7 ms·

What's gonna happen to software engineers?

75 points by yakkomajuri 4mo ago

artyom 4mo ago
Once upon a time there were engineers that used software. Just like any other tool, and usually in combination with electronic, electrical and mechanical equipment, all of them being very well aware of the laws governing it all. But it was so great as a tool that some engineers didn't want to deal with the burdens and limitations of the physical world, and started focusing on software more and more. Then the software engineers came, for whom the physical and mathematical aspect of the whole thing was just a distant history lesson (and preferably a problem in someone else's computer). And after software engineers, the only constant in the entire ordeal will remain: engineering, in a shape or form that very likely nobody can predict right now.
- calvinmorrison 4mo ago
  That's why I drink Genesee Light, to get drunk not for the flavor. I find the IPA drinkers to be of that same ilk That is to say, somewhere along the way software got really complex, and really artistic, and really full of hubris.
- apsurd 4mo ago
  As someone not old but young enough to not have experienced a world before software, Im not sure that engineering rooted in the physical is a necessary prerequisite. I appreciate your comment but the entire world I happened to experience in my coming of age was at the dawn of the consumer internet. And so “web stuff” was how I cut my teeth. And its my profession. And i never went to school for it, im basically a dumb untrained web dev, borne from the script kiddie days. There’s a stigma to it sure, but im well past it. All to say I just dont think CS principles down to the physics level is the root and all is an abstraction. Theyre just different things now.
  - artyom 4mo ago
    > All to say I just dont think CS principles down to the physics level is the root and all is an abstraction. Not my point either. I was just referring to the tooling changing over time, with the discipline constantly evolving forward nonetheless.
prplfsh 4mo ago
I really love using AI to code but more and more I wonder ... Are things really that different? So I guess I'm the business as usual type. I think on the frontend side we're going to see a lot more scope for teams. On a backend infra side it seems as hard as ever. Still have to think really hard problems, think deeply about data structure and flow, and deal with second- and third-order effects. Or even harder because the models like to confidently lie. The harder question is how we train people but that doesn't seem insurmountable either. Most of us cut our teeth as junior engineers somewhere, implementing tasks that Claude can now do without breaking a sweat but was that really the most efficient way to train and learn?
- slopinthebag 4mo ago
  Yeah I mean, as far as I can tell the result of the agent mania is the same amount of software, but an acceleration in the decline of performance and quality. I'm also increasingly seeing early adopters going back to a more "traditional" approach to development. So idk, maybe the result will be more jobs fixing up all the vibe code while we transition to a more mature implementation of language models into our workflows.
  - glouwbug 4mo ago
    I’ve noticed a massive reverse in AI sentiment in the last 3 weeks here on HN. It’s not that I don’t disagree, but I wonder what’s going on. Maybe it’s the IPO
    - hootz 4mo ago
      Reversing to which direction? Because what I've always seen here is a pretty good mix of positive and negative sentiments. Usually we get a lot of AI related submissions, but with skeptics/opposers in the comments.
      - glouwbug 4mo ago
        I’m not sure. I’ve been reading death-of-the-software engineer for years, but recently the -vibe- feels different. I don’t have anything anecdotal to back it up so take it with a grain of salt. I might be reading what I want to see
ChicagoDave 4mo ago
I've been thinking about this since ChatGPT arrived. My thoughts are distilled in a single page: https://devarch.ai/trio-paradigm.html https://devarch.ai/trio-paradigm.html I doubt we will ever need a large team to build software again. PMs will be fractional. Product owners and subject matter experts will become more valuable. And engineers that have deep experience with things like Domain-Driven Design will thrive and vibe coders will eventually be shut out of bigger roles.
- deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
- UncleOxidant 4mo ago
  > I doubt we will ever need a large team to build software again. but that seems to contradict what you say here: > vibe coders will eventually be shut out of bigger roles. Isn't vibe coding driving that greater productivity and negating the need for large teams to build software?
  - ChicagoDave 4mo ago
    Vibe coding is the chaos version of using GenAI. Seven agents in parallel and the dev refuses to believe this will just be a circle jerk of hallucinations. Planned, architected problems led by experienced dev/arch’s will be where success is measured.
ai_fry_ur_brain 4mo ago
[flagged]
- caspper69 4mo ago
  The difference, and I think we as an industry will have to reconcile this depending on how advanced llms get, is that you don’t see the quality in handmade code like you do in a high end watch or a luxury automobile or appliance. The veneer might be identical. It’s going to be tough to convince people that handmade software has added value or quality over slop. I still believe it does right now, but that might not always be true. And this is an industry that has pumped out a lot of sloppy code for decades, even before it was actual slop.
  - thr33 4mo ago
    well this is not exactly unique to software. It is not a given that the 'handmade' nature of a product (luxury or otherwise) manifests in anything tangible or self-evidently superior. Luxury products in general overwhelmingly treat the crafted nature of the product as almost solely an investment in narrative (read: marketing) and market positioning, not an actual material outcome.
    - pitched 4mo ago
      I like this take a lot. Posting a counter-example not because I disagree but because I think it’s interesting. Ghostty is a terminal emulator with a pretty good narrative. The author is very accessible on podcasts to go over the story. It is also actually very good though. I think the jump in performance and usability put it on the map before the narrative could help push it further. The product does have to actually be good before the crafted nature can be invested into.
  - thaumasiotes 4mo ago
    > you don’t see the quality in handmade code like you do in a high end watch or a luxury automobile or appliance. But you can't see the "quality" in a high end watch either. They are inferior to low-end watches by every metric you can imagine.
ryandvm 4mo ago
I've definitely noticed a distinct lack of pride now that Claude Code is writing 90% of the code I'm delivering these days. For simple problems (which most are) it works well enough and you are definitely shipping code faster - and with actual test coverage to boot. But it just doesn't feel the same - there's little craftsmanship and honestly it's boring as fuck. You spend a lot of time setting up guardrails and having it produce plans that you then have to refactor multiple times. It's impressive that LLMs can do this, but it's not particularly enjoyable. I guess I was a "writing code was the fun part" guy. Semi-related, but I really want to see the long term maintenance outcomes of all code being produced by these software engineers that were apparently just closeted project managers. I feel like having 50% of the engineers in this industry just telling Claude Code, "yeah that looks good to me" 150 times a day is going to result in an incredible amount of software rewriting.
- sokoloff 4mo ago
  My feelings about front-end code are that I have a stronger feeling of craftsmanship, in the sense that I can ship a much more polished product because all the small nagging annoyances are things that I can eliminate (second-hand), where I’d previously have just lived with a lot of them as fixing them took too long to be worthwhile. I hate shipping some of the resulting working slop. For me, part of craftsmanship is the quality of the shipped product. (I’m also willing to use CNC tools while doing hobby woodworking; others think that takes away the craftsmanship; I think it changes how the craftsmanship is experienced and applied.)
- scorpioxy 4mo ago
