short sighted level. In reality, their modeling is incredibly simplistic. I will…

PP is (probably) a market maximalist. Many rationalists end up there. Strangely, there are market maximalists who try to answer all your questions..

E.g. Buterin, Weyl, Friedman. How we started talking in the first place, remember? It was rather regrettable that we stopped asking each other questions..

In place of that, I'd like to see you, jdw64, try to debate with these high-ranked people (in their own community, anyway) :)

To everyone: How can market reward advantageous situation-dependent temperaments in the long term, is I think my question. That sounds like climate (or weather) manipulation, but somehow I sense both theory and practise are much simpler.

In fact, I think I can even eliminate jdw64's ingredient of "temperament".., framing the issue of conflicting temperanents as one between "generalists" & "specialists". Note that you can (probably) use "Marxist theory" to defeat PP without calling it that.

(I think this is more complex than the debate between "wise" and "clever"?? The gap is itself interesting)

This last one, even all of YC would be interested in, I'd argue. In VC lingo, that'd be "T-shape". see also the thread "Felix & I [& D]". That's either like a person who is like both Jobs and Wozniak, depending on situation, or a Wozniak (/Jony Ive) who has the ability to become Jobs, thus sidestepping the situation-dependence-dependence.

Side-quest one is to redefine both "making a billion dollars" and "writing good prompts" as specialities, so that markets as they are imagined now don't necessarily reward these

Side-quest two is make the chameleon skill teachable (or at the very least into an _identity_ ;)

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

#694

Post by sgarland »

annzabelle wrote: post #641
monocasa wrote: post #511

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was one of the biggest changes that happened with common core. Common core itself didn't really mandate this, but it took a reset of the curriculum to insert the new ideas like an emphasis on intuition rather than rote arithmetic.

The problem with common core is that it replaced building arithmetic fluency with less rigorous ways of building intuition, leading to a generation of kids who never gained the basic math skills that are foundational to actually understanding the intuition. You can't just skip arithmetic drills in favor of intuition and still come out with students who are prepared for further study in math. There's a reason Kumon et…

Montessori. My kids’ school has kindergarteners solving trinomials [0]. My kids learned multiplication and division by 3rd grade. They’ve also memorized powers of 2 up to 2^20, but that was more me telling them about exponents one day, and then giving those as examples. However, they did learn binary trees (and binary) from their school.

Kids can absolutely learn complex concepts early, they just may not be able to formally write them out until a few years later. But they’re kids, so who cares? By the time they need to be able to write out math equations, they’ll understand the underlying concepts on such a deep level that it doesn’t matter how long you make it, they’ll plow through it.

I was a skeptic, and am aware that I sound like a cultist, but damn if Montessori isn’t something special. I highly recommend it.

0: https://www.montessori-theory.com/montessori-trinomial-cube/

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

#695

Post by breezybottom »

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…

Milton Friedman was a libertarian crank. I'm a consumer and I'm quite happy that doctors and lawyers are licensed.

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

#696

Post by win311fwg »

breezybottom wrote: post #695
ElProlactin wrote: post #590

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Milton Friedman was a libertarian crank. I'm a consumer and I'm quite happy that doctors and lawyers are licensed.

What advantage do you, the consumer, see to licensing over certification?

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

#698

Post by crystal_revenge »

skydhash wrote: post #675
crystal_revenge wrote: post #572

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A good engineer, without LLM assistance, will still produce great stuff. Not fast enough to keep their job these days. Time was always the limiting factor to code quality, good engineers satisfied the classic "good", "fast" but not "cheap" selection of those three classic options. I very sincerely doubt it is possible for even an incredible engineer to keep up with the delivery schedules required to ship products n…

> I very sincerely doubt it is possible for even an incredible engineer to keep up with the delivery schedules required to ship products now. What's the current delivery rates? From my past experience, any feature can take several weeks from idea to be in a somewhat usable shape for production. While the actual coding is often less than a few days. A lot of time is spent on gathering requirements and resolving confli…

> I believe most current improvement in speed is just moving from idea to demo in a few days

This is an outdated view.

Current timelines I'm facing are to be going from "thought", through customer trials and being fully live in the product and ready for sales in ~3 weeks (from kick off to live in app is a bit more than a week). This is for a full product feature that could easily be standalone. In 2023 I would say the timeline for a similarly shaped feature at another startup was around ~3 months (and the team at the time agreed that was an aggressive timeline). Bug rates are not noticeably different than other teams I've been on in the past 20 years.

Nobody I know working in startups is still building demos with AI like they were a year or more ago (for work), that's seen as largely a waste of time since you can just ship the feature and be experimenting with customers much faster.

On top of that everyone working in startup land knows that SaaS's days are numbered, so you need to be shipping working software fast enough you can get ahead of the curve to navigate where things are going next.

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

#699

Post by edot »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #615
tossandthrow wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My non technical wife asked ai to brush up the photo for her cv. Ai did that with whatever cli tools were available and what it would write itself. Ai is not a faster horse. It is a phase shift. We won't see a gas station clerk write photoshop because we won't need a photoshop.

Doesn't really answer the question. The relevant question with your example is "where is your wive's new business of brushing up other people's photos?"

That’s his point, there isn’t one. You don’t need bespoke software anymore. We’ve got the basics already, all the standards we’d ever need, the agents can figure out how to put them together for whatever thing specific you need.
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