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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

#741

Post by pjmlp »

koonsolo wrote: post #710
insane_dreamer wrote: post #640

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For software projects, there is always more work to do. sure, but there is not more work that people will pay you to do; that's the important question

Software developers get paid to crunch out as much code as possible. If you work twice as fast, do you think your employer will let you slack off a bit because they ran out of work? What really happens is that your bucket gets filled with more work, and now you are as busy as before. Or did someone else got fired because now you were working twice as fast as them?

Nope, in many countries software developers are office workers like everyone else, there is no salary tied to lines of code.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#742

Post by Paradigm2020 »

bluGill wrote: post #190
passivepinetree wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ignoring the preference of people generally wanting to live in HCOL areas, this only works if every company hires equally from LCOL areas. One of the benefits of living in a HCOL area is access to the job market it provides. It's much easier to get hired for a software position living in San Francisco than it is living in Deming, New Mexico.

More importantly, in San Francisco, there are a lot more opportunities than in coming. I've never been to either city (i'm not going to come to the conference I was at because I never left the hotel.) however, I can still tell you confidently that if you have a weird hobby, you're much lower than you can find other people with that interest, stores that sell the things you need to complete the hobby, and all those ot…

For the gilded class everything is available where everything is for sale.

For the not so gilded class that can get a job in a lcol area that allows them to actually own a home and have emergency savings the lack of cricket won't even appear on their mind (~also mark twain convincing others to pay him to paint.)

Re: stores that sell it well there's this thing called amazon.

Anyway. I feel like most people here are just afraid of going down the ladder in term of remuneration... A ladder that starting from the 70s got shittier for most...

First they came for the guy working 11h days working a blue collar job and I didn't say a thing because I was white collar...

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#743

Post by Paradigm2020 »

passivepinetree wrote: post #120
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…

Ignoring the preference of people generally wanting to live in HCOL areas, this only works if every company hires equally from LCOL areas. One of the benefits of living in a HCOL area is access to the job market it provides. It's much easier to get hired for a software position living in San Francisco than it is living in Deming, New Mexico.

Most of the time it's hcol areas because the gentry decided to nimby those who came after them...

And the ones who managed anyway to break through that (because the gentry needed some cash and built some extra expensive houses/ condos to try and keep the riff raff at buy...) Felt they had worked hard and became nimby'ers themselves because housing is not a humane thing ... It's an investment that has to grow grow grow...

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#744

Post by ChrisRR »

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…

10% writing code. 90% reading and understanding code

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#745

Post by timacles »

BurningFrog wrote: post #435
wartywhoa23 wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What in the current state of world affairs outside of IT do you think is indicative of that potential for huge improvements in human standard of living?

It's what I mentioned: If we double productivity per worker, we have twice as much wealth on average. I know there are angry people convinced that this will all be consumed by billionaires and jews, but historically that is not at all the track record of the last 250 years, and I expect that to continue.

If you are going to bring up history you should really look into what it took to redistribute wealth from oligarchs in the past.

The fact that oligarchy now has more resources than ever in the history of humankind, a means to mass surveillance and generating mass propaganda, those wealth redistributions are looking much MUCH harder to accomplish.

Yea, historically it will inevitably happen. Realistically it will be after the new version of fuedalism and dark ages. So strap in for the next 400 years aren’t looking too good

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#746

Post by Backslasher »

Referring purely to the article and not to the title (which is hard, because I see a lot of people are, and it is tempting), I can say that I disagree with 1 (Using AI means you don’t learn as much from your work).

At least personally, using codegen LLMs allows me to step into areas I'm completely unfamiliar with, produce value, and learn new things along the way. I just made changes to a FOSS Android app I'm using, and I'm relatively inexperienced in mobile. However, now I know soe Kotlin keywords, I know a bit about the UI libs, and know better how to build and test Android code.

So I think I don't learn less, maybe I learn the things that interest me.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#747

Post by agnishom »

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…

This is a bit of a strawman. When people say "writing code", they don't necessarily mean [pressing the keys on the keyboard that produces the necessary bytes in a text file].

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#748

Post by mecHacker »

snvzz wrote: post #697
kasey_junk wrote: post #592

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On one of my very first jobs in around 2000 I got paired with a much more experienced software engineer. He’d been a pro since the early 70s. I was stoked to learn from him. On like my fourth day he said “now I’m going to teach you the thing that helped me the most in my career…” I waited, ready for the received wisdom. And he said “always number your punch cards so if you drop them they will be easy to put back into…

That conversation seems like he was covertly teaching you about linked lists.

Or perhaps a peek into how fast the Software-engineering is changing that what works for you now may be irrelevant in future, and hence be prepared to be adaptive!

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#750

Post by tavavex »

keybored wrote: post #709
tavavex wrote: post #544

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like by the time the societal pressure starts rising in any major way, it won't matter anymore. By that point, the people who will profit will become gods with a prepared response for every action the lower classes could take.

I feel like this subthread is full of passive acceptance of defeat. How many years did it take for HN to go from “worker unions bad because I make a lot of money” to “Of course there is a capitalist/worker war going on and in fact the capitalists might become technology-assisted gods”? I guess we’re all vulgar marxists when we think it’s too late to fight back. Where did the can-do hustler attitude go? Only applicabl…

Sometimes it almost feels like there's more than one person on HN holding more than one opinion.

I'm from the younger, lower end of the job market, far from the average HN user. You could accuse me of being excessively cynical. That's what happens when the systems you assumed would be there tell you to get bent the moment it's your turn to enter the job market. There's very few people my age I know who aren't angry at something. What you can't accuse me of is hypocrisy. I was never in the ranks of the SV money-above-all billionaire-loving population that's so common here, and I never wanted to join them. All I wanted was a career in something I enjoyed doing and an ability to sustain myself. I really don't understand why I am the one person you decided to turn your snarky, enraged tirade towards.

And it doesn't matter that LLMs can't act on their own. You don't need to literally replace every worker to the last one to get to the place I was talking about. A productivity boost that leads to 20-30% of all white collar workers losing their job would be horrific, and it would only get worse from there. That seems entirely possible to me. Nothing I'm talking about is particularly insane, it's all just a continuation of what's already been happening, with the same people ruling over it.

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