  I wonder that too. I've been on the receiving end of "it's 90% done, we just need someone to get it over the line for us" way too many times to know that there's going to be a lot of pain trying to maintain or re-write parts of anything that is vibe-coded. On the other hand, I notice the AI-fundamentalists(I am not sure how to refer to people within that group) just say that you won't be doing any hand coding anymore and you'd "just" ask something like claude to maintain it or re-write.
  - drzaiusx11 4mo ago
ppeetteerr 4mo ago
Engineers are not going anywhere, they are going to fill the spaces outside of coding that are still critical to shipping new product. Here is a post that summarizes what I mean: https://substack.com/home/post/p-200064883 https://substack.com/home/post/p-200064883
- krackers 4mo ago
  Traditionally those roles of providing "alignment" to overcome organizational inertia were held by program managers. So that seems like IC roles are indeed going away, to be replaced by more "technical program manager" type roles.
  - ppeetteerr 4mo ago
    Maybe it's my experience, but TPMs were often responsible for coordinating large org-wide or cross-org initiatives. It's prohibitively expensive to have TPMs on anything smaller. Since engineering with AI is still very technical, I would wager that software engineers would stretch into less technical areas of software development rather than TPMs stretching into technical areas. I only say this as someone with experience with AI and I see how easy it is to write bad code with AI if you're not aware of what it's doing.
jeremyjh 4mo ago
I've been both types on and off and on for my whole career. At times, very engrossed in the technology itself - but I got started because I needed tools for my job that didn't exist so I learned how to build them. I've also developed and maintained open source software - some of it very much for its own sake as a technology - some of it quite utilitarian. Understanding of product and business has always differentiated me though, and this is why I've never really stressed about any of this. Another thing I've noticed - most developers are really bad at reviewing code - whether AI wrote it or not. Its really hard to make your brain sink in deep enough to really evaluate what you are looking at. I think a lot of developers never - or almost never - find bugs based on code inspection alone. Once they are written - there is often no other practical way to confirm that tests actually test what they claim to other than inspection. And bugs in design are still very costly in this new world. As long as any human still has an edge in any aspect of the software development process - people who can force themselves to really think through proposed designs, test plans and cases and code will be really valuable.
- sublinear 4mo ago
  > people who can force themselves to really think through proposed designs... You're describing experience, not "forcing themselves". On the dev side, the differentiator is enough of this experience that using AI is actually significantly slower for everything but literally typing the code.
oompydoompy74 4mo ago
Nothing. There will be more of us than ever as the amount of money each engineer can generate goes up. I’m not sure why everyone comes to the conclusion that there will be less engineers as productivity increases. We aren’t that expensive relative to the value we generate and AI, when wielded by an expert, will exponentially increase the amount of return a single engineer can generate.
- operatingthetan 4mo ago
  >I’m not sure why everyone comes to the conclusion that there will be less engineers as productivity increases. The politics of corporations is such that they don't actually want near infinite productivity. They require churn, cycles, a cadence.
singingtoday 4mo ago
They're going to be overworked. In the old days we programmed systems by literally wiring them. There wasn't much work, only a few "programmers" were employed. Then somebody came up with Punch cards that was much more vision than wiring the systems directly. This opened the door for a lot more people to use them and now programmers were busier. The punch cards didn't scale either so eventually we created panels with buttons so we could type the programs into the computers. That was more efficient and now all the sudden it lowered the bar entry and more people who are employed and doing the work. Assembly language to machine code compilers to assembly language high-level languages and LLMs. Every time developing software gets easier, it only increases the amount of work required. I'm busier today than I've ever been in my entire life. What's going to happen to software engineers? They're going to be overworked and they're going to be given more work and the cycle will never end.
- munksbeer 4mo ago
  >Every time developing software gets easier, it only increases the amount of work required. I'm busier today than I've ever been in my entire life. I have the same sentiment. So far, no indication that I can be replaced yet. Maybe some day, but right now I'm more productive because of AI (*), but just as if not more busy. (*) Such as: Obviously the coding side, but also... AI is helping scrape logs to diagnose bugs, and doing so with high accuracy, much, much faster than I could have done. AI is taking care of my work journal (basically how I manage my own state) by scraping slack, emails, git commits, ticket state changes and everything else, and updating and maintaining my journal each day. I can't overstate how pleased I am with this. I am usually pretty diligent but if I get out of the habit, I could go weeks before I was back in. Now it is trivial and I always do it. And more.
- james_marks 4mo ago
  Jevon’s paradox. We’ve been constrained by how much software could be produced for decades. Making it easier/faster doesn’t increase leisure, it increases the demand for (cheaper) software.
  - blharr 4mo ago
jdw64 4mo ago
But has software engineering really changed that much? I've barely had any regular fulltime work experience most of my career has been contracting, so I’m not sure.It seems like the perceived change varies depending on the environmen What I don’t get is using AI agents feels basically the same as what I used to do with legacy codebases of 100k–200k lines—understanding the codebase and making partial fixes or adding features. To me, it feels like nothing has changed. Most of my career has been about finding parts that won't break within the overall code structure—without necessarily knowing the entire detailed specification—and adding features or fixing bugs there. So I feel like it's no different from finding and fixing small issues and bugs in a large codebase written by AI. Of course, when delivering a solution that's 70,000–80,000 lines long, there is a change things that used to rely on templates and CMS tools can now be created more diversely using AI. But aside from that, I don't think things have changed as much as people say. It might be different for those who build things entirely from scratch with AI, though. My code writing ability has declined, but I'm not really seeing a dramatic change in workflow Now I work with code written by AI, adding features and modifying it… Most of the codebases I’ve seen were bad anyway—there was no good code to begin with. When coding with AI, I split tasks into P0, P1, P2 based on importance. For P0, I write everything myself. For P1, I write the draft and AI implements it. For P2, AI implements everything. For P0, I only handle things that involve responsibility, like payment logic or login logic. I don't participate in open source, so I don’t see big changes. The only thing I notice is that AI speeds things up a lot—for things I used to understand by reading documentation and examples, now I can generate them much faster. Personally, I wish open source projects had more simple, short examples in their code
fhub 4mo ago
Four day working weeks would be nice.
- yakkomajuri 4mo ago
  OP here. So I've also been running a survey about how developers are feeling about AI (added a link to the post) and 60% of respondents said that using AI actively makes them more tired. Most also report being more productive with AI. One would think these two things combined make up for initiatives for shorter work weeks and the like, but from what I've seen, at least for now, the opposite seems to be happening. P.S. Sample size is currently small but I've also gathered a fair amount of qualitative data to indicate both of these things. Of course measuring productivity is also far from a science.
