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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

#791

Post by bborud »

atleastoptimal wrote: post #593
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…

LLMs also can “understand things and apply their ability to formulate solutions”. There is nothing that will inherently limit AI from doing all knowledge work (and all physical work once robotics is good enough). Of course developers could just move up the “next level of abstraction” and become managers of agents who write the code, but eventually AI becomes a better manager of agents than even the best humans, at wh…

Let me ground this a bit: at the core, LLMs are systems trained to predict the next token in a sequence. They can learn extremely rich statistical structure from language and become surprisingly capable, but extrapolating from that to something akin to a robust general intelligence is a much stronger claim.

The open question is not “can next-token prediction produce impressive behavior?” Clearly it can. The question is whether scaling that mechanism is enough to produce stable world models, grounded understanding, long-horizon agency, self-correction, and reliable reasoning across novel situations.

That has not been demonstrated.

In the past few years I've repeated the same thing: I'm not afraid of AIs that are hallucinating. They do that by design. It is expected. What scares me is people who hallucinate something into existence which isn't there.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#792

Post by leptons »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #780
leptons wrote: post #766

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

Maybe you aren't familiar with all the ways AI can be used.

I use AI in two ways. In the way you describe, and also in the text editor as AI autocomplete. It works great until it doesn't. It inserts typos all the fucking time.

Also, don't assume you know it all.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#793

Post by rhubarbtree »

wan23 wrote: post #557
rhubarbtree wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you’re a developer and you’re writing code 2% of your time pre-Claude, that’s 9 minutes a day, you will and should be fired.

Things besides writing code that you might be doing: - Meetings - Code reviews - Manual testing - Deployments and more testing - Triaging issues - WTF how did this bug happen? - JIRA in general - Whiteboarding sessions / Design docs - Interviews - 1:1s (mandatory ones) - 1:1s (networking / problem solving / political alignment) - Whatever your company's version of corporate extracurriculars is

If you’re spending 98% of your time on the above, you’re still fired.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#794

Post by truncate »

pjmlp wrote: post #784
truncate wrote: post #777

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Semantic equivalence breaks down with UB optimizations.

and hence reading code is unnecessary because how well LLMs understand and converts my prompts is almost equivalent to how well compilers can understand programs and turn into assembly. The prompts carry equal amount of ambiguity as the prompts I would write to define the behavior and want.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#795

Post by bossyTeacher »

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…

> The developers who still think their job is about writing code will perhaps not have a job in the future.

The Jira ticket munchers represent a good chunk (if not, most) of the workforce in case you haven't noticed.

Also, just because you will still have a job somewhere not too far from a codebase, it doesn't mean that it will be a worth job having. Think how awful human made legacy codebases can be. Now imagine a codebase 100x bigger without the human friction of generating code (think of all the execution paths that will never be hit but will neverthless be there in big quantities increasing the time you need to understand the codebase). Now imagine that most jobs involve dealing with such codebases.

Good look, keeping your dev job and spending the rest of your career trying to understand AI generated codebases.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#796

Post by bossyTeacher »

BurningFrog wrote: post #195
LPisGood wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The AI is coming for that too. That may be true I’m not gonna say one way or the other, but if AI comes for that then almost all knowledge work is effectively dead, so all that’s left would be sales or physical labor.

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

> The history of the last 250 years is inventing new professions as old ones are automated away.

Are you going to have the time and money in 2035 to spend 5 years retraining though? Will you be as cheap and fast as the young ones that will learn with you and ask for half your salary?

New professions will likely come no doubt. Whether existing professionals will be able to transition to those easily is another matter.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#797

Post by bossyTeacher »

throw234234234 wrote: post #691
jmyeet wrote: post #492

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This an example of survivor bias dressed up as general advice that doesn't consider the entire ecosystem. And we need look no further than what's happened in Hollywood with writing in particular. The general progression of a Hollywood writing career is from PA (production assistant), which often starts off as a volunteer "intern" position, to writer's assistant. Assistant here usually means doing any meanial task any…

If the industry is to shrink this is the best way it can. Stop people entering while they are young and can pivot into something with better returns. Keep the experienced people who are older and may find it harder to pivot and had some "good days" to help them ride them through these bad times. I've seen similar dynamics in other industries as they slowly die/move on (e.g. manufacturing, niche trades, etc). A slow d…

>Stop people entering while they are young and can pivot into something with better returns.

