Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?

blog.florianherrengt.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 800 posts

Re: AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?

#81

Post by whateveracct »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #61
Syntaf wrote: post #35

> 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…

Ironically, AI mitigates bad developers quite a bit. The architecture/design is coming from above bad devs (in a functional org), and AI tends to write less sloppy code than bad devs, and test/validate it more rigorously.

AI is very good at making the bad dev's PR look plausible and be green in CI. And thus, merged.

Re: AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?

#82

Post by mrbombastic »

reactordev wrote: post #40
mikert89 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ofcourse not, but they can pay someone 80k a year to work on the backlog, whereas maybe they used to pay 175k. its not about work going down, its the skill set needed to complete the work is lower than ever, and they need less people than ever

they won't even need that as agents talk to their own lanes in some Linear project management workflow that your sales team agents are connected. The entire system is going to end up agentic and even the CEO will be out of work unless they are founders and owners of the company. We'll all have our own business this way. Or it all collapses. Time will tell.

color me skeptical that the CEO or anyone non-technical is ever going to prompt their way out of a major incident when all the AI chickens come home to roost.

Re: AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?

#83

Post by wetoastfood »

scronkfinkle wrote: post #52

I think of it more as "the automation of the stackoverflow engineer". In enterprise software, there has always just been a non-negotiable large volume of code that was required to be written. This has traditionally been offloaded by having seniors do the hard thinking then distill it into a jira ticket which could be handed off to an engineer that'd actually write the code and punch every hiccup into google along the…

I agree the time it takes to go from planning to deployed is condensing. I'm not sure the hand off is no longer necessary (though it admittedly often feels like it). Perhaps it means we need better ways of planning and collaborating faster and on larger features? So you still end up with a hand off, but it looks different, is maybe more detailed, or spans a wider implementation than we previously might?

Re: AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?

#86

Post by WarmWash »

dauertewigkeit wrote: post #45
declan_roberts wrote: post #12

Between AI and competing against the world with H-1B, it's really never been harder to get an entry or mid-level software engineering job. Which means our pipeline to senior engineer is completely broken.

For some reason people never mention this, but aren't there also much more people graduating with CS degrees than ever before?

Pretty much no other engineering field made sense to go into for about a decade. Even kids who did go EE, Mech E, or even Chem E ended up taking software jobs. The pay, benefits, and work/life balance of SWE just absolutely obliterates everything else. Or did at least

Re: AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?

#87

Post by cautiouscat »

Syntaf wrote: post #35

> 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…

I think this point gets lost on people. A frequent argument I see in favor of vibecoding is: “well there’s also bad engineers”. In other words, bad code is already being written, so who cares if the LLM is wrong sometimes?

The issue is that with no reins, the LLM is a fire hose of bad code compared to the garden hose of bad code orgs had before. A good engineer, with a good model and harness will produce great stuff. A bad engineer with a good model and harness will produce something faster, but it will be worse.

Re: AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?

#88

Post by whateveracct »

dauertewigkeit wrote: post #45
declan_roberts wrote: post #12

Between AI and competing against the world with H-1B, it's really never been harder to get an entry or mid-level software engineering job. Which means our pipeline to senior engineer is completely broken.

For some reason people never mention this, but aren't there also much more people graduating with CS degrees than ever before?

Degrees take 4 years. It's a very laggy indicator.

Re: AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?

#89

Post by Syntaf »

OutOfHere wrote: post #63
Syntaf wrote: post #35

> 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…

What is A&D? Shouldn't it have been defined in your comment?

Fair point! I edited my comment, A&D -> Architecture & Design

Re: AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?

#90

Post by mikert89 »

weatherlite wrote: post #73
mikert89 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the field is basically over as a long term career unless you are truly exceptional. It will become very easy to build most software, and the upper end will be filled with the top people in the country/from abroad. Wages are certainly going down for most software roles

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.

no programming is verifiable, and the major LLM companies are focused on it. its the first domino to fall by probably 5+ years
Post reply on HN