  - scorpioxy 4mo ago
    Shorter work weeks don't mean less work though. Not from the point of view of management, at least. It just means that 5 days are now compressed to 4, probably making the problem much worse and burn out much more likely. In my experience, this is what ended up happening.
    - pitched 4mo ago
      When you work for someone, you’re selling hours of time. Reducing days means you’re selling fewer hours. That has always been possible but they’ll probably want to pay less.
seer 4mo ago
I really liked reading through the Mars trilogy. It imagined a world where AI is used for fluent effortless translation - local languages get a renaissance since now you _dont_ need a lengua Franca, everyone just speaks what they like the most, and can understand everyone else. Much more “flavour” to human interaction. Also ai makes things just resource constrained, not labour - whatever you imagined, you could make happen, just needed to “talk to an ai” about it. Lots of terraforming Mars / Venus in that book were imagined like that. But it also analysed the social / political / behavioural aspects of it. Places that had to preserve old power structures - aka US/Europe/China - got engulfed with mega corps controlling everything etc. But Mars - where people had enough freedom to imagine something different, came up with political/financial structures to incorporate all of that, and thrived. I think it tried to play the card of “if US was being created right now - what would its ideals be” If you had a huge tract of land that was “free” and nobody (powerful enough) claiming it, and a population that didn’t yet have strong allegiances and could be persuaded to band together, what would AI, tech and all these years of progress allow us as humans to achieve politically. Which also makes you feel kinda sad for the US in that world - it is the old rusted power center that can’t innovate and is stuck in the past… Now it’s only sci fi of course, but it was quite interesting to imagine a world where AI gets smarter and smarter but never reaches that “sentient” threshold. I think the whole trilogy aged incredibly well all things considered.
- TheOtherHobbes 4mo ago
  The issues are really social/political/behavioural. If white collar jobs are decimated the economy will collapse, because it's still - nominally - a consumer economy, even though most of the spending comes from the top 10%. If 25% of that top 10% is suddenly out of work, that's a huge chunk of GDP gone, and a likely depression as the knock on effects spread. I don't see anyone thinking about this seriously. [Something something UBI] is not a serious attempt to deal with the problem. Ultimately you end up with an economy where most humans are surplus to economic requirements and will literally be murdered by economics. Or wealth and opportunity are widely distributed, but "jobs" are nothing like they are today. Given where we are now option 1 looks closer.
- b65e8bee43c2ed0 4mo ago
rglover 4mo ago
Pay increases and red carpet rollouts along with your choice of fruit or candy basket.
gymbeaux 4mo ago
LLMs have taken much of the enjoyment out of coding for me, but I don’t think it has to be that way. I hope that as an industry we settle on LLMs being more like tools than human assistants. I think most of the engineers at my company are using LLMs as human assistants- most of them have agentic workflows set up and have premium subscriptions to Claude AND Gemini AND ChatGPT. Many have local LLMs running on their company MacBook Pros, but they can never manage to describe to me in plain English what those local LLMs are doing. I would compare local LLMs to Raspberry Pi clusters. They’re neat, and technically they can do stuff but they are incredibly impractical. I want so desperately to have the power of Claude Opus running locally, but we are incredibly, ridiculously, extremely far off (benchmarks are often misleading and nobody likes to talk about the paltry tokens/s they’re getting on their home rig). So the problem for me is that I’ve noticed a trend with my coworkers- they usually don’t have a formal CS background (e.g., Comp Sci degree), their resumes are unimpressive, and they have personal websites where anyone can download a copy of their resume. I haven’t seen this at any previous job. It’s just weird, man. Anyway, so my problem is when they are purported to be the best of the best at this company, and they’re chugging the LLM kool-aid, I’m struggling to figure out whether they’re really ahead of the curve and getting the drop on the rest of us, or they’re doing basically no work and waving through each other’s PRs with little to no oversight on what the LLMs are writing. The bush league nature of many of the bugs I’m seeing going all the way to prod makes me think it’s the latter. Meanwhile, these guys and their teams are completing an absurd number of story points each sprint. My team is dead last (and coincidentally we’re all pretty anti-AI for writing code). I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop. I’m waiting for the C suite to call our project a failure and lay everyone off. The product generally works, though I think if the devs were truly rockstars, things would be much smoother. It seems like LLMs are letting middle-of-the-road or mediocre devs appear to be rockstars purely on output speed. Nobody in this org cares if the output has 4x the bugs it should have, just that it was completed quickly. The main issue I think is that nobody- including the rockstar tech leads- knows how the system works. They don’t know the code. There’s a bug and it takes forever to track down. Don’t ask about unit tests. I think in a perfect world, these LLMs are treated like another tool rather than another person- meaning you and I still write a large portion of the code, and we read and understand every line- especially the lines generated by LLMs. It’s still a huge productivity multiplier for me to not have to remember how to do mundane things like write out arrays into CSV files- before I’d find a close implementation on StackOverflow and tweak to my needs. Now I can just describe what I want the CSV to look like and Claude Code generally gets it right on the first try.
mikewarot 4mo ago
Software Engineers, like all licensed professional Engineers will be just fine, as AI can't assume liability, nor be professionally licensed. Programmers, on the other hand have a lot less leverage to bring to bear. Of course, the above assumes that the job cuts are actually AI related, and not just cover for having to fire people because ZIRP (Zero Interest Rate Policy - aka free money) is over.
- cube00 4mo ago
  > Software Engineers, like all licensed professional Engineers will be just fine, as AI can't assume liability, nor be professionally licensed. There's no such licensing, unlike other fields such as medicine you are not required by law to hold any license or qualification to perform software engineering.
  - munksbeer 4mo ago
    An business over a certain size will want people that are "responsible" or in other words liable for software issues.
Zoo3y 4mo ago
>after writing all this, I think these categories are a lot more about "what got you into this" rather than what you actually end up doing in this space. >Nevertheless, my point here was to show a few of the ideas and directions I've been considering, and I'm keen to hear from others what you're thinking about too. I decided to study computer science in college as a hopeful 18 year old who wanted to learn how video games work and maybe work for a development studio. I needed to find a job right after college, and I ended up going the full stack route. 10 years later (now) I'm working remote, making decent salary, but never fulfilled my original purpose for studying computer science. What's gonna happen to this software engineer? Anecdotally, I'll ride my IT job as long as I can while using AI to learn about game development.
dbetteridge 4mo ago
Writing code by LLM feels like management, or tech leading a project. It's tiring in a different way, but without the flow state or "high" of solving a particular problem in a clever or intuitive way. Some days I enjoy shipping a change that would never have been greenlit for the sprint points it would have required, other days it's like herding cats and I'm tired with nothing to show for it.
whateveracct 4mo ago
