3 ms·

If by software engineering, one means typing code character by character into a text editor, sure it's going to be difficult to find someone to pay you for it.

by fooker 5mo ago

If by software engineering, one means typing code character by character into a text editor, sure it's going to be difficult to find someone to pay you for it. If you mean creating software, well we are creating more software than ever before and the definition of what software is has never been so diverse. I can see many different careers branching off from here.

harimau777 5mo ago
My concern would be whether creating that software pays enough to keep up with skyrocketing costs of living. In the past, the jobs created by automation have generally been lower paid with less autonomy.
- lanstin 5mo ago
  This problem is not a software engineering problem nor an AI problem but a problem of the balance of power between working hard vs. investing. If the people who believe in working hard organize and slow down the tendency to rig everything for investors, then the markets should stabilize at a more generally prosperous place.
  - rayiner 5mo ago
    The balance of power is dictated by economic facts, not by organizing or politics. Auto workers in 1950 weren't better organized than auto workers in 2026. They just had more leverage because they weren't competing with auto workers in China. Likewise, Silicon Valley isn't paying people writing web apps $$$ because those workers are organized. They are doing it because they don't have a feasible alternative. If AI enables them to do more with less, they'll take that option.
    - lanstin 5mo ago
      Are you saying that auto labor unions can't go into other places and organize the people there for higher salaries and less wretched conditions? Or that organizing doesn't increase the power of the hard working people? Economic facts are partially determined by human factors such as the supply curve for labor and information flow amongst sellers or buyers for various goods.
      - xyzzyz 5mo ago
        Yes, and by shifting the labor supply curve you can make the laborers worse off, because it will often shift the supply curve of the product they’re making. If labor unions make you pay your workers more, you might need to raise the prices, which will make you less competitive, and reduce your sales, which can result in layoffs, or in preventing new workers from gaining employment.
- aleph_minus_one 5mo ago
  > My concern would be whether creating that software pays enough to keep up with skyrocketing costs of living. You might need to relocate to a place with much lower costs of living. This was the idea behind remote working discussed during COVID-19 times: - the company can pay less money because the employee is living at a much cheaper place than the expensive city where the company is located - on the other hand, even with a smaller salary, the employee has more money at the end of the month because of the smaller costs of living So both sides win.
  - harimau777 5mo ago
    [flagged]
    - aleph_minus_one 5mo ago
      > Unfortunately, in America places with low cost of living are generally, to put it diplomatically, unpleasant places to live. This will change for the better if more and more educated people relocate there.
      - nly 5mo ago
        And then those areas become more expensive...
    - SoftTalker 5mo ago
      But at least stereotyping happens everywhere!
      - selimthegrim 5mo ago
        I like how the assumption was they were all white, Christian and rural.
  - Natfan 5mo ago
    but moving to a lower COL area can reduce that amount of public and private services one gets access to, no? network connectivity will, for example, likely be worse out in the sticks
xtracto 5mo ago
We are experiencing what Civil Engineers experienced going from slide rules to calculators. Or electrical engineers going from manual circuit path drawing to CAD tools. The interesting thing to me is that, Software Engineering will have to evolve. Processes and tools will have to evolve, as they had evolved through the years. When I was finishing university in 2004, we learned about the "crisis of software " time, the Cascade development process and how new "iterative methods" were starting. We learned about how spaghetti code gave way to Pascal/C structured prpgramming, which gave way to OOP. Engineering methods also evolved, with UML being one infamous language, but also formal methods such as Z language for formal verification; or ABC or cyclomatic complexity measurements of software complexity. Which brings me to Today: Now that computers are writing MOST of the code; the value of current languages and software dev processes is decreasing. Programming Languages are made for people (otherwise we would continue writing in Assembler). So now we have to change the abstractions we use to communicate our intent to the computers, and to verify that the final instructions are doing what we wanted. I'm very interested to see these new abstractions. I even believe that, given that all the small details of coding will be fully automated, MAYBE we will finally see more Engineering (real engineering) Rigor in the Software Engineering profession. Even if there still will be coders, the same way there are non-engineers building and modifying houses (common in Mexico at least)
- hnthrowaway0315 5mo ago
