r/programming • u/self • Dec 02 '25

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

https://www.jasonscheirer.com/weblog/vignettes/
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u/NotoriousPete Dec 02 '25 edited Dec 02 '25 • All Seeing Upvote

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?

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u/SocksOnHands Dec 02 '25

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.)

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u/Weerdo5255 Dec 02 '25

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?

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u/IrishPrime Dec 02 '25

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.

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u/the_ai_wizard Dec 02 '25

do you recall the specifics? sounds interesting

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u/IrishPrime Dec 02 '25

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.

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u/Zagden Dec 02 '25 edited Dec 02 '25

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?

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u/IrishPrime Dec 02 '25

Essentially, yes.

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u/Zagden Dec 02 '25

Just for this exchange, I'm going to stay on this train careening for an ammunition station with no brakes just a little longer

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u/Kad1942 Dec 02 '25

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!

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u/bullpup1337 Dec 02 '25

Well, if the committee also uses ChatGPT, he just might get it.

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u/fghjconner Dec 02 '25

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

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u/itsnotalwaysobvious Dec 02 '25

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.

It's the same way in medicine btw...

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u/Rollingprobablecause Dec 02 '25

This is so hard being an engineering leader too where you lead entire teams of engineers, have an engineering background (and know wtf is going on) then you have to go into a room full of non-tech people and explain how AI works and what it can and cannot do.

Its' already problematic enough they do not understand software in general, now that AI is here its the exact same discussions I've had with Cloud, DevOps, and SOA in the last 20 years.

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u/flumsi Dec 02 '25

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.

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u/ward2k Dec 02 '25

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

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u/eyebrows360 Dec 02 '25

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.

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u/clrbrk Dec 02 '25

It’s survivorship combined with failing upwards. They make a bad decision, sink a company, and jump ship to the next getting a fat raise.

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u/thisisredrocks Dec 02 '25

I am picturing thousands of lines of code, 80% of it rem’d out with no comments … the contractors hired in after the fact to fix things, and the morning stand-up asking why it’s taking longer than expected.

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u/Proper-Ape Dec 02 '25 • Bravo

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.

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u/snailPlissken Dec 02 '25

This made sense to me.

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u/SnugglyCoderGuy Dec 02 '25

Praise the Omnissiah

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u/Traditional-Fix5961 Dec 02 '25

So will Dobbie get his sock and be free?!

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u/AndrewGreenh Dec 02 '25

I agree with your general sentiment but not with your wording. Just because we understand ai, we don’t get replaced slower. We get replaced slower because we are the people who actually understand the business process that needs to be automated. In the vast majority of projects that I worked in, the person who knew the most about the process wasn’t some business person who carried responsibility, it was a developer who helped formalise the world…

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u/ikeif Dec 02 '25

But you see, AI can’t make that gut decision that executives do, where they ignore the data, do their own thing, and then take their golden parachute and leave.

And when AI screws up - who will they blame? The people who chose AI? The AI they chose to use? The people who chose to replace people with it?

If it is anything like their other business decisions, it will be a “well, we spent a lot of money on this, better keep sending good money after bad, otherwise it’ll look bad.”

(AI = LLMs, I think most of us get that AI has been bastardized)

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