6 ms·

This is what I don’t understand: why highly-paid SWEs seem to think that their salaries will remain the same (if they even still have a job) if their role is no

This is what I don’t understand: why highly-paid SWEs seem to think that their salaries will remain the same (if they even still have a job) if their role is now a glorified project manager.

xnx 9mo ago
Salaries might remain the same, but they'll be expected to produce a lot more.
- GiorgioG 9mo ago
  We produce way more than the punch-card wielding developers of yesteryear and we’re doing just fine (better even).
  - direwolf20 9mo ago
    And we get paid less.
- deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
aurareturn 9mo ago
Recently, I had to do an integration with a Chinese API for my company. I used Codex to do the whole thing. Yet, there is no way a product manager without any coding experience could have done it. First, the API needed to communicate to the main app correctly such as formatting, correcting data. This required human engineer guidance and experience working with expected data. AI was lost. Second, the API was designed extremely poorly. You first had to make a request, then retry a second endpoint over and over again while the Chinese API did its thing in the background. Yes, I had to poll it. I then had to do load testing to make sure it was reliable (it wasn't). In the end, I gave a recommendation that we shouldn't rely on this Chinese company and back out of the deal before we send them a huge deposit. A non-technical PM couldn't have done what I did... for at least a few more years. You need a background and experience in software development to even know what to prompt the AI. Not only that, in the last 3 years, I developed an intuition on where LLMs fail and succeed when writing code. I still have a job. My role has changed. I haven't written more than 10 lines of code in a day for months now. Yes, it's kind of scary for software devs right now but I'm honestly loving this as I was never the kind of dev who loved the code, just someone who needed to code to get what I wanted.
echelon 9mo ago
This is what I don't understand: everyone who thinks we're still relevant with the same job and salary expectations. Everything just changed. Fundamentally. If you don't adapt to these tools, you will be slower than your peers. Few businesses will tolerate that. This is competitive cycling. Claude is a modern bike with steroids. You can stay on a penny farthing, but that's not advised. You can write 10x the code - good code. You can review and edit it before committing it. Nothing changes from a code quality perspective. Only speed. What remains to be seen is how many of us the market needs and how much the market will pay us. I'm hoping demand and comp remain constant, but we'll see. The one thing I will say is that we need ownership in these systems ASAP, or we'll become serfs to computing.
- yoz-y 9mo ago
  I don’t think that the real dichotomy here. You can either produce 2-5x good maintainable code, or 10-50x more dogshit code that works 80-90% of the time, and that will be a maintenance nightmare. The management has decided that the latter is preferable for short term gains.
  - echelon 9mo ago
    It's not dogshit if you're steering. That's what so many of you are not getting. Look at the pretty pictures AI generates. That's where we are with code now. Except you have ComfyUI instead of ChatGPT. You can work with precision. I'm a 500k TC senior SWE. I write six nines, active-active, billion dollar a day systems. I'm no stranger to writing thirty page design documents. These systems can work in my domain just fine.
    - orphea 9mo ago
      > Look at the pretty pictures AI generates. That's where we are with code now. Oh, that is a great analogy. Yes, those pictures are pretty! Until you look closer. Any experienced artist or designer will tell you that they are dogshit and don't have value. Don't look further than at Ubisoft and their Anno 117 game for a proof. Yep, that's where we are with code now. Pretty - until you look close. Dogshit - if you care to notice details.
jlarocco 9mo ago
It's even worse - project management where you have to micromanage every thing the AI is doing. But yeah, if anybody can do it, the salaries are going to plummet. You don't need a CS degree to tell the AI to try again.
interstice 9mo ago
Doesn't this mean the ones that should be really worried are the project managers, since the SWE has better understanding over what's being done and can now orchestrate from a PM level?
- bayarearefugee 9mo ago
  Both should realize that if this all works out according to plan then there eventually reaches a point that there is no longer a need for their entire company, let alone any individual role in it.
zozbot234 9mo ago
Good project managers (with a technical focus) are not low-paid at all, even compared to SWE's.
- sgarland 9mo ago
  Sure, but you need 1/10th the amount of PMs as you do SWEs.
  - FeteCommuniste 9mo ago
    But (the thinking) goes, with AI in the mix, spinning up a new project or feature will be so low-friction that there will be 10x as many projects created. So our jobs are saved! (Color me skeptical.)
dasil003 9mo ago
Architects and engineers are not construction workers. AI can build the thing but it needs to be told exactly what to build by someone who knows how software works. I’ve spent enough time working with cross-functional stakeholders to know that the vast majority of PM (whether of the product, program, or project variety), will not be capable of running AI towards any meaningful software development goal. At best they can build impressive prototypes and demos, at worst they will corrupt data in a company-destroying level of failure.
- mattmanser 9mo ago
  Don't be stupid, if an AI can figure out how to arrange code, it can also figure out how to pick the right architecture choices. Right now millions of developers are providing tons of architecture questions and answers. That's all going to be used as training data for the next model coming out in 6 months time. This is a moat on our jobs as deep as a puddle. If you believe LLMs will be able to do complex coding tasks, you must also concede they will be able to make the relatively simpler architecture choices easily simply by asking the right questions. Something they're already starting to be able to do.
  - dasil003 9mo ago
    > [...] by asking the right questions [...] Now you've put your finger on something. Who is capable of asking the right questions?
    - mattmanser 9mo ago
      It already asks questions in plan mode. It's not a massive jump to go from, 'add a button above the table to the right that when clicked downloads and excel file', to 'The client's asking to dowbload an excel file". If you believe the LLMs will graduate from junior level coding to senior in the next year, which they're clearly not capable of doing yet despite all the hype, there is no moat of going from coder to BA to PM. And then you don't need middle management either.
- amjnsx 9mo ago
raw_anon_1111 9mo ago
You have to move up the stack and make yourself a more valuable product. I have an analogy… I’ve been working for cloud consulting companies/departments for six years. Customers were willing to pay mid level (L5) consultants with @amazon.com by their names (AWS ProServe) $x to do one “workstream”/epic worth of work. I got paid $x - Amazon’s cut in cash and RSUs. Once I got Amazon’ed, I had to get a staff level position (senior equivalent at BigTech) at a third party company where now I am responsible for larger projects. Before I would have needed people - now I need code gen tools and my quarter century of development experience and my decade of experience leading implementations + coding.
FpUser 9mo ago
You are under delusion. Glorified project manager will not produce production quality code no matter what. At least not until we will have reached that holy grail of AGI. But if that ever happens the world will have way bigger problems to deal with.
_zagj 9mo ago
They're delusional, but that's to be expected if you imagine them as the types for whom everything in life has always just kinda worked out. The idea that things could suddenly not work out is almost unimaginable to them, so of course things will change, but not, for them, substantially for the worse.

