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AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?

blog.florianherrengt.com

731–740 of 773 posts

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

#731

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because the companies everyone claims are now obsolete are making a lot of money still doing the supposedly obsolete things?

Many of those companies like duolingo have already collapsed in stock price with YoY growth dropping off a cliff. It is happening, it just isn't instant.

And yet those companies aren't collapsing because it became easier to rewrite their software, but because llms themselves have replaced a core part of their business (such as translation or simple art).

Seems like so far the market is not convinced at all that SaaS companies as a whole are any more disruptable than before.

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

#732

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A large amount of programmers are hired just building crud apps. Display data from a database and write it back with a validation. Etc. There is very little innovation going on. And most companies do everything they can to stick to standard patterns, technologies etc where all the risk is removed and known in advance. Often "good" programmers are worse - they over complicate the architecture, go off on tangents, try…

Out of every single reason given for why the bootcamp era was justified the only one I believe is that there was so much focus on it because bigger players wanted to flood the market with cheap supply and drive salaries downward. This is not any different with offshoring before, and AI now.

You say it like it's a bad thing.

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

#733

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For one, the industry never did professionalize to begin with, certainly not in the way accountants, lawyers etc did. "Professionalize" is an interesting way to frame this. As Milton Friedman argued, occupational licensure is almost always pursued by the practitioners rather than consumers. The licensing boards are mostly run by practicing lawyers and CPAs, so you have practicing lawyers and CPAs determining who ca…

I, for one, am extremely happy that electricians and plumbers have to be licensed.

Sure, but are you happy about the requirements of that licensing? Requirements that have continually expanded to require more "experience" over the years. I know in my state it was originally 1 year of experience or completion of a tech diploma and then you had to take the licensing exam. Now it is 5 years of experience and a diploma can count for one of those years. Which of course has pushed prices to insane levels.

Are you happy that the license is much less a license to do the work and much more of a license to hire unlicensed people to do all the work.

And lastly are you happy that private equity can "hire" the licensed professional to hire 100s more unlicensed people to run a huge company with a catchy slogan?

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

#734
post #720

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it means he fooled the interviewers

I don't think he "fooled the interviewers." The point of the story is that he focussed down on what the company's culture decided was important.

It's like cramming for an exam. Yes you can get enough information in your short term memory to pass, even do well. But a year later (or a month) it's all gone. You never really knew it.

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

#735

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> The whole "learn to code" and software bootcamp craze always baffled me. Why? While the rest of your comment explains why the plan failed, it seems like it should be pretty obvious why business would try to attract an increased supply. Hint: It puts downward pressure on price. Same reason they are trying again with AI. > every other job I can think of at a similar salary level has entrance requirements ' Yes, the a…

> Hint: It puts downward pressure on price. Same reason they are trying again with AI.

You say it like it's a bad thing.

About occupational licensing for software: it's also a uniquely global market, so I'm not sure how any one economy moving ahead with occupational licensing would work, unless they also restricted what software you can import or use in the cloud.

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

#736
> You were never expected to understand every service and every database. But at least someone did and would explain it to you.

This hasn't been my experience. Especially when it comes to enterprise software, eventually everyone that was involved with the design of and iteration on a system will have left the company. Yet, often those systems need to continue running because they support "legacy" customers (who sometimes actually tend to be more economically valuable to the company than the customers on the shiny new system).

Before AI, in these cases you just had to dive into the code and start trying to understand it yourself from zero. Usually, you would come to a very limited understanding of the system, just enough to fix the latest bug or keep it running until it hit another issue.

I'm not sure why it's necessarily worse to rely on an agent to do this for you these days.

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

#737
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…

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…

Previously it felt like there was a lot more nerds who were in it for the interest instead of today for the career path and fast track higher salaries.

2010’s was when more traditional CS courses also started moving from traditional languages and content to JS etc…following industry demand.

A lot of tech conferences were pure tech. Now a lot of them are agile, soft skills based, introverted nerds pushed out.

It’s certainly a different place from the 2010’s.

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

#738
I'm simultaneously frustrated and I see a business opportunity - I now know that we senior folks are very far from replaceable - and soon there might be consulting to fix big problems. No one will say it's AI's fault necessarily - you'll just be living with painful complexity that works for a startup or an individual entrepreneur but not in an enterprise environment. To wit:

>The person adding Kafka should have been able to explain exactly why it was needed.

Here it is. People who don't know what they are doing are adding infrastructure layers they don't understand, can't envisage operationally in the future, and missing scalability. I'm seeing this. In fact I'm spending hours a week fighting it. I had to set up a call with a senior developer recently to explain why his prescriptive attempt to make infrastructure changes in his project can't be done with Claude like he did it.

It's playing wack-a-mole as the "velocity" has gone up of changes, and it's promulgated by every manner of product manager and senior developer under an attempt to please the brass.

>The person who built the feature should have been able to explain where the data came from without sending a link to a Claude conversation.

And they won't - because it's too embarrassing when you see what Claude responded with and someone failed to question.

We're in a new era, that's for sure.

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

#739

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…

> 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."

Any profession with scammers, con artists, and snake-oil sellers?

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

#740

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?

Liability for the professional that knows if they botch a job in horrendous fashion that they could lose the ability to continue practicing their profession.
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