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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?

#721

Post by hattmall »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #414
overgard wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 shit load of jobs could be taught to a useful level with a 4 month bootcamp. It's just that it's very easy to set up, scale, and monitor results for coding. It's the same with AI, AI isn't particularly good at coding compared to how good it could be at other tasks. It's just that by nature coding is easy to iterate, test, and verify. I've certainly seen AI produce impressive code that works but the actual quality of the code is abysmal.

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

#722

Post by nullsanity »

win311fwg wrote: post #696
breezybottom wrote: post #695

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

[dead]

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

#723

Post by codexon »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #671
codexon wrote: post #661

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The output is indistinguishable from manually written code.

I hope on HN of all places I don't need to explain the difference between "writing correct code" and "Software Engineering". We both know what a 20 year old million line legacy software needs.

Not everything needs to be amazon/google scale backed with things like sharded dbs or kubernetes.

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

#724

Post by johnnyanmac »

codexon wrote: post #723
johnnyanmac wrote: post #671

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope on HN of all places I don't need to explain the difference between "writing correct code" and "Software Engineering". We both know what a 20 year old million line legacy software needs.

Not everything needs to be amazon/google scale backed with things like sharded dbs or kubernetes.

Nope, not at all. But a million line codebase isn't close to Google scale. That's typical boring non-tech legacy code system scale. And I don't think I'm at a point where I'd want to vibe code my way though that and take responsibility for it.

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

#726

Post by toss1 »

groundzeros2015 wrote: post #627
toss1 wrote: post #612

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More credentialing and requirements would do plenty to curtail leadership incentive problems. First, as the sibling points out, it gives the licensed engineer a solid ground to stand on when refusing a stupid leadership order — "I'm not going to lose my license for that stupid idea", and a serious incentive to do so, as well as solid job prospects if he does get canned for it (because there's a limited pool of creden…

> it gives the licensed engineer a solid ground to stand on when refusing a stupid leadership order I disagree to the extent to which this is real leverage. It changes the language and approach, but not the outcome, Ask a civil engineer the degree to which they can fight their leadership on these grounds. > clearly cuts off huge numbers of would-be doctors who never pass the exams Yes the fallacy is that more exclusi…

Wow you have a relentlessly unrealistic view of things.

>>Ask a civil engineer the degree to which they can fight their leadership on these grounds. Both civil engineers and doctors both can and absolutely do refuse to sign off on unsafe situations.

That does not mean they detect them 100% of the time, or never cave to pressure, but they absolutely do. We just never hear about the incidents that didn't happen because a doctor or engineer forced the right solution or no action — precisely because nothing newsworthy happened. We DO hear about the ones that did happen, Therac-25, Mars Climate Orbiter loss, Cloudflare outage, it is endless

>>I think it actually selects against those who are bad at avoiding responsibility and not legally savvy.

You might think that, but clearly you have never read even the summaries of cases where doctors lost their licenses. Hint: it was not some mistake that could have been covered up by better schmoozing. If anything, the system is too lenient.

The rest isn't even worth the bytes to respond; just handwaving an attitude. There are very good arguments to not have licensing on software engineering but you are not making them

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

#727

Post by WalterBright »

tombert wrote: post #637
WalterBright wrote: post #492

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We never had any real body that could certify proficiency Good! > having to resort to leetcode and other such styles of interviewing Such test filter out the obvious frauds.

> Such test filter out the obvious frauds. I know everyone says that, but I really don't think that they do a good job filtering out shitty engineers. I have worked with plenty of incompetent people who managed to get past the leetcode challenge but are wholly unable to do anything useful involving software. I feel like what leetcode primarily tests is "does this person know how to use a hashmap in a way that you sho…

You might be surprised at how incompetent some engineers are. They get filtered out with the leetcode test. Of course, it doesn't filter them all out, and that's why there's a followup interview round.

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

#728

Post by eru »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #414
overgard wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

> 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 period and follow on licensure exams.

It's the great strength of software engineering as a profession that formal barriers to entry are so low.

You are right that good engineering is hard, and many people who went to these bootcamps didn't make it. But that doesn't mean we need more bureaucracy and paperwork to keep people out.

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

#729

Post by pbronez »

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…

Good talk, thanks for sharing! I’m trying something similar for personal project I’m hacking on.

Specifically, I’m spending a lot of time on the first few instances of a pattern that I hope to have the AI scale out for me. My thought is that I can provide an opinionated project structure, feel it out myself, then point the AI to those working examples in the future. Until then, I’m mostly just using ai as fancy autocomplete + domain research.

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

#730

Post by Animats »

unified101 wrote: post #716
Animats wrote: post #715

There's a more general problem. We need to figure out how to use LLMs and still have decent code quality. One possibility is to have firmer APIs for known components. APIs that come with the entry and exit conditions for proof of correctness. That gives an LLM a hard definition it can work to meet. This isn't as bad as it used to be. We may be able to use LLMs to create entry and exit conditions from specs written fo…

It's your code review process (with or without agents). If you don't hold this fort, the battle is lost, and the repo is going to devolve.

What I'm getting at was covered in an article yesterday about the end of abstraction. There's an argument being made for layer-free software, where everything is one big blob of code, created and understood only by an LLM. The software is modified only by re-prompting.

There are a lot of people edging around this concept, but it's not solid yet.

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