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AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?

blog.florianherrengt.com

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

#891

Post by ipsod »

thr0w wrote: post #886
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole "learn to code" and software bootcamp craze always baffled me. 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." Practically every other job I can think of at a similar salary level has entrance requirements (e.g. grad school admissions exams), extensive and expensive training, a lengthy apprenticeship p…

> And more directly, I believe good software engineering is really hard. It really is, if there's one sentiment that's remained consistent in me over time it's awe at how harsh of a mistress software is. As good as coding agents are, it still routinely dismantles them in astonishing ways. It's like complexity is the natural state to which all systems want to settle.

Software is a machine with thousands or millions of moving parts. It's always complicated, and complexity is the natural state of complicated things.

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

#893

Post by tp3358 »

dgellow wrote: post #29
tp3358 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it long term pain if a small startup in a very competitive vertical gets to market quicker with code gen and finds market fit? Whether that results in a rewrite or a refactor, that is still a huge win and one that a lot of people will gamble on.

Do you have examples? Ideally a startup that isn’t itself selling AI to other AI companies

Example of startups/incumbents that are using AI to reinforce workflows? I am assuming you don't read up on this stuff much, but it's everywhere. I can give you multiple examples in my industry (logistics) that are actively using AI to speed up doc collection, invoicing, maintenance cycles, and in general, a lot of back office flows.

These are just some of the bigger guys that are either raising seed funding or already well-established... I can't imagine all the small and obscure teams that are chasing the same thing.

https://www.flexport.com/ https://www.loop.com/ https://bubba.ai/ https://alvys.com/ https://www.roserocket.com https://www.withterminal.com/

A lot of these guys have marketshare already and are weaving AI surgically through the stack, which is how people should be building. These aren't AI wrapper companies... these are companies that are leveraging AI to amplify their existing products.

I am not sure why it's so hard for people to assume the semantical analysis that AI offers can't be leveraged properly inside of a product.

Take this one post, and then extrapolate similar products across all verticals... that is currently the waters that are being tested. Law, healthcare, construction, etc - there all getting pressure tested for similar AI integrations.

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

#894

Post by fg137 »

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

I was told that private car ownership would be a thing of the past by 2025. Somehow it is 2026 now, and there is not a single (true) self driving car near where I live.

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

#895

Post by groundzeros2015 »

toss1 wrote: post #726
groundzeros2015 wrote: post #627

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it gives the licensed engineer a solid ground to stand on when refusing a stupid leadership order I disagree to the extent to which this is real leverage. It changes the language and approach, but not the outcome, Ask a civil engineer the degree to which they can fight their leadership on these grounds. > clearly cuts off huge numbers of would-be doctors who never pass the exams Yes the fallacy is that more exclusi…

Wow you have a relentlessly unrealistic view of things. >>Ask a civil engineer the degree to which they can fight their leadership on these grounds. Both civil engineers and doctors both can and absolutely do refuse to sign off on unsafe situations. That does not mean they detect them 100% of the time, or never cave to pressure, but they absolutely do. We just never hear about the incidents that didn't happen because…

> Wow you have a relentlessly unrealistic view of things.

I noticed from your response that you didn’t really refute the claims, but that suggesting that systems don’t achieve their stated goal gives you a distasteful feeling.

> We just never hear about the incidents that didn't happen because a doctor or engineer forced the right solution or no action

And the same is true of software. I and my peers tell my bosses ideas are bad all the time. We don’t need a credential to do that. And the credential is not what gave us trust with that decision maker.

> If anything, the system is too lenient.

Correct. Bad doctors continue to keep their jobs all their time.

So that’s my point. What is the criteria that distinguishes those cases? Both doctors made a medical error. Which one gets off and which one gets fired? The doctor who is more focused on medicine is likely the one less skilled at navigating the legal problem.

The doctors making mistakes and keeping their jobs are a pathological minority that is reinforced by their credential giving them authority to operate.