why do people forget so quickly that you can just code without LLMs? And be hugely impactful? Like in 2020 i coded better shit than my principle agentic engineer go do a good job. it's increasingly rare nowadays. the frauds are growing.
- i2km 4mo ago
  It's bizarre isn't it. It being treated as though actually knowing how to write quality code by hand is a skill that's somehow been lost to time... I can only guess that a lot of the engineers who went into software purely for money were all too happy to distance themselves from writing code and really don't want to go back...
  - Izkata 4mo ago
    Also skill atrophy due to over-reliance on these tools is a real thing. And for some people it happens really fast, just a couple of months before they start noticing a difference (like with two of my co-workers - one stated directly to me, another indirectly through a team member).
- mynameisbilly 4mo ago
  Do you still write assembly code?
  - whateveracct 4mo ago
    non sequitur. English through an LLM isn't the same as a higher level language compiling to a lower one. I am very familiar with this because I write Haskell. Which compiles to Core. Which is actually an extension of Sustem F which itself is an extension of lambda calculus. That then compiles to STG. That then compiles to Cmm. That then compiles to assembly code. See how that isn't the same as an LLM? To the point where your comment is a non sequitur?
b65e8bee43c2ed0 4mo ago
same thing that happened to translators. they are still needed, just several orders of magnitude fewer than before.
cicko 4mo ago
> they don't need you but you still need them. I can see very few reasons why AI couldn't replace their expertise for all of us non-experts, the same way it did for software development.
- fragmede 4mo ago
  The reason is a lack of an immediate verification process. The reason LLMs are been great at programming but less so elsewhere is because if it generates non-working code, calling hallucinated libraries or functions, there's immediate feedback. That code doesn't compile, it crashes, it fails tests, it's slow, it's buggy. But if the LLM gives me bad relationship advice, there's no repl that it can use to retry that conversation with my now-ex until we're back together. Or whatever thing that it's being used for that doesn't have some sort of way to give it a verifier. So taste is still a thing. Software engineering will have to develop (uh oh) taste and the ability to say no. Your app could include a button to make the device scream like a monkey, but if management tells you it has to have a feature that makes no sense, the answer is no.
drzaiusx11 4mo ago
Any sufficiently large (preexisting) codebase has subtlties and "load bearing" bugs that allow it to function. In my personal experience, the vibe coded solutions are incapable of delivering "safe" changes outside of anything trivial without breaking something. Folks now just seem to think this is OK? The result is software like my password manager and banking apps no longer reliably work. The trade offs (currently) just aren't worth it imho. Maybe once we get context windows in the 100M range these systems will handle large scale (and distributed in my case) backend systems just fine. They most certainly are not at the moment, at least not to preexisting backend software systems of modest complexity. Not even close.
CM30 4mo ago
I'd say it very much depends on software focused the company/industry in question is. On the lower end, there are a lot of companies whose sole purpose is to build websites for other small/medium sized businesses that don't care enough about tech to pay for a full-time engineering team. For those companies and developers, I suspect the increasing rise of AI will be a bloodbath. If your whole value proposition is "we can build your website using WordPress/Squarespace/Shopify/[CMS name here]", then AI can basically do about 95% of your job. I suspect a lot of these companies are going to shutter when clients take the work in-house due to AI, and many others will probably lose about 90% of their employees due to AI solutions being generally 'good enough'. On the other hand, if your company is tech focused and needs to implement more complex functionality as a selling point, then there'll still be a place for software engineers even with AI. This is where the engineer as pseudo project manager thing comes into play, and where the actual coding side of things is probably going to be limited to things the AI can't implement properly. Both situations will probably see a significant drop in the number of software engineers employed there, but the latter feels like it'll still have some room for a career.
- 1auralynn 4mo ago
  I think "don't care enough about tech" is a mischaracterization. Software engineers are EXPENSIVE and many companies just can't afford it. Personally I think AI unlocks a ton of opportunity, because things that were just not possible due to the high salaries (justified, of course) of software engineers are all of a sudden very possible. Maybe these small businesses will now be more likely to hire a fresh grad who can not only build them a website in a couple weeks but also a ton of other useful internal software.
spwa4 4mo ago
I think AI will make software developers and system administrators a necessity for many more companies, because they'll have AI carry out other jobs. Given the quantity of such companies that exist, I'd expect a lot more jobs for software devs. Somewhat different, sure, but not fundamentally different.
pjmlp 4mo ago
It will be like offshoring, with the difference this time around there is no team on the other side of the planet getting the jobs. The few lucky ones to stay employed, get to be promoted to technical architects, and everyone else whose passion was equivalent to brick layers has to find something else where humans haven't yet been replaced by robots or self service machines. When each team member gets more productive we're not doing e.g. 5x more output, we're doing more with less (team size).
prewett 4mo ago
This is a thoughtful article, but I think the axis isn't between builders and algorithm researches, but between craftsmen and results-oriented builders. Both want to build something, but the craftsman cares about the quality of the result (usability, maintainability, code quality, UI polish, etc.) while the non-craftsman is happy with something that works, even if some of the corners are janky. Or, thinking about Windows and macOS in the Jobs era, perhaps the difference is more between the quality of taste. Microsoft focused on quality code, and came up with COM, architectures where an instantiable button is 13 levels of inherited classes, and things like DirectX, where the architecture is clean and extendable, but forces every developer to do things like allocate their own @#$! framebuffer. High level of craftsmanship, but poor taste. Jobs tended to focus on the user experience and had good taste, so the results were generally pretty good, but I got the feeling that the code wasn't as much of a priority.
- marssaxman 4mo ago
  > Microsoft focused on quality code That's a sentence I have certainly never read before!
  - collyw 4mo ago
    It's closed source, how would you know?
    - marssaxman 4mo ago
      I used to work there - but I was talking about their reputation, not the actual quality of their code.
Henchman21 4mo ago
The same thing as auto mechanics when the ICE became well understood and ubiquitous.
iJohnDoe 4mo ago
This won’t be a popular position, but I don’t have much sympathy for software engineers. For decades, software engineers have been smug toward a lot of surrounding professions. Look at how they treated IT because developers thought they were server and network experts. Then cloud came along, and some of that work got moved over in the name of DevOps. Frontend and backend engineers were also treated unfairly at times. Then came roles requiring someone to be an expert in “full stack,” which I never thought was fair unless it paid a ton of money, which at times it didn’t. Now software engineers are being obfuscated away. Well, for a long time, software engineers acted like their shit didn’t stink. Maybe that was true for a while. Unfortunately, I’ve seen a lot of my colleagues not care who they walked over. But guess what, there are a ton of people out there who are going to be perfectly happy hearing the cries of software engineers now. “Be careful of the toes you step on today. They may be connected to the ass you need to kiss tomorrow.”

