> “It’s more fun to write code than to read code,” said Simon Willison, an A.I. fan who is a longtime programmer and blogger, channeling the objections of other programmers. “If you’re told you have to do a code review, it’s never a fun part of the job. When you’re working with these tools, it’s most of the job.”
> This shift from writing to reading code can make engineers feel as if they are bystanders in their own jobs. The Amazon engineers said that managers have encouraged them to use A.I. to help write one-page memos proposing a solution to a software problem and that the artificial intelligence can now generate a rough draft from scattered thoughts.
> They also use A.I. to test the software features they build, a tedious job that nonetheless has forced them to think deeply about their coding.
I was just thinking about this the other day (after spending an extended session talking to an LLM about bugs in its code), and I realized that when I was just starting out, I enjoyed writing code, but now the fun part is actually fixing bugs.
Maybe I'm weird, but chasing down bugs is like solving a puzzle. Writing green-field code is maybe a little bit enjoyable, but especially in areas I know well, it's mostly boring now. I'd rather do just about anything than write another iteration of a web form or connect some javascript widget to some other javascript widget in the framework flavor of the week. To some extent, then, working with LLMs has restored some of the fun of coding because it takes care of the tedious part, and I get to solve the interesting problems.
I'm with you. I love solving puzzles to make something go. In the past that involved writing code, but it's not the code writing that I love, it's the problem solving and building. And I get plenty of that now, in a post-LLM world.
Not OP but I’ll give my perspective. I have no problem fixing someone else’s bugs up to a point, but I also don’t want to be the one cleaning up someone else’s mess who didn’t take time to do proper testing but is getting rated higher than me for clearing more tasks last month because they cut corners
Maybe we have changed or the industry changed, but last 5 years I’ve rarely met anyone who took the code reviews seriously. Any feedback, or glaring issues, are swept under “we will address this later”, “we work in MVP way(read:deploy barely working code without any accountability to production”, or just outright take it as a character challenge. I’ve lead a team of junior-level engineers who would fight with you via the product owner/scrum master because of the “priorities” and “deadlines”. And then, you’d be on the call solving the same issues you’ve raised in pull request earlier. Maybe I’m getting old, but, taking accountability or pride in one’s work, is getting only worse with Vibe coding and ai generated garbage
Well, from personal experience, code reviews at the FAANG I worked at were taken quite seriously. (But we were building OS frameworks so it mattered more.)
I think for me, the fun comes from preventing bugs; being able to draw on my experience to foresee common classes of bugs, and being able to prevent them through smart code architecture, making it easier for future contributors/readers to avoid walking into those traps. I'm hoping I'll keep being able to do that.
I spend all day fixing bugs and that's why they pay me -- because for most people it's not an enjoyable task. I'm not denying your experience but I will tell you I think you're an outlier. For most people, fixing bugs they didn't create is the worst part of the job.
Part of the fun is also figuring out the “best” way to achieve a thing. LLMs don’t often propose the best way and will happily propose convoluted ways. Clean approaches are still hard to come up with, but LLMs certainly help implementing them once thought up
Yeah, I agree with that. I still enjoy doing the conceptual and design work that once upon a time would have been the role of an "architect", and that's still required with LLMs.
I find both fun. Writing a web form is still kinda fun even after 20 years. I guess it’s like how some people still play the same video games after years and years while others want something new.
Have coders really psyopped themselves into thinking their job is somehow that much more special than the rest simply because it paid better due to temporarily market conditions?
I thought that was a joke where everyone was in on it, not that they were serious. I assumed it was clear we're all replaceable cogs in a machine, baring a few exceptions of brilliant and innovation people.
> Have coders really psyopped themselves into thinking their job is somehow that much more special than the rest simply because it paid better due to temporarily market conditions?
Yes. We don't need to pay $$$ for simply changing elements on a page or adopting the next web framework to replace another. The hype in many web technologies that lots of developers that have fell for also contributed to the low quality of the software that you use right now.
All of this work to pay developers to over-engineer inefficient solutions and to give a false sense of meaningful work contributed to the "psyop" of how highly inflated their salaries were to do their jobs in the ZIRP era.
And AI has shown which developer jobs it is really good at, and it is consistently good at web developer roles.
So I'd expect those roles to be significantly less valuable.
Joke's on us; this is going to rapidly drain what little creativity there is in places like Amazon as they rely increasingly more on a tool that at best intelligently regurgitates what it learned/gleaned/stole from the internet. As the AI models are further trained on their own slop, the signal to noise ratio will only get worse; this has already been noted in studies.
What even are most programmers at Amazon doing? It seems like all the interesting bits (the MVP of Amazon's major products) was developed long ago. All the low-hanging fruit is gone so the task is now focused on squeezing the few remaining drops of efficiency out of the stone.
That’s most major tech companies at this point. The fun was building closer to the mvp of the core product. Once that’s done, it’s just corporate druggery with computers.
Until you join a FAANG you simply cannot imagine the complexity of the systems and how much has not been automated and how much there is to build.
I've been in Amazon for close to a decade, and I constantly think "I can't believe X hasn't been automated in the 30 years that Amazon has existed and is still done on Excel".
