711–720 of 809 posts
The truth is that software engineering, as a profession, is not even a full hundred years old. Even if someone spent their all career with it, it has probably changed so much over time that it became a completely different job.
So far, we have barely scratched the surface.
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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
> the societal pressure on redistribution will rise. And then we'll see if the wealthy and powerful people will just send automated killer drones after the poors, because culling us would be more preferable than sharing their wealth
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Also, it's not necessarily true that there will be other great careers available. This seems to just be an assumption people are making. Of course, there are jobs that will still require human labour for some time yet, but in reality a lot jobs that require physical human labour are now done in other parts of the world where labour is cheaper. Those which cannot be exported like plumbing or waitressing only have limi…
+1 50% of the workforce was in farming near the end of the 1800's. Today, 2% 40% of the workforce was in manufacturing early to mid 1900's. Today 8% 60+% of the current workforce is white collar. What will it be in 20 years ? LLM's are only a couple of years old, we have no idea where this will go. Maybe it will be a big hallucination, maybe we are looking at the very early version of farm and manufacturing machines.…
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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.
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Most of the time is spent figuring what the right thing to do is, not writing the implementation. Sometimes the process of writing the implementation surfaces new considerations about what the right thing is, but still, producing text to feed to a compiler is not the bulk of the work of a software engineer. It is to unearth requirements and turn them into repeatable software.
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.
If you care about maintainability and quality (and I include maintaining using LLM based tools) then you need to understand what it does (in doing so you will find lots of things for it to fix - you'll probably find that the architecture it's chosen is not right for what you want too).
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Are you, perchance, assuming that since you spend most of your time struggling with actual code, this is so for everyone else? Or are you saying that I'm lying. That I am secretly hammering away at my keyboard while pretending not to? No, writing code hasn't been how I spend most of my time for many decades now.
Are you a staff level engineer that has dozens of other engineers banging away at code projects you help define?
Less capable engineers think in terms of implementing runtime execution and solving runtime errors.
More capable engineers think in terms of designing the most effective architecture and abstractions for maintainability, performance, and robustness.
I have a project I am working on, It has not compiled in months, but that's ok, since the real work, for me, is in the architectural design.
Yes, getting it to actually run takes some time and effort, but for me that is almost mechanical now.
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…
Judging by how many day to day tech products in my life are buggy, slow or user-hostile there can't be more than 50-100 tech companies actually innovating, right?
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…
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I highly doubt that a significant portion of farm labor became salesman or researchers. Builders? I could see that but robots already replaced a portion of those too.
less jobs creation is a almost certain for tech, but some people with high IQ get wayy more things done, they already do. This will spread to robots and other areas because robots are not automous yet, maybe will take decade(s). but meanwhile few operators will lead them in a more productive way? That's my bet. It's a clear, logical process with iterations. A lot of things are getting faster with AI, except energy pr…
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+1 50% of the workforce was in farming near the end of the 1800's. Today, 2% 40% of the workforce was in manufacturing early to mid 1900's. Today 8% 60+% of the current workforce is white collar. What will it be in 20 years ? LLM's are only a couple of years old, we have no idea where this will go. Maybe it will be a big hallucination, maybe we are looking at the very early version of farm and manufacturing machines.…
There’s over a century of history of workers “caring” and fighting back.
I don't think there was a lot of support, outside the farming industry, to prevent machines from taking over peoples jobs even though 1/2 of the workforce were farmers. Similar for manufacturing.
And I do not believe the answer to those changes was to do farming or manufacturing by "hand". I also do not believe that the answer to AI is to not use it.
But, in the same way, I also do not believe that people will really care that call center workers will be replaced, that designers will be replaced, that many programmers will be replaced, that most admins and middle managers (anyone who pushes paperwork, creates reports, that just communicate and report on work "progress") will be replaced.
I also believe that these workers will get retrained and find better jobs is a fallacy - because it has not happened in the past. Farmers may have done this, but those who lost their well paid manufacturing, most lost their place in society. Blue collar workers in Detroit are not today's laptop warriors.
We will be undergoing a fundamental change in how society functions. It is quite possible the end result will be good, or at least looked at as good. But there was a lot of pain in the previous transitions, and the distribution of "winners" and "losers" will undergo significant change.