  Calculators and CAD tools do not give you non-deterministic answers. Both of them simply automate part of the manual work for them without creating anything "new". I haven't used CAD tools but I did use some level editors such as Trenchbroom -- I think what is automated is the 3d shapes that you want to make -- e.g. back in the day of '96, when ID Software is creating Quake, there was very little pre-drawn shapes in the level editor and they have to make the blocks by themselves, thus it is very difficult and time consuming to make complex shapes such as curved walls and tunnels. Then better tools were invented and now it is much easier to create a complex shape. But you don't type "a Quake level with theme A, and blah blah" and then you get a more or less working level -- this is what AI is doing right now. I think the right analogy to calculators and CAD tools, is IDE with Intellisense for SWE -- instead of typing code one char by one char, we can tab to automate some part of it. But I agree with your consensus -- SWE is changing, whether we like it or not. We need to adapt, or find a niche and grit to retirement.
ryeights 5mo ago
s/software engineer/secretary/ s/creating software/typing correspondence/ In a world where software programming/architecting is solved by AI, value will accrue to people with expertise in other domains (who have now been granted the power of 1000 expert developers), not the people whose skillsets have been made redundant by better, faster and cheaper AI tools.
- ReptileMan 5mo ago
  It could go either way. Don't forget that LLMs also have expertise in the other domains. Who would do better - the chemist with vibe coded app or the developer with vibe coded chemistry?
  - ryeights 5mo ago
    My premise is that a vibe-coded app will be indistinguishable from a ‘hand-crafted’ one. So in that scenario the chemist wins, because the developer has no value to add. It is clear to me that SWE and ML research will be subsumed before other domains because labs are focusing their efforts there, in their quest to build self-improving systems.
  - jazzpush2 5mo ago
    Vibe-coded chemistry is absolute garbage right now. The former would do magnitudes better.
deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]
jerf 5mo ago
In 2020, there are two companies that are competitors with each other. They each employ 100 programmers to do their job, and we all know how those organizations operated; perpetually behind, each feature added generating yet more possible future features, we've all lived it and are still largely living it today. In 2026, both companies decide that AI can accelerate their developers by a factor of 10x. I'm not asserting that's reality, it's just a nice round number. Company 1 fires 90 of their programmers and does the same work with 10. Company 2 keeps all their programmers and does ten times the work they used to do, and maybe ends up hiring more. Who wins in the market? Of course the answer is "it depends" because it always is but I would say the winning space for Company 1 is substantially smaller than Company 2. They need a very precise combination of market circumstances. One that is not so precise that it doesn't exist, but it's a risky bet that you're in one of the exceptions. In the time when the acceleration is occurring and we haven't settled in to the new reality yet the Company 1 answer seems superficially appealing to the bean counters, but it only takes one defector in a given market to go with Company 2's solution to force the entire rest of their industry to follow suit to compete properly. The value generation by one programmer that can be possibly captured by that programmer's salary is probably not going down in the medium and long term either.
- boredatoms 5mo ago
  This resonates strongly with me, in that all that extra margin has to be spent on something other than dividends
- rayiner 5mo ago
  Your hypothetical ignores the distribution of programmer talent. Company 1 can pay more per person and hire 10x programmers, who can then leverage AI to produce the same or more as Company 2. We have seen this in other knowledge industries. U.S. legal sector job count is about the same today as it was 20 years ago. But billing rates have exploded and revenues in the 200 largest firms have increased more than 50% after adjusting for inflation. Higher-end law firms have leveraged technology to be able to service much more of the demand and push out smaller regional competitors.
  - 5mo ago
ReptileMan 5mo ago
Except we are now in the golden age where people with 20 or 30 years of experience know what quality software is - or at least what it is not. So they are able to steer the LLMs. Once this knowledge is gone - the quality could go downhill.
kypro 5mo ago
There will be more software in the same way there is more agricultural output today. The idea that productivity gains which result in more of something being produced also create more demand for labour to produce that thing is more often wrong that true as far as I can tell. In fact, it's quite hard to point to any historical examples of this happening. In general labour demand significantly decreases when productivity significantly increases and typically people need to retrain.
Rotundo 5mo ago
Creating more software does not solve anything if that software is mostly a functional duplicate of other software. Or, in other words, all companies re-invent the wheel many times over. It doesn't matter if you 10x the development of software that brings nothing new besides being written in a shiny new framework. We should, IMHO, start getting rid of most software. Go back to basics: what do you need, make that better, make it complete. Finish a piece of software for once.