Most engineers will work on new features for at least half of the year, and I personally work on brand new projects or at least features constantly.
working in a warehouse, just recently built over the last 4 years, and the pallet management is done via excel. im pretty sure the scanner app is just a frontend.
horrified to think the totes are done the same way.
Doing work that helps another team will rarely result in getting any credit and is a great way to get stuck in the bottom of the stack rank (top grading or whatever they call it now). So automating anything that integrates across the org chart won't happen because the incentive structure is against it.
That's not true. In fact OP1 and OP2 [1] in Amazon are in majority an intake process for projects requested by other teams. I'd say only half of them come from the team itself.
“OK Andrew, we’re looking for someone for this senior developer and they’ve got to be really really great at copying and pasting between Claude and an IDE.
Now we’re going to set up a whiteboard test here and you can demonstrate to us your best copying and pasting.”
“errrr, do I do any actual coding in the job?”
“Well, yes, inasmuch as anyone does these days. It’s mostly copying and pasting though, but hey that’s what coding IS now, right?”
“OK are you ready for your coding test, here it is: what key is COPY? And what key is PASTE?”
But for about ten years, at least, the majority of Google swe rules have been talked about as "just moving protobufs", which is effectively the same. If your job is just plumbing other people's designs for existing products, how fun can it be?
It's a running joke internally. But not always far from the truth. Translating business level protobufs into solution level protobufs is indeed the job of entire teams sometimes.
Ruby/Dawson in SLU even looks like a warehouse on the inside, complete with chain link fence decor, exposed concrete floors with a splash of paint, exposed ceiling infrastructure, and spartan decorations. And it was built over a decade ago.
About 8 or 9 years ago, I talked to a friend who started their first software engineering job. They talked about their job as taking tickets from the JIRA board, completing the change, and putting the tickets back. They were expected to complete 2-3 tickets per day. They didn't enjoy the job, needless to say.
I found this ultra-depressing, and far from what coding was for me - a creative role with great creativity and autonomy. Coding was always solving problems, and never felt like some sort of assembly line. But in a lot of companies, this is how it was constructed, with PMs setting up sprints and points, etc.
Similarly, I spoke to a doctor about how much they loved being able to work remotely at their role - with 2-3 days a week where they just responded to email and saw patients over telehealth. It felt very "ticket" focused and not at all the high status doctor role I imagined.
I suspect that both those roles will be lost to AI. If your role is taking a ticket that says "the box should be green, not red", and nothing more, that's the sort of thing that AI is very capable of.
> They were expected to complete 2-3 tickets per day.
Based on my experience with sprint teams, breaking things down into just a couple hours of work per ticket implies that someone else is doing an enormous amount of prep work to create a dozen tickets per feature. I agree that your friend is performing the work of a development system. I've heard this called "programming in Developer" as opposed to whatever language the developer is using.
I've had plenty of colleagues who expect the job to be that. Just working on a small ticket and moving it to "to test" when done.
It's incredibly frustrating to try and get anything done in a team like that. The reality of most software jobs I've had is that problem discovery is part of it. The only people who know the code well enough to know the problens it has are the developers.
I said it before and I'll say it again: it's high time we got the taste of our own medicine. Getting people out of jobs has been the main selling point of our industry since its first days, this is what we've collectively been doing for decades. Do I want my job to be automated right in front of my eyes? Not really. Do I see some poetic justice in the whole thing? Absolutely.
This is the message between the lines of much of the anti-dev schadenfreude, but actually spelling it out makes it obvious: it's not true.
Only a minority of dev jobs are automating people out of work. There are entirely new industries like game dev that can't exist without it.
Software development has gained such a political whipping-boy status, you'd be forgiven for forgetting it's been the route to the middle classes for a lot of people who would otherwise be too common, weird or foreign.
I think a lot of genAI coding efficiency will have the same property: costs will go down to the point where things that couldn’t be done affordably in software in 2020 will be affordable in 2030. That could well result in a net increase in tech employment.
Software development is the most automated career in the history of all time.
Assemblers, Linkers, Compilers, Copying, Macros, Makefiles, Code gen, Templates, CI & CD, Editors, Auto-complete, IDEs are all terms that describe types of automation in software development.
LLM-generated code is another form of automation, but it certainly isn't the first. Right now most of the problems are when it is inappropriately used. The same applies to other forms of automation too - but LLMs are really hyped up right now. Probably it will go through the normal hype cycle where there'll be a crash, and then a plateau where LLMs are used to drive productivity but expectations of their capability are more aligned to reality.
In french the two fields that are Computer Science and Information Technology are under the same moniker: "informatique", a portmanteau of information and automatic.
The whole field is about automating yourself out of a job, and it's right in the name.
> Il faut attendre 1962 pour réentendre parler d’informatique dans les médias. « Informatique » est en effet le terme utilisé pour la première fois par un scientifique français pour désigner le traitement automatique des données. Il s’agit de Philippe Dreyfus, fondateur de la société SIA, acronyme pour « Société d’Informatique Appliquée ».
And then enters the dictionary in 1966.
In 1957 in Germany, Karl Steinbuch describes Informatik as Automatische Informationsverarbeitung.
Gloating about hardships was and is a great way to ensure things will get worse for workers as efficiency and automation increases.
