[HN Gopher] A series of vignettes from my childhood and early ca...
___________________________________________________________________
A series of vignettes from my childhood and early career
Author : absqueued
Score : 134 points
Date : 2025-12-02 12:28 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.jasonscheirer.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.jasonscheirer.com)
| everlier wrote:
| I was, for a long time, scared of my future due to the low/no-
| code, automation, LLMs, outsourcing, etc. Until, at some point, I
| realised something simple - the risk factor for my job is not
| determined by how good new tools are, but only by how lazy people
| are about learning and adopting them. And here history gives
| another lesson - we never learn, eternal cycle of mistakes will
| continue.
| giantg2 wrote:
| The outsourcing is the only real threat in your list. In the
| past, we have eliminated jobs in the primary (eg farming) and
| secondy (eg manufacturing) industries through automation and
| outsourcing with the goal of moving workers into higher level
| industries, including tertiary industries (eg software). If we
| are outsourcing tertiary industry jobs as well, what does that
| leave us?
|
| 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.
| nxor wrote:
| It leaves us nothing :)
| forgotoldacc wrote:
| For those who are young, single, and are open to adventure,
| the endless outsourcing provides another option: pack up and
| leave high cost of living areas or the US entirely. There are
| plenty of places where you can get a fraction of a US salary
| while living a quality of life beyond what the US offers. US
| companies have return to office mandates so they can fire US
| workers. But if you're a US citizen living abroad and willing
| to accept 1/4th the salary of a person in California (and
| living in a place with 1/10th the living costs), companies
| get the best of both worlds: an employee they feel they can
| trust while also undercutting wages. Yeah, it sucks for
| people still in the US, but it's been great for me.
| giantg2 wrote:
| "pack up and leave high cost of living areas or the US
| entirely."
|
| 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.
| grvdrm wrote:
| Incredible comment. I live on biz side of insurance but use
| tech/automation skills all the time. My industry should have
| solved so many problems so many years ago.
|
| But it didn't because of exactly what you said: "how lazy
| people are about learning and adopting them"
| markus_zhang wrote:
| Except in other industries it is usually the lazier people
| who got the power to fix the things as they were like 30
| years ago. While in IT they got washed out quickly.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| "The Death of Software Engineering as a Profession" ... is
| greatly exaggerated.
|
| 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.
| absqueued wrote:
| Its just the title, I have read the post texts before posting,
| he actually says its here to say dispite mainstream claiming
| coding is dead every other five year.
| dmoy wrote:
| Yea I think Calhoun also read the article before posting, and
| agrees with you; they meant the full title should be
|
| > "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.
| alwa wrote:
| For today's lucky 10,000- @JKCalhoun is most likely making
| reference here to American humorist Mark Twain, who, in
| response to news stories claiming he had died, was reported
| to have quipped "reports of my death have been greatly
| exaggerated."
|
| [0] https://quoteinvestigator.com/2024/06/07/report-death/
| jama211 wrote:
| Software engineering isn't dead and won't be dead from LLMs,
| I have no fear of that, but coding by hand may become as
| usually unnecessary as coding in assembly is now.
|
| And I think that's ok.
| fpauser wrote:
| I still love programming. Even more so after trying out llm
| coding in some projects.
| fpauser wrote:
| One day "real programmers" will be gold.
| okokwhatever wrote:
| Once we understand demand set the price we'll understand why
| our "career" is dead. Thank me later.
| MangoToupe wrote:
| I don't think the career is going anywhere unless the career
| just consists of typing. We need people who understand how
| computers work more than ever.
| BinaryIgor wrote:
| Exactly and arguably we will always - unless AGI
| giantg2 wrote:
| "We need people who understand how computers work more than
| ever."
|
| 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.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Sure, they can do it for them - but the purpose of
| college is not to write papers. The papers are so that
| the students can demonstrate that they understand the
| subject and that they have "learned to learn". If an LLM
| writes it for them then they haven't proven anything
| other than that they can prompt an LLM. Which is great if
| your college degree is for "LLM prompting", but not much
| else.
