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

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#721

Post by DeusExMachina » Tue, May 12, 2026, 10:48 AM UTC

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…

> Natural selection will take care of them in due course.

While you are seemingly not at the moment, some day you might be at the receiving end of that "natural selection" in ways that seriously impact your remainint time on the planet.

In that case you might reconsider your stance, and especially question how natural is the selection of a few powerful rich people depriving others of their way to earn a living and their way to draw meaning from their lives.

The AI revolution keeps getting compared to the industrial revolution, but people keep forgetting the consequences of that one.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#722

Post by braebo » Tue, May 12, 2026, 10:57 AM UTC

bilbo0s wrote: post #212

rayiner wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Which is true, but it’s true as long as it’s not true. It also isn't true. The story of the last 50 years has been that technology, especially computer and communications technology, has facilitated the concentration of wealth. The skilled work got computerized, or outsourced to India or China. That left U.S. workers with service jobs where they have much lower impact on P&L and thus much less leverage. In my field…

> It's not clear to me how that's sustainable If it makes you feel better, I'm pretty sure it isn't sustainable. (But I'm not an economist so take that with a block of salt.) I don't think anyone has the answers. It's just some of us are honest enough to concede we have no answers, while others promote an answer that aligns best with their belief system. "It'll all work out." "It's the immigrants/blacks/jews/whatever…

Socialism has been the answer since I was born in the 90s and the V shaped economy took hold.

We have enough resources for everyone to have food, shelter, education, and healthcare without the need to extract value from their labor.

All of these problems are self inflicted wounds. The solution is for humanity to stop stabbing itself and care for itself instead.

The solution is to let go of greed and embrace our humanity.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#723

Post by mplanchard » Tue, May 12, 2026, 11:17 AM UTC

suzzer99 wrote: post #643

robot-wrangler wrote: post #632

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Part of the practical degradation of traditional programmers over time has always been concentration and deep calculation, just like in chess. Fortunately SWEs have the architect path, which frequently rewards having lots of deep intuition even as the details of calculation continue to change. So one question that's urgent but unknowable until we get there is.. are we going to get good architects if they don't come…

A software architect who doesn't actually code is worse than useless imo, because they drag actual developers down, forcing them to implement their Powerpoint apps. I say that having worked in the architecture group at one of largest companies in the world. "I don't care if the app is a synchronous multi-page form with zero no need for websockets. It must have them!" (because it says so on my slide)

I used to think this, and I’m sure there are plenty of bad architects who add net-negative value, but having worked on some extremely difficult systems as an IC, I would have given anything to have future me able to hand down a scalable architecture from on high, vetted by past experience and domain familiarity.

Not having that, I developed the knowledge myself through trial and error, but we would have saved a lot of time, money, and stress doing it right the first time.

In general, I think this kind of “architect bad” take underestimates the cost and the stress of being responsible for a system that ultimately isn’t a great fit for the domain, and needing to balance hacking another fix onto it vs migrating to what now know is the right thing.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#724

Post by le-mark » Tue, May 12, 2026, 11:40 AM UTC

rTX5CMRXIfFG wrote: post #679

i_love_retros wrote: post #620

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bro group B might as well write the code themselves. this is getting silly

Dear god no, I actually want AI to write the code that integrates my unit-testable abstractions into the existing spaghetti. I don’t care how it does it, the thing just needs to work. The moron that wrote the mess didn’t care enough to begin with, why should I? But all work moving forward must only be made of the good stuff Not silly

The great thing about spaghetti is you only have to be as smart as the person(s) who wrote it; there’s generally a self enforced bound on how obtuse it can be.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#725

Post by le-mark » Tue, May 12, 2026, 11:43 AM UTC

jayd16 wrote: post #77

giobox wrote: post #36

Anecdotally, it feels like something materially changed in the US software hiring market at the start of this year to me. It feels like more and more businesses are taking a wait and see approach to avoid over-investing in human capital in the next few years. It also feels like the hiring "signal", which was always weak before, is just completely gone now, when every job you do advertise receives over 500 LLM written…

Honestly, AI doesn't feel like it's affecting hiring needs from the trenches. We don't have engineers sitting on their hands because AI wrote up everything the leadership could imagine. Instead, we get an economy that feels like it's on the cusp of a fall or at the very least a roller coaster. Poor tax incentives to hire. ZIRP is long gone. And the hiring managers are overrun with slop. But bosses are happy to say it…

> We don't have engineers sitting on their hands because AI wrote up everything the leadership could imagine.

