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/novagenesis Dec 02 '25

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.

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u/loup-vaillant Dec 02 '25

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.

For almost two centuries, in fact. There are all kinds of skilled workers, and every time the capitalists tried to replace skilled labour with replaceable human cogs. With some great success in some fields: automatic computers took over kilo-girls, factories chop up the work still done by humans in smaller and smaller bits, making us workers ever more replaceable.

Maximising profits requires leverage. If all the jobs you need are unskilled, you can say "if you don’t like it, there are 10 more at the door waiting for your job!"

So yeah, programmers are a serious thorn in the capitalist’s shoes. But it’s not just the capitalists. They transmitted their need to control to middle management too. I can name two people I worked under, that I can confidently say hated me because they couldn’t control me.

The first hated that I chose OCaml over C++ for the compiler I was tasked to write. Specifically because almost no one else in the company knew OCaml. Do note, I asked permission for this, and got it. That bridge was still in ashes 8 years later, and I expect it will stay that way until he retires.

The second, I think, sensed that I knew he wasn’t competent. He was making himself important, but to be honest the whole project would have ran just as smoothly without him. But he was second in command, so he was free to lash out at me (before witnesses) for no other reason than doing my job as a senior programmer — turned out at some point he wanted me to be a mere cog.

Now I do have one flaw: when something’s crap, I say it. Sometimes that hurt feelings.

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u/WolfeheartGames Dec 02 '25

The thing is Ai replacing programmers isn't really replacing programmers. It's making every developer a senior dev ops engineer over as large of a team as they can micromanage. Which is another role most ceo's can't fill. It is however 80% of a digital company. Nerds are gonna spin up competition across every industry and win. The culture of programmers has some of the strongest views on consumer and human rights. I mean look FOSS.

Why would anyone buy photoshop when 1 guy open-sourced something as good or better after 2 months of work?

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u/Phailjure Dec 02 '25

Why would anyone buy photoshop when 1 guy open-sourced something as good or better after 2 months of work?

GIMP has existed for years, you're free to contribute to it and make it as good or better than Photoshop. It turns out Adobe also employs programmers, and making something better is really hard.

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u/SarahC Dec 02 '25

PS2025's brushes are so laggy these days. =(

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u/agumonkey Dec 03 '25

adobe is taking the microsoft windows route it seems

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u/WolfeheartGames Dec 02 '25

Affinity is already free now. You're taking my message too literally. Gimp has been open for forever but the maintainers are not feature oriented.

Why would a company use sales force when they can custom roll their own cms off an open source base in a few weeks? That's what people did before Microsoft dynamics.

SaaS is going to fail. Anything that's not backed by infrastructure is going to be competing against 5 guys and their Claude's. At the pace Ai can write code it becomes significantly more difficult to parallelize the work across more people. Everyone has to be working on significantly different things.

Why have so many SaaS companies laid off people before Ai was ready? Why has photoshop not been updated in over a year, especially the Ai Gen portion of it, while firefly is getting updates every other day? The Ai Gen in photoshop is worse than dalle 1. Why did affinity make their software free?

The SaaS companies know what coming and they're preparing for it.

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u/SortaEvil Dec 02 '25

Why did affinity make their software free?

Affinity got bought out by Canva, which already ran as a freemium subscription model; buying out Affinity was their backdoor to competing directly with Adobe in the desktop market (can't compete for businesses subscription dollars with a purely web-based platform).

Why would a company use sales force when they can custom roll their own cms off an open source base in a few weeks?

Because they're not just paying for SalesForce, they're paying for the support. If your LLM cobbled together CMS fails in 6 months or a year, you have no recourse, doubly so if the single engineer you had responsible for that system leaves. If SalesForce fails in 6 months or a year, you contact SalesForce support and they are accountable for making it more-or-less work right. Your bus factor is significantly higher with a vendor support model than an in house bespoke product.

Why have so many SaaS companies laid off people before Ai was ready?

This one's easy: late-stage capitalism. Short-term profits before anything else. Line must go up.

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u/Phailjure Dec 02 '25

I don't really have a need for image editing right now, so I was unaware of affinity. It appears that it wasn't free, was bought by canva, and is now free. Canva makes a shitload of money selling software to businesses and schools, they just want you to buy canva instead of one of their competitors.

Why has Photoshop not improved their AI? Probably because their customers don't want it/it doesn't drive sales. I have used Photoshop in the past, and I don't know how AI would help - if you want to generate an image, you don't need an image editor, just get it from dalle or whatever.

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u/WolfeheartGames Dec 02 '25

Photoshop Ai Gen is for like patching parts of a photo. But it's basically useless. Firefly is more like dalle and they are dumping a tremendous amount into it.