alt Hacker NewsI'm literally considering a career switch from software engineering to electrical engineering and electronics, and naturally going back to school, because the AI and the way it's used in writing software has sucked out all the meaning in it for me.
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Meaningful or not, that's a lot of work and money for a pay cut, fewer options, and worse job prospects [0].
[0] Most of the new EE Grads I see go into software engineering.
I'm in the same boat, I'm hoping firmware / embedded might be better in this regard due to the inherit constraints. If not then EE is probably the only other option. Anyone else have thoughts on this? I'm craving a more civil engineering approach to rigor rather than the mess of modern software. Perhaps that means software just isn't for me.
Generative AI didn't need to come into existence in order for the proliferation of utterly mind-numbing devops slop that already dominated modern development to suck all the fun out of computers that were originally intended to solve problems for humans.
That's the difference between the original "free software" community and the "open source" one to me, including its modern incarnation on GitHub: the former produces a collaborative effort to develop a UNIX replacement/alternative and a thriving ecosystem around free software desktop environments with apps intended for humans to do their personal computing. The latter gets you Apache Kafka.
That's one possible way to look at it. The other, perhaps more positive way to look at it, is that similar to autocomplete, AI-assisted tools have made the boring parts less boring and left more space for the interesting bits. I use them every now and then for chores and such which I would put off otherwise, but there is certainly no shortage of interesting problems that they can't tackle. Now I just have more time to focus on those.
Yeah I'm the same, I enjoy thinking of a system of things, doing it, not typing a couple of commands and a bunch of code is generated. It's not the rote process but feeling like I worked for it/doing it. Similar argument is "why buy milk" you can get a cow, milk it yourself, kind of thing. Which I see that, some people don't care what the code looks like, does it work.
Absolutely the same boat here as well sadly. As I sit here reviewing another PR with
dotted everywhere, I am very much over it.