3 ms·

My job for the last 8 years has involved Talking to sales to get an idea what the customer wanted from the business side (first B2B at a product company and no

My job for the last 8 years has involved Talking to sales to get an idea what the customer wanted from the business side (first B2B at a product company and now consulting) -> talking to the customer and hashing out more detailed requirements -> designing the architecture and a proposed technical plan -> presenting it to the stakeholder (sometime internal sometime external) -> doing the work or delegating and leading the work -> presenting the work to the stakeholder and leading the UAT -> getting it to production. The coding part has been a commodity for enterprise developers for well over a decade. I knew a decade ago that I wasn’t going to be 50 years old reversing b trees on a whiteboard trying to prove my worth. Doing the work is the only thing that the AI does. While I don’t make the eye popping BigTech comp (been there. Done that and would rather get a daily anal probe than go back), I am making more than I could make if I were still selling myself as someone who “codez real gud” as an enterprise dev.

lelanthran 9mo ago
> Talking to sales to get an idea what the customer wanted from the business side (first B2B at a product company and now consulting) -> talking to the customer and hashing out more detailed requirements -> designing the architecture and a proposed technical plan -> presenting it to the stakeholder (sometime internal sometime external) -> doing the work or delegating and leading the work -> presenting the work to the stakeholder and leading the UAT -> getting it to production. You are not the first person to say things like this. Tell me, you ever wondered why a person with a programming background was filling that role?
- raw_anon_1111 9mo ago
  If not the technical person, then who? It’s a lot easier for a technical person to learn how to talk the language of the business than a business person to have a deep understanding of technology. On the enterprise dev side of the industry where most developers work, I saw a decade ago that if I were just a ticket taker who turned well defined requirements into for loop and if statements, that was an undifferentiated commodity. You’re seeing now that even on the BigTech side knowing how to reverse a binary tree on the whiteboard is not enough. Also if you look at the leveling guidelines of any major tech company, their leveling guidelines above mid level are based on scope, impact and dealing with ambiguity - not “I codez real gud”
  - lelanthran 9mo ago
    > Also if you look at the leveling guidelines of any major tech company, their leveling guidelines above mid level are based on scope, impact and dealing with ambiguity - not “I codez real gud” Your entire comment is this specific strawman - no one, and I mean no one, is making this claim! You are the only one who is (ironically, considering the job you do) too tone-deaf and too self-unaware to avoid making this argument. I'm merely pointing out that your value-prop is based on a solid technical foundation, which I feel you agree on: > If not the technical person, then who? It’s a lot easier for a technical person to learn how to talk the language of the business than a business person to have a deep understanding of technology. The argument is not "Oh boo hoo, I wish I could spend 8 hours a day coding for money like I used to", so stop pretending like it is.
    - raw_anon_1111 9mo ago
      There is an entire contingent of comments here who miss translating requirements into code. Even the comment I replied to mentioned “being a BA” like the most important quality of a software engineer is their ability to translate requirements into code.
    - NamlchakKhandro 9mo ago
      > The argument is not Then what is it. be blunt and obvious in your reply or go home.
      - lelanthran 9mo ago