by fooker 5mo ago

harimau777 5mo ago

My concern would be whether creating that software pays enough to keep up with skyrocketing costs of living. In the past, the jobs created by automation have generally been lower paid with less autonomy.

lanstin 5mo ago
This problem is not a software engineering problem nor an AI problem but a problem of the balance of power between working hard vs. investing. If the people who believe in working hard organize and slow down the tendency to rig everything for investors, then the markets should stabilize at a more generally prosperous place.
- rayiner 5mo ago
  The balance of power is dictated by economic facts, not by organizing or politics. Auto workers in 1950 weren't better organized than auto workers in 2026. They just had more leverage because they weren't competing with auto workers in China. Likewise, Silicon Valley isn't paying people writing web apps $$$ because those workers are organized. They are doing it because they don't have a feasible alternative. If AI enables them to do more with less, they'll take that option.
  - lanstin 5mo ago
    Are you saying that auto labor unions can't go into other places and organize the people there for higher salaries and less wretched conditions? Or that organizing doesn't increase the power of the hard working people? Economic facts are partially determined by human factors such as the supply curve for labor and information flow amongst sellers or buyers for various goods.
    - xyzzyz 5mo ago
      Yes, and by shifting the labor supply curve you can make the laborers worse off, because it will often shift the supply curve of the product they’re making. If labor unions make you pay your workers more, you might need to raise the prices, which will make you less competitive, and reduce your sales, which can result in layoffs, or in preventing new workers from gaining employment.
aleph_minus_one 5mo ago
> My concern would be whether creating that software pays enough to keep up with skyrocketing costs of living. You might need to relocate to a place with much lower costs of living. This was the idea behind remote working discussed during COVID-19 times: - the company can pay less money because the employee is living at a much cheaper place than the expensive city where the company is located - on the other hand, even with a smaller salary, the employee has more money at the end of the month because of the smaller costs of living So both sides win.
- harimau777 5mo ago
  [flagged]
  - aleph_minus_one 5mo ago
    > Unfortunately, in America places with low cost of living are generally, to put it diplomatically, unpleasant places to live. This will change for the better if more and more educated people relocate there.
    - nly 5mo ago
      And then those areas become more expensive...
  - SoftTalker 5mo ago
    But at least stereotyping happens everywhere!
    - selimthegrim 5mo ago
      I like how the assumption was they were all white, Christian and rural.
- Natfan 5mo ago
  but moving to a lower COL area can reduce that amount of public and private services one gets access to, no? network connectivity will, for example, likely be worse out in the sticks

xtracto 5mo ago

We are experiencing what Civil Engineers experienced going from slide rules to calculators. Or electrical engineers going from manual circuit path drawing to CAD tools. The interesting thing to me is that, Software Engineering will have to evolve. Processes and tools will have to evolve, as they had evolved through the years. When I was finishing university in 2004, we learned about the "crisis of software " time, the Cascade development process and how new "iterative methods" were starting. We learned about how spaghetti code gave way to Pascal/C structured prpgramming, which gave way to OOP. Engineering methods also evolved, with UML being one infamous language, but also formal methods such as Z language for formal verification; or ABC or cyclomatic complexity measurements of software complexity. Which brings me to Today: Now that computers are writing MOST of the code; the value of current languages and software dev processes is decreasing. Programming Languages are made for people (otherwise we would continue writing in Assembler). So now we have to change the abstractions we use to communicate our intent to the computers, and to verify that the final instructions are doing what we wanted. I'm very interested to see these new abstractions. I even believe that, given that all the small details of coding will be fully automated, MAYBE we will finally see more Engineering (real engineering) Rigor in the Software Engineering profession. Even if there still will be coders, the same way there are non-engineers building and modifying houses (common in Mexico at least)

hnthrowaway0315 5mo ago
Calculators and CAD tools do not give you non-deterministic answers. Both of them simply automate part of the manual work for them without creating anything "new". I haven't used CAD tools but I did use some level editors such as Trenchbroom -- I think what is automated is the 3d shapes that you want to make -- e.g. back in the day of '96, when ID Software is creating Quake, there was very little pre-drawn shapes in the level editor and they have to make the blocks by themselves, thus it is very difficult and time consuming to make complex shapes such as curved walls and tunnels. Then better tools were invented and now it is much easier to create a complex shape. But you don't type "a Quake level with theme A, and blah blah" and then you get a more or less working level -- this is what AI is doing right now. I think the right analogy to calculators and CAD tools, is IDE with Intellisense for SWE -- instead of typing code one char by one char, we can tab to automate some part of it. But I agree with your consensus -- SWE is changing, whether we like it or not. We need to adapt, or find a niche and grit to retirement.