Another option would be to join forces to collectively demand more equitable distribution of the fruits of technological development. Sadly it doesn't seem to be very popular.
Strange enough the people that have the most to gain from keeping things the same, are really successful at convincing the masses who have the most to benefit from change in this regard to vote against it.
Certainly back when I worked in IT, the people I worked with were mostly very much anti-union. I didn't hear much anti immigrant talk back then but I've been retired for a while.
I don't really believe in unions either. But I do believe in a good balance between capitalism and socialism (and welfare systems, employee rights etc). I don't believe in the market solving everything.
The problem I have with unions is that they can be too unreasonable. They're too much on the other side, they're too hardline just like the ultracapitalists/neoliberals but on the other side. In a good system we wouldn't have to fight for our rights because we'd already have them anyway.
I'm very socialist actually. I just think that with a good socialist government, unions are not needed as such because the national law already protects workers' rights. I find it a bit 'off' that each class of labour has to fight for their own rights separately. That shouldn't be needed (and really isn't, where I live). It also causes a lot of uproar, see France for example where a strike is just tuesday. Employee rights are strong, but the public is heavily impacted all the time. Better to just handle this on the government side. This is why I was a member of the socialist party but not of the union in my workplace (I'm no longer a member because I moved countries and can't vote where I live).
Note: I'm not living in the US obviously :)
I do say a balance because of course we're not living in a communist state. So even with a socialist government there is still capitalism. Just not unrestrictedly so as it is in the US.
I'm not sure how it works in the US but in our company the union is many bitching about stupid stuff like breastfeeding rooms (when there are no women who bring their babies to work anyway - they just work from home after their 6 months maternity leave). All our basic rights are already sorted. We can't work too many hours, we have unlimited sick leave (though of course validated by a doctor for long absences), we're entitled to a lot of money when fired etc. But this is all national law level stuff. Not industry level.
> I'm very socialist actually. I just think that with a good socialist government, unions are not needed as such because the national law already protects workers' rights.
Having strong and independent unions is how you keep a good socialist government. Almost anytime you hear “With a good government, you don’t need <whatever>”, you are hearing a recipe for guaranteeing that good government is an exceptional, transitory state. If your society isn't prepared for bad government, it will have one sooner than you’d like, and it will be difficult to dislodge it.
> I'm not sure how it works in the US but in our company the union is many bitching about stupid stuff like breastfeeding rooms (when there are no women who bring their babies to work anyway - they just work from home after their 6 months maternity leave)
No really, we had such a room built and it is literally never used. Because there is nobody who brings their baby to work (which would be exceptionally impractical anyway - who'd want to be sitting on a phone call beside a crying baby??).
The bad thing is they converted the welfare room for this which was used all the time :(
I was told by building services when I complained about the removal of the wellness/meditation room. They have presence sensors. They also told me that nobody actually asked for it besides the union idiots who are not even in our city. They're just ticking boxes.
I really needed that place because of the move to hotdesking so I'm constantly sitting besides blabby sales people. Formerly we had an IT floor where people knew concentration is sometimes needed. So I'd go there to sit in silence and de-stress for a while.
But I have to say the company is good otherwise, I told them about my difficulty and the H&S people let me work from home much more than others.
I hate the way companies are going back from full remote to hybrid hotdesking though because that is the worst of both worlds.
I can imagine why the breastfeeding rooms were empty if your comments are indicative of your attitude in work.
Nothing about your example is an overreach of unions. In fact, it is a perfect example of the value of organised labour.
In honour of recent comments by dang, I won't be as direct as I'd historically be and instead invite you to think about - in the grand scheme of things - how accessibility, including expressing mothers, may be a societal and absolute good.
As a secondary exercise, maybe it's worth thinking about the ethics of presence sensors.
This comment reeks of liberalism and illustrates why liberalism doesn’t work.
You claim you’re trying to balance individualism and collectivism but don’t actually support things that make collectivism work so you end up de facto supporting individualism.
Its a way to support individualism while allowing people to feel extra good about themselves for supporting collectivist ideas, on paper.
I'm very socialist, and anti-liberal (at least, in the economic sense of liberalism).
But where I live we just have strong labour rights from the government so individual unions fighting for each type of labour's rights are not needed as much. Sometimes they are, when there are specific risks like chemicals that they work with. But for overall "not get taken advantage of" stuff, it's just not needed so much.
I’m glad the people in your country allow good things to happen. That’s definitely not the case in all countries and you need collective power to get nice things for workers.
Yes! In a fair world, we would all be very excited about jobs becoming 30% more efficient or fully automated with AI, because that surplus would come back to us. Producing more with less work is a good thing! It's only been distorted to become an economic anxiety become the gains from automation are so unevenly distributed.
I have been in this industry for some time, and over the years I have only seen more people being glued to electronic devices, not less.
It might have been a selling point, but the status quo is that we are inventing new jobs faster than phasing out old ones. The new jobs aren't necessarily more enjoyable, though, and there are no more smoking breaks.
The goal of all American business is exactly the same: maximize the return of profits to the shareholders at large. It is in fact, the law. Do more with less is a natural consequence of this.
Same goes for a truck driver, road builder, railway worker, etc.
