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Comment by elevatortrim | Hacker News Reader

What I do not understand is why is it that software engineers are so afraid? I have heard from so many other white collar people that AI already changed their job entirely (technical salesmen, translators, designers, government researchers, the list goes on), yet it is the software engineers that I hear the most noise from.

Software engineering is one of the most intellectually demanding categories of white collar work. I’m not saying it is invincible, but I do not see why SWEs should worry more.

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Sampling bias.

You're on a site dominated by software engineers, in the field of software engineering, and likely have a lot of software engineer friends.

Translators got fucked, there's very little market for them compared now compared to decades past. Find their forums and I bet you'd have seen similar worry.

Agreed. The job market for ad-copy, proofreading, etc. also got collectively set on fire - particularly in the gig economy.

A lot of pride is wrapped up in the craft of writing software. If that goes away (I don't think it will) it would leave a lot of people wondering how they spent all their time.

(or something like that. Obviously I'm too well adjusted to have these existential worries)

it's because software fundamentally has specific, measurable outcomes. it has to, that's why we build things: to do things. and in computing, necessarily, the things you do can be computed, which means they can be checked for correctness and reproducibility

much of an SWE's role is to artfully construct complex abstractions of reality in such a way that it can be understood by others, with the intent that it can be fixed or improved on in the future.

but if you don't _need_ artful construction in the first place, because you can just brute force AI slopped assembly language that's impossible (for MeatI) to comprehend, and the same AI is sufficient at improving and fixing it, then why do you need an SWE to bring artfulness to the table for you?

we're a long way off from this, ultimately, but imho, this is the broad strokes of it

How is software verifiable whatsoever for correctness? Ironically hardware is

I mean pure functions maybe verifiable for correctness, but I don't know how you verify facebooks codebase is 'correct'

Maybe try to run a maximizing function on the stock value, very unfeisable ofcourse

I also hear the most from software engineers, but then again, I don't really follow translation or government research discussion forums.

>government research discussion

Its bad. The most depressing part is that it is because of de-funding not AI. While at the same time this field is probably one of the only venues for escaping the AI sinkhole but its being dismantled rather than built up. Source my partner in research.

Software engineers see the most dramatic change, and they haven't had to worry about job security for the last 25 years.

Tractors replaced farm hands, not farmers. Software developers are farm hands.

Why not both.

An absolutely massive numbers of farmers were replaced too. Farm management was rather grueling in the early 1900s. Farmers that embraced mechanization were able to buy up surrounding farms that didn't and grew in size. As the equipment got better the amount of work per acre farmed dropped so farms expanded with more acreage. Farmers and hands dropped in number.

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