alt Hacker NewsSoftware engineering may no longer be a lifetime career
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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?
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 ?
Nah it is
> 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.
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?
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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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.