alt Hacker NewsAI isn't replacing SREs, it's deskilling them
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Previous discussion on an extremely similar article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49574167. This one even name-checks The Ironies of Automation in pretty much the same way.
It's fairly hard to understand to me, but also entirely unsurprising that swapping one occupation for another would be interpreted as a net loss at individual skill level.
You guys are still doing things, correct? Is my experience so outside the norm, or is stuff still challenging?
This is happening to SWEs too. If you have a certain amount of experience, you are capable of critically analyzing AI output. In Big Tech parlance, these are the Senior SWEs and higher. You require little to no supervision and can work independently.
But how do you make Senior+ SWEs? By having a pipeline of juniors who get trained and mentored. That pipeline is cooked now.
There is going to be a brief period where some like Staff+ SWEs are going to make a lot of money by being AI specialists. But the flood waters are rising for everyone. Those opportunities are going to shrink.
It's eventually going to be a problem that the ecosystem has died because there's no new blood and the people there lack the experience and critical thinking to understand what's being done.
I can use AI on topics I know because I can spot the errors. LLMs lie a lot and get things wrong a lot. What happens when nobody can check the output?
- "not you OP but to the other guy linked on your post "writing code was always the easy part of the job"
- if writing code was that easy, i request you to come and write call of duty modern warfare 5 from scratch without a game engine in c++
idk.. it’s upskilling many people. AI seems to be very kind to people with ideas. It takes away the boring work and leaves the interesting part. So yes, it replaces and deskills those who only do boring work
> If human SREs (okay, now we have to use adjectives like human ) only engage with Tier 3 incidents, i.e. the novel, never-before-seen outages, where do they build the intuition to handle them?
Ime this doesn't happen or reflect the reality of work. I had one mythical job where I wasn't directly on call and only received escalations and didn't have a problem with debugging whole system issues. I still worked on the whole system day to day.
Also I feel like this post is also my frustration with sre. In people's minds it's just the job that deals with issues pumped out by swes and they have to work magic because no one else can be bothered to try at their job. This just reinforces that idea.
I had an incident in prod years ago, that no one was able to solve from my team, and it took days for me to figure out what is happening. It was a tricky one.
For Claude it took 10 minutes to solve it.
Yeah that. Watched our lot spending 2 hours using Claude to debug shit that was blindingly obvious if they actually didn't go to Claude first.
If Claude goes down or stops existing when we go down, we're fucked.
Why just SRE's it's deskilling everyone in this industry.
Deskilling is good, actually, as long as it's the right deskilling. "Skill" in software development is partly raw IQ and partly knowledge of complexity. Programming author Fred Brooks (author of The Mythical Man-Month) categorized complexity into "essential" and "incidental". Examples of incidental complexity are: React/Rails/Django/Laravel makes a backward-incompatible change to their interface and you need to scurry around the codebase fixing invocations. Or a senior developers on your team have a weird in-house coding style and all the junior devs need to learn it to get their code approved. Or management wants to move everything from one cloud provider to another so you have to change a bunch of resource URLs. Examples of essential complexity are: Self-driving car algorithms. Making your code run faster on the CPU. Adding support for a new web standard like SPDY.
I'm not lamenting the days when you needed to pull a seasoned (read: exquisitely expensive) COVOL developer out of retirement to make a change. Now AI can figure it out well enough, I just need to know how the basic concepts work.
I'm (still) a software engineer, and I've found it crucial to solve some LeetCode problems from time to time. It's honestly refreshing to write code yourself, make your own mistakes, and not end up low-key mad at a robot for failing to understand your lousy description because, apparently, it still can't read your mind.
Not deskilling all of us. Some of us with greybeards are immune to the hype train.
Seeing this posted a week after I had to emergency push cve fixes to 1200 servers in production is pretty funny.
Every person on my team is capable of networking, product engineering, database, job processing and we have command of the entire stack. We will push updates for CVEs with stuff we manually compiled. We own the build system and have the ability to change product as needed. We all have experience in product and we're all capable of pushing fixes as needed. Frankly the SRE team is by far the smartest team I have ever worked with at any company I've ever worked at.
The ubiquity of this rhetoric is not an indication of its correctness. Repetitive tropes like "deskilling", "losing the ability to think" reflect a deep seated distrust of AI alone. No matter how many people parrot these fears the fact remains that you choose your attention. My manager has started coding, heavily, aided by frontier LLMs. He instinctively knows his boundaries and defers much of the more complex work to his engineers. We use the clankers too. Have we been deskilled? Hardly appropriate. Trans-skilled, or learning a new emphasis built upon our long experience? Much closer to the truth.
Wow. I wonder how the tech bros are gonna handle this thoughtful article.
I work a "dev"ops job, and like yeah, I'm pretty sure this field is even more fucked than software engineering is.
IaC codebases, configs, utility scripts are relatively tiny, and fit into context windows whole. Models are eating them for breakfast.
They're really good at incident response. Sadly, much better than our dedicated colleagues from <location> ever will be. They'll chew through cloud service logs, application logs, application code, iac code and config, CI output, etc. to get whatever is needed, cause wide knowledge is no issue. Even disassembling stuff is no barrier, tracing things down from app level, to runtime level (e.g. JVM), to native calls.
They're really good at handling deployments, end to end infra setup and migrations, following checklists. Hell, they don't even really need checklists. Something that cannot be said about other dedicated colleagues from <location>, who cannot breathe without a checklist, will skip over steps, or otherwise very creatively misinterpret them or improvise something wicked.
They're really good at spinning up mad nice dashboards, and keeping business types happy with impressive looking write-ups they'll never read. It's really refreshing to not have to write those write-ups anymore (or the aforementioned checklists).
It's straight up both not looking good and looking better than ever. Having it be fully hands off remains an issue though.
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At this point a company can effectively fire you by taking away access the Enterprise LLMs.
This neglected to say what an "SRE" is.