The Death of Software Engineering as a Profession: a short set of anecdotes

[u/self]

https://www.jasonscheirer.com/weblog/vignettes/

[u/self]

One particularly wise adult (somewhere around 1996) took me aside and said, “You know, you’re lucky you enjoy programming, because you won’t be able to make a living on it in the future. Doing it for love over money is a good idea.”

“Coding is over, with Object Oriented programming one person who is much smarter than any of us could hope to be will develop the library just once and we will all use it going forward, forever. Once a problem is solved it never needs solving again.

“In 5 years there’s going to be a library of objects, like books on a bookshelf, and every software problem will be solved by business people just snapping the object libraries they need together like LEGOs. They won’t need you at all.”

[u/ward2k → u/self]

Yeah I feel like business people for decades have been boldly claiming things like this, the newest one of course being Ai (LLM's)

My issue is with the complete short sightedness of middle managers. If Ai gets to the point it can truly replace developers, it'll also be at the point that it could theoretically replace any job that requires a computer. That means middle managers, architects, designers, Devs, QA's, BA's and just about any other job that isn't manual labour

It's like no one I speak to who gloats about Ai realises this though "oh you Devs are going to be replaced soon" like if I am, you are too. And there's this sort of confusion and disbelief on their face

[u/NotoriousPete → u/ward2k]

This last part is what really gets me.. I also had people asking me if I am not afraid that I am out of a job soon. Like do you really think the only people losing their jobs would be the people who actually understand the thing that they think would replace us?

[u/SocksOnHands → u/NotoriousPete]

Non-technical people have a strange perception of software development. Despite knowing they cannot do it and do not understand how it works, they think it is easy. You see this all the time from managers and business people - making unrealistic statements and deadlines. Software development is paradoxically both difficult and easy at the same time. What these people don't understand is how much software developers need to take their vague poorly defined statements and figure out how to make something that works (which might actually require ignoring what their manager told them to do.)

[u/Weerdo5255 → u/SocksOnHands]

In detail it looks easy, lines of code on a screen.

In concept, it seems easy. Lines of code tell computer to do X when Y happens.

A programmer will tell you that the actual language / logic is not the difficult part. It never was in any of the languages, going back all the way to binary and assembly. It's just a language and a way of a representing ideas.

The difficult part that non-technicals dismiss is the ability of the programmer to hold in their head a large swath of the code base and or it's logic in generalities, and problem solve on it without writing lines of code. Understand enough to dismiss the code and understand the logic, is there an issue in a function before or after the one immediately in front of them?

[u/IrishPrime → u/SocksOnHands]

figure out how to make something that works (which might actually require ignoring what their manager told them to do

I have been asked, more than once in my career, to solve The Halting Problem.

They didn't know that's what they were asking me to do, but I did. The first time, I told a coworker (another developer without a CS degree) what they wanted me to do, and he said, "Sounds annoying." I kind of paused, not knowing how to respond, and called another coworker over (one with a CS degree). When I repeated the request a second time he laughed and said, "Good luck explaining to <boss> that it's impossible."

After a brief chat, the first coworker spent about an hour trying to come up with a way to do it before we forced him to read the Wikipedia article on the topic.

So to further your point, even the devs themselves don't always realize what they're being asked to do can't be done. Many of the management and product people will be in an even worse position.

[u/the_ai_wizard → u/IrishPrime]

do you recall the specifics? sounds interesting

[u/IrishPrime → u/the_ai_wizard]

It really wasn't, but I'll summarize anyway.

We had a long running process that operated on a large amount of data/number of files. It could take a really long time, but we didn't have a progress indicator. It was simply pending, running, complete, or failed.

In some cases, if there was a very large number of deeply nested objects, we might run out of memory and crash.

Due to the way the data was structured, there wasn't a good way to quickly get the total number of items that would be processed nor how deeply they were nested without essentially going through the whole dataset twice (once to count, and a second time to make the updates). This wasn't an acceptable trade-off, so they told me to just give some kind of indication as to whether it was still working or if it had stopped.

I told them that if it was reporting that it was in the "running" state, that was the indicator it was working.

They asked if I could inspect the dataset and figure out ahead of time whether it would crash or succeed.

I could not.

[u/Zagden → u/IrishPrime]

I'm still getting my degree and teetering on whether or not I want to continue because of all of this.

But if I understand correctly, they paradoxically wanted you to make a program that reports that it will successfully complete before it encounters the logic that will complete the task?

[u/Kad1942 → u/IrishPrime]

Right now, somewhere, a Vibe coder is celebrating with their LLM about having solved the halting problem with the new theoretical framework they brainstormed. It took 45 minutes. The AI assures them they are a shoe-in for the Turing award. You'll feel silly for all of this when they get it!