FWIW, I spent many years as a cashier. It's not something I find inherently more valuable to the world. If we could trust people not to steal, we wouldn't need them.
Ok, but so is everyone involved with building the fulfillment centre, the sorting machines, the roads for delivery, the trucks, the railways...
If it sounds like I'm including a lot of jobs, it's because every non-service job in the history of the post-industrial revolution economy has revolved around making things more efficient. Software development is not some uniquely evil domain.
Nothing in my comment was a personal attack, only a reflection of GP's own behaviour. Go ahead and ban the account if calling out these comments as written is unwelcome. But beware the behaviour you welcome by leading it unchallenged.
I don't want to ban you! I hope to persuade you to stop using personally pejorative language in your HN comments, which you've unfortunately been doing a lot of.
If you don't like the phrase "personal attack" we can call it something else, but the point is you can't treat other commenters this way on HN, regardless of how wrong anyone is or you feel they are.
If those comments are the problem rather than the messages to which they're responding, then ban me. But again, beware the discourse you welcome, because bad ideas deserve to be challenged.
I think you're probably overestimating the provocation in other people's comments and underestimating the provocation in your own. This is something nearly everyone does.
Savoring suffering is uniquely hideous, and one of the grand hallmarks of almost every facet of the decline of the US. It's a clear, bright sign of the death of one's humanity, and the foundation of all evil.
Is that dramatic? No.
More specifically: Things can be inevitable and also horrible. It is not some kind of cognitive dissonance to care about people losing their livelihoods and also agree that it had to happen. We can structure society to help people, but instead we hate the imaginary stereotypes we've generalized every conceivable grouping of real people into, politics being the most obvious example, but we do it with everything, as you have.
The electrician doesn't "deserve" punishment for "advocating" away the jobs replaced by electricity. The engineer doesn't "deserve" punishment for "advocating" away the jobs replaced by engineering. A person isn't an asshole who deserves his family to suffer because he committed his life to learning to write application servers, or whatever.
If in the process of automating away people's livelihoods, you do not simultaneously advocate for the destruction of the capitalist system that ties the well-being of people and their families intrinsically to those jobs, then you do in fact deserve what's coming to you. History shows that retribution against class traitors is not limited to financial hardship, either.
The problem I see is less that of losing jobs, but the fact that the jobs get less enjoyable, less deep work, more mindlessness and less reflection, and possibly also the quality of the produced software decreasing.
Modern AI encroaches upon what software engineers consider to be interesting work, and also adds more of what they find less enjoyable — using natural language instead of formal language (aka code) for detailed specification — which creates a conflict that didn’t previously exist in software technology.
To be fair, all of corporate has grated against deep work and well written software way before the dawn of LLMs. Tech debt is one of the things that modern software engineering produces in spades.
I may be wrong, but I think every job creates wealth overall (or it would not exist), and that software engineering has been making some jobs more efficient and others not necessary, and then the wealth which formerly had to be employed where those jobs were inefficient, or had to exist at all, is then employed elsewhere.
If you are the person who lost their job, you get all the downside.
Overall, over the whole of the economy, the entire population, and a reasonable period of time, this increasing efficiency is a core driver of the annual overall increase in wealth we know as economic growth.
When an economy is growing, there is in general demand for workers, and so pay and conditions are encouraged; when an economy is shrinking, there is less demand than supply, and pay and conditions are discouraged.
> Overall, over the whole of the economy, the entire population, and a reasonable period of time, this increasing efficiency is a core driver of the annual overall increase in wealth we know as economic growth.
This is only true while wealth inequality is decreasing, which it is not.
Hmm on the other hand, there isn't much resistance against genAI in software development (unlike other creative industries) because ours is founded in collaboration and continuing others' work. It's where open source came from, and the use of libraries. Using stackoverflow was never frowned on. AI is just the same but more efficient. Nobody invents the wheel from scratch.
It will change the job yes but it also can mean the job can go in new directions because we can do more with less.
There isn't much open resistance because most of open source developers are bought and paid for. So they continue the path of destruction in the hopes that they will not be obsolete.
This is naive of course. Once you have identified yourself as corporate servants (like for example the CPython developers) the companies will disrespect you and fire you when convenient (as has happened at Google and Microsoft).
These things are waves. First they will fire a bunch of people, but no company can grow through constant downsizing. Then they'll start to imagine to do new things they can do with the new skills and invest in that.
It will cause a displacement of job types for sure. But I think it means change more than decline. When industrialisation happened, lots of factory workers were afraid of their jobs and also lost them. But these days nobody even wants to do a menial factory job, slaving away on the production line for minimum wage. In fact most people have a far better life now than the masses did before industrialisation. We also had the computer automation that made entire classes of jobs obsolete. Yet it's almost impossible to find skilled workers in Holland now.
And companies need customers with purchasing power. They can't replace everyone with AI because there will be nobody left with money to sell things to. In the end there will be another balance. The interim time, that's the difficult part. Though it is temporary, it can really hurt specific people.
But I don't see AI as a downward spiral that will never recover. In the end it will enable us to look more towards the future (and I am by no means an "AI bro", I think current capabilities of AI have been ridicuously overhyped)
I think we need to redraw society too to compensate. Things like universal basic income, better welfare etc. Here in Europe we already have that but under the neoliberal regimes of the last 20 years (and the fallout from the American banking crisis), things have been austerised too much.
