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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

#751

Post by therealpygon »

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 agree in some ways, but I think this also overlooks that your job might be like that, but most decidedly “developer” jobs are not all like what you say which is more Engineering. Many people are able to have a career making basic HTML website changes. Are they not developers? Will their job not potentially be replaced by an AI that can make that change in seconds?

It’s weird that people always seem to argue the extremes when reality is jumbled mess in the middle. Will developers lose jobs to AI? Without question. Will many “developer” jobs be eliminated because of that? Without question. Is it probably a really bad time to think you can go from your retail job to fixing people’s website as a lifetime career move? Yeah, probably not the best idea. Would it be smarter to focus on becoming a “Software Engineer” instead of a “Developer”? Yes usually. Does that mean it is a bad idea for EVERYONE to choose to become of developer? No, and that would be a dumb thing to argue.

We’re still going to need developers and definitely engineers, we are just going to need less of them in their current form, just like we needed less saddle makers, farriers and blacksmiths. We didn’t stop needing Horse Mechanics, we just needed less of them because we needed Car Mechanics. Some of those skills transferred, some didn’t.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#752

Post by ej88 »

tavavex wrote: post #615
bluesnowmonkey wrote: post #508

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah pretty much. Have you seen Polsia and its ilk? Maybe "trivial" would be too strong a word but... in 2026 it's not hard. That's my point. You couldn't tell an unemployed farm worker to go start their own farm. They probably don't have the land or substantial capital it takes. But an unemployed software engineer just doesn't need anything like that to go into a business built on AI.

This may seem like an important change that's making things different today, but it's not. Farms back in the day were constrained by supply, software today is constrained by demand. A farmer couldn't create a farm from nothing, but if you had one, you very likely were able to sell its products - everyone always wants to eat. That is in addition to the natural benefit of being able to use the food grown there to survi…

i would argue its the opposite

farming hit a ceiling because of demand

software today is heavily, heavily constrained by supply. demand is basically infinite for actually good software that solves problems people have (and people always have problems).

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#753

Post by BurningFrog »

jplusequalt wrote: post #589
BurningFrog wrote: post #435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 we double productivity per worker, we have twice as much wealth on average. That's not true. There are other factors at play such as demand. If we make the average IT worker twice as productive, that doesn't mean now every IT worker is being paid twice as much, because most users aren't going to care if there are twice as many options on the app store, or twice as many bug fixes per release.

Consumption in a society will always be roughly equal to production.

There are differences due to import/export balance, investments, government borrowing etc, but as a first approximation, if GDP increases by 10%, consumption will rise by a similar amount.

About your IT worker example: Let's say s/he produces $150k/year in value and is paid $140k. If AI makes them produce $300k of value, they may not automatically get a raise. But it becomes very attractive for another employer to hire them for $200k or $250k, or even $280k.

In the medium/long term, I don't see why wages would keep proportional to produced value.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#754

Post by xyzzyz »

lanstin wrote: post #612
rayiner wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The balance of power is dictated by economic facts, not by organizing or politics. Auto workers in 1950 weren't better organized than auto workers in 2026. They just had more leverage because they weren't competing with auto workers in China. Likewise, Silicon Valley isn't paying people writing web apps $$$ because those workers are organized. They are doing it because they don't have a feasible alternative. If AI en…

Are you saying that auto labor unions can't go into other places and organize the people there for higher salaries and less wretched conditions? Or that organizing doesn't increase the power of the hard working people? Economic facts are partially determined by human factors such as the supply curve for labor and information flow amongst sellers or buyers for various goods.

Yes, and by shifting the labor supply curve you can make the laborers worse off, because it will often shift the supply curve of the product they’re making. If labor unions make you pay your workers more, you might need to raise the prices, which will make you less competitive, and reduce your sales, which can result in layoffs, or in preventing new workers from gaining employment.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#755

Post by ElevenLathe »

siriusastrebe wrote: post #497
jhrmnn wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing, it’s that same story again. Industrialization turned peasants to blue collar workers by mechanizing agriculture. Then blue collar workers were turned to white collar workers by mechanizing all manual labor. Now AI is coming for white collar workers by mechanizing intellectual labor. The big question is what will white collar workers turn into.

