alt Hacker NewsSoftware engineering may no longer be a lifetime career
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Is anything today a lifetime career? I’ve had at least five or six job descriptions over my time, and at least a few of them pretty much don’t exist anymore, or are changed beyond recognition.
Have you seen construction workers lately? They have machines for everything. I highly doubt they even need to lift things any more.
It's been absolutely astonishing to see software developers pick software development as the first profession to attempt to automate away. Couldn't you geniuses have picked any other profession to start with? And it's not just the developers at Anthropic & OpenAI, even at my own company, the rockstar developers were the first to try and automate away all of the software development jobs at our company.
>I don’t think there’s compelling evidence that using AI makes you less intelligent overall1.
That statement is enough of an evidence
Wage suppressing propaganda btw
Author makes a living by working for a company that sells an AI coding product. Their livelihood is dependent on people buying AI coding products. The author just happens to write an article about how amazing AI is for coding and how software engineers will no longer be needed. Wow, I'm so shocked, every single time it's the same exact pattern.
Almost like we learned nothing from the bitcoin period where all the people that would make money if people invest in bitcoin constantly posted stories to HN about how amazing bitcoin is.
Why are we upvoting this?
Virtually, the entire blog is about AI with a ridiculous publishing rate (https://www.seangoedecke.com/page/5), funny how I can look at this site HTML and know right away it was done with AI.
Can we stop upvoting vibe published articles? The arguments are flawed and don't even make sense to anyone who does software
So, permeant underclasses those billionaires talking about are actually just juniors that never get a chance to become a senior.
"Simply put, someone will always be needed to do the job—a software engineer (SWE). Today, SWEs don't punch cards to program; in the future, they may not even 'write' code. However, the job will continue to exist, even if it looks different."
it never was. Look around, its a young mans game from the get go
I love coding. AI does the boring bits. I still get to do the fun bits.
I'm a software engineer and architect, I love my job, I love diving into the small details, I love the grand overview.. I love identifying concepts and applying them to achieve elegant high-performing systems.
I love thinking about what kind of assembler the compiler may generate (though honestly, I haven't got a chance), I love thinking about how languages should be more dynamic (Who's got actually-first-class functions? Like, ones that you can build, compose, combine and manipulate to the same degree you can a string or a JSON object, no LISP, you're cheating, close no point).
And yet.. I don't care that much. Not because I'm late in my career (I'm 40, there's still some years left in me), but because I want to make computers do things, and what I enjoy doing is thinking up ways the things can happen, and sometimes the particulars that matter when making a lot of different things happen in a coherent system.. And yea, LLMs are trained on peoples output, and from what I'm seeing everywhere, is that people are overall fairly terrible at that, and most of the plumbing-type glue being written is not worth anyones time..
And I'm not saying I don't care because LLMs can't do my job (heck, even after hours of back-and-forth spec building and refining every little nook and cranny, the stupid coding agent still cheats or gets it wrong (even after it's beautifully explained, proven even, by reasoning and example alone, and on first try even) that the words coming after the previous words makes sense, as soon as the plan is put into motion, it'll mess it up on some scale so fundamental I should just have done it myself.. And I hope that changes, I hope that I don't have to go into such detail.. I hope to become a steward of taste rather than a code-reviewer.. I hope that I will eventually not be needed for that anymore.. I want it to replace me, so I can move to telling what I want, and have it made that way..
I hope I won't need to steward good taste, and that nobody will.. I hope the applications I use in 5 years will be a collection of one-offs, and gradually improving tools that was written _just_ for me, for my way of working, and my way of thinking.. I want to prompt the damn program to change itself as I discover new ways to do things, until it can eventually figure out how to automate the last bit of my task away.. And then I'll go do something else exciting.
"may no longer be a lifetime career"
60 years total so far
construction has what, 6k years
I'll get into that next.
Engineering boils down to figuring out what is important and prioritizing.
This requires having an understanding of a business domain, economics, human psychology and technology.
The competitive aspect of it means that you need to understand these things better than most people and machines. If you don't, then your skills have no value on the market. Will generalist AI trained on public data ever understand these things better than software engineers across every possible niche?
I don't think so because that knowledge is usually gate-kept. Nowadays, new engineers almost have to beg to be given access to knowledge of company systems. It takes at least 6 month for a skilled engineer to ramp up on large systems... And it's mostly because of institutional resistance.
The thing is, it doesn't even require people to be withholding information... Some engineers will happily share everything they know about internal systems... But in a big company; you first have to identify this person. That can take a while... Then you need to identify other persons who will give you other information that is relevant to your specific tasks/integrations. Then there are all sorts of other constraints and restrictions to deal with.
You can't just deploy an AI to a big company and it will magically guess all the endpoints which exist... You have to tell it what is available and enterprise systems are not designed for transparency.
Big companies resorted to a kind of security-through-obscurity. This used to be considered bad practice 10 years ago but at some point they just gave up, let complexity run amok and started calling it "multiple layers of defence" but now this obscurity is a problem for evaluating system security (too much unknown context is required, nobody fully understands the entire system) and it slows down development and maintenance as well.
Whoever knows the most context about a system has the advantage... And this isn't necessarily a company insider. Most likely, the people with the most context are platform providers.
I predict that most major hacks will originate from platform providers. We already started seeing this with Axios hack (originating from GitHub/npm) and Vercel (originating from Google Workspace).