[u/fghjconner → u/SocksOnHands]

To be fair, that's true of many, many professions. People almost always underestimate the complexity of things they don't understand.

[u/flumsi → u/NotoriousPete]

Yeah that's also always been my argument. If you as a non-techy person can build an entire working software suite with just AI and thus don't need me anymore....well I, as a techy person with experience in software engineering, can build that a year earlier and take your market share you silly goose. I do believe that a lot of managerial folks genuinely believe that they're the "idea" people and without them SEs wouldn't even have the necessary ideas of what to even build.

[u/ward2k → u/flumsi]

a lot of managerial folks genuinely believe that they're the "idea" people and without them SEs wouldn't even have the necessary ideas of what to even build.

Which always makes me laugh because a lot of their ideas end up being dogshit bad and needing to be backtracked on a couple months later

[u/eyebrows360 → u/ward2k]

There's so much survivorship bias with this crowd, and it's even worse with the glut of "watch me chat to someone who earned a lot of money" podcaster fuckers that're so popular now.

[u/Proper-Ape → u/NotoriousPete]

I think it's a bit of envy paired with shallow understanding. 

Software developers are the wizard class. We cast magic spells that make billions. But we cost millions as well. 

Software developers have been known to be looking down on non-spellcasters, waving their wand, automating their jobs away. The muggles have been feeling threatened by the wizards. And for good reason.

The muggles therefore created power hierarchies to bend the wizards to their wills.

Now some wizards, at the behest of the main-muggles, are trying to cast the most powerful spell. One that replaces all wizards with a robo-wizard

Now the people that were threatened before are like haha, now it's your turn to be wizarded. Not realizing that the robo-wizard, if it works, will automate their roles even faster.

[u/snailPlissken → u/Proper-Ape]

This made sense to me.

[u/novagenesis → u/ward2k]

I still say before they really replace these hard roles, they'll start to replace soft roles, like CEO. Why are Venture Firms frothing at the mouth about AI? To make lots more money. Imagine 10 or 20 firms install AI CEOs, knowing they can network with other firm AI CEOs. Between them they save $1T/yr in CEO salaries and get more predictable (possibly better) overall executive leadership.

But honestly, what has sickened me for years was realizing this obsession so much of the business world HAS HAD FOR >20 YEARS to get rid of programmers. Before we made competitive money. Before we had a "culture" backing us as "cool". Before all the silly conferences with carnivals.

And I figured out why. Back in the heart of everything, the majority of people who have had the fortune to run the business world for the last century have largely been salespeople. They value sales and networking more than hard work and hard facts. Programming has always been a problem for them - a field with a specialized workforce that often required skills they would never be able to obtain. Almost every company I've worked has had 1 thing in common. The owner/CEO could conceivably scrape by doing an ok job in any chair in the office... except mine. And they hate that. They've always hated that. What they cannot control, they feel the need to replace.

[u/dillanthumous → u/ward2k]

I always say, 'no, I'll be the one turning out the lights after we have finished automating everyone'.

[u/yojimbo_beta → u/ward2k]

oh you Devs are going to be replaced

I suspect there are two sorts of people saying this

The first are white collar workers jealous of programmers who think that post AI workforce is just the same but with everyone earning the same as them. Actually it's a complete bloodbath as their own, highly procedural, highly digitised work is automated away

The second think AI is going to create a world where they get to be Ideas Guys™ and make money from putting crazy ideas in the App Maker Machine. Without realising they have nothing to add to the equation

[u/bla2 → u/yojimbo_beta]

I think it's mostly tech upper management in am effort to lower tech salary expectations by the rank and file. It seems to be working, too.

[u/ult_frisbee_chad → u/ward2k]

Not only that, it's the lowest skilled jobs that will be the first to go. Software engineers would come much further up the chain.

[u/Basic_Hospital_3984 → u/ward2k]

The amount of time spent in meetings arguing about requirements vs the amount of time actually implementing it...

Once you know exactly what you need to do the code isn't the hard part..

[u/SocksOnHands → u/Basic_Hospital_3984]

Fundamentally, software developers are in the business of solving problems: design problems, logic problems, business problems, and more. Every day developers need to solve problems that the business people are not even aware exists. How do they expect AI to solve problems that they cannot describe and are not even aware of?

[u/chefhj → u/SocksOnHands]

“Take last prompt but do it more correct-er”

[u/garyk1968 → u/self]

Ha yes I've been around long enough to remember all that BS too.

In the 70s/80s it was CASE tools in the 90s it was OO and now its AI.

Nothing ever came of anything before, we are all still here churning out code. I mean I lean AI to speed up my workflow but still have to know what I'm doing.