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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?

#71

Post by ebb_earl_co »

sameesh wrote: post #48
petcat wrote: post #32

I think it is less about junior/mid engineers, and more just about the kinds of work inexperienced/cheap developers are often doing: assembly line, JIRA-ticket-taker type development. This is especially impacting Indian tech workers in the US [0] since these are often the types of roles that InfoSys and other foreign tech consulting firms are staffing. The new $100,000 fee to sponsor an H1B visa has made it difficult…

What's with people using the number "0" for their first reference? I have only ever seen that practice here at Hacker News.

Lots of (most?) programming languages are 0-indexed so it feels natural for software developers and our ilk.

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

#72

Post by snk »

mikert89 wrote: post #31
api wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is true of all tools. AI is a tool. A tool provides leverage. It does not make a bad craftsperson good.

right but we have never seen a tool like this

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_historic_invention...

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

#73

Post by weatherlite »

mikert89 wrote: post #15
declan_roberts wrote: post #12

Between AI and competing against the world with H-1B, it's really never been harder to get an entry or mid-level software engineering job. Which means our pipeline to senior engineer is completely broken.

I think the field is basically over as a long term career unless you are truly exceptional. It will become very easy to build most software, and the upper end will be filled with the top people in the country/from abroad. Wages are certainly going down for most software roles

All fields are basically over as a long term career besides perhaps prostitutes and even there I'm not entirely sure. But the questions of how soon and by how much matter a lot. Being early is the same as being wrong a clever guy once said.

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

#74

Post by fl4regun »

iLoveOncall wrote: post #53
mikert89 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

have you been inside a big tech company? there arent many american fresh grads working there, its mostly foreign

[flagged]

IME many big companies are filled with mediocre morons, or at least people who just don't care enough to do better than mediocre. Still not the fault of brown people either way.

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

#76

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

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…

This is me to a tee. I think I'm a fairly good software engineer, and I loved building software and mentoring more junior engineers who I thought had both ability and a good attitude. I also think I was a pretty pragmatic engineer (I was not an "architecture astronaut"), but I did enjoy the craft of getting into the nitty gritty details of software.

The past 5-10 years or so saw me pretty beaten down though with software engineering, and AI was the final nail in the coffin that caused me to leave the profession in later middle age. I thought software as a business had "lost its way" from building great products with attention to detail to "how do we addict as many people as possible as quickly as possible". Think about the degradation in Apple software from say the "it just works" era to now.

With respect to AI, I'm not really against it, and I find it extremely valuable in my personal projects. I just feel in a large group/enterprise context that it's replaced a lot of tasks I actually enjoy doing with becoming an editor for what feels like a slightly inebriated junior developer. Or maybe it's better to say a junior developer on a mild amount of meth, because as you say this developer can churn out semi-but-not-fully-working code at an astonishing rate, and then I feel like it's often my job to mop the slop off the floor. Pass, not interested.

I feel lucky to have had my career during what I consider the golden age of software engineering, but I'd note I don't think that golden age lasted even a full career of one person.

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

#77

Post by hn_submit »

Look, stupid companies who use A.I. to generate their code will simply fail. Companies that use bright engineers to engineer their product and write code (and pay them accordingly) will thrive and thrash the competition.

Darwinism in action.

I don't believe A.I. will change much, but it will lead to winners and losers, that's certain. Lessons will be learned, A.I. will remain but play a minor role, just like IntelliSense and ReSharper.

People need to understand that when things break management will hold you accountable, not the A.I. If you can't fix it you'll be out of a job. So you'd better make sure that you understand the generated code and clean it up before putting it in production because you'll be maintaining it.

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

#78

Post by doctorwho42 »

scronkfinkle wrote: post #52

I think of it more as "the automation of the stackoverflow engineer". In enterprise software, there has always just been a non-negotiable large volume of code that was required to be written. This has traditionally been offloaded by having seniors do the hard thinking then distill it into a jira ticket which could be handed off to an engineer that'd actually write the code and punch every hiccup into google along the…

Again, this ignores the second order effect of entirely gutting the personnel pipeline that is required to create new senior devs...

So without a training pipeline to provide experience to jr. Devs, in 15 years we will be hurting for senior devs to replace all the graybeards. Kind of like the fortran crisis of the last decade or so.... Just across an entire industry that supports every other industry....

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

#79

Post by re-thc »

sarchertech wrote: post #65
scronkfinkle wrote: post #52

I think of it more as "the automation of the stackoverflow engineer". In enterprise software, there has always just been a non-negotiable large volume of code that was required to be written. This has traditionally been offloaded by having seniors do the hard thinking then distill it into a jira ticket which could be handed off to an engineer that'd actually write the code and punch every hiccup into google along the…

>This has traditionally been offloaded by having seniors do the hard thinking then distill it into a jira ticket which could be handed off to an engineer that'd actually write the code and punch every hiccup into google along the way. This is the theory, but I’ve never worked anywhere (and I’ve worked at a lot of places over 20 years) that actually did it like that in practice. What tends to happen is that the EMs an…

> but I’ve never worked anywhere (and I’ve worked at a lot of places over 20 years) that actually did it like that in practice

I've seen a twist - not juniors but just offshore engineers.

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

#80

Post by _doctor_love »

sarchertech wrote: post #65
scronkfinkle wrote: post #52

I think of it more as "the automation of the stackoverflow engineer". In enterprise software, there has always just been a non-negotiable large volume of code that was required to be written. This has traditionally been offloaded by having seniors do the hard thinking then distill it into a jira ticket which could be handed off to an engineer that'd actually write the code and punch every hiccup into google along the…

>This has traditionally been offloaded by having seniors do the hard thinking then distill it into a jira ticket which could be handed off to an engineer that'd actually write the code and punch every hiccup into google along the way. This is the theory, but I’ve never worked anywhere (and I’ve worked at a lot of places over 20 years) that actually did it like that in practice. What tends to happen is that the EMs an…

> I’ve worked at a lot of places over 20 years

Primarily in Silicon Valley or outside of it?

I worked most of my two decades in the Valley but also spent time outside of it. There is in many cases a vast gulf between the dev cultures. What the parent comment is describing I've seen many many times.

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