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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?

#91

Post by re-thc »

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 tends to write less sloppy code than bad devs, and test/validate it more rigorously

I've often had it test and benchmark against the wrong things = no test.

It also writes over-engineered code. So yes sort, maybe.

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

#92

Post by mikert89 »

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.

i think this is farther off, much sooner is just the subjugation of technical workers to be low skill drivers of LLMs

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

#93

Post by AppleBananaPie »

sarchertech wrote: post #65
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…

>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 way. This is the theory, but I’ve never worked anywhere (and I’ve worked at a lot of places over 20 years) that actually did it like that in practice. What tends to happen is that the EMs an…

I've never thought about it this way before but this definitely mirrors my experience

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

#94

Post by doctorwho42 »

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?

And how do you think people go from fresh graduates to senior devs?

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

#95

Post by whateveracct »

whywhywhywhy wrote: post #2

>AI makes projects with weak engineering culture fail much faster. >There used to be a time when people sat down and talked about how they'd do something. Now they can just prompt an agent for a few hours and open a PR. >The most tragic aspect of this way of working is that, to the untrained eye, it works. >If you pull the branch and test it, you'll probably get something somewhat functional. So what do they do? They…

> Now they can just prompt an agent for a few hours and open a PR.

Bruh..I haven't consistently sat at my computer for even a hour at a time to code for a decade..people spend that much time in Claude??

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

#96

Post by jameshart »

throwayay4929 wrote: post #62
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…

... And Django and React removed ("stole the jobs from under") the engineers handcrafting html and jQuery web pages/apps.

Django? Django is older than jQuery…

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

#97

Post by RSHEPP »

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…

This 100%. I just requested a hackathon for performance improvement (might be wasted effort).

We are pushing tons of code and now our CPU usage has grown exponentially over the past year because the bad engineers just ship whatever Claude gives them and do not think about the consequences.

Our biggest consumer of CPU right now is HTTP connection churn because engineers are creating new clients every request we handle. If the engineers would just think for a second, push back on Claude, even Claude would tell them this is bad. But they don't... Platform engineering is now 10x harder with terrible engineers and unlimited code machines.

Don't even get me started on ffmpeg usage, engineers act like the resources are unlimited.

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

#98

Post by a2ff6eeb0 »

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 think AI is getting pretty good at generating the tickets as well. Not amazing, but it feels like ticket generation today is where code generation was a year ago.

I wonder if there's an agent harness that would work well for requirements gathering.

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

#100

Post by subygan »

api wrote: post #26
mikert89 wrote: post #13

AI gives more leverage to exceptional people, its an amplifier not an extender

That is true of all tools. AI is a tool. A tool provides leverage. It does not make a bad craftsperson good.

Ai is a tool in the same way an employee is a tool. very unlike a hammer.
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