75 points by yakkomajuri 4mo ago

Once upon a time there were engineers that used software. Just like any other tool, and usually in combination with electronic, electrical and mechanical equipment, all of them being very well aware of the laws governing it all. But it was so great as a tool that some engineers didn't want to deal with the burdens and limitations of the physical world, and started focusing on software more and more. Then the software engineers came, for whom the physical and mathematical aspect of the whole thing was just a distant history lesson (and preferably a problem in someone else's computer). And after software engineers, the only constant in the entire ordeal will remain: engineering, in a shape or form that very likely nobody can predict right now.

calvinmorrison 4mo ago
That's why I drink Genesee Light, to get drunk not for the flavor. I find the IPA drinkers to be of that same ilk That is to say, somewhere along the way software got really complex, and really artistic, and really full of hubris.
apsurd 4mo ago
As someone not old but young enough to not have experienced a world before software, Im not sure that engineering rooted in the physical is a necessary prerequisite. I appreciate your comment but the entire world I happened to experience in my coming of age was at the dawn of the consumer internet. And so “web stuff” was how I cut my teeth. And its my profession. And i never went to school for it, im basically a dumb untrained web dev, borne from the script kiddie days. There’s a stigma to it sure, but im well past it. All to say I just dont think CS principles down to the physics level is the root and all is an abstraction. Theyre just different things now.
- artyom 4mo ago
  > All to say I just dont think CS principles down to the physics level is the root and all is an abstraction. Not my point either. I was just referring to the tooling changing over time, with the discipline constantly evolving forward nonetheless.

prplfsh 4mo ago

I really love using AI to code but more and more I wonder ... Are things really that different? So I guess I'm the business as usual type. I think on the frontend side we're going to see a lot more scope for teams. On a backend infra side it seems as hard as ever. Still have to think really hard problems, think deeply about data structure and flow, and deal with second- and third-order effects. Or even harder because the models like to confidently lie. The harder question is how we train people but that doesn't seem insurmountable either. Most of us cut our teeth as junior engineers somewhere, implementing tasks that Claude can now do without breaking a sweat but was that really the most efficient way to train and learn?

slopinthebag 4mo ago
Yeah I mean, as far as I can tell the result of the agent mania is the same amount of software, but an acceleration in the decline of performance and quality. I'm also increasingly seeing early adopters going back to a more "traditional" approach to development. So idk, maybe the result will be more jobs fixing up all the vibe code while we transition to a more mature implementation of language models into our workflows.
- glouwbug 4mo ago
  I’ve noticed a massive reverse in AI sentiment in the last 3 weeks here on HN. It’s not that I don’t disagree, but I wonder what’s going on. Maybe it’s the IPO
  - hootz 4mo ago
    Reversing to which direction? Because what I've always seen here is a pretty good mix of positive and negative sentiments. Usually we get a lot of AI related submissions, but with skeptics/opposers in the comments.
    - glouwbug 4mo ago
      I’m not sure. I’ve been reading death-of-the-software engineer for years, but recently the -vibe- feels different. I don’t have anything anecdotal to back it up so take it with a grain of salt. I might be reading what I want to see

ChicagoDave 4mo ago

I've been thinking about this since ChatGPT arrived. My thoughts are distilled in a single page: https://devarch.ai/trio-paradigm.html https://devarch.ai/trio-paradigm.html I doubt we will ever need a large team to build software again. PMs will be fractional. Product owners and subject matter experts will become more valuable. And engineers that have deep experience with things like Domain-Driven Design will thrive and vibe coders will eventually be shut out of bigger roles.

deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]
UncleOxidant 4mo ago
> I doubt we will ever need a large team to build software again. but that seems to contradict what you say here: > vibe coders will eventually be shut out of bigger roles. Isn't vibe coding driving that greater productivity and negating the need for large teams to build software?
- ChicagoDave 4mo ago
  Vibe coding is the chaos version of using GenAI. Seven agents in parallel and the dev refuses to believe this will just be a circle jerk of hallucinations. Planned, architected problems led by experienced dev/arch’s will be where success is measured.

ai_fry_ur_brain 4mo ago

[flagged]

caspper69 4mo ago
The difference, and I think we as an industry will have to reconcile this depending on how advanced llms get, is that you don’t see the quality in handmade code like you do in a high end watch or a luxury automobile or appliance. The veneer might be identical. It’s going to be tough to convince people that handmade software has added value or quality over slop. I still believe it does right now, but that might not always be true. And this is an industry that has pumped out a lot of sloppy code for decades, even before it was actual slop.
- thr33 4mo ago
  well this is not exactly unique to software. It is not a given that the 'handmade' nature of a product (luxury or otherwise) manifests in anything tangible or self-evidently superior. Luxury products in general overwhelmingly treat the crafted nature of the product as almost solely an investment in narrative (read: marketing) and market positioning, not an actual material outcome.
  - pitched 4mo ago
    I like this take a lot. Posting a counter-example not because I disagree but because I think it’s interesting. Ghostty is a terminal emulator with a pretty good narrative. The author is very accessible on podcasts to go over the story. It is also actually very good though. I think the jump in performance and usability put it on the map before the narrative could help push it further. The product does have to actually be good before the crafted nature can be invested into.
- thaumasiotes 4mo ago
  > you don’t see the quality in handmade code like you do in a high end watch or a luxury automobile or appliance. But you can't see the "quality" in a high end watch either. They are inferior to low-end watches by every metric you can imagine.

ryandvm 4mo ago

I've definitely noticed a distinct lack of pride now that Claude Code is writing 90% of the code I'm delivering these days. For simple problems (which most are) it works well enough and you are definitely shipping code faster - and with actual test coverage to boot. But it just doesn't feel the same - there's little craftsmanship and honestly it's boring as fuck. You spend a lot of time setting up guardrails and having it produce plans that you then have to refactor multiple times. It's impressive that LLMs can do this, but it's not particularly enjoyable. I guess I was a "writing code was the fun part" guy. Semi-related, but I really want to see the long term maintenance outcomes of all code being produced by these software engineers that were apparently just closeted project managers. I feel like having 50% of the engineers in this industry just telling Claude Code, "yeah that looks good to me" 150 times a day is going to result in an incredible amount of software rewriting.