|
| 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)
| giantg2 wrote:
| "but the purpose of college is not to write papers. The
| papers are so that the students can demonstrate that they
| understand the subject and that they have "learned to
| learn"."
|
| 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.
| QuercusMax wrote:
| It's not just a piece of paper - it's a piece of paper
| that shows you can complete a 4-year course of study in a
| particular field. I'm not sure how useful a piece of
| paper that says you spent 4 years typing prompts into a
| LLM could be without a huge change in how education
| works.
| giantg2 wrote:
| I'm not sure how you think those two things are
| different. Right now, we have people graduating a 4 year
| course of study in a particular field _and_ spending a
| large part of that 4 years using LLMs to do a lot of the
| work.
| MangoToupe wrote:
| Eh, maybe. I think it could actually be the opposite: we
| might need more people than ever to clean up the crap
| that LLMs spit out.
| gtowey wrote:
| How would the person promting the LLM know if it were
| producing "B" grade results? That's the biggest issue
| right now: you have to know more than the LLM to verify
| its output or you're likely to get garbage.
|
| 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.
| giantg2 wrote:
| Many workers don't care what grade they get. The PMs just
| want the shit delivered.
| orwin wrote:
| Just to react to the "i automated myself out of a Job" part:
| happened to me at my first job, as we automated more and more our
| deployment, we could take more and more clients, and I ended up
| spending 90% of my time fixing routing issues, onboarding
| clients, integrating their ETLs or inhouse software, or fixing
| their "chmod -R 777 /" and other mistakes. Which wasn't an issue
| when it was 30%, or even 50% of my job to be clear, but became
| extremely boring and soulcrushing at the end.
|
| I'm still happy i automated stuff, that was the interesting part
| of the job,
| QuercusMax wrote:
| Sounds like your company should have hired some (cheaper) ops
| folks to handle that stuff, and given you bigger projects to
| take on.
|
| 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.
| sandruso wrote:
| The ongoing issue is the maintenance.
|
| 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.
| BinaryIgor wrote:
| Ahh - so many gems!
|
| "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.
| exitb wrote:
| Isn't this a bit revisionist? I started to become interested in
| programming around late 90s and I don't remember anyone floating
| the idea that OOP, libraries or IDEs will make programming
| obsolete as a profession. If anything, pre-2023 most programmers
| considered their job as one of the hardest ones to automate.
| stavros wrote:
| Yeah, I can confirm, before LLMs I definitely thought coding
| would be the last thing to go.
| mistersquid wrote:
| > before LLMs I definitely thought coding would be the last
| thing to go.
|
| 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.
| autoexec wrote:
| > 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.
|
| 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.
| stickfigure wrote:
| I'm still of the opinion that coding will be the last thing
| to go. LLMs are an enabler, sure, but until they integrate
| some form of neuroplasticity they're stuck working on
| Memento-guy-sized chunks of code. They need a human
| programmer to provide long context.
|
| 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.
| forgetfulness wrote:
| I'm more inclined to believe that no jobs (as in trades,
| professions) will go, but programming will be the most
| automated, along with design and illustration.
|
| 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.
| zoeysmithe wrote:
| I'm not sure what happens when you replace coders with
| 'prompt generalists' and the output has non-trivial bugs.
| What do you do then? The product is crashing and the business
| is losing money? Or a security bug? You can't just tell llm's
| "oh wait what you made is bad, make it better." At a certain
| point, that's the best it can make. And if you dont
| understand the security or engineering issue behind the bug,
| even if the llm can fix this, you don't have the skills to
| prompt it correctly to do so.
|
| 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.
| autoexec wrote:
| > You can't just tell llm's "oh wait what you made is bad,
| make it better." At a certain point, that's the best it can
| make. And if you dont understand the security or
| engineering issue behind the bug, even if the llm can fix
| this, you don't have the skills to prompt it correctly to
| do so.
|
| 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
| jollyllama wrote:
| Beyond training data availability, it's always easiest to
| automate what you understand. Since software engineering is a
| subset of the discipline of AI/LLMs, it has been automated to
| the extent that it has. Everything else involves more domain
| knowledge.
