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Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

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Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#731

Post by kj4211cash »

geodel wrote: post #156
KronisLV wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yes, about 2-5% of the time. There are also those for whom that percentage is higher, let’s say 6-50%. > I understand things and then apply my ability to formulate solutions The AI is coming for that too. You might just be lucky to be in circumstances that value your contributions or an industry or domain that isn’t well represented in the training data, or problem spaces too complex for AI. Not everyone is, not ev…

Agree. It is just like 2 totally separate groups are arguing. One very tiny slice of speciality/ rare industries where code is critical but overall small part of project costs. I can see if code / software is 5% of overall cost even heavy use of AI for code part is not moving the needle. So people in this group can feel confident in their indispensability. Second group is much larger and peddling CRUD / JS Frontends…

I agree with the 2 separate groups theory, but I don't buy that the group that produces "copy/paste junk" is the much larger group. I think in most mega-corps, there is a huge existing code base, there are huge organizational challenges, and there is huge hierarchy with most people not being the junior juniors. 90+% of the work is "not coding." Probably way, way more if we include the middle managers. At startups, there is a lot of "copy/paste junk" but also often a decent amount of push the boundary new stuff. I don't know. I've been in the industry for 8 years now and it's been really rare to see the actual coding being the bottleneck or even the thing that takes the majority of the time.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#732

Post by bborud »

hateful wrote: post #135
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…

Not sure where I first heard this, but I say it to my team all the time: "Programming is thinking, not typing"

A former colleague of mine used to work for a boss who would periodically stick their head into the office where the programmers were and yell "I can't hear typing! Why are you not working!?".

The reason I just remembered that is that the other day they proudly announced that everyone in their company would now be vibe-coding exclusively.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#733

Post by jerf »

suzzer99 wrote: post #645
jerf wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In 2020, there are two companies that are competitors with each other. They each employ 100 programmers to do their job, and we all know how those organizations operated; perpetually behind, each feature added generating yet more possible future features, we've all lived it and are still largely living it today. In 2026, both companies decide that AI can accelerate their developers by a factor of 10x. I'm not asserti…

The problem with this idea of feature backlog, at least everywhere I've worked, is what you really have is an idea backlog. You have some things people want to build, and maybe a business analyst or product owner has done a first pass. But they're far from the rubber-meets-the-road part where someone needs to write out a detailed spec based on the exact current state of the app/system, and the developers start asking…

An incorrect "reply" link, I think?

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#734

Post by bborud »

DeusExMachina wrote: post #721
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 th…

I'm not terribly worried. The reason I am not worried is that software isn't my only marketable skillset. That is deliberate. Even though I see myself as primarily a software engineer, in the past decade I've worked in areas that tend to be viewed as wildly different strata and domains.

And if the apocalypse comes, I'm actually not that bad at a handful of skilled blue collar jobs.

The people who should be worried are the ones with narrow skill-sets and no capacity for dealing with rapid change. Especially if those skills are shallow too.

But I wasn't talking about people. I was talking about companies. And the reason I'm not worried about companies going under is that they have gone all the time since the start of the industrial revolution. Yes, it happens faster and more violently today than before but neither the churn nor the reasons are all that new. They just need to be understood so you can deal with change rationally and without panicking.

It is a good idea to read up on historic innovation/disruption cycles and realize that they are nothing new. The only reason people think this is a new problem is that 50-100 years ago they used to take about as much time as your productive career. So people wouldn't need to understand how to deal with it. And every generation would be convinced that this is some unexpected and unique upheaval that only their generation has to deal with.

My stance is the only one that works well during disruption: you make sure you have more legs to stand on and you don't waste time fretting over things you can't change. If you find yourself out of options, you can only blame yourself.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#735

Post by pjmlp »

malfist wrote: post #286
cromka wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We've literally just started, what "over and over" do you refer to?

I've been told the past four years that AI is coming for my job. And thats just not true. Its no closer to that than it was 4 years ago.

I surely have seen jobs around me being replaced by AI tooling, it is getting closer in corporate consulting.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#736

Post by pjmlp »

truncate wrote: post #424
wartywhoa23 wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For those who claim to be developers who code no more than 5% of their time and resort to arguments like "we're already not writing machine code by hand for 50 years, how is AI different from a higher level language?", it's not commenting, it's shilling for the AI corpocracy on HN.

>> "we're already not writing machine code by hand for 50 years, how is AI different from a higher level language?" I never got that argument. Compilers are formally proven, deterministic algorithms . If you understand what compiler does, you can have pretty good idea what it will produce. If it doesn't do that, its a bug. Definition of correctness is well defined by semantic equivalence. LLMs are none of that. Its a…

Because compilers are only deterministic when using ahead of time compilation, without profiling data, and always the same set of compiler flags.

Introduce dynamic compilation, profiling data, optimization passes, multiple implementations, ML driven heuristics, and getting deterministic Assembly output from a compiler starts to get harder to achieve.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#737

Post by pjmlp »

fnordpiglet wrote: post #326
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…

Something missed in that computer science was a highly theory driven discipline where people were taught how to think critically about solving complex problems. Industry complained they weren’t teaching enough programming skills, so they dumbed down the thinking part and emphasized the vocational part. Now the vocational part is virtually useless, and the grounding of theory applied to complex problems is suddenly re…

This is kind of country specific, in many European countries the kind of university various in years and content required for a degree, depending if they focus on vocational or more generic high education.

Example, university versus polytechnic.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#738

Post by pjmlp »

foldr wrote: post #236
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…

I think the future is pretty up in the air in this respect, but my guess is that AI will just lead to another shift in the set of knowledge that a 'real programmer' is expected to have. I'm old enough to remember when people would make fun of web developers for 'programming' using HTML and JavaScript. And of course, back in the day, you couldn't be a real programmer unless you wrote assembly language. In a few years'…

Kind of ironic, given than OS implemented in high-level programming language trace back to 1958, with JOVIAL being one of the first systems programming languages.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#739

Post by pjmlp »

bluesnowmonkey wrote: post #411
bel8 wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But when a senior can do the job of 6 coworkers, what do you suppose will happen to the coworkers? In farming, those who were replaced by tractors did not keep their jobs. What is different now?

With farming, you couldn't just start your own farm, because it requires farmland, and there's only so much of that. But those 6 software engineers can start their own companies, fire up their own team of agents. There's no limit to how many companies can exist in the world.

Pity that as everyone is unemployeed, those companies don't have anyone to sell to.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#740

Post by Paradigm2020 »

Natfan wrote: post #66
aleph_minus_one wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My concern would be whether creating that software pays enough to keep up with skyrocketing costs of living. You might need to relocate to a place with much lower costs of living. This was the idea behind remote working discussed during COVID-19 times: - the company can pay less money because the employee is living at a much cheaper place than the expensive city where the company is located - on the other hand, eve…

but moving to a lower COL area can reduce that amount of public and private services one gets access to, no? network connectivity will, for example, likely be worse out in the sticks

Starlink / amazon something etc etc
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