sokoloff 4mo ago
My feelings about front-end code are that I have a stronger feeling of craftsmanship, in the sense that I can ship a much more polished product because all the small nagging annoyances are things that I can eliminate (second-hand), where I’d previously have just lived with a lot of them as fixing them took too long to be worthwhile. I hate shipping some of the resulting working slop. For me, part of craftsmanship is the quality of the shipped product. (I’m also willing to use CNC tools while doing hobby woodworking; others think that takes away the craftsmanship; I think it changes how the craftsmanship is experienced and applied.)
scorpioxy 4mo ago
I wonder that too. I've been on the receiving end of "it's 90% done, we just need someone to get it over the line for us" way too many times to know that there's going to be a lot of pain trying to maintain or re-write parts of anything that is vibe-coded. On the other hand, I notice the AI-fundamentalists(I am not sure how to refer to people within that group) just say that you won't be doing any hand coding anymore and you'd "just" ask something like claude to maintain it or re-write.
- drzaiusx11 4mo ago

ppeetteerr 4mo ago

Engineers are not going anywhere, they are going to fill the spaces outside of coding that are still critical to shipping new product. Here is a post that summarizes what I mean: https://substack.com/home/post/p-200064883 https://substack.com/home/post/p-200064883

krackers 4mo ago
Traditionally those roles of providing "alignment" to overcome organizational inertia were held by program managers. So that seems like IC roles are indeed going away, to be replaced by more "technical program manager" type roles.
- ppeetteerr 4mo ago
  Maybe it's my experience, but TPMs were often responsible for coordinating large org-wide or cross-org initiatives. It's prohibitively expensive to have TPMs on anything smaller. Since engineering with AI is still very technical, I would wager that software engineers would stretch into less technical areas of software development rather than TPMs stretching into technical areas. I only say this as someone with experience with AI and I see how easy it is to write bad code with AI if you're not aware of what it's doing.

jeremyjh 4mo ago

I've been both types on and off and on for my whole career. At times, very engrossed in the technology itself - but I got started because I needed tools for my job that didn't exist so I learned how to build them. I've also developed and maintained open source software - some of it very much for its own sake as a technology - some of it quite utilitarian. Understanding of product and business has always differentiated me though, and this is why I've never really stressed about any of this. Another thing I've noticed - most developers are really bad at reviewing code - whether AI wrote it or not. Its really hard to make your brain sink in deep enough to really evaluate what you are looking at. I think a lot of developers never - or almost never - find bugs based on code inspection alone. Once they are written - there is often no other practical way to confirm that tests actually test what they claim to other than inspection. And bugs in design are still very costly in this new world. As long as any human still has an edge in any aspect of the software development process - people who can force themselves to really think through proposed designs, test plans and cases and code will be really valuable.

sublinear 4mo ago
> people who can force themselves to really think through proposed designs... You're describing experience, not "forcing themselves". On the dev side, the differentiator is enough of this experience that using AI is actually significantly slower for everything but literally typing the code.

oompydoompy74 4mo ago

Nothing. There will be more of us than ever as the amount of money each engineer can generate goes up. I’m not sure why everyone comes to the conclusion that there will be less engineers as productivity increases. We aren’t that expensive relative to the value we generate and AI, when wielded by an expert, will exponentially increase the amount of return a single engineer can generate.

operatingthetan 4mo ago
>I’m not sure why everyone comes to the conclusion that there will be less engineers as productivity increases. The politics of corporations is such that they don't actually want near infinite productivity. They require churn, cycles, a cadence.

singingtoday 4mo ago

They're going to be overworked. In the old days we programmed systems by literally wiring them. There wasn't much work, only a few "programmers" were employed. Then somebody came up with Punch cards that was much more vision than wiring the systems directly. This opened the door for a lot more people to use them and now programmers were busier. The punch cards didn't scale either so eventually we created panels with buttons so we could type the programs into the computers. That was more efficient and now all the sudden it lowered the bar entry and more people who are employed and doing the work. Assembly language to machine code compilers to assembly language high-level languages and LLMs. Every time developing software gets easier, it only increases the amount of work required. I'm busier today than I've ever been in my entire life. What's going to happen to software engineers? They're going to be overworked and they're going to be given more work and the cycle will never end.

munksbeer 4mo ago
>Every time developing software gets easier, it only increases the amount of work required. I'm busier today than I've ever been in my entire life. I have the same sentiment. So far, no indication that I can be replaced yet. Maybe some day, but right now I'm more productive because of AI (*), but just as if not more busy. (*) Such as: Obviously the coding side, but also... AI is helping scrape logs to diagnose bugs, and doing so with high accuracy, much, much faster than I could have done. AI is taking care of my work journal (basically how I manage my own state) by scraping slack, emails, git commits, ticket state changes and everything else, and updating and maintaining my journal each day. I can't overstate how pleased I am with this. I am usually pretty diligent but if I get out of the habit, I could go weeks before I was back in. Now it is trivial and I always do it. And more.
james_marks 4mo ago
Jevon’s paradox. We’ve been constrained by how much software could be produced for decades. Making it easier/faster doesn’t increase leisure, it increases the demand for (cheaper) software.
- blharr 4mo ago

jdw64 4mo ago

But has software engineering really changed that much? I've barely had any regular fulltime work experience most of my career has been contracting, so I’m not sure.It seems like the perceived change varies depending on the environmen What I don’t get is using AI agents feels basically the same as what I used to do with legacy codebases of 100k–200k lines—understanding the codebase and making partial fixes or adding features. To me, it feels like nothing has changed. Most of my career has been about finding parts that won't break within the overall code structure—without necessarily knowing the entire detailed specification—and adding features or fixing bugs there. So I feel like it's no different from finding and fixing small issues and bugs in a large codebase written by AI. Of course, when delivering a solution that's 70,000–80,000 lines long, there is a change things that used to rely on templates and CMS tools can now be created more diversely using AI. But aside from that, I don't think things have changed as much as people say. It might be different for those who build things entirely from scratch with AI, though. My code writing ability has declined, but I'm not really seeing a dramatic change in workflow Now I work with code written by AI, adding features and modifying it… Most of the codebases I’ve seen were bad anyway—there was no good code to begin with. When coding with AI, I split tasks into P0, P1, P2 based on importance. For P0, I write everything myself. For P1, I write the draft and AI implements it. For P2, AI implements everything. For P0, I only handle things that involve responsibility, like payment logic or login logic. I don't participate in open source, so I don’t see big changes. The only thing I notice is that AI speeds things up a lot—for things I used to understand by reading documentation and examples, now I can generate them much faster. Personally, I wish open source projects had more simple, short examples in their code

fhub 4mo ago

Four day working weeks would be nice.