In America this won't happen as it seems to go only the other way (very hardline capitalism, with a fundamentalist almost taliban-like religious streak) but well, it's what they voted for.
Agreed, although it's slightly beside the point. The goal of building tools and robots has always been to alleviate work. And this is fine. There's still plenty of stuff to do if machines work for us to give us basic housing and food.
Now what needs to be done is to give back the profits to everyone, inclusively, as a kind of "universal basic income", so that we all enjoy it together, and not just the billionaires
Sure, AI makes writing code easy, but code review remains a bottleneck. The individual coders are finding ways to use AI to improve their workflows, but as long as organizational culture remains stuck in the old ways of reviewing code, the overall throughput will not improve significantly. That's been my personal experience at Amazon. I get significant pushback when I submit a CR more than a few pages long. You need to have high degrees of trust within a team for this to work at scale, and that's very rarely the case in my group.
Stuck in the old ways of reviewing code? In other words, what you're suggesting should be the new way is to simply accept the LLM's code salad and push it to production as soon as the pipeline lights up green?
Well if the majority of developers are mostly using web-based technologies such as JS, TS, HTML and CSS, and all you're doing is modifying the site and shuffling around elements + a11y addition, etc that is something an AI can do in seconds.
Seems indeed to be like Warehouse work, which is why Web developers will be the first to be affected by AI.
Doesn't matter if you are "senior" or "staff" in Web development. AI is already senior staff level in that.
Is it really that LLM-based tools make developers so much more productive or rather that organizations have found out they can do with less -- and less privileged -- developers?
What I don't really see, especially not big tech-internally, are stories of teams that have become amazingly more productive. For now it feels we get some minor productivity improvements that probably do not off-set the invest and are barely enough to keep the narrative alive.
No. The actual competency of AI won't matter. Lots of corporate executives will prioritize short-term cost savings, with little concern for the degradation for essential systems. They will hop from company to company, personally reaping the benefits while undermining the systems that users and society rely on. That's part of the reason why the current hype is blown way out of proportion by these people. Because who has faced consequences for behaving this way?
For this narrative to make sense you would have to believe that Amazon management cares more about short-term profit than the long-term quality of their work.
Management has different layers with different goals.
A middle manager and a director certainly care a lot about accomplishing short term goals and are ok with tech debt to meet the goals.
The narrative reflects a broader cultural shift, from "we are all in this together" (pandemic) to "our organizations are bloated and people don't work hard enough" (already pre-LLM hype post-pandemic). The observation that less-skilled people can, with the help of LLMs, take the work of traditionally more-skilled people fits this narrative. In the end, it is about demoting some types of knowledge workers from the skilled class to the working class. Apparently, important people believe that this is a long-term sustainable narrative.
The skilled class is the working class and always has been. The delusion that software developers were ever outside the working class because they were paid well is just that - an arrogant delusion.
Well, for the time SEs are substantially better paid than working-class jobs, they are not the working class. For now, this applies at least to some regions, not only within the US. I agree in that I have at times felt some level of arrogance among some people taking up software engineering jobs, but IMO this just confirms the social class aspect of it. So there may have been some level of delusion to it, but at least temporarily it was, and partially still is, true.
Is the average amount of properties (1-2) owned by a software developer closer to those of:
A) a worker at Walmart
B) Mark Zuckerberg?
> Well, for the time SEs are substantially better paid than working-class jobs, they are not the working class.
That's what they have been telling SEs to prevent us from unionizing :) All so they can put you where you stand now, when they (wrongly) think they don't need you. SE jobs are working class jobs, and have always been.
I don't think that way of defining the working class is very sound.
Everyone expect ~50 people would be working class, probably including Taylor Swift and Donald Trump.
Also "working class" has a historical, social component, by which programmers are certainly not included.
Normalize it to a logarithmic scale, and the SWE is still quite obviously a wagie. But the gross and unconscionable concentration of power in a small handful of unelected oligarchs is not the relevant distinction here.
When ownership of things can keep you and your family fed, clothed, and sheltered in comfort, you're part of the owning class. If it can't, you're a worker. Maybe a skilled worker, maybe a highly paid worker, maybe a worker that owns a lot of expensive 'tools' or credentials, or licenses, or a company truck, or a trillion worthless diluted startup shares that have an EV of ~$50, but you're still a worker.
If you're the owner of a small owner-operated business, and the business will go kaput because you didn't show up to do work, you're also a worker. The line is drawn at the point where most of your contribution to it is your own (or other peoples') capital, not your own two-hands labour.
Now, if you're some middle manager, with no meaningful ownership stake - you are still a worker. You still need to go to work to get your daily bread. It just so happens that your job is imposing the will of the owners on workers underneath you.
If you have somewhere between $5M and $10M in a HCoL American city, you are probably no longer working class insofar as you could quit, get on ACA healthcare, and rent a decent house or buy / mortgage a decent house and live a pretty comfortable life indefinitely. But you're on the very low end of not-working-class and are living a modest life (if you quit and stop drawing a salary).
If you have under that threshold (in a big expensive US city), you are probably still working class.
