A series of vignettes from my childhood and early career
jasonscheirer.com
jasonscheirer.com
Could be the title of the piece.
I agree: throughout my own career as a programmer (I prefer the more blue-collar sounding term—it better fits my skill set) I have also seen large changes in the industry that certainly made waves, did not capsize the profession.
At the same time, the profession I retired from was by no means the profession I entered into in the '90s. I confess I liked the older profession better.
> "The Death of Software Engineering as a Profession" ... is greatly exaggerated.
As in "is greatly exaggerated" is part of the title
They did not mean the title should be
> The Death of Software Engineering as a Profession
and that they think the thesis is greatly exaggerated.
And I think that’s ok.
Its not dead at all and it wont die either.
Why? chagpt, or figma or v0 can spin up a few pages of brochure site, even some blog posting level web apps, basic cruds you know. But I don't think it will replace full software engineering.
I work with a large codebase, thats almost 30 years old, multiple framework ( backbone, react, angular) and then java, python for backends. All from different phases and everything is stitched together to make it work, and have a well profit making business going on. There is no model or chatxyz that can dig throug all these connected apps and services and replace our engineering team. It helps us here and there- yeah a lot.
The version of this hype that I remember from circa 2004 was UML[1] was going to make most programming automated. You'd have an architect that would draw out your problem's architecture in a GUI[2], press a button to automate all the code to build that architecture, and have a programmer fill in a couple dozen lines of business logic. Boom, program done by two or three people in a couple weeks, let's all go home. It uh, didn't work out that way.
You can read a lot more about all this by following the various links to concepts & products from Rational's Wikipedia page, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rational_Software (the Rational Unified Process page in particular brings back some memories). It wasn't badly intentioned, but it was a bit of a phase that the industry went through that ultimately didn't work out.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UML
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Component-based-Software-...
I never believed it, though (if I had, I would probably have switched degrees, as I hate management). And while the belief was common, my impression is that it was only so among people who didn't code much. The details on how it would happen were always highly handwavy and people defending that view had a tendency to ignore any software beyond standard CRUD apps.
In contrast, if I had to choose a degree right now, I'd probably avoid CS (or at most study it out of passion, like one could study English philology or something, but without much hope of it being a safe choice for my career). I think the prospects for programmers in the LLM era look much scarier, and the threats look much more real, than they ever did in that period.
Of course, some level of computer skills is important in most professions at this point. But logic suggests that CS (and programming) compensation will level out at a level comparable to similarly skilled technical professions.
And the "unskilled people putting together legos" is also very much a thing in the form of low/no-code platforms, from my own circles there's Mendix and Tibco, arguably SAP, and probably a heap more. Arguably (my favorite word atm) it's also still true in most software development because outside of coding business logic, most heavy lifting is done by the language's SDK and 3rd party libraries.
Oh man, you had it lucky. Object databases were going to replace SQL multiple times, XML would eat the world and I strongly remember a UX person taking one look at Ruby on Rails at maybe 1.0 and declaring he would not be needing us programmers anymore.
Someone should honestly write a history of Zope. Can't say I hated it, because it was my first paid job as a programming working with it, but it was special, very special, let's call it that. 20 years from that moment I do think though that it had its good moments, even bright ideas in some places, too bad that they didn't scale.
While LLMs do still struggle to produce high quality code as a function of prompt quality and available training data, many human software developers are surprised that LLMs (software) can generate quality software at all.
I wonder to what extent this surprise is because people tend to think very deeply when writing software and assume thinking and "reasoning" are what produce quality software. What if the experience of "thinking" and "reasoning" are epiphenomena of the physical statistical models present in the connections of our brains?
This is an unsolved and ancient philosophical problem (i.e. the problem of duality) of whether consciousness and free will affect the physical world. If we live in a materialist universe where matter and the laws of physics are unaffected by consciousness then "thinking", "reasoning", and "free will" are purely subjective. In such a view, subjective experience attends material changes in the world but does not affect the material world.
Software developers surprised by the capabilities of software (LLMs) to write software might not be so surprised if they understood consciousness as an epiphenomenon of materiality. Just as words do not cause diaphragms to compress lungs to move air past vocal cords and propagate air vibrations, perhaps the thoughts that attend action (including the production of words) are not the motive force of those actions.
It takes deep thought and reasoning to produce good code. LLMs don't think or reason. They don't have to though because humans have done all of that for them. They just have to regurgitate what humans have already done. Everything good an LLM outputs came from the minds of humans who did all the real work. Sometimes they can assemble bits of human generated code in ways that do something useful, just like someone copying and pasting code out of stack exchange without understanding any of it can sometimes slap something together that does something useful.
