Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

tayo42

> 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?

vasco

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.

raffael_de

The differentiator is augmenting reasoning with AI versus replacing reasoning with AI. But those who choose to replace their reasoning with AI probably weren't good at it to begin with; cause if they were, they'd choose to not replace it. Exception is that AI can actually replace reasoning (which it can't, yet) - then it's game over with a career in software engineering anyway.

otabdeveloper4

It will be for those fixing AI slop software. (In fact, they might need several lifetimes.)

the_real_cher

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.

torben-friis

Unless I'm missing something, there's an obvious logic issue here. If we truly need to sacrifice our skill to be productive by using LLMs that atrophy us, then the only devs that have a limited lifespan are us. The next ones won't have a skillset to atrophy since they won't have built it through manual work. Also, I hereby propose to publicly ban the "LLMs generating code are like compilers generating machine code" analogy, it's getting old to reargue the same idea time after time.

fooker

If by software engineering, one means typing code character by character into a text editor, sure it's going to be difficult to find someone to pay you for it. If you mean creating software, well we are creating more software than ever before and the definition of what software is has never been so diverse. I can see many different careers branching off from here.

harimau777

I keep reading about how AI will be fine because people can just retrain for different careers. However, I never read what those careers are or who is going to pay for retraining. I certainly don't have the money or time to go back to college and start a new career at the bottom.

philipnee

80% of my day to day job has never been pumping out lots of code. it is a complicated career is it? we do a lot of alignment, design and thinking. i can't even agree the idea of outsourcing thinking, i think AI is very good at helping us to think clearly, but it doesn't really "think" for us. if you do that then... likely very replacable.

pphysch

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.

delusional

> 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.

giobox

Anecdotally, it feels like something materially changed in the US software hiring market at the start of this year to me. It feels like more and more businesses are taking a wait and see approach to avoid over-investing in human capital in the next few years. It also feels like the hiring "signal", which was always weak before, is just completely gone now, when every job you do advertise receives over 500 LLM written applications and cover letters that all look and feel the same. The pro-athlete comparison in this article is bit silly IMO- there are obvious physical body issues that occur with aging if you rely on your muscles etc to make money. If you compare to other fields of knowledge work, such as say law or medicine, there are loads of examples of very experienced, very sharp operators in their 40s and 50s.

mariopt

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

joduplessis

I really wish seemingly intelligent people would stop using the abstraction analogy (like the article does). The key word is: determinism. Every level of abstraction (inc. power tools, C, etc.) added a deterministic layer you can rely on to more effectively do whatever it is that you're doing - same result, every time. LLM's use natural language to describe programming and the result is varied at the very best (hence agents, so we can brute force the result instead). I think the real moat is becoming the person who can actually still program.

afavour

Seems the solution here is the same it's actually always been if you want career progression: be more than just a code jockey. The true value of an engineer is to be plugged into overall roadmaps, broader thinking around product, how to achieve company goals, etc etc. Yes, LLMs might dramatically reduce the amount of code we write by hand. But I'm a lot less convinced they'll solve all of the amorphous, human-interacting aspects of the job.

woeirua

Was it ever a lifetime career? Haven't most people looked around and asked themselves where are all the 50+ engineers? They basically don't exist in large numbers. Ageism is real in this industry. You either save up enough money to retire early, switch into management, or get forced out of the industry eventually. AI is just accelerating the trend. I see very few junior engineers resisting AI. I see a LOT of staff+ engineers resisting it. Just look at the comments on HN. Anti-AI sentiment is real.

bborud

Multiple times per week I have the same conversation. It goes something like this: - AI will make developers irrelevant - Why? - Because LLMs can write code - Do you know what I do for a living? - Yes, write code? - Yes, about 2-5% of the time. Less now. - But you said you are a developer? - I did - So what do you do 95-98% of the time? - I understand things and then apply my ability to formulate solutions - But I can do that! - So why aren't you? The developers who still think their job is about writing code will perhaps not have a job in the future. Brutal as it may sound: I'm fine with that. I'm getting old and I value my remaining time on the planet. Business owners who think they can do without developers because they think LLMs replace developers are fine by me too. Natural selection will take care of them in due course.

yobid20

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.

keybored

> 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. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47362178

coolThingsFirst

It never was a lifetime career, if you don't get the dough by 35 you just failed.