Following this logic, mathematicians disappear first.
Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career
701–710 of 809 posts
Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career
#702[dead]
Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career
#703Wage suppressing propaganda btw
Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career
#704Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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
That table tennis robot is not conscious. That table tennis robot does one thing well. A human is capable of far more. There is far more going on for a human playing table tennis than a robot. It doesn't matter if the table tennis robot plays table tennis better, it can't also play hocket, soccer, football, basketball, chess, polo, baseball, or many other things one human can do.
The human condition is nothing but a massive amount of calculations under the hood. You don't feel it, or understand it, but it's there. Everything in nature is math, every physical phenomena has a cause and effect rooted in mathematics, and it's no surprise that humans are great at subconsciously calculating myriad things on-the-fly, as life is happening around us.
Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career
#705Just stop calling everyone a software engineer. You can be a script kiddie, coder, developer - but all of those are not engineers. Engineering is much more than just writing the code. There is a reason why you can earn a degree in engineering - not saying a degree is automatically making you an engineer or that it's even needed.
Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career
#706Was it ever a lifetime career? Haven't most people looked around and asked themselves where are all the 50+ engineers? They basically don't exist in large numbers. Ageism is real in this industry. You either save up enough money to retire early, switch into management, or get forced out of the industry eventually. AI is just accelerating the trend. I see very few junior engineers resisting AI. I see a LOT of staff+ e…
Managers are being slammed - FB, Amazon and recently Cloudflare and Coinbase. New grads are being slammed, "because LLMs can do that work." No new folks, no managers, and no olds. What a delightful career we've chosen for ourselves.
Feels like musical chairs. We’ll see how long until it’s just a few oligarchs with their robot software teams
Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career
#707Earlier quoted context omitted.
And before long you have a solution that is made up of a thousand pieces of spaghetti that neither you nor anyone else understands. And when your solution becomes too brittle to use, cannot be maintained, or fails catastrophically, then what? Just hope that's someone else's problem?
Refactoring is cheap too, but you have to read your code and know when to stop and ask the agent to refactor, rewrite, adopt or change libs, fix issues presented by linters and code quality scanners, change abstractions and rethink the architecture. It's never been easier to replace chunks of code with sane software patterns, but you have to have a feel for those patterns. And also understand what's under the hood. Y…
Refactoring is not cheap when you take into account the cost of not breaking things.
Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career
#708Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are jobs with limited work, and jobs with unlimited work. Since your farming land is limited, after the job is done, there is no more work. For software projects, there is always more work to do. It's an arms race between competitors. Imagine you fire developers to maintain your speed, and your competitor keeps their people to go faster. Good luck to you!
There will always be more work that could be done, certainly. What’s uncertain, however, is whether the work that remains to be done is valuable enough that it makes sense to pay someone an engineer’s salary to do it. In your analogy, your competitors who keep their people could just as easily end up bankrupt.
If your competitor can deliver more features faster and with higher quality, I don't think it's them that will end up bankrupt.
Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career
#709Earlier quoted context omitted.
When no work is safe from mechanization, surely the value of labor wrt capital must fall, and the societal pressure on redistribution will rise. The ultimate outcome of technological progress is either extreme inequality or massive redistribution
I feel like by the time the societal pressure starts rising in any major way, it won't matter anymore. By that point, the people who will profit will become gods with a prepared response for every action the lower classes could take.
I feel like this subthread is full of passive acceptance of defeat.
How many years did it take for HN to go from “worker unions bad because I make a lot of money” to “Of course there is a capitalist/worker war going on and in fact the capitalists might become technology-assisted gods”? I guess we’re all vulgar marxists when we think it’s too late to fight back.
Where did the can-do hustler attitude go? Only applicable for looking out for number one?
But now that we are all, at least the non-millionaires here, in the same boat? Curious sudden onset of catatonia
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To countermand the insane negativity for a second: LLMs are brains in a vat and therefore cannot by themselves do any tasks that goes beyond simulating keyboard & mouse in front of a computer screen.
Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career
#710Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are jobs with limited work, and jobs with unlimited work. Since your farming land is limited, after the job is done, there is no more work. For software projects, there is always more work to do. It's an arms race between competitors. Imagine you fire developers to maintain your speed, and your competitor keeps their people to go faster. Good luck to you!
> For software projects, there is always more work to do. sure, but there is not more work that people will pay you to do; that's the important question
Software developers get paid to crunch out as much code as possible. If you work twice as fast, do you think your employer will let you slack off a bit because they ran out of work?
What really happens is that your bucket gets filled with more work, and now you are as busy as before. Or did someone else got fired because now you were working twice as fast as them?