Earlier quoted context omitted.
Less sloppy in that it's clean and consistent looking but much more sloppy in the AI good looking non-sense way.
Just like compiler-generated machine code, then.
no, not like that at all.
AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?
761–770 of 778 posts
Re: AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?
#762Earlier 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…
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…
True, and the explanations about "solving big problems" are each engineer's personal brand and justification for having a job. I'm sure some of those people exist, but they probably aren't the ones doing it rote on forums.
Re: AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?
#763Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
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Re: AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?
#764Earlier quoted context omitted.
All fields are basically over as a long term career besides perhaps prostitutes and even there I'm not entirely sure. But the questions of how soon and by how much matter a lot. Being early is the same as being wrong a clever guy once said.
I hear you, but just to pedantic.. prostitution is certainly not a long term career either.. never has been. After 35, you're not going to find work as a sex worker..
Depends on your definitions, I guess, but look up people who get busted for performing sex acts at massage parlors.
Re: AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?
#765Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Such test filter out the obvious frauds. if you need garbage like leetcode to filter out "obvious frauds" you got a whole lot of problems in your company/team/...
A colleague of mine came to me for advice. He wanted one of those high dollar jobs at a well-known MegaCorp. He knew a leetcode test was used by them. I suggested that his top priority was to study the leetcode books for the next 3 weeks. I told him those three weeks would be the best ROI he'd ever make. He did so. He aced the test. He got the job with a huge offer. He agreed that the ROI was out of the park! P.S. I'…
All this proves is that BigCo puts a lot of value in these idiotic leetcode tests. It doesn’t imply at all that it gets rid of “obvious frauds”, and in fact seems to suggest the opposite given that someone was able to “ace” the test just by buying a book and studying it for three weeks.
Re: AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?
#766I'm sure everyone reading this article thinks of themselves as a good engineer.
Re: AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?
#767> 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…
This is why my theory is LLMs are self defeating in large orgs. Or worse terminal for the organisation.
For everyone adding value with LLMs there will be way more destroying value. If you roll a critical failure a mediocre LLM enhanced VP convinces the org to sail aggressively in the wrong direction.
Re: AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?
#768Do we yet have actual, irrefutable evidence of SWE job losses attributable to successful implementation of LLM coding agents? They've been around long enough and management has been horny enough about the whole thing long enough that we should be able to point to some notable examples.
I've seen examples of non-hiring: new teams that are staffed at half or quarter the headcount that they would have before LLMs. Are those job losses? Maybe not. But they are much lower hiring relative to the amount of software engineering output.
Re: AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?
#769Earlier quoted context omitted.
Really? Where do you live because in my country the opposite is true
In Germany, in this case selling shovels if you want to take the example literally is selling construction machines, or renting them, versus having guest workers digging the holes. Naturally we can't use figures of speech.
Are you aware AI companies are subsidizing usage and have negative revenue?
And now your comparison is inaccurate. I said whole application. So the correct one would be selling/renting construction vehicles vs building entire building and here selling/renting is maybe 10% of developer income.
Digging a hole is like making small code change and if you wish to continue using this analogy then tokens are digging a hole and selling entire applications (thing Software house do) is construction company building entire building
Second obviously deliver more cash and here AI premise starts to crack. AI can't deliver anything good, costs much more than developing team (Uber proved it) and even if you use it as hard as possible and it does what it suppose to deliver max 5% increase across the board
Re: AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?
#770Earlier quoted context omitted.
Doesn't this imply that, had your friend not taken your advice, he would have failed and thus been an "obvious fraud", but a mere 3 weeks transformed him from fraud to competent programmer?
The leetcode test is just a screening device. Passing it means you then go through the real interviews. Also, if someone is unwilling to do the work to pass the leetcode test, they likely don't have the ambition to get the high pressure jobs.
If a good candidate can do it in 3 weeks, then a middling one can do it in 10 weeks, and a bad one in 6 months of memorizing. They all pass the screen, but two are lower-quality, and the bad candidate is about as much of a waste of the "real" interview as a total fraud would be.
If the bar is that low, just use an accredited degree, certification, references, or a proctored quiz with questions like "define a linked list in < 3 sentences," and it would be just as effective at filtering the very lowest, while more pleasant for everyone involved and maybe cheaper. Crammable puzzles that don't represent real software engineering don't provide much more value than those filters would.