what are your thoughts on Software engineer replacement. My team has already seen big reductions. Q/A team is gone. Software Engineer reduced by a third.
Scared for the future
Personally, the more time I spend working with coding agents the least worried I am for my career. Getting the best results out of them is really hard. They amplify existing skills and experience, so the more experience you have the better.
I wonder why there is such a mad dash to trump up the capabilities of coding agents. And why such loose terminology and lack of rigor? I thought programmers were supposed to be rational people (har har!)
I have a theory: if they were good at writing automated tests, they would have been developers instead of QA engineers.
Not saying that there aren't any high quality QA engineers, I worked with some. But LLM's raised the bar in a way that most QA engineers can't reach.
In my limited experience they write test cases, test each story, do regression test, verify bugs from customers. All by hand.
At my current job I don't want to miss them.
The best QA people I've worked with didn't write much code at all. You'd give them a new system and they'd find all of the bugs, testing obscure edge-cases that you'd never thought of.
What are you going to tell them? Suddenly you're earning what they're earning for sitting at a desk every day?
Non SWEs (salespeople, clerks, secretaries, assistants, taxi drivers, writers, 3D modelers, artists, designers) are of course going the same way. Unless they are protected (unionized or such), why would they have sympathy for SWEs? People of our ilk are the ones causing this (to them and to ourselves). What I will tell them is to not repeat our mistake, organize and protest.
AI reduces the cost of producing software (and other intellectual tasks), which greatly improves the viability for more and more ambitious projects. As far as we know the amount of problems software (and humanity) can solve is unbounded
It feels like the market has shifted in SWE yet again to heavily prioritize a new set of skills, of which those in the top quartile are desired more than ever
Fundamentally, steering LLMs requires the same structured, logical thought process that is required to write code, regardless of abstraction level. Unlike what HN would have you believe this is not a skill that is equally distributed across the population.
But given the rapid pace at which this technology is evolving, "steering" may very well be ceded to the clankers. LLM agents are fantastic at logical reasoning & any inefficiencies relative to human experts can be circumvented by sheer compute.