yakkomajuri 4mo ago
OP here. So I've also been running a survey about how developers are feeling about AI (added a link to the post) and 60% of respondents said that using AI actively makes them more tired. Most also report being more productive with AI. One would think these two things combined make up for initiatives for shorter work weeks and the like, but from what I've seen, at least for now, the opposite seems to be happening. P.S. Sample size is currently small but I've also gathered a fair amount of qualitative data to indicate both of these things. Of course measuring productivity is also far from a science.
- scorpioxy 4mo ago
  Shorter work weeks don't mean less work though. Not from the point of view of management, at least. It just means that 5 days are now compressed to 4, probably making the problem much worse and burn out much more likely. In my experience, this is what ended up happening.
  - pitched 4mo ago
    When you work for someone, you’re selling hours of time. Reducing days means you’re selling fewer hours. That has always been possible but they’ll probably want to pay less.

seer 4mo ago

I really liked reading through the Mars trilogy. It imagined a world where AI is used for fluent effortless translation - local languages get a renaissance since now you _dont_ need a lengua Franca, everyone just speaks what they like the most, and can understand everyone else. Much more “flavour” to human interaction. Also ai makes things just resource constrained, not labour - whatever you imagined, you could make happen, just needed to “talk to an ai” about it. Lots of terraforming Mars / Venus in that book were imagined like that. But it also analysed the social / political / behavioural aspects of it. Places that had to preserve old power structures - aka US/Europe/China - got engulfed with mega corps controlling everything etc. But Mars - where people had enough freedom to imagine something different, came up with political/financial structures to incorporate all of that, and thrived. I think it tried to play the card of “if US was being created right now - what would its ideals be” If you had a huge tract of land that was “free” and nobody (powerful enough) claiming it, and a population that didn’t yet have strong allegiances and could be persuaded to band together, what would AI, tech and all these years of progress allow us as humans to achieve politically. Which also makes you feel kinda sad for the US in that world - it is the old rusted power center that can’t innovate and is stuck in the past… Now it’s only sci fi of course, but it was quite interesting to imagine a world where AI gets smarter and smarter but never reaches that “sentient” threshold. I think the whole trilogy aged incredibly well all things considered.

TheOtherHobbes 4mo ago
The issues are really social/political/behavioural. If white collar jobs are decimated the economy will collapse, because it's still - nominally - a consumer economy, even though most of the spending comes from the top 10%. If 25% of that top 10% is suddenly out of work, that's a huge chunk of GDP gone, and a likely depression as the knock on effects spread. I don't see anyone thinking about this seriously. [Something something UBI] is not a serious attempt to deal with the problem. Ultimately you end up with an economy where most humans are surplus to economic requirements and will literally be murdered by economics. Or wealth and opportunity are widely distributed, but "jobs" are nothing like they are today. Given where we are now option 1 looks closer.
b65e8bee43c2ed0 4mo ago

rglover 4mo ago

Pay increases and red carpet rollouts along with your choice of fruit or candy basket.

gymbeaux 4mo ago

LLMs have taken much of the enjoyment out of coding for me, but I don’t think it has to be that way. I hope that as an industry we settle on LLMs being more like tools than human assistants. I think most of the engineers at my company are using LLMs as human assistants- most of them have agentic workflows set up and have premium subscriptions to Claude AND Gemini AND ChatGPT. Many have local LLMs running on their company MacBook Pros, but they can never manage to describe to me in plain English what those local LLMs are doing. I would compare local LLMs to Raspberry Pi clusters. They’re neat, and technically they can do stuff but they are incredibly impractical. I want so desperately to have the power of Claude Opus running locally, but we are incredibly, ridiculously, extremely far off (benchmarks are often misleading and nobody likes to talk about the paltry tokens/s they’re getting on their home rig). So the problem for me is that I’ve noticed a trend with my coworkers- they usually don’t have a formal CS background (e.g., Comp Sci degree), their resumes are unimpressive, and they have personal websites where anyone can download a copy of their resume. I haven’t seen this at any previous job. It’s just weird, man. Anyway, so my problem is when they are purported to be the best of the best at this company, and they’re chugging the LLM kool-aid, I’m struggling to figure out whether they’re really ahead of the curve and getting the drop on the rest of us, or they’re doing basically no work and waving through each other’s PRs with little to no oversight on what the LLMs are writing. The bush league nature of many of the bugs I’m seeing going all the way to prod makes me think it’s the latter. Meanwhile, these guys and their teams are completing an absurd number of story points each sprint. My team is dead last (and coincidentally we’re all pretty anti-AI for writing code). I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop. I’m waiting for the C suite to call our project a failure and lay everyone off. The product generally works, though I think if the devs were truly rockstars, things would be much smoother. It seems like LLMs are letting middle-of-the-road or mediocre devs appear to be rockstars purely on output speed. Nobody in this org cares if the output has 4x the bugs it should have, just that it was completed quickly. The main issue I think is that nobody- including the rockstar tech leads- knows how the system works. They don’t know the code. There’s a bug and it takes forever to track down. Don’t ask about unit tests. I think in a perfect world, these LLMs are treated like another tool rather than another person- meaning you and I still write a large portion of the code, and we read and understand every line- especially the lines generated by LLMs. It’s still a huge productivity multiplier for me to not have to remember how to do mundane things like write out arrays into CSV files- before I’d find a close implementation on StackOverflow and tweak to my needs. Now I can just describe what I want the CSV to look like and Claude Code generally gets it right on the first try.

mikewarot 4mo ago

Software Engineers, like all licensed professional Engineers will be just fine, as AI can't assume liability, nor be professionally licensed. Programmers, on the other hand have a lot less leverage to bring to bear. Of course, the above assumes that the job cuts are actually AI related, and not just cover for having to fire people because ZIRP (Zero Interest Rate Policy - aka free money) is over.

cube00 4mo ago
> Software Engineers, like all licensed professional Engineers will be just fine, as AI can't assume liability, nor be professionally licensed. There's no such licensing, unlike other fields such as medicine you are not required by law to hold any license or qualification to perform software engineering.
- munksbeer 4mo ago
  An business over a certain size will want people that are "responsible" or in other words liable for software issues.

