AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?

Post by breezybottom » Thu, Aug 13, 2026, 1:43 PM UTC

roenxi wrote: post #819

breezybottom wrote: post #695

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Milton Friedman was a libertarian crank. I'm a consumer and I'm quite happy that doctors and lawyers are licensed.

You can also buy from companies that hire licensed software engineers if you want to? The main thing that would stop people patronising licensed individuals is if there was no obvious skill gap between a licensed and unlicensed practitioner that justifies the price gap. People don't need a government body to tell them to check for credentials. If people care they can ask (I had to give a copy of my degree certificate…

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Aug 13, 2026, 1:57 PM UTC

mikert89 wrote: post #354

kakacik wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It won't be photoshop then. It will be shitty, buggy clunky app that costed a (major) fraction to develop but it will also earn a fraction. Companies like MS can afford this ie with Office suite but patience of markets and customers can allow them to go only so far, if ie Excel becomes semi-useless thats the end of Office and big cash cow for M$ (I'd say about time, that monopoly is not good for consumers at all). Th…

This is cope, ai coding agents will follow the path of self driving cars. They will be watched with extreme caution, but will slowly but surely expand outwards. Eventually manually writing code will be considered a dangerous/bug introducing act

Post by leonidasrup » Thu, Aug 13, 2026, 2:07 PM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #564

WalterBright wrote: post #508

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Management types really really really loathe software developers for making good money Of course. I bet you loathe having to spend $70,000 to buy a nice car, too! > Capitalism simply wants to eliminate any and every cost by definition You could look up what life was like under Soviet communism. Me, I prefer capitalism.

The irony is that Soviets are famous for falling behind in computing because their 5 year plans failed to appreciate the importance.

Post by mjr00 » Thu, Aug 13, 2026, 2:24 PM UTC

johnnyanmac wrote: post #674

mjr00 wrote: post #36

It's very true, you used to have to hire people you knew were not very good just to have warm bodies who could throw together widgets, minor bug fixes, etc. You still had to have a competent developer review what they did, which was annoying, but ultimately a time saver over doing it themselves. Now the competent developer can just run agents and do the same review process, except it's ~free (relative to human salari…

> it's ~free (relative to human salaries, even outsourced). Even ignoring the shift to token based costs, the opportunity costs of throwing everything onto your "competent developers" isn't free. They still need time to review and correct output on top of whatever else they were doing in their day to day. And they probably aren't getting a pay raise either, so how long until they use that bullet point to jump jobs?

Post by elmer2 » Thu, Aug 13, 2026, 2:29 PM UTC

nixon_why69 wrote: post #751

jselysianeagle wrote: post #463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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." For one, the industry never did professionalize to begin with, certainly not in the way accountants, lawyers etc did. We never had any real body that could certify proficiency, which is what contributed to companies having to resort to leetcode and other such sty…

Ok, but consider if we had professionalized in, say, the late 90s. Would we be insisting everyone writes bad 90s style OO code because that's the professional standard? How do you have standards when the field is still figuring itself out?