921–930 of 1001 posts
To me, the game has shifted from just “knowing how to code” to being really good at something specific. General software work is becoming cheaper, while deep knowledge in a niche is still hard to replace.
LLMs are speeding this up, but I don’t think they started it.
I started feeling like a factory worker well before LLMs. My reputation and network stopped mattering and it all came down to take this assessment and do this Leetcode to prove you are a good enough replaceable cog. I have about 15 more years before retirement and I doubt there is anything left to look forward to in my career.
We were still coding, however most of the work was reduced to serverless, or configuration of said cloud products.
Now even coding serverless is going away with AI based orchestrations.
I spent most of the last two years making a rather large hobby project. A 3D renderer for cad/visualization. It's pretty hard and slow work because getting anything wrong is usually hard to debug. Get a sign wrong and you have a black image suddenly, with painstaking debugging following. I worked on it for evenings and weekends, probably totaling a man-month of work or so. As a fun experiment, yesterday I asked a mod…
You knew exactly what you wanted, since you already built it. All decisions were already made, all tradeoffs reached. LLMs are definitely helpful, but try exploring something new with them and you'll slow down significantly.
But this has always been a developer's work, it's understanding what is needed, translating it to working software, and judging the result, and doing so at scale, over time, and with other people.
The glory days are over. In the future, one software engineer will be able to support multiple product areas much like how one HR team can support 1,000's of employees. LLMs have made domain knowledge and reasoning "cheap"; it doesn't matter if the output is lower quality - look around you for countless examples of where cheap wins and "cheap" continues to improve. Good luck out there; we will all need it.
> The glory days are over. In the future, one software engineer will be able to support multiple product areas much like how one HR team can support 1,000's of employees. I mean, it seems within the realm of possibility that much more productive software engineers make more and not less money.
I sympathise with the author being in the same boat, largely. I just want to emphasise a point... Calculators give 100% correct answers and yet we still hire accountants; for the simple fact that we don't want all to be accountants. People will hire software engineers for the simple fact that they do not want to be software engineers.
People don't make their own bread. They buy it from an expert. But bread shops are available on every corner. Will software jobs become as common as bread shops? If yes, what happens to the salaries? Something to think about.
To me looks like, if we're not collectively careful, civilisation will soon be on a path to an evolutionary dead-end. Anything that can replace a deeply experienced s/ware engineer can replace anyone in the employment stack, meaning that only the owners of capital will be left, and they too will soon fade as the economy falls off a cliff and money has no value, because the only value that money has is the value of a…
This is so blinkered and egocentric. Just because LLMs are good at translating English to code, doesn’t imply they are good at many other jobs. Coding isn’t that hard, it’s just not enjoyable to most people. The enjoyment has always been the barrier to entry.
Coding effectively is hard AND painful for the majority of folks. And I’d venture to guess they don’t want to be responsible for debugging LLM output either. Just like I don’t want to fix a car, or do my own plumbing.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Domain knowledge can be learnt much quicker than how to apply good engineering principles. What kind of domains did you have in mind?
That's a fair question. I suspect highly specialised industries are harder (rocket and space, defense, nuclear, etc), but for things like finance (most of it, anyway) and retail, which IME make the bulk of the tech jobs out there, it's certainly nothing out of this world.
This is what getting left behind looks like.
Get your thumb out of your ass and learn the damn tools.
I spent most of the last two years making a rather large hobby project. A 3D renderer for cad/visualization. It's pretty hard and slow work because getting anything wrong is usually hard to debug. Get a sign wrong and you have a black image suddenly, with painstaking debugging following. I worked on it for evenings and weekends, probably totaling a man-month of work or so. As a fun experiment, yesterday I asked a mod…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> With LLMs, only the "best" engineers will survive, because nobody needs mediocre engineers anymore. I don't think this is true. A good engineer doesn't have infinite throughput. In my opinion the best engineers should be constantly bottlenecked because they solve difficult problems. They don't have time for grunt work. Every company needs less than perfect engineers, AI assisted or not.
Perhaps that's true of the top 5% engineers. But the question is if the top 40% of engineers can replace the bottom 60%. The LLMs don't need to be perfect, they just need to be good enough so that the cost of fixing their code is lower than the communication overhead and the 'lost in translation' overhead from delegating tasks to mediocre engineers.
If AI + lower skill engineers turn out to be valuable, it also becomes more attractive for smaller companies and startups to do software or expand / inhouse software. Which is actually a good opportunity to level up, because many devs don't become great because they miss the chance to take responsibility. Which is harder in smaller companies.