        > Then what is it. It's that the erosion and atrophying of the fundamental skill that made you (or, in this case, the GP) valuable is a matter of concern, because you (or GP, as the case may be) are willingly embracing the fact that you will be no more valuable than the average office office worker, and so can expect that compensation will drop to match. As an example, moving to Python from C was was moving to a higher level of abstraction, but it still didn't jettison the need for actually knowing how to program! Moving to LLMs from Python does jettison any need to know what an object is, what "parse, don't validate" actually means, etc. If the problem you are solving with the LLM doesn't need that knowledge, then that job doesn't need all those valuable programming skills anyway, and thus you are no more valuable than the average clerk toiling away in the middle of some organisation. > be blunt and obvious in your reply or go home. Very classy.
nunez 9mo ago
Look, there are at least dozens of us who like and enjoy programming for programming's sake and got into this crazy industry because of that. Many of these people made many of the countless things we take for granted every day (networking, operating systems, web search; hell, even the transformer architecture before they got productized!). Seeing software development --- and software engineering by proxy --- get reduced to a jello that will be stepped on by "builders" in real-time is depressing as shit. It's even more depressing to see folks on HACKER news boost the "programming never mattered" mentality that's taken hold these last few years. Last comment I'll make before I step off my soapbox: the "codez real gud" folks that makes the big bucks bring way more to the table than their ability to code...but their ability to code is a big contributor to why they bring more to the table!
- raw_anon_1111 9mo ago
  Well as depressing as it is, check out the 2024 and 2025 YC batches. Guess how many of them are “ai” something or other? It’s never been about “hackers”. Not a single founder who takes VC funding is thinking about a sustainable business - at least their investors aren’t - they are hoping for the “exit”. It’s always been jello. I at 51 can wax poetically about the good old days or I can keep doing what I need to do to keep money appearing in my account.
- danparsonson 9mo ago
  > Look, there are at least dozens of us who like and enjoy programming for programming's sake and got into this crazy industry because of that. You and me both, and I truly sympathise, but really we were just lucky that we could enjoy our passion at work. > It's even more depressing to see folks on HACKER news boost the "programming never mattered" mentality that's taken hold these last few years. Delivering stuff to customers for money is always what we've been paid for; that's not new, it's just that perhaps many of us didn't really pay much mind to that in the past. That's perhaps why there's traditionally been so much complaining about artificial deadlines and managers and sales teams; many of us also didn't really notice that the programming was never the thing that our employers cared about; it is just a link in a long chain from idea to income. The way I'm looking at our current situation is this: I spent my whole career and much of my free time learning to become a great furniture maker, and I take a lot of pleasure producing functional and elegant items. Now someone has handed me some power tools. I can mourn the loss of care and love that goes into hand-crafting something, but I can also learn to use the tools to crank out the good-enough cabinets that my employer wants me to make, focussing on the more abstract elements of the craft and doing less of the laborious stuff. I think I can still take pleasure and pride in my work in this way, and personally I find the design aspect of software development to be a lot of fun. I can still hand-craft things sometimes too; there will no doubt always be important difficult parts of a project that would take as long to describe to an LLM as they would to write by hand, at least for those of us with sufficient experience of the latter. I can also, hopefully, finally knock out some of those side projects that I have had on my list for many years but never had time to make. I would prefer that those things existed in a less than perfect state, than that they were perfect but only in my head :-)