The centralization risk is massive because each platform is servicing so many large companies. It only works when there is perfect incentive alignment but that's not usually the reality during difficult economic times. Third-party platforms cannot be trusted anymore.
> Construction workers don’t say that being a good construction worker means not lifting heavy objects. They say “too bad, that’s the job”
I dont know, maybe in your part of the world, but where I'm from we have a series of robust worker protection laws that try to limit the damage the work does to you. We generally consider it a bad thing for workers to damage their bodies, and if we could build houses without it, we'd prefer that.
In this specific case we do have a techniques to build software without causing damage, so why change that?
This post is arguing that maybe software enginnering should start being harmful, even though we know it doesn't have to. It's a post of a guy begging to be fed into the capitalist meat grinder. Meaningless self sacrifice.
Imagine a situation where AI creates thousands of lines of code in a few repos and there is a Production issue and does get resolved by AI. How can humans jump in and resolve the bug without knowing anything about the code ?
Wake up babe it's time for your hourly venture-approved FUD-slop.
Month 30 of software engineering disappearing in the next 6 months
I'm greatly anticipating the next Great Leap Forward™ with a publicly available Mythos or other new paradigm I can't currently imagine
but at the moment, agentic coding has made me busier than ever before, while its Product Managers, UX, QA, Data Scientists and DevOps that have disappeared from the teams I'm on - across multiple organizations - and I have to do all their work and make dashboards that I didn't have to make as well
All the projects that would have been cancelled by Q3 are being attempted in Q1, means more work
It'll move, sure.
Im looking at proper engineering in building local LLM networks, with proper firewalls, capability access, and guards around the LLM systems to allow and enable advanced use while not just "lol delete everything" happening.
When theres a land grab, move to selling tools and how to knowledge work in maintaining the tools and proper operation and maintenance.
I also look at upsells like local LLMs as reason to do this in house, so that companies arent liable for rug pulls and violation (consumption) of trade secrets, or breaching confidential discussions.
And LLMs arent good at recommending tech stacks for running them. Stuff is moving faster than most data training sets have.
Software is a tool to solve a problem, as long as you keep finding problems that you can solve with it, you're likely to get paid to do it.
If your crowning achievement is: "I can 100% all leetcode hards" I have bad news for you.
Software engineering was not a career long time ago. The companies have no respect for software engineers and treat them as commodity that can be replaced at any time. The traditional career "progression" also doesn't exist. You can get pay rise only so many times and become the seniorest senior or you want to fulfil the Peter's principle.
While most developers were busy grinding, the corporations did the most ensuring the only sensible pathway to wealth and development is closed = running own business that is. In many countries, due to regulatory capture enacted by corrupt governments, making profit is next to impossible, that if you manage to jump bureaucratic hurdles that are not present for larger corporations.
AI is just a tool. Will AI replace software engineer is like asking will hammer replace the carpenter?
Nah it is
It never was a lifetime career, if you don't get the dough by 35 you just failed.
> I hope that this isn’t true. It would be really unfortunate for software engineers. But it would be even more unfortunate if it were true and we refused to acknowledge it.
More AI Soothsaying. Not so hard on the Inevitabilism this time.
On the contrary, in an efficient economy, every business operations manager (MBA) would be a skilled software engineer, able to comfortably manage data flows and design custom automated processes. There's so much potential energy there in unlocking this technical literacy.
Less "pure" programming, but lots more programming in general.
Was it ever? It's always seemed weird to me that people even think 'software engineering' is a career.
It's a tool for knowledge work.
No carpenter is a specialist in drills.
It seems to me that the best way to navigate a long term career is to have another specialty and use software engineering as a tool within that specialty.
Are people seriously thinking that you can make yourself dumber by using a chat UI?
If talking to an AI makes me dumber and a limited career, then all the customer support people that ever existed were in the same or worse position talking to dumb humans on chat all day answering tickets always about the same topics and linking the same docs over and over. This makes no sense.
> The career of a pro athlete has a maximum lifespan of around fifteen years. You have the opportunity to make a lot of money until around your mid-thirties, at which point your body just can’t keep up with it.
If you believe this about your software career, how do you think your going to switch into another career as a junior and keep up?
I mean according to our tech overlords, no one will need to do anything and we'll just sit around and goof off all day. so, honestly, future is bright.
Most careers evolve as technology does.
Other professions do too, whether it's healthcare, etc.
Software being a new field, didn't really become a standardized profession in the way engineering might be.
The goalposts are moving because the standards are moving, because the capabilities are moving.
Remaining a self-directed learner will remain critical.
terribly written article that failed to make any point. anyone whise read ai generated code from the best models and who understand how llms work, knows this statement is complete bs.
It will be for those fixing AI slop software. (In fact, they might need several lifetimes.)
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This should be repeated ad nauseaum: Just because CNC tooling is available, you wouldn't get rid of your wood/metal workers. You give them more scoped tasks, expect them to finish sooner with more standardized output, and... you let them experiment a bit on the side. Perhaps not with industry grade tooling unless they want to pay for fancy tooling, but like DIY, and then, you lure nontechnical people in by telling them how much you can save with DIY. Of course it doesn't matter to no techies that some of the finishes they want are truly gruesome handiwork, but hey, they are a part of the DIY community now!
That's the way. Anything else shows that they don't know how modern economy works. And let's admit it, as a bunch of IT/software people here we are terrible at this.