| arethuza wrote:
| It's an idea that surfaces every few years - back in 1981 I can
| remember reading about "The Last One" - named because it was
| supposed to be the last computer program that would ever need
| to be written:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_One_(software)
| rokob wrote:
| There was definitely a widely held belief in the late 90s,
| early 00s that programming was commoditized to the point that
| it would be fully offshored to the lowest cost of labor. This
| happened in some areas and failed. It still happens now and
| then. But I remember hearing some of that based on OO and
| libraries making it so unskilled people could just put together
| legos.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| It's a bit too generalizing that it failed and happens "now
| and then", offshoring is a multi-billion industry employing
| millions of people.
|
| 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.
| Al-Khwarizmi wrote:
| I remember that. I studied CS in that period and some
| professors were convinced that software development was going
| to become an unskilled job, analogous to bricklaying, and
| that our goal as future CS graduates should be to become
| managers, just like someone that studies a university degree
| about making buildings is intended to become an architect and
| not a bricklayer.
|
| 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.
| ghaff wrote:
| The bigger issue is that so many people have jumped into CS
| because programming (not the same thing I know) has become
| seen as this thing that will earn you big bucks.
|
| 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.
| coldpie wrote:
| > I started to become interested in programming around late 90s
| and I don't remember anyone floating the idea that OOP,
| libraries or IDEs will make programming obsolete as a
| profession.
|
| 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-...
| HPsquared wrote:
| It's interesting that even with the rise of transformers, UML
| still isn't popular. I wonder if that, or some other visual
| way of representing specs, might make a comeback.
| absqueued wrote:
| I find the idea that IntelliJ being a job killer hard to
| believe, just like when some of my colleagues used to think
| Dreamweaver would wipe out frontend development - or 'HTML
| slicing', as we called it back then.
| QuercusMax wrote:
| Yeah, that's weird; IntelliJ was more like "this is how
| amazing and friction-free Java development and refactoring
| can be". Enabling more ppl to be 10x programmers, not putting
| ppl out of work.
| tclancy wrote:
| >I don't remember anyone floating the idea that OOP, libraries
| or IDEs
|
| 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.
| paganel wrote:
| > Object databases were going to replace SQL multiple times
|
| 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.
| munificent wrote:
| It had definitely been a thing even from the 80s, though
| everyone always seemed to think it would be the _next_
| generation of languages that did it. For example, in 1981,
| James Martin wrote a book called "Application Development
| Without Programmers".
| QuercusMax wrote:
| I remember reading 25-30 years ago about how 4GLs and object
| libraries were going to democratize software creation. Don't
| recall it being sold as an apocalypse for coders, though.
| throwaway150 wrote:
| Forgive me but a lot of the examples seem like strawman.
|
| > 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!
| tclancy wrote:
| Just because people make stuff up on certain corners of the
| Internet doesn't mean everyone does. Occam's Razor applies
| here: some guy who has been in the industry 25 years doesn't
| have any good stories to illustrate his point (how did he reach
| the conclusion then?) so he makes one up, writes a whole blog
| post and then someone else posts it here-- what's the endgame?
| throwaway150 wrote:
| > what's the endgame?
|
| 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.
| JuniperMesos wrote:
| The newspaper industry arguably collapsed due to internet
| multimedia.
| hshsiejensjsj wrote:
| The title is "The Death of Software Engineering as a Profession",
| why was this changed? Not really fair to the author.
| absqueued wrote:
| I actually posted with that title. Not sure what happend.
|
| @dang could perhaps help?
| coldpie wrote:
| The title of the blog post is " _A Series of Vignettes From
| My Childhood and Early Career_ ". The heading for the first
| section is " _The Death of Software Engineering as a
| Profession_ ". It makes sense to me to use the title of the
| blog post, not one of the section headings.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| That's not the title, that's the subheading.
| sebastianconcpt wrote:
| _The reports about our death were greatly exaggerated_.