The globalized economy has demonstrated that a single country and supply the majority of the world's manufacturing needs, at least for a while. Taiwan creates most of the worlds semiconductors. China makes the majority of everything else. Silicon Valley created a majority of the tech market's value. But there's a cap where the world has enough stuff at least in the short term, and growth slows. Humans only need a cer…

Why would companies want to grow if there is no more demand by consumers? I understand that "b2b" exists, but surely all production and commerce is ultimately about satisfying (or creating) demand for consumption? Why would companies want to keep growing if there is no demand for their products?

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#756

Post by munksbeer »

didgetmaster wrote: post #656
CyberDildonics wrote: post #595

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI is decent at solving problems that lots of people already solved a long time ago.

Too many people believe that AI is going to come up with elegant solutions to problems that no one has ever solved before. Maybe someday, but for now it seems to be good at finding a solution that may be hidden away somewhere in stack overflow. If it just isn't there, then you are out of luck.

There is almost nothing new in computer programming. 99.999% of any code most of us on this forum write will be repeating patterns that have been written thousands of times before.

Tell a coding agent what your new thing needs to do, give it the absolute constraints, max response times, max failover times, and so on, tell it which technologies it has access to or could use, and then tell it to spend a lot of time going over and over the design, coming up with an initial X number of designs (I use 5), and then it must self criticise each one of them and weigh them up, narrow down to three, before finally presenting those three options to the user.

Now you read the options, understand them, realise that the AI has either converged on something very sensible, or it has missed something, so you tell it what it missed and iterate. Or it nailed something good, you pick the option you prefer, and tell it to come up with a more fleshed out high level design, describing the flow and behaviour deeply (NO CODE REFERENCES!). Then once you're happy, tell it to use that and write a comprehensive coding plan. Tell it specifically what coding patterns you prefer (you should have these in your AGENTS.md file already), what patterns to avoid (single threaded? multi-threaded? Avoid gc? How you typically deal with error conditions, etc etc).

Then have it start iteratively working on the coding plan, and it *MUST* have a strong feedback loop. If there is no feedback loop initially, I tell it to build one. It must be able to write very fluent integration tests (not just unit tests). It must be able to run the app and read the logs.

Do all this and I bet you get a better result that 80% of developers out there. Coding agents are extremely good when used well.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#757

Post by johnthescott »

timacles wrote: post #623
BurningFrog wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The history of the last 250 years is inventing new professions as old ones are automated away. I expect that to continue.

This is the kind of sleep walking that’s about to walk humanity into the next dark ages. My parents say a lot of stuff like this. They tend to gloss over the untold suffering, great depressions and world wars that took us to get here. The planets resources were also not in risk of running out. As the world is min maxed by billionaires, it nice the lower classes are drained of all capital, they will soon move to fight…

> They tend to gloss over the untold suffering, great depressions and world wars that took us to get here..

spot on. you gotta wear shades to survive, future so bright.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#758

Post by suzzer99 »

mplanchard wrote: post #723
suzzer99 wrote: post #643

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

Yeah I should caveat I'm talking about development where the ultimate outcome is the web or web-apps (iOS, Android, smart TVs). Everything is still changing so fast in that field, an architect who doesn't code gets out of touch very quickly IME. It's possible an architect makes more sense in other more mature fields.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#759

Post by pydry »

powvans wrote: post #349
estebank wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of the time is spent figuring what the right thing to do is, not writing the implementation. Sometimes the process of writing the implementation surfaces new considerations about what the right thing is, but still, producing text to feed to a compiler is not the bulk of the work of a software engineer. It is to unearth requirements and turn them into repeatable software.

Feels like lately most of the time is spent arguing about or at least worrying about whether or not AI is going to replace all software developers.

Or dealing with the idiotic fallout of somebody who sucks at coding or even has never coded in their life trying to make that happen.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#760

Post by roncesvalles »

avador wrote: post #618
roncesvalles wrote: post #581

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's only if you do agentic coding. I use LLMs in the following ways: 1. Copy-pasting code into the web chat UI and asking for something (bugfix, add a feature, refactor, explain, review it etc), including entire source code files. A $20/mo Gemini subscription goes a long way (never been rate-limited). I only use the highest model. I often just copy-paste the entire source file between 3 backticks. 2. Cursor Tab. I…

I _think_ what you’ve said is “go shallow, not deep”. That is, don’t let the walk you make inside the latent space a long one. Twenty-five short and peppered steps, from de novo, is better than one long, protracted stew. Is that accurate?

Well yeah. If you know what you're doing, why would you let the AI take control?
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