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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

#771

Post by kingleopold »

Schiendelman wrote: post #719
kingleopold wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

less jobs creation is a almost certain for tech, but some people with high IQ get wayy more things done, they already do. This will spread to robots and other areas because robots are not automous yet, maybe will take decade(s). but meanwhile few operators will lead them in a more productive way? That's my bet. It's a clear, logical process with iterations. A lot of things are getting faster with AI, except energy pr…

Why do you think less jobs creation is certain? We have more jobs now than we did before tech...

if AI get advanced, it only makes certain % of the engineers and related jobs wayy more productive, not everyone. This is already happening, it will grow from here or AI and LLMs stop advancing

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#772

Post by throwaway74628 »

vineyardmike wrote: post #169
insane_dreamer wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you described are senior developers and system architects. Junior developers spend most of their time writing code (when they're not forced to attend pointless standups, because Agile/blah/blah) > The developers who still think their job is about writing code will perhaps not have a job in the future. So you're saying the same thing everyone else is saying. SWEs won't go away, but they will be greatly reduced, b…

> How will Sr Devs in the future be created? As an extreme example, maybe we’ll see long-running internships and trainings like doctors experience. Doctors don’t start their career until ~12+ years of prep and training. Pragmatically, software development has a lot of examples of teenagers making apps and college students building software companies. In the 12 years it takes for training, low-knowledge workers could…

[flagged]

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#773

Post by Schiendelman »

kingleopold wrote: post #771
Schiendelman wrote: post #719

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you think less jobs creation is certain? We have more jobs now than we did before tech...

if AI get advanced, it only makes certain % of the engineers and related jobs wayy more productive, not everyone. This is already happening, it will grow from here or AI and LLMs stop advancing

Everyone always assumes this, and it's always wrong. There is an infinite amount of work to do, and the more complex that work gets, the MORE people get employed.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#774

Post by avador »

roncesvalles wrote: post #760
avador wrote: post #618

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Well, if it works on step one, then why not step two? Where would different folks draw the line? My grandparents might continue on a while, whereas I would not. But if it also “works” on step two for me, should I take a third?

What counts as “works” is the important bit, I think.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#775

Post by anon84873628 »

WorldMaker wrote: post #761
anon84873628 wrote: post #678

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you explain how you "know" two things are related? If I ask you the similarities between a cat and a dog, is your answer based solely on an understanding of their genetic phylogeny and how those genes express traits? Grouping vectors in concept space is exactly how you create semantic understanding. The proof is in how good they are at creating semantically valid text. The fact that it took massive amounts of dat…

> is exactly how We don't know that. It seems like great hubris to declare we know how the human brain works. You are asking me to explain how we know things and then telling me we've already figured it out in the same breath, and that's hilarious. It doesn't take massive amounts of language data to train a baby human. It is almost entirely just: "Look. Here's a cat. Can you say cat? Cats go meow." "Over here, your a…

We do mostly know how the brain works at this level of detail, and it is akin to Principal Component Analysis. There are only so many ways it could work, unless you believe in dualism. My question was rhetorical. All you've described with the other stuff is a "multi-modal" model (and ignoring all of the "biological pre-training" that took place through millennia of evolution). The interesting (and perhaps surprising to some people) thing is how well pure text training can compensate for the lack of other senses.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#776

Post by [deleted] »

Schiendelman wrote: post #773
kingleopold wrote: post #771

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if AI get advanced, it only makes certain % of the engineers and related jobs wayy more productive, not everyone. This is already happening, it will grow from here or AI and LLMs stop advancing

Everyone always assumes this, and it's always wrong. There is an infinite amount of work to do, and the more complex that work gets, the MORE people get employed.

[deleted]

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#777

Post by truncate »

pjmlp wrote: post #736
truncate wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> "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.

You are right about that but that's talking about what you generate but not what the output does. My point is that the compilers still designed to preserve semantic equivalence. semantic equivalence makes sense here because there are semantics well defined for both input and output. That bit is supposed to be deterministic. If something breaks that that is a bug.

I just don't think comparing with compilers is a good argument.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#778

Post by pickleRick243 »

dakiol wrote: post #324

We're forgetting one thing: we (mere engineers) have control over nothing. The vast majority of us are at the mercy of executives and investors. Before AI we had some sort of grip because our skills weren't so much a commodity, and yeah, dealing with code and systems architecture and data and distributed systems wasn't that easy. Now AI is a tool not for us but for the higher-ups, they can finally commoditize softwar…

This happens whenever a disruptive technology is introduced to a field and I will never get over the irony of a software engineer (in a profession whose entire goal is to automate tasks) not noticing the hypocrisy.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#779

Post by pickleRick243 »

youknownothing wrote: post #641

People who think that "software engineering" and "writing code" are the same thing will indeed be out of a job. People who understand the difference will continue to thrive. Thinking that software engineers can be replaced by AI is like thinking that mathematicians can be replaced by calculators.

This viewpoint is curdling rapidly. The definition of "reasoning" and "intelligence" will be debated for ages by philosophers and cognitive scientists, but whatever type of logical/critical thinking is going on in the heads of software engineers and mathematicians, frontier LLMs can now emulate to a very high degree. For mathematics in particular, examples like the following will become common place:

https://gowers.wordpress.com/2026/05/08/a-recent-experience-...

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#780

Post by marcus_holmes »

leptons wrote: post #766
marcus_holmes wrote: post #659

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So get the LLM to test and fix those typos. Why are you letting it mis-spell things?

Maybe you aren't familiar with how AI works. It writes the code for you. Nobody is "letting it mis-spell things". You run the code it wrote, it fails. You look through the code the AI wrote and find the typo it put in there, or give the AI the error for it to fix - but it still created the typo, and that is the main point here. AI often ignores the rest of the document and does what-ever-the-fuck it wants to make you…

No, that's not how it works.

It writes the code for you. Then it runs the tests. Then it runs the linter. Then it runs the static analysis tool. If any of those fail, then it rewrites the code and runs them all again.

You only look at the code once it has done all of that.

If AI is ignoring the rest of the document and doing whatever it wants then you need to improve your document-writing skills. You can ask it why it did something, that helps discover how to improve. It's a process of refinement and discovery, just like learning how to use any new tool.

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