lelanthran 9mo ago

> Talking to sales to get an idea what the customer wanted from the business side (first B2B at a product company and now consulting) -> talking to the customer and hashing out more detailed requirements -> designing the architecture and a proposed technical plan -> presenting it to the stakeholder (sometime internal sometime external) -> doing the work or delegating and leading the work -> presenting the work to the stakeholder and leading the UAT -> getting it to production. You are not the first person to say things like this. Tell me, you ever wondered why a person with a programming background was filling that role?

raw_anon_1111 9mo ago
If not the technical person, then who? It’s a lot easier for a technical person to learn how to talk the language of the business than a business person to have a deep understanding of technology. On the enterprise dev side of the industry where most developers work, I saw a decade ago that if I were just a ticket taker who turned well defined requirements into for loop and if statements, that was an undifferentiated commodity. You’re seeing now that even on the BigTech side knowing how to reverse a binary tree on the whiteboard is not enough. Also if you look at the leveling guidelines of any major tech company, their leveling guidelines above mid level are based on scope, impact and dealing with ambiguity - not “I codez real gud”
- lelanthran 9mo ago
  > Also if you look at the leveling guidelines of any major tech company, their leveling guidelines above mid level are based on scope, impact and dealing with ambiguity - not “I codez real gud” Your entire comment is this specific strawman - no one, and I mean no one, is making this claim! You are the only one who is (ironically, considering the job you do) too tone-deaf and too self-unaware to avoid making this argument. I'm merely pointing out that your value-prop is based on a solid technical foundation, which I feel you agree on: > If not the technical person, then who? It’s a lot easier for a technical person to learn how to talk the language of the business than a business person to have a deep understanding of technology. The argument is not "Oh boo hoo, I wish I could spend 8 hours a day coding for money like I used to", so stop pretending like it is.
  - raw_anon_1111 9mo ago
    There is an entire contingent of comments here who miss translating requirements into code. Even the comment I replied to mentioned “being a BA” like the most important quality of a software engineer is their ability to translate requirements into code.
  - NamlchakKhandro 9mo ago
    > The argument is not Then what is it. be blunt and obvious in your reply or go home.
    - lelanthran 9mo ago
      > Then what is it. It's that the erosion and atrophying of the fundamental skill that made you (or, in this case, the GP) valuable is a matter of concern, because you (or GP, as the case may be) are willingly embracing the fact that you will be no more valuable than the average office office worker, and so can expect that compensation will drop to match. As an example, moving to Python from C was was moving to a higher level of abstraction, but it still didn't jettison the need for actually knowing how to program! Moving to LLMs from Python does jettison any need to know what an object is, what "parse, don't validate" actually means, etc. If the problem you are solving with the LLM doesn't need that knowledge, then that job doesn't need all those valuable programming skills anyway, and thus you are no more valuable than the average clerk toiling away in the middle of some organisation. > be blunt and obvious in your reply or go home. Very classy.

nunez 9mo ago

Look, there are at least dozens of us who like and enjoy programming for programming's sake and got into this crazy industry because of that. Many of these people made many of the countless things we take for granted every day (networking, operating systems, web search; hell, even the transformer architecture before they got productized!). Seeing software development --- and software engineering by proxy --- get reduced to a jello that will be stepped on by "builders" in real-time is depressing as shit. It's even more depressing to see folks on HACKER news boost the "programming never mattered" mentality that's taken hold these last few years. Last comment I'll make before I step off my soapbox: the "codez real gud" folks that makes the big bucks bring way more to the table than their ability to code...but their ability to code is a big contributor to why they bring more to the table!

raw_anon_1111 9mo ago
Well as depressing as it is, check out the 2024 and 2025 YC batches. Guess how many of them are “ai” something or other? It’s never been about “hackers”. Not a single founder who takes VC funding is thinking about a sustainable business - at least their investors aren’t - they are hoping for the “exit”. It’s always been jello. I at 51 can wax poetically about the good old days or I can keep doing what I need to do to keep money appearing in my account.
danparsonson 9mo ago
> Look, there are at least dozens of us who like and enjoy programming for programming's sake and got into this crazy industry because of that. You and me both, and I truly sympathise, but really we were just lucky that we could enjoy our passion at work. > It's even more depressing to see folks on HACKER news boost the "programming never mattered" mentality that's taken hold these last few years. Delivering stuff to customers for money is always what we've been paid for; that's not new, it's just that perhaps many of us didn't really pay much mind to that in the past. That's perhaps why there's traditionally been so much complaining about artificial deadlines and managers and sales teams; many of us also didn't really notice that the programming was never the thing that our employers cared about; it is just a link in a long chain from idea to income. The way I'm looking at our current situation is this: I spent my whole career and much of my free time learning to become a great furniture maker, and I take a lot of pleasure producing functional and elegant items. Now someone has handed me some power tools. I can mourn the loss of care and love that goes into hand-crafting something, but I can also learn to use the tools to crank out the good-enough cabinets that my employer wants me to make, focussing on the more abstract elements of the craft and doing less of the laborious stuff. I think I can still take pleasure and pride in my work in this way, and personally I find the design aspect of software development to be a lot of fun. I can still hand-craft things sometimes too; there will no doubt always be important difficult parts of a project that would take as long to describe to an LLM as they would to write by hand, at least for those of us with sufficient experience of the latter. I can also, hopefully, finally knock out some of those side projects that I have had on my list for many years but never had time to make. I would prefer that those things existed in a less than perfect state, than that they were perfect but only in my head :-)