You mean stopping CS grads, who spend money and years on their degree from pursuing a career in their field? A better move would be to stop allowing people to graduate in CS.

Not that I think that any of the above should actually be done though.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#798

Post by tavavex »

keybored wrote: post #787
tavavex wrote: post #750

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

I don’t have a problem with people being very negative and cynical. I have a problem with people being very negative and cynical and also defeatist. The things that I alluded to were examples of fighting back. Not just dreading the hypothetical future. That I brought up things that cannot be automated right now was to demonstrate that we won’t go from the status quo—which is after all not a white collar automation wi…

> I have a problem with people being very negative and cynical and also defeatist.

Why? Does it honestly seem like there's a serious possibility that this will turn out well, that there's something people will do to stop it? Can you name a time in recent history when something like this had happened and the crisis was averted? I'm not saying I've given up, but I can't influence the situation and, with what has happened so far in my life, expecting things to get worse seems like a pretty safe guess to me.

> The things that I alluded to were examples of fighting back.

Can you spell them out for me? I read the comment again, but most of it was just rallying up against my perceived hypocrisy as a supposed representative of the tech elite. I honestly can't see any allusions to actions or anything of the sort.

The status quo right now isn't just mass layoffs, it's a very noticeable sag in the job market, especially the junior job market. I don't know if it has ever been this bad, even in past crises that affected this field. Large-scale unemployment seems like a reasonable possibility because even seasoned professionals who aren't AI salesmen are all saying that the tooling skyrockets their productivity, and because we know there's a good chunk of white collar workers doing relatively simple work that would be low-hanging fruit for automation. Also, where did I mention killer robots?

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#799

Post by throw234234234 »

bossyTeacher wrote: post #797
throw234234234 wrote: post #691

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the industry is to shrink this is the best way it can. Stop people entering while they are young and can pivot into something with better returns. Keep the experienced people who are older and may find it harder to pivot and had some "good days" to help them ride them through these bad times. I've seen similar dynamics in other industries as they slowly die/move on (e.g. manufacturing, niche trades, etc). A slow d…

>Stop people entering while they are young and can pivot into something with better returns. You mean stopping CS grads, who spend money and years on their degree from pursuing a career in their field? A better move would be to stop allowing people to graduate in CS. Not that I think that any of the above should actually be done though.

> A better move would be to stop allowing people to graduate in CS.

Its a free market if you are the one paying for it solely. If you are willing to pay for the degree then the demand is there for them to sell you the product. Buyer beware sadly. Its a question of what you see the purpose of the course is - to prep people for the job market or to teach knowledge? If it is the former to you then yes they should at least warn people of the competition and the contraction of the industry they may face - they can decide if it is worth it for them.

For many on this forum if they are honest with themselves given the pace of AI and the future risk/uncertainty they may not have taken this risk on. They've misallocated their own funds which is always not ideal - and sadly expected when there is rapid change; not all investments pay off. The only thing I can say is if you are young the time horizon is there to invest in something else and get back on your feet. There is more to life then work IMV especially as you get older; and an investment in your career needs enough time horizon to pay off. For many a job is a means to an end - they may enjoy it but being able to earn a long term living is the primary goal.

In other countries where the education is subsidized for the purposes of skill building for the economy then yes I actually think it might be pragmatic for them to offer less places. Otherwise its tax money going to waste with a misallocation of public resources without the associated society wide economic benefits.

Re: Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

#800

Post by imtringued »

7e wrote: post #437
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.

If you’re spending time thinking and not experimenting, then it’s because experimentation is expensive. With an LLM you don’t have to try to predict a complex system in advance, experiments are so cheap to can just converge to a solution directly. None of this pontificating; it’s really not that useful anymore.

I've noticed that a lot of developers fall into a trap where they start a project or experiment because their mental model is that an LLM made the task effortless, but in reality they ended up spending more time, because they committed themselves to doing projects that bring correspondingly less value such as throwaway prototypes.
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