This is what I don’t understand: why highly-paid SWEs seem to think that their salaries will remain the same (if they even still have a job) if their role is now a glorified project manager.

xnx 9mo ago

Salaries might remain the same, but they'll be expected to produce a lot more.

GiorgioG 9mo ago
We produce way more than the punch-card wielding developers of yesteryear and we’re doing just fine (better even).
- direwolf20 9mo ago
  And we get paid less.
deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]

aurareturn 9mo ago

Recently, I had to do an integration with a Chinese API for my company. I used Codex to do the whole thing. Yet, there is no way a product manager without any coding experience could have done it. First, the API needed to communicate to the main app correctly such as formatting, correcting data. This required human engineer guidance and experience working with expected data. AI was lost. Second, the API was designed extremely poorly. You first had to make a request, then retry a second endpoint over and over again while the Chinese API did its thing in the background. Yes, I had to poll it. I then had to do load testing to make sure it was reliable (it wasn't). In the end, I gave a recommendation that we shouldn't rely on this Chinese company and back out of the deal before we send them a huge deposit. A non-technical PM couldn't have done what I did... for at least a few more years. You need a background and experience in software development to even know what to prompt the AI. Not only that, in the last 3 years, I developed an intuition on where LLMs fail and succeed when writing code. I still have a job. My role has changed. I haven't written more than 10 lines of code in a day for months now. Yes, it's kind of scary for software devs right now but I'm honestly loving this as I was never the kind of dev who loved the code, just someone who needed to code to get what I wanted.

echelon 9mo ago

This is what I don't understand: everyone who thinks we're still relevant with the same job and salary expectations. Everything just changed. Fundamentally. If you don't adapt to these tools, you will be slower than your peers. Few businesses will tolerate that. This is competitive cycling. Claude is a modern bike with steroids. You can stay on a penny farthing, but that's not advised. You can write 10x the code - good code. You can review and edit it before committing it. Nothing changes from a code quality perspective. Only speed. What remains to be seen is how many of us the market needs and how much the market will pay us. I'm hoping demand and comp remain constant, but we'll see. The one thing I will say is that we need ownership in these systems ASAP, or we'll become serfs to computing.