A lot of software engineers can get to $5M-$10M range in like 10-30 years depending on pay and savings rate. But also a lot of software engineers operate their budgets almost paycheck-to-paycheck, and will never get there.
I don’t see how something like 160-320k income without working is a “modest life”. By any absolute standard you have it better than almost every human that has ever lived.
The caveat is stated above: in a large expensive US city where a lot of these high paying tech jobs are.
Over 50% of that $160k floor is eaten up by just housing and private or ACA insurance.
So your housing costs for like a 1k-2k sqft spot, all in (rent, or if owning then insurance, upkeep, etc) costs you something like $50k+, your health insurance for two people on ACA costs you like $40k yr assuming kids are out of the picture (more if not), and you have a decent chunk leftover to spend on living a decent life, but not like egregiously large amounts. You're not flying first class, probably not taking more than 2 big vacations a year, driving nice but not crazy expensive car, etc.
If you elect to leave the big expensive US city, then of course you can do it with substantially lower amounts (especially so long as you can swing ACA subsidies and are willing to risk your "not-working-class" existence on the whims of the govt continuing that program).
Obviously if you live in some place (read: everywhere except the US?) where the floor for medical costs of two people not working but still having income from capital isn't around $40k/yr, then the amount can go wayyyy down.
> A lot of software engineers can get to $5M-$10M range in like 10-30
$5-$10M for 30 years, but only if you save every penny in between? Wow, that's very impressive and totally life-changing! Reminds me of the story how millennials are not able to afford buying a house because of avocado toast!
> I don't think that way of defining the working class is very sound
Oh, really? Is that why both "white-collar worker" and "blue-collar worker" contain the word "worker"? Working class is everyone who has to work for their money. Can most programmers, on a whim, afford to never work again? An average programmer's salary is 2x the average coal miner's. A CEO is nowadays paid 339 the salary of their average worker https://www.epi.org/publication/ceo-pay-in-2023/.
Programmers are just one prolonged sickness or medical debt away from being destitute, the same as every other member of the working class. Lawyers, teachers, doctors, programmers, those are all working class, along with agriculture, mining, utilities and all people who have to get up and work for their daily bread and a roof over their head. Sure, there is a discrepancy in pay, but it's not as glaring as it is between a worker and the oligarchs like Trump and Elon Musk. The biggest con in society is that you are so far distanced from the obscene wealth of the rich, that it's not in your face to see how little you have and how much they do.
Both the guy in an old Dodge and the guy in the new Tesla are stuck in traffic, and you fail to realize realize there are people out there right now flying on a private jet for a cocktail? You think the guy living in an apartment is so much different than a guy living in a house in suburbia? How about the guy whose real-estate company bought the whole development and now is cranking up prices?
You make $200k yearly as a welder? Still working class.
You own a small business with 10 workers working for you? Still working class.
You manage a team of devs in a FAANG and are doing alright for yourself? Still working class.
Your parents donated a wing to Yale and own a hotel chain? Not working class.
Your savings account and stocks generate enough for you that you never have to work again? You are not working class.
This is because wealth wise, you are still closer to how much an unemployed person on benefits than to a CEO of a multinational company, and that's a fact.
Non-founder (i.e. external hire) CEOs and other corporate executives also have to work for their money, therefore they are working class. The definition may be technically correct (the best kind of correct) but it is useless.
("A CEO is nowadays paid 339 the salary of their average worker" you say? If we are nitpicking, that's obviously false; only a tiny, tiny fraction of CEOs are paid that well.)
Aside from that, I'd wager a rather large fraction of HN can easily afford never to work again. This place is crawling with millionaires and they're definitely not embarrassed about it, temporarily or otherwise. Good luck convincing them.
> A CEO is nowadays paid 339 the salary of their average worker" you say? If we are nitpicking, that's obviously false; only a tiny, tiny fraction of CEOs are paid that well.
"In 2022, it was estimated that the CEO-to-worker compensation ratio was 344.3 in the United States. This indicates that, on average, CEOs received more than 344 times the annual average salary of production and nonsupervisory workers in the key industry of their firm."
> Aside from that, I'd wager a rather large fraction of HN can easily afford never to work again. This place is crawling with millionaires and they're definitely not embarrassed about it, temporarily or otherwise. Good luck convincing them.
You can wager whatever you want, but statistically you'd be wrong.
Dude, your own link https://www.epi.org/publication/ceo-pay-in-2023/ says "We focus on the average compensation of CEOs at the 350 largest publicly owned U.S. firms (firms that sell stock on the open market) by revenue."
These 350 largest publicly owned US firms employ a major portion of the US population. Just the top 10 companies by revenue employ 6% of the US work-eligible population. Imagine the total 350 companies!
So, while 350 seems to be a small number, these 350 companies employ the largest chunk of the US market, and that's why they are the most representative to do the study with.
And that's my point! If you select a random worker in the US, there is a HUGE chance they are employed by Amazon, Walmert or one of the big-s. And there is a HUGE chance their salary is 339 times less than their CEO's.
"One medical debt away from being destitute" is socialists trying to make common cause between the upper and lower class. We have great insurance and big piles of savings, there's nothing in common with people who can barely afford their deductible and lose their job for missing too much work.