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

#896

Post by groundzeros2015 »

disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #836
groundzeros2015 wrote: post #630

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s not how these systems work in reality. I’m actually an extreme pessimist. What actually happens is that you as an engineer become paid to frame the desired leadership goals in compliant terms. It’s similar to how lawyers and regulatory compliance rarely change the product. They change how the product is talked about and framed for the purpose of regulation. This skill among engineers is highly sought after in…

> It’s similar to how lawyers and regulatory compliance rarely change the product. They change how the product is talked about and framed for the purpose of regulation. This is true, and basically what tends to happen is that if the Head of some compliance function (e.g. internal audit) is causing problems for the business, then they are replaced with someone who won't cause such problems. It's still better than noth…

> It's still better than nothing.

Once again the alternative is not nothing. The most important factor is that they are stakeholders in a project with influence. That is the reality right now, even without credentials.

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

#897

Post by johnnyanmac »

joegibbs wrote: post #816
johnnyanmac wrote: post #709

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well I'm not sure if that's a convincing premise, then. If micro libraries customized for the user's needs was all that was needed we wouldn't have most of the net moated out by overly invasive social media. Even if people could find the tools, they won't seek it if a one button solution can come to them. But we can't outcompete Instagram in a prompt, nor some popular app.

There’s probably already a LibTouchupGl available since 2005, a perfect touchup tool in 83kb, but nobody had heard of it. On the other hand people can just say “ChatGPT do everything” and it can

> people can just say “ChatGPT do everything” and it can

Yeah, that's the marketing pitch. Much easier to fall into that than really think and approach how you perform a task.

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

#898

Post by johnnyanmac »

unified101 wrote: post #826
johnnyanmac wrote: post #808

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you think A is not happening for a software engineer's role, then you are mistaken. En masse, I argue not. More productivity for engineers would not be met with mass layoffs if engineering production was why value was being added. On the contrary, other industries have had to hire back talent becsuse companies were too aggressive cutting people and needed that work to be done. But I'm not an oracle. I can only s…

You're reading too widely for a simple point I'm making: what an engineer did in Aug 2025, they can do in a fraction of the time in Aug 2026. Everything else is something else you care about, but producitivty is simply proven for almost every engineer on the above point.

> You're reading too widely for a simple point I'm making: what an engineer did in Aug 2025, they can do in a fraction of the time in Aug 2026.

You're not getting my point, and it's not hard. I disagree with this statement.

>producitivty is simply proven for almost every engineer on the above point.

I've read otherwise.

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

#899

Post by johnnyanmac »

mjr00 wrote: post #877
johnnyanmac wrote: post #674

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

> 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. Maybe it wasn't clear in my comment, but this was already happening in many large organizations pre-AI: you had a small contingent of competent senior developers whose job was to review and correct outputs from junior…

>they're very happy with getting rid of their offshore teams and using AI instead.

I've read different testimony.

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

#900

Post by groundzeros2015 »

Silhouette wrote: post #677
groundzeros2015 wrote: post #630

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s not how these systems work in reality. I’m actually an extreme pessimist. What actually happens is that you as an engineer become paid to frame the desired leadership goals in compliant terms. It’s similar to how lawyers and regulatory compliance rarely change the product. They change how the product is talked about and framed for the purpose of regulation. This skill among engineers is highly sought after in…

In the physical engineering teams I've worked with the culture you just described is not what happens at all. There are always some people who seemingly live to circumvent the intention of rules lurking around the edges of regulated industries. But my own experience has been that real engineers very much value real engineering - it's often why they got into the field in the first place - and will push back hard again…

> circumvent the intention of rules lurking around the edges of regulated industries

That’s not what I said,

For every human activity there is an underlying reality and there is a social component of how it’s framed or talked about.

Regulatory compliance is 90% social and 10% reality.

So a focus on compliance means engineers spend less of their time on reality.

> They won't be impressed at all by someone's big title and even bigger budget while they're exercising that professional judgement either

Correct. But they do care about their management chain.

Imagine a new grad telling their boss “we aren’t going to build it like that because I learned X in school”. They have the same credentials!

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