A Programmer's Loss of Identity

I think this is part of why programming as a job never appealed to me (and I never became one). I'd like to do something that is worth doing in the sense that it's worth discussing in your "free" time too. And most programmers feel like the show Severance (yeah I know it's the other way round).

To contrast, I have some philosopher friends and they discuss about food (they, unlike me, love cooking shows), travelling, but also philosophy. There is never any feeling of "this is work, we don't talk about this". It's very refereshing. And I imagine writers talk a bit about writing too.

You are the one not getting it, there are companies where those in power only offer two pills, the red one allows to remain a company employee, the blue one means out willing or not.

People aren't selected, they are dragged into their Peter principle role.

I've been thinking exactly this.

I'm a recent CS grad and have zero experience in anything physical or on the engineering side but I think I would enjoy it. I'm a bit intimidated by it, is there a path you'd recommend taking in learning?

Definitely. I left the industry and became a community college professor two years ago, partly because I felt disillusioned with the industry. This decision had nothing to do with LLMs.

As someone who was inspired by people like Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Dennis Ritchie, Ken Thompson, Alan Kay, and other major figures of computing, I’m not inspired by Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Mark Zuckerberg, and other current tech leaders. But the current leadership is the current leadership, and they have set the tone not only for our industry, but society as a whole.

While I am not opposed to LLMs per se, LLMs in software development, in my opinion, have made the relationship between the employer and the employee crystal clear: employers own the means of production and can dictate how they want their employees to work. Despite the limitations of LLMs, if employers want them to be used because they feel they could ship faster, then employees at those companies have no choice but to use them if they want to keep their jobs. Some employees might not even have the option of using LLMs since they may get outright replaced by them.

The employer has always dictated the terms of employment, but software engineers have enjoyed many decades of relative freedom and negotiating power due to their in-demand, hard-to-replace skills. Indeed, there are many companies where engineers had significant influence regarding the company’s software.

LLMs, combined with other economic factors (the end of ZIRP, the software industry being dominated by a tiny handful of powerful players), are threatening to change this by reasserting the power of business owners and managers to set the agenda.

Even before LLMs, I felt the software industry has moved away from craftsmanship, quality, and creativity. LLMs in software development may accelerate this, since there may be fewer opportunities for engineers to push back.

I think software craftsmanship is going to end up becoming just like art. Unfortunately it will be paid for accordingly, and that’s the unsettling thing that many of us need to adjust to.

I feel for the author, but I'm not sure we will ever get to the point where programmers are replaced. Building a software product requires so much more than just writing some code. Yes, pretty soon most of us might not be writing individual functions or modules and rely on code generation instead. But to even produce a collection of cooperating services which deliver a coherent UX still requires hundreds of small decisions to be made. Our Lego blocks got bigger.

We didn't feel the same impact moving from assembly to high level languages probably because there was a smaller programmer population perhaps? And computers weren't underpinning the lives of all people.

IMHO, the danger with the current trend isn't necessarily the change to the day job of a "programmer". It is that this leads to a concentration of power in a small group of people. Then again, computer hardware were always the produce of a very small number of players and we managed to live through that without too much of a catastrophe. In aggregate, the world got better. Like with any new technological development, there are pros and cons. It is up to us as a society to amplify the pros and attenuate the cons.

Yes, writing a beautiful piece of code by hand is fun - and yes, the days of doing purely that for a living are probably disappearing soon, but there is no going back. Make peace with it and evolve.