Zoo3y 4mo ago

>after writing all this, I think these categories are a lot more about "what got you into this" rather than what you actually end up doing in this space. >Nevertheless, my point here was to show a few of the ideas and directions I've been considering, and I'm keen to hear from others what you're thinking about too. I decided to study computer science in college as a hopeful 18 year old who wanted to learn how video games work and maybe work for a development studio. I needed to find a job right after college, and I ended up going the full stack route. 10 years later (now) I'm working remote, making decent salary, but never fulfilled my original purpose for studying computer science. What's gonna happen to this software engineer? Anecdotally, I'll ride my IT job as long as I can while using AI to learn about game development.

dbetteridge 4mo ago

Writing code by LLM feels like management, or tech leading a project. It's tiring in a different way, but without the flow state or "high" of solving a particular problem in a clever or intuitive way. Some days I enjoy shipping a change that would never have been greenlit for the sprint points it would have required, other days it's like herding cats and I'm tired with nothing to show for it.

whateveracct 4mo ago

why do people forget so quickly that you can just code without LLMs? And be hugely impactful? Like in 2020 i coded better shit than my principle agentic engineer go do a good job. it's increasingly rare nowadays. the frauds are growing.

i2km 4mo ago
It's bizarre isn't it. It being treated as though actually knowing how to write quality code by hand is a skill that's somehow been lost to time... I can only guess that a lot of the engineers who went into software purely for money were all too happy to distance themselves from writing code and really don't want to go back...
- Izkata 4mo ago
  Also skill atrophy due to over-reliance on these tools is a real thing. And for some people it happens really fast, just a couple of months before they start noticing a difference (like with two of my co-workers - one stated directly to me, another indirectly through a team member).
mynameisbilly 4mo ago
Do you still write assembly code?
- whateveracct 4mo ago
  non sequitur. English through an LLM isn't the same as a higher level language compiling to a lower one. I am very familiar with this because I write Haskell. Which compiles to Core. Which is actually an extension of Sustem F which itself is an extension of lambda calculus. That then compiles to STG. That then compiles to Cmm. That then compiles to assembly code. See how that isn't the same as an LLM? To the point where your comment is a non sequitur?

b65e8bee43c2ed0 4mo ago

same thing that happened to translators. they are still needed, just several orders of magnitude fewer than before.

cicko 4mo ago

> they don't need you but you still need them. I can see very few reasons why AI couldn't replace their expertise for all of us non-experts, the same way it did for software development.

fragmede 4mo ago
The reason is a lack of an immediate verification process. The reason LLMs are been great at programming but less so elsewhere is because if it generates non-working code, calling hallucinated libraries or functions, there's immediate feedback. That code doesn't compile, it crashes, it fails tests, it's slow, it's buggy. But if the LLM gives me bad relationship advice, there's no repl that it can use to retry that conversation with my now-ex until we're back together. Or whatever thing that it's being used for that doesn't have some sort of way to give it a verifier. So taste is still a thing. Software engineering will have to develop (uh oh) taste and the ability to say no. Your app could include a button to make the device scream like a monkey, but if management tells you it has to have a feature that makes no sense, the answer is no.

drzaiusx11 4mo ago

Any sufficiently large (preexisting) codebase has subtlties and "load bearing" bugs that allow it to function. In my personal experience, the vibe coded solutions are incapable of delivering "safe" changes outside of anything trivial without breaking something. Folks now just seem to think this is OK? The result is software like my password manager and banking apps no longer reliably work. The trade offs (currently) just aren't worth it imho. Maybe once we get context windows in the 100M range these systems will handle large scale (and distributed in my case) backend systems just fine. They most certainly are not at the moment, at least not to preexisting backend software systems of modest complexity. Not even close.

CM30 4mo ago

I'd say it very much depends on software focused the company/industry in question is. On the lower end, there are a lot of companies whose sole purpose is to build websites for other small/medium sized businesses that don't care enough about tech to pay for a full-time engineering team. For those companies and developers, I suspect the increasing rise of AI will be a bloodbath. If your whole value proposition is "we can build your website using WordPress/Squarespace/Shopify/[CMS name here]", then AI can basically do about 95% of your job. I suspect a lot of these companies are going to shutter when clients take the work in-house due to AI, and many others will probably lose about 90% of their employees due to AI solutions being generally 'good enough'. On the other hand, if your company is tech focused and needs to implement more complex functionality as a selling point, then there'll still be a place for software engineers even with AI. This is where the engineer as pseudo project manager thing comes into play, and where the actual coding side of things is probably going to be limited to things the AI can't implement properly. Both situations will probably see a significant drop in the number of software engineers employed there, but the latter feels like it'll still have some room for a career.

1auralynn 4mo ago
I think "don't care enough about tech" is a mischaracterization. Software engineers are EXPENSIVE and many companies just can't afford it. Personally I think AI unlocks a ton of opportunity, because things that were just not possible due to the high salaries (justified, of course) of software engineers are all of a sudden very possible. Maybe these small businesses will now be more likely to hire a fresh grad who can not only build them a website in a couple weeks but also a ton of other useful internal software.

spwa4 4mo ago

I think AI will make software developers and system administrators a necessity for many more companies, because they'll have AI carry out other jobs. Given the quantity of such companies that exist, I'd expect a lot more jobs for software devs. Somewhat different, sure, but not fundamentally different.

pjmlp 4mo ago

It will be like offshoring, with the difference this time around there is no team on the other side of the planet getting the jobs. The few lucky ones to stay employed, get to be promoted to technical architects, and everyone else whose passion was equivalent to brick layers has to find something else where humans haven't yet been replaced by robots or self service machines. When each team member gets more productive we're not doing e.g. 5x more output, we're doing more with less (team size).

prewett 4mo ago

This is a thoughtful article, but I think the axis isn't between builders and algorithm researches, but between craftsmen and results-oriented builders. Both want to build something, but the craftsman cares about the quality of the result (usability, maintainability, code quality, UI polish, etc.) while the non-craftsman is happy with something that works, even if some of the corners are janky. Or, thinking about Windows and macOS in the Jobs era, perhaps the difference is more between the quality of taste. Microsoft focused on quality code, and came up with COM, architectures where an instantiable button is 13 levels of inherited classes, and things like DirectX, where the architecture is clean and extendable, but forces every developer to do things like allocate their own @#$! framebuffer. High level of craftsmanship, but poor taste. Jobs tended to focus on the user experience and had good taste, so the results were generally pretty good, but I got the feeling that the code wasn't as much of a priority.

marssaxman 4mo ago
> Microsoft focused on quality code That's a sentence I have certainly never read before!
- collyw 4mo ago
  It's closed source, how would you know?
  - marssaxman 4mo ago
    I used to work there - but I was talking about their reputation, not the actual quality of their code.

Henchman21 4mo ago

The same thing as auto mechanics when the ICE became well understood and ubiquitous.

iJohnDoe 4mo ago

This won’t be a popular position, but I don’t have much sympathy for software engineers. For decades, software engineers have been smug toward a lot of surrounding professions. Look at how they treated IT because developers thought they were server and network experts. Then cloud came along, and some of that work got moved over in the name of DevOps. Frontend and backend engineers were also treated unfairly at times. Then came roles requiring someone to be an expert in “full stack,” which I never thought was fair unless it paid a ton of money, which at times it didn’t. Now software engineers are being obfuscated away. Well, for a long time, software engineers acted like their shit didn’t stink. Maybe that was true for a while. Unfortunately, I’ve seen a lot of my colleagues not care who they walked over. But guess what, there are a ton of people out there who are going to be perfectly happy hearing the cries of software engineers now. “Be careful of the toes you step on today. They may be connected to the ass you need to kiss tomorrow.”