LLMs are a neat party trick, and it can be surprising to see what they do and fun to see where they fail, but it all says very little about what it means to think and reason or even what it means to write software.
Maybe some new technique will change that, but it's not guaranteed. At this point I think we can safely surmise that scaling isn't the answer.
Why? To this day still they’re the showcase of what LLMs “can” do for (to) a line of work, but they’re the only ones with all the relevant information online.
For programming, there’s decades of textbooks, online docs, bug tracker tickets, source code repositories, troubleshooting on forums, all laying out how a profession is exercised from start to finish.
There’s hardly a fraction of this to automate the tasks of the average Joe who does some paperwork the model has never seen, who’s applying some rough procedures we would call “heuristics” to some spreadsheets and emails, and has to escalate to his supervisor for things out of code several times a day.
I see tech as 'the king's guard' of capitalism. They'll be the last to go because at the end of the day, they need to be able to serve the king. 'Prompt generalists' are like replacing the king's guard with a bunch of pampered royals who 'once visited a battlefield.' Its just not going to work when someone comes at the king.
In that case, the idea is that you'd see most programmers in the company replaced by a much smaller group of prompt generalists who work for peanuts, while the company keeps on a handful of people who actually know how to program and do nothing all day long but debug AI written code.
When things crash or a security issue comes up they bring in the team of programmers, but since they only need a small number of them to get the AI code working again most programmers would be out of a job. High numbers of people who actually like touching code for a living will compete for the very small number of jobs available driving down wages.
In the long term, this would be bad because a lot of talented coders won't be satisfied being QA to AI slop and will move on to other passions. Everything AI knows it learned from people who had the skill to do great things, but once all the programmers are just debugging garbage AI code there will be fewer programmers doing clever things and posting their code for AI to scrape and regurgitate. Tech will stagnate since AI can't come up with anything new and will only have its own slop to learn from.
Personally, I doubt it'll happen that way. I'm skeptical that LLMs will become good enough to be a real threat. Eventually the AI bubble will burst as companies realize that chatbots aren't ever going to be AGI, will never get good enough to replace most of their employees, and once they see that they're still going to be stuck paying the peasant class things will slowly get back to normal.
In the meantime, expect random layoff and rehires (at lower wages) as companies try and fail to replace their pesky human workers with AI, and expect AI to be increasingly shoehorned into places it has no business being and screwing things up making your life harder in new and frustrating ways
Yet one thing does seem different for anyone who just missed the dotcom crash, is that the roles available have fallen off a cliff while the numbers looking for roles seem to be up, at least in the UK. The UAE is even worse. I've spent 20 years hiding from recruiters and now they're all leaving me on read. Karma, maybe.
After every downturn ends, there comes a sudden hunger for engineers, and companies can’t seem to get enough. Some companies will even hire engineers just so other companies don’t hire them. Be ready.
But, to be honest, I do miss the "just after dotcom crash" period, there were lots and lots of interesting things people were working on back then, and the majority of it didn't involve making money. Maybe this is just nostalgia, because I first became a paid programmer in 2005, but that's how it feels 20+ years from that time.
I'd only once in 20 years been turned down for a job I'd applied for. Every other job I applied for I was offered. I've applied for over 600 roles in the past year and barely had a handful of interviews. That certainly feels different.
The US outsources something like 300k jobs annually, with over half of these being IT jobs. Adding 10k IT jobs per month could change the employment numbers and economic outlook we've been seeing lately. It seems like we're in a race to the bottom. I do think AI will make things worse, economically at least, with the reduction in jobs. But this could be offset by policies promoting on-shore employment.
The lower cost domestic areas still can't compete with the labor cost of low cost countries. Most low cost countries have tradeoffs when it comes to rights and freedoms enjoyed in most developed (high cost) counties.
But it didn't because of exactly what you said: "how lazy people are about learning and adopting them"
But then BASIC came along and really finished the job. Now _anybody_ could program, without needing all that specialized training. It was just a skill, not a job!
Jason has nailed it. If he were older, his list of vignettes might be longer, but the point would remain the same.
"The dream of the widespread, ubiquitous internet came true, and there were very few fatalities. Some businesses died, but it was more glacial than volcanic in time scale. When ubiquitous online services became commonplace it just felt mundane. It didn’t feel forced. It was the opposite of the dot com boom just five years later: the internet is here and we’re here to build a solid business within it in contrast with we should put this solid business on the internet somehow, because it’s coming."
Yes. And it continues on.