The boundary between working class and not working class is not at the 99th percentile where you would have it. The diminishing marginal utility of money means you get 90% of the security of being wealthy at 0.1% of the net worth of a billionaire.
> We have great insurance and big piles of savings, there's nothing in common with people who can barely afford their deductible and lose their job for missing too much work.
Between 30 and 70% of Americans can't make ends meet. What used to be called "middle class" is disappearing, making way to only 1%-ers and us, the rest. The fact that I drive a Tesla and some guy drives a Dodge, doesn't mean we are not both stuck in traffic while there is some shcmuck flying on their private jet to reach their yacht.
The objective level of reproduction of labor force is about $2 per day. Cheaper for warm climates, slightly more expensive for cold ones.
So by that logic there is no working class in the US whatsoever because you don't have to work to survive. At all. Maybe half a year in your entire lifetime.
You just choose to spend all your money on things you don't need to survive, that's the only reason you needed to work. But that doesn't make you a worker class any more than Elon Musk becomes a worker class by buying 10 companies like Twitter.
So, using your logic, "You are making more than 50 cents an hour? You're not working class. You don't have to work most of your life to survive yourself or to provide for your children. You're closer to Elon Musk than to workers forced to work for $2 a day to survive."
> The objective level of reproduction of labor force is about $2 per day. Cheaper for warm climates, slightly more expensive for cold ones.
I also like making random numbers up. Here are other numbers. 420. 1337. 1911.
> So by that logic there is no working class in the US whatsoever because you don't have to work to survive. At all. Maybe half a year in your entire lifetime.
I have no words to express how weak this argument is. The US has MOSTLY working class people because less and less people can survive on their salaries.
> So, using your logic, "You are making more than 50 cents an hour? You're not working class. You don't have to work most of your life to survive yourself or to provide for your children. You're closer to Elon Musk than to workers forced to work for $2 a day to survive."
I am not sure if this sentence is a troll, or comes from genuine misunderstanding. I don't know what to advice. I genuinely chuckled. Here are a three numbers, elementary math:
7.25
53
1 600 000
Which two of these numbers are closer to one another? 7.25 and 53, right (I hope)? Well, let's look what those numbers mean:
And for all of Mark Zuckerberg's wealth and property holdings, it wasn't enough and didn't stop him from trying to take sacred land from native Hawaiians on the island of Kauai.
They enjoy more benefits and compensation than if they were not in a union. Most importantly more protections.
Comparing those in unions who are more likely to be in the video game making or industry or government to faangs like Amazon where you work day and night for a 4 year vesting offer that pays out very little until the 4th year and where on average most worker work less than 2 years at Amazon.
A teacher out of union is still as much working class as is a teacher in a union. We software engineers are working class because we have to work for our money.
Do you own businesses, land, investments, and other forms of capital that generate wealth independently of direct labor? Enough wealth so you don't have to work for the foreseeable future? Is this the average software engineer for you (in or out of a union)? Because that's the definition of NOT being a part of the working class.
This feels like the wrong question to ask. Someone with a net worth of a "mere" $2 million is also closer to the coal miner, but at a 3% per year withdrawal rate, has a passive income equal to the coal miner's full time work week without lifting a finger.
I don't think it makes sense to group the "don't have to go to work anymore" people with the "can buy anything" people, but they don't have a lot in common with the working class, either.
To what extent are SWEs working class? I guess that depends on how many of them still have to go to work. A salary of $350k certainly puts you on the road to never having to work again.
The working class is globally the class of people who must sell their labour. That includes - to a rounding error - all software developers and that is completely uncontroversial.
That group is, in fact, traditionally considered largely working class (proletarian, more specifically the proletarian intelligentsia, though some in that group might be middle class, again, in the traditional class analysis, petit bourgeois sense.)
American popular usage defers from traditional economic role-based class analysis to be instead do income-based “class” terminology which instead of defining the middle class as the petit bourgeois who apply their own labor to their own capital in production (or otherwise have a relation to the economy which depends on both applying labor and ownership of the non-financial means of production) defines middle class as the segment around the median income, almost entirely within the traditional working class.
This is a product of a deliberate effort to redefine terminology to impair working class solidarity, not some kind of accident.
Whose tradition? Not the American working class. Despite the strong labor unions extent I think you'd be hard pressed to find marxists among them. We talk of middle and upper class precisely because we don't ascribe to the "traditional" framing of bourgeoisie v. proletariat, because running a business is actually work too, even if you own the capital. If you sit around and spend money all day we just call you an aristocrat.
It doesn't, because a lot of those people do not sell their labor. Doctors sell a practice, or can anyway. As time goes on fewer and fewer do - they're being pushed out of the capitalist class to the working class. Most now work a salary for a large employer, like you or me.
I guess it depends on whose tradition is under discussion. In the contemporary American usage, "working class" means the trades, or factory and service work. Few people would call a physician or lawyer "working class" even though they are paid for their time (and knowledge).
I wonder about your contemporaries. I imagine that most of them have a completely different definition to you, because you and doctors and lawyers are - to a rounding error - working class and everyone but you is aware of it.
As someone who used to be in the actual working class (plastic factory), it's not the same at all. Professional-Managerial Class (PMC) covers the autonomy and good treatment the working class can't have. Plus just talk to them.