| absqueued wrote:
| I posted this link after reading all the way. Jason actually
| makes a good point - its just that this title is loud. Blog post
| itself isn't claiming the death of software engineering at all.
| If anything, it just shows that every five or ten years someone
| claims software engineering is dead.
|
| 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.
| cs02rm0 wrote:
| Seems like groundhog day, although I'm not sure I remember anyone
| telling me that software engineers were on borrowed time until
| relatively recently and I'd largely ignored it.
|
| 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.
| deadbabe wrote:
| Same thing happened after dotcom. Same thing happened after
| 2008. Same thing will happen now during AI and the trump
| recession.
|
| 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.
| QuercusMax wrote:
| Now's a good time to look for the less exciting but stable
| companies in recession-proof industries. Doesn't even mean
| you need to look for lower pay.
| paganel wrote:
| I think the 2008 downturn (when it comes to this profession)
| was a little bit less severe compared to just after dotcom,
| or so it felt here in Eastern Europe.
|
| 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.
| cs02rm0 wrote:
| I changed jobs in '08, '10 and was contracting by '11.
| Didn't notice any downturn from 2008 at all.
|
| 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.
| barfoure wrote:
| Not sure what to make of the post.
|
| 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.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| What profession are engineers like mechanical or chemical in?
| jibe wrote:
| These days, software development
| BigTTYGothGF wrote:
| > "Coding is over, with Object Oriented programming one person
| who is much smarter than any of us could hope to be will develop
| the library just once and we will all use it going forward,
| forever. Once a problem is solved it never needs solving again.
|
| This kind of happened, and it was a good thing.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| I don't see how that requires OOP, as one can write a library
| of a series of standalone functions too and distribute that.
| The two are orthogonal.
| yatopifo wrote:
| There is one and only one important question... have companies
| been hiring as many juniors as in the past recently?
| esafak wrote:
| And is that a transient phenomenon or a secular shift?
| FlamingMoe wrote:
| Have to say, love the typography on this site. Did some quick
| digging and the headings font is an Adobe font called Forevs,
| with a similar Google font being Fraunces.
| MarkusQ wrote:
| Have we forgotten that COBOL was going to eliminate the need for
| programmers (even though FORTRAN and ALGOL had both somehow
| _increased_ the need (not to mention LISP, which for some reason
| mostly no one did at the time (though it still got more attention
| than APL)))?
|
| 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.
| next_xibalba wrote:
| I really like the font this author is using for the headers.
| Reminds me of the fonts used on covers of 1970s scifi novels.
| poolnoodle wrote:
| I thought this was Jason Schreier and got confused for a minute.
| jama211 wrote:
| I'll be honest, I'm confused by the ending. It says this is a
| series of jabs at LLM hype, and I understand that it's intended
| as a series of jabs against those who would say "software
| engineers will be out of a job", but I'll be honest I think only
| a loud minority are saying that yet it's treated like it's a
| majority position.
|
| 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.
| lordnacho wrote:
| Every time a new tool is made, more complicated things come
| within reach. And then you need a guy who can use the new tool.
| Who is that guy going to be? He's gonna be the guy who already
| knows how to use the previous tool.
| teddyh wrote:
| > _New problem sets not covered by the garden path come up all
| the time._
|
| I believe the appropriate term is "happy path", not "garden
| path".
| QuercusMax wrote:
| The idiom "garden path" typically refers to a _misleading_
| path, as in "He led me down the garden path" (to take
| advantage). See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden-
| path_sentence.
| teddyh wrote:
| Yes, I know. This is why the term "garden path" does not fit
| in that sentence.
| QuercusMax wrote:
| I was yes-anding you, not no-butting.
| teddyh wrote:
| I see. You could have made that more clear by prepending
| something like "For those who don't know," to the start
| of your comments.
| tomasphan wrote:
| This should be taken in the context of software demand versus
| production. Demand has risen steadily over these years and
| efficiency gains in production just unlocked more demand because
| it lowered the cost. I think LLM coding will also unlock more
| demand but only up to a point until unit cost is so low it
| doesn't make sense to have a human in the loop anymore. Then we
| software devs are SOL.
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