ryeights 5mo ago

s/software engineer/secretary/ s/creating software/typing correspondence/ In a world where software programming/architecting is solved by AI, value will accrue to people with expertise in other domains (who have now been granted the power of 1000 expert developers), not the people whose skillsets have been made redundant by better, faster and cheaper AI tools.

ReptileMan 5mo ago
It could go either way. Don't forget that LLMs also have expertise in the other domains. Who would do better - the chemist with vibe coded app or the developer with vibe coded chemistry?
- ryeights 5mo ago
  My premise is that a vibe-coded app will be indistinguishable from a ‘hand-crafted’ one. So in that scenario the chemist wins, because the developer has no value to add. It is clear to me that SWE and ML research will be subsumed before other domains because labs are focusing their efforts there, in their quest to build self-improving systems.
- jazzpush2 5mo ago
  Vibe-coded chemistry is absolute garbage right now. The former would do magnitudes better.

deleted 5mo ago

[deleted]

jerf 5mo ago

In 2020, there are two companies that are competitors with each other. They each employ 100 programmers to do their job, and we all know how those organizations operated; perpetually behind, each feature added generating yet more possible future features, we've all lived it and are still largely living it today. In 2026, both companies decide that AI can accelerate their developers by a factor of 10x. I'm not asserting that's reality, it's just a nice round number. Company 1 fires 90 of their programmers and does the same work with 10. Company 2 keeps all their programmers and does ten times the work they used to do, and maybe ends up hiring more. Who wins in the market? Of course the answer is "it depends" because it always is but I would say the winning space for Company 1 is substantially smaller than Company 2. They need a very precise combination of market circumstances. One that is not so precise that it doesn't exist, but it's a risky bet that you're in one of the exceptions. In the time when the acceleration is occurring and we haven't settled in to the new reality yet the Company 1 answer seems superficially appealing to the bean counters, but it only takes one defector in a given market to go with Company 2's solution to force the entire rest of their industry to follow suit to compete properly. The value generation by one programmer that can be possibly captured by that programmer's salary is probably not going down in the medium and long term either.

boredatoms 5mo ago
This resonates strongly with me, in that all that extra margin has to be spent on something other than dividends
rayiner 5mo ago
Your hypothetical ignores the distribution of programmer talent. Company 1 can pay more per person and hire 10x programmers, who can then leverage AI to produce the same or more as Company 2. We have seen this in other knowledge industries. U.S. legal sector job count is about the same today as it was 20 years ago. But billing rates have exploded and revenues in the 200 largest firms have increased more than 50% after adjusting for inflation. Higher-end law firms have leveraged technology to be able to service much more of the demand and push out smaller regional competitors.
- 5mo ago

ReptileMan 5mo ago

Except we are now in the golden age where people with 20 or 30 years of experience know what quality software is - or at least what it is not. So they are able to steer the LLMs. Once this knowledge is gone - the quality could go downhill.

kypro 5mo ago

There will be more software in the same way there is more agricultural output today. The idea that productivity gains which result in more of something being produced also create more demand for labour to produce that thing is more often wrong that true as far as I can tell. In fact, it's quite hard to point to any historical examples of this happening. In general labour demand significantly decreases when productivity significantly increases and typically people need to retrain.

Rotundo 5mo ago

Creating more software does not solve anything if that software is mostly a functional duplicate of other software. Or, in other words, all companies re-invent the wheel many times over. It doesn't matter if you 10x the development of software that brings nothing new besides being written in a shiny new framework. We should, IMHO, start getting rid of most software. Go back to basics: what do you need, make that better, make it complete. Finish a piece of software for once.