The idea of leadership knowing what they want is laughable, always has been. If anything AI will expose them as the bottleneck they’ve always been.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#726

Post by datsci_est_2015 » Tue, May 12, 2026, 11:49 AM UTC

pear01 wrote: post #682

thinkthatover wrote: post #573

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really don't like this framing - it's hard to short a market at the best of times, let alone when governments have a vested interest in tech being too big to fail to compete in the global economic arms race - see Intel's stock in the past few months. I agree with you both - undoubtedly there are still massive gains to be made with the frontier models we have today with tooling and iteration, yet I do not believe th…

Just remember you don't need AGI to see massive societal change. Certainly not mass layoffs. AGI is not the bar. By the time we all agree AGI has come the world will have already changed. You just need AI to be just good enough to win the tradeoff over a human employee. Just take your average office. Then ask yourself if the bar is really that high. AGI strikes me as an extremely nebulous concept. Better to just list…

> Just take your average office. Then ask yourself if the bar is really that high.

How many years away do you think we are from a “concierge” AI that can do the menial tasks handled by most personal assistants / program managers? Booking flights and hotels and coordinating employee availability?

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#727

Post by coldtea » Tue, May 12, 2026, 12:34 PM UTC

KalMann wrote: post #388

coldtea wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but not all of it, because it is actually a statistical machine with context limit. And the human mind is not?

I can give you the exact mathematical formula used to statistically optimize the output of a neural network from input examples. Can you do the same for the brain?

Not atm, but does it matter?

Is it similar, even if much simpler, of the sort of process that goes on there too? That's the important question.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#728

Post by laughing_man » Tue, May 12, 2026, 12:34 PM UTC

dvsfish wrote: post #574

laughing_man wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Yes, but if/when that happens, it won't just affect software engineers. An AI that can do that can replace any white collar worker. Yes. Yes, that's exactly what we're going to see, and more swiftly than people are generally comfortable with. What are we going to do with all those cubicle dwellers?

a new paradigm of 3 day work weeks. share the salary of the days off with those less automatable, and work to automate everyone. I wish some sort of dicussion like this could happen where the workers of the world get to see some of the gains of a new technology more immediately. If "the state" wants to maintain legitimacy and protect its citizenry (one of the primary promises of a state) to avoid a period of social u…

I don't think it will happen. For one thing, it hasn't in the US since the introduction of the forty hour work week in 1940.

But beyond that, I don't think most people want a three day work week. They would rather work five days and get the extra money. I worked at a company that did government contracting. We had a couple quarters without much in the way of orders, so instead of laying people off like you'd normally see in that situation, the company decided to go to a four day week, with a commensurate cut in pay.

I was thrilled, as a young single guy, to get Fridays off. I rented a room in someone's house and hit my monthly nut in about two weeks. But most of the people I worked with hated it. Some of them quit. A lot of them both needed the money and also had no idea what to do with themselves on that extra day.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#729

Post by coldtea » Tue, May 12, 2026, 12:35 PM UTC

malfist wrote: post #490

Animats wrote: post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They can make it unnecessary for you to understand. Consider hash tables. Nobody implements a hash table by hand any more. I've written some, but not in this century. Optimal hash table design is a specialist subject. Do you know about robin hood algorithms? Changing the random number generator's seed to discourage collision attacks? A basic hash table starts to slow down around 70% full. Modern hash tables can get a…

That's obviously not what I'm talking about. If you're asking an AI to write an optimal hash table algorithm, something is clearly wrong. I'm talking specifically about understanding the business domain and problem you are trying to solve.

>I'm talking specifically about understanding the business domain and problem you are trying to solve.

And that's what people use AI everyday to help with, so?

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#730

Post by mbgerring » Tue, May 12, 2026, 12:36 PM UTC

jhrmnn wrote: post #467

mbgerring wrote: post #455

I don’t understand why so many people are convinced that “this time is different.” New tools raise the ceiling of what’s possible. New jobs emerge at the limit of what’s possible with new tools. The jobs doing what we do today will disappear. New jobs with greater complexity and specialization will emerge. I have watched this happen in the software industry in my lifetime. I expect that it will continue to happen.

This can’t be sustainable, there must be a limit in human biology as to how complex jobs we can handle. More and more people will fall under that threshold.

I think there’s probably a limit to given technologies of social organization, but not biology.

I think most people have more potential than they’re ever allowed to reach, and that capitalism is indifferent to the social structures it destroys. I don’t think neoliberal capitalism was the end of history, or that returning to feudalism is the answer, but we’re probably going to have to do something different to avoid social collapse in my lifetime.