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What's gonna happen to software engineers?

yakko.dev

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Re: What's gonna happen to software engineers?

#91

Post by pjmlp »

It will be like offshoring, with the difference this time around there is no team on the other side of the planet getting the jobs.

The few lucky ones to stay employed, get to be promoted to technical architects, and everyone else whose passion was equivalent to brick layers has to find something else where humans haven't yet been replaced by robots or self service machines.

When each team member gets more productive we're not doing e.g. 5x more output, we're doing more with less (team size).

Re: What's gonna happen to software engineers?

#92

Post by prewett »

This is a thoughtful article, but I think the axis isn't between builders and algorithm researches, but between craftsmen and results-oriented builders. Both want to build something, but the craftsman cares about the quality of the result (usability, maintainability, code quality, UI polish, etc.) while the non-craftsman is happy with something that works, even if some of the corners are janky.

Or, thinking about Windows and macOS in the Jobs era, perhaps the difference is more between the quality of taste. Microsoft focused on quality code, and came up with COM, architectures where an instantiable button is 13 levels of inherited classes, and things like DirectX, where the architecture is clean and extendable, but forces every developer to do things like allocate their own @#$! framebuffer. High level of craftsmanship, but poor taste. Jobs tended to focus on the user experience and had good taste, so the results were generally pretty good, but I got the feeling that the code wasn't as much of a priority.

Re: What's gonna happen to software engineers?

#93

Post by marssaxman »

prewett wrote: post #92

This is a thoughtful article, but I think the axis isn't between builders and algorithm researches, but between craftsmen and results-oriented builders. Both want to build something, but the craftsman cares about the quality of the result (usability, maintainability, code quality, UI polish, etc.) while the non-craftsman is happy with something that works, even if some of the corners are janky. Or, thinking about Win…

> Microsoft focused on quality code

That's a sentence I have certainly never read before!

Re: What's gonna happen to software engineers?

#95

Post by Izkata »

i2km wrote: post #77
whateveracct wrote: post #68

why do people forget so quickly that you can just code without LLMs? And be hugely impactful? Like in 2020 i coded better shit than my principle agentic engineer go do a good job. it's increasingly rare nowadays. the frauds are growing.

It's bizarre isn't it. It being treated as though actually knowing how to write quality code by hand is a skill that's somehow been lost to time... I can only guess that a lot of the engineers who went into software purely for money were all too happy to distance themselves from writing code and really don't want to go back...

Also skill atrophy due to over-reliance on these tools is a real thing. And for some people it happens really fast, just a couple of months before they start noticing a difference (like with two of my co-workers - one stated directly to me, another indirectly through a team member).

Re: What's gonna happen to software engineers?

#97

Post by mynameisbilly »

singingtoday wrote: post #22

They're going to be overworked. In the old days we programmed systems by literally wiring them. There wasn't much work, only a few "programmers" were employed. Then somebody came up with Punch cards that was much more vision than wiring the systems directly. This opened the door for a lot more people to use them and now programmers were busier. The punch cards didn't scale either so eventually we created panels with…

The people who own the tools decide how the productivity gains are distributed. The workers could produce the same output in less same and go home earlier. Or the capitalists could keep the worker there the same (or more) hours per day and capture the extra output as profit.

Under capitalism, the choice is always the latter. You correctly identified the pattern that Marx described over 100 years ago. The capitalists own the tools and control the conditions of our labor as software developers. They extract that productivity gain as surplus value, and will never choose to willingly give us more leisure time.

Re: What's gonna happen to software engineers?

#98

Post by mynameisbilly »

whateveracct wrote: post #68

why do people forget so quickly that you can just code without LLMs? And be hugely impactful? Like in 2020 i coded better shit than my principle agentic engineer go do a good job. it's increasingly rare nowadays. the frauds are growing.

Do you still write assembly code?

Re: What's gonna happen to software engineers?

#99

Post by mynameisbilly »

ryandvm wrote: post #7

I've definitely noticed a distinct lack of pride now that Claude Code is writing 90% of the code I'm delivering these days. For simple problems (which most are) it works well enough and you are definitely shipping code faster - and with actual test coverage to boot. But it just doesn't feel the same - there's little craftsmanship and honestly it's boring as fuck. You spend a lot of time setting up guardrails and havi…

You're describing the same alienation of labor Marx identified 150+ years ago. It was only a matter of time before it caught up with our field. Someone who used to make their own clothes, from planting the cotton, to picking it to turning it into thread to weaving the thread into fabric to creating the piece of clothing felt a LOT less pride in their work when it was transferred to a factory line or automated loom.

Re: What's gonna happen to software engineers?

#100

Post by whateveracct »

mynameisbilly wrote: post #98
whateveracct wrote: post #68

why do people forget so quickly that you can just code without LLMs? And be hugely impactful? Like in 2020 i coded better shit than my principle agentic engineer go do a good job. it's increasingly rare nowadays. the frauds are growing.

Do you still write assembly code?

non sequitur. English through an LLM isn't the same as a higher level language compiling to a lower one.

I am very familiar with this because I write Haskell. Which compiles to Core. Which is actually an extension of Sustem F which itself is an extension of lambda calculus. That then compiles to STG. That then compiles to Cmm. That then compiles to assembly code.

See how that isn't the same as an LLM? To the point where your comment is a non sequitur?

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