I'm still happy i automated stuff, that was the interesting part of the job,
My current company is doing exactly that type of thing. We have tons of data imports from different clients that have to run regularly, and my team started out writing the ETLs and troubleshooting stuff, but eventually we were able to write out playbooks for how slightly less-technical folks can do this stuff. We're now trying to automate more tools and processes for those folks, so they can take on more clients without needing more people.
Software Engineering isn’t a profession. Software Development is. Software development as a profession may wane and morph, due to advancements in technology and other creations.
I don’t know any engineer who has ever said “engineering is a dead end”. Because that’s an obviously nonsensical statement. So, engineering stands on its own for time immemorial.
And no - I’m not nitpicking over terminology. Learn engineering.
This kind of happened, and it was a good thing.
I believe the appropriate term is “happy path”, not “garden path”.
This can't be solved without fully trusting the LLM period.
Just don't autopilot on important code you want to own. That's good start.
In small numbers, yes. In current/large numbers, maybe not. Do college students need to understand language, grammar, or the subject to write B grade papers? No, they can just prompt an LLM to do it for them. Same thing for basic CRUD apps and websites. We will always need people who understand computers, but it seems likely that the proportion of the overall IT employees that need to know how it works will approach a horizontal asymptote.
I hope people that use LLMs to generate papers fail in other tests, else the value of a degree will be reduced to nothing - it's already suffering from a lot of "inflation" due to lowered standards and oversupply. (The lowered standards are because graduation rate became a metric and a target)
That depends on the perspective. In theory, that is the correct view. To many, the degree is just a piece of paper used to gatekeep jobs.
That's also my biggest concern is that corporations will decide that crap results are good enough as long as it cost them very little to produce.
@dang could perhaps help?
All the stories listed seem interesting, but none of them seem all that relevant.
I feel like most people understand that this is a seismic shift in abstraction layer, but intelligent people will still be in demand to manage the machines at whatever level is currently highest. The motor car didn’t kill taxi drivers, unless those who drove a carriage refused to learn how to drive a motor car.
Perhaps I’m not expressing my point very well… but this feels like both an argument against something almost no one is saying seriously, and it uses examples that also aren’t that applicable to the current situation other than having the commonality that people have said before that software engineers will die out. Make me wonder… How many times did people think an invention would kill off a job incorrectly, until one day it actually did?
Intelligent and well educated people will always be in demand somewhere. Until we’re in some post money utopia, we’ll just have to roll with the punches. In the meantime, HN readers like ourselves will simultaneously upvote any article that says humans are super necessary down at lower levels of abstraction and are way better at coding than LLMs, whilst quietly also coding less and less by hand and crawling up that abstraction layer themselves. That’s just human nature.
FTFY
> The dream of “multimedia” became commonplace and everyone just accepted it as normal. I’m not aware of any industries that collapsed dramatically due to multimedia.
But "multimedia" was never purported to be something that would lead to collapse of any segment of the industry, much less industries. If anything, the multimedia hype was purported to increase IT work which it did for some years.
> In 2000 a coworker took me aside and showed me his brand-new copy of IntelliJ IDE. “It’s over for us,” he said, “this thing makes it so programmers aren’t strictly necessary, like one person can operate this tool and they can lay the rest of us off.”
I've a hard time believing this. Literally nobody I've met was ever mistaken that IntelliJ would mean the doom of software engineering work. It's a great IDE and all IDE including IntelliJ required engineers to write code with them. Nobody was foolish enough to really think one engineer or one manager or one salesperson can "operate" IntelliJ and generate all the code to meet business requirements.
> And then he showed me the killer feature “that’s going to get us all out of a job:” the refactoring tools.
I'll bet there was no such "coworker". No sane person would think "refactoring" could mean "magically understand business requirements and write code"? All of this sounds like strawman setup so that the author could go on to making their next point like the bit where he challenged his "coworker" and asked if refactoring tools can write new code.
Don't get me wrong. The rest of the post is on money though. I just think the post would do better without these fake stories to set up strawmans only to take them down. Feels a bit forced!
Is it not obvious? The endgame is to publish a blogpost that sounds interesting. That itself may be the reward and the endgame for the author.
Someone who has worked for 25 years would definitely have stories. I've worked far longer than that. I've got stories too. But none of the stories are as ridiculous as a "coworker" thinking that of all things IntelliJ would lead to the doom of software engineering or multimedia would lead to the collapse of an industry. I mean, what the heck! How does one even go from "multimedia" to "collapse of an industry". There is no logical connection. On the other hand, "multimedia" creates more work in the industry.
So my application of Occam's Razor tells me, surely the stories are made up to set up strawman that they can take down one by one to write an interesting blog post.
But I'll reiterate that it's a good post. I can like a post and find issues with it at the same time. I find all the strawman a bit forced which detracts from the reading experience.