yoz-y 9mo ago
I don’t think that the real dichotomy here. You can either produce 2-5x good maintainable code, or 10-50x more dogshit code that works 80-90% of the time, and that will be a maintenance nightmare. The management has decided that the latter is preferable for short term gains.
- echelon 9mo ago
  It's not dogshit if you're steering. That's what so many of you are not getting. Look at the pretty pictures AI generates. That's where we are with code now. Except you have ComfyUI instead of ChatGPT. You can work with precision. I'm a 500k TC senior SWE. I write six nines, active-active, billion dollar a day systems. I'm no stranger to writing thirty page design documents. These systems can work in my domain just fine.
  - orphea 9mo ago
    > Look at the pretty pictures AI generates. That's where we are with code now. Oh, that is a great analogy. Yes, those pictures are pretty! Until you look closer. Any experienced artist or designer will tell you that they are dogshit and don't have value. Don't look further than at Ubisoft and their Anno 117 game for a proof. Yep, that's where we are with code now. Pretty - until you look close. Dogshit - if you care to notice details.

jlarocco 9mo ago

It's even worse - project management where you have to micromanage every thing the AI is doing. But yeah, if anybody can do it, the salaries are going to plummet. You don't need a CS degree to tell the AI to try again.

interstice 9mo ago

Doesn't this mean the ones that should be really worried are the project managers, since the SWE has better understanding over what's being done and can now orchestrate from a PM level?

bayarearefugee 9mo ago
Both should realize that if this all works out according to plan then there eventually reaches a point that there is no longer a need for their entire company, let alone any individual role in it.

zozbot234 9mo ago

Good project managers (with a technical focus) are not low-paid at all, even compared to SWE's.

sgarland 9mo ago
Sure, but you need 1/10th the amount of PMs as you do SWEs.
- FeteCommuniste 9mo ago
  But (the thinking) goes, with AI in the mix, spinning up a new project or feature will be so low-friction that there will be 10x as many projects created. So our jobs are saved! (Color me skeptical.)

dasil003 9mo ago

Architects and engineers are not construction workers. AI can build the thing but it needs to be told exactly what to build by someone who knows how software works. I’ve spent enough time working with cross-functional stakeholders to know that the vast majority of PM (whether of the product, program, or project variety), will not be capable of running AI towards any meaningful software development goal. At best they can build impressive prototypes and demos, at worst they will corrupt data in a company-destroying level of failure.

mattmanser 9mo ago
Don't be stupid, if an AI can figure out how to arrange code, it can also figure out how to pick the right architecture choices. Right now millions of developers are providing tons of architecture questions and answers. That's all going to be used as training data for the next model coming out in 6 months time. This is a moat on our jobs as deep as a puddle. If you believe LLMs will be able to do complex coding tasks, you must also concede they will be able to make the relatively simpler architecture choices easily simply by asking the right questions. Something they're already starting to be able to do.
- dasil003 9mo ago
  > [...] by asking the right questions [...] Now you've put your finger on something. Who is capable of asking the right questions?
  - mattmanser 9mo ago
    It already asks questions in plan mode. It's not a massive jump to go from, 'add a button above the table to the right that when clicked downloads and excel file', to 'The client's asking to dowbload an excel file". If you believe the LLMs will graduate from junior level coding to senior in the next year, which they're clearly not capable of doing yet despite all the hype, there is no moat of going from coder to BA to PM. And then you don't need middle management either.
amjnsx 9mo ago

raw_anon_1111 9mo ago

You have to move up the stack and make yourself a more valuable product. I have an analogy… I’ve been working for cloud consulting companies/departments for six years. Customers were willing to pay mid level (L5) consultants with @amazon.com by their names (AWS ProServe) $x to do one “workstream”/epic worth of work. I got paid $x - Amazon’s cut in cash and RSUs. Once I got Amazon’ed, I had to get a staff level position (senior equivalent at BigTech) at a third party company where now I am responsible for larger projects. Before I would have needed people - now I need code gen tools and my quarter century of development experience and my decade of experience leading implementations + coding.

FpUser 9mo ago

You are under delusion. Glorified project manager will not produce production quality code no matter what. At least not until we will have reached that holy grail of AGI. But if that ever happens the world will have way bigger problems to deal with.

_zagj 9mo ago

They're delusional, but that's to be expected if you imagine them as the types for whom everything in life has always just kinda worked out. The idea that things could suddenly not work out is almost unimaginable to them, so of course things will change, but not, for them, substantially for the worse.