I don't know if my (software development) job will still exist in ten years
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19 replies
10 years is optimistic. I'm already seeing management telling experienced developers "You aren't using Claude hard enough."
we were mandated to double our output to justify what the company is spending on Claude and to do so we were told to use god awful skills that are constructed in a way that often ignore guide rails and bypass permission rules causing more time to be wasted in debugging and fixing shitty ai slop than would have been spent actually by humans planning and implementing sound changes.
Consistent with my experience! With the added bonus of cheap, outsourced developers who can't find their ass with both hands.
I have a feeling there's a fine line between not hard enough and everyone spending $2k per month on tokens.
I don't think of myself as a developer but have been doing IT for 25 years before my current unemployment that is creeping toward two years. I have a lot of linkedin contacts in the same boat.
The feels. Week 1 here.
We've had a growing invisible divide in software for two decades now:
A: People who jam in frameworks, copy examples online, and adopt "processes" and principles that bigger companies claim work for them, that only result in pulverizing responsibility, speed and understanding. They don't expect to understand their tools. They fudge them until they stop giving off visible problems and wrap that up in "grown up words" by making ineffectual unit tests, make a PR, tagging it "bugfix: ticket #877", sending it to review, debating some syntax, and spend the next two years debugging the system because of all the small things that go wrong because the thing they make don't behave according to a clear mental model.
B: People who don't think knowing a single programming language counts as competence, and prefer making things according to a model (instead of copying someone else's framework and contorting their own work to fit inside it)
Group A are the reason shit sucks today, and they believe LLMs can code, because they themselves can barely code and just copy impressive looking convoluted shit from others anyway.
so group B doesn't use frameworks but prefers making things according to a model? What's a model here? I'm not following
Frameworks can be fine. Using them before understanding what you make is not. At that point you often see it is faster and better to just make the parts you needed yourself.
Model as in you have a clear opinion on what your system does, why, how, and what it doesn't do. A model evolves during development, which is where it becomes hard: You always need to make room for things you didn't predict, so you need to adapt and refine the system model so that the change makes sense.
Adding features until a full system explanation consists largely of "but", "and also" or "except", things like "and you should ask Bea about how that part works" or the worst of all "this part can be anything", is the opposite of working from a model.
I honestly don’t know what to do, and I don’t think anybody does. Coworkers, other professionals, therapists—there is no consensus.
I fucking love development. I went to computer camp and decided I wanted this career at age 10 before I even understood it was a possibility.
I want to be paid to know things. Not to supervise a guessing machine and guide it like a sycophantic lost puppy.
I cling to the hope that AI companies will burn through their revenue and will implode under their own infestors’ demand for ROI before they truly have something that wipes away the entire profession. I am a terrible gardener.
I'm not really sure why anyone in tech ever expected job security. The pace at which tech has been advancing and its role changing in our lifetimes is way faster than you could just make a cozy career out of.
This is an odd take... I personally know several people that started, worked, then retired as programmers
How old do you think computer Tech's are? There's been programmers since the 60s on punch cards. There's totally careers worth of work there.
That's like saying you don't understand how anyone expected to make a career in metal work? Surely we would find something better than metal within a couple of hundred years right there's no way that industry is still exists in a thousand years.
Useful development, or just development for the sake of development so the shareholders are happy? Useful being defined as a product that people would still be happy to use in decade from now.
Yeah, I've had that existential crisis this Spring, and so have other devs I know. There's still a good way to go, but unless LLMs hit a hard limit on cognition I tend to share the author's feelings.
Why's this post at a 27%?
Is this question about upvotes/downvotes? My instance has downvotes disabled, so I don't even see (and care about) them. I enjoyed reading it (as it represents what some software devs are thinking about these times) and some here, too. That matters for me.
Yep, and in 5 years architects and tech leads will be similarly be made obsolete. In the end, if you want to make money, all technology decisions are just implementation details in service of what actually matters - delivering business value. Therefore the only stable career in the age of AI is the project manager.
lol
If you're this lacking in confidence of your skills, you may have other issues to work out...