Marxism is the most impactful ideology of the history of the 20th century and its vocabulary permeates all of political and economic analysis. Marxist analysis is not the same as communism.
Most professional economists IMHO would not agree that Marxism's vocabulary permeates their field.
Core economic concepts are things like elasticity of demand, market equilibrium, externality, market failure, network effect, opportunity cost and comparative advantage, and AFAIK Marx and his follower had essentially no role in explaining or introducing any of those.
Please list terms in this different terminology that are equivalents or analogs of the terms I listed, so that I can use Ctrl+F to find them in my PDF of volume one of the book.
Here's deepseek's answer. To Deepseek I add: Market failure is addressed even more in Lenin's "Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism" which addresses market and financial consolidation in the early 20th century (it's worse now). I would also add that Marx built off of and sometimes critiqued Adam Smith and Ricardo, it's not an entirely different branch of the intellectual tree.
Elasticity of Demand – Marx does not explicitly discuss elasticity, but he analyzes demand fluctuations in terms of "the social need" (gesellschaftliche Bedürfnis) and "effective demand" under capitalism (Capital, Vol. III). He notes how capitalist production responds to demand shifts, though not in the formalized neoclassical sense.
Market Equilibrium – Marx critiques the idea of equilibrium (a key concept in classical and neoclassical economics), instead emphasizing "anarchy of production" and "tendential laws" (e.g., the tendency of the rate of profit to fall). He sees markets as inherently unstable due to contradictions in capitalism (Capital, Vol. I & III).
Externality – While Marx doesn’t use this term, he discusses "social costs of production" (e.g., environmental degradation, worker exploitation) as inherent to capitalism’s drive for profit (Capital, Vol. I). His concept of "metabolic rift" (in Capital, Vol. III and his ecological writings) touches on unintended consequences akin to negative externalities.
Market Failure – Marx’s entire critique of capitalism can be seen as an analysis of systemic "failures," such as "crises of overproduction", "underconsumption", and "disproportionality" between sectors (Capital, Vol. II & III). He attributes these to contradictions in the capitalist mode of production rather than isolated market inefficiencies.
Network Effect – Marx does not discuss this directly, but his analysis of "general social labor" (the socially necessary labor time underpinning exchange) and the role of "commodity fetishism" (Capital, Vol. I) implies that value is socially determined in a way that could loosely parallel network effects (e.g., the more a commodity is exchanged, the more its value appears natural).
Opportunity Cost – Marx does not use this term (rooted in marginalist economics), but his labor theory of value centers on "socially necessary labor time", implying that the cost of producing one good is the labor diverted from other uses (Capital, Vol. I). His concept of "alternative employments of capital" in Capital, Vol. III also touches on trade-offs.
Comparative Advantage – Marx critiques David Ricardo’s theory of comparative advantage (e.g., in Theories of Surplus Value), arguing that international trade under capitalism exploits unequal exchange and reinforces imperialism. He focuses on "uneven development" and "super-exploitation" rather than mutual gains from trade.
Marx builds on Adam Smith and Ricardo among others and contributes an understanding of where money comes from and where profits come from among other things.
This is an interesting perspective, and I assume your definition is the technically correct one. Still, many SEs receive substantial compensation in RSUs, direct stocks, shares in startups, et cetera. So also from this perspective, there are many non-working class SEs. Another aspect is that culturally, the perception has been that SEs don't necessarily sell their work by the hour, but instead sell knowledge that scales tremendously, in exchange for a comfortable upper middle-to-lower upper class life.
To be technical, and to borrow a bit. Proletariat[1] are the working class, they work for the Bourgeoisie[2], the people who own the means of productions. That's why I asked why you used demote. Lower, Middle and Upper are strata or ranks within classes. Within the bourgeoisie, you can distinguish:
Petite bourgeoisie: small business owners, shopkeepers
Haute bourgeoisie: industrialists, financiers
Managerial class (in some frameworks): high-paid non owners who control labor
Within the proletariat, you can distinguish:
Lumpenproletariat[3]: unemployed, precarious
Skilled laborers vs unskilled laborers
Labor aristocracy: better-paid, sometimes ideologically closer to capital
The distinction here is "do you get your money from owning assets or do you get your money from working" because where you get your money is where you get your incentives and the incentives of owning are opposite the incentives of working in many important regards.
The economy is inhabited by people who work for a living but it is controlled by people who own things for a living. That's not a conspiracy theory, it's the definition of capitalism. If you do not own things for a living and do not know people who do, spend some time pondering "the control plane." It should seem like an alien world at first, but it's an alien world with a wildly outsize impact on your life and it behooves you to understand it in broad strokes even if you aren't trying to climb into it.
I wouldn’t say the economy is “controlled” by those people. The economy is just an emergent phenomenon. It’s a natural result of unrestricted freedom of exchange.
The means of production for a software engineer is a laptop. Many SEs own them. There are no raw materials or factories needed to produce software, at least not in the sense of traditional production.
You could say the same thing of hands. What really distinguishes capital from labor is not what counts as a tool, but market power. A large number of non-unionized workers are inherently at a disadvantage against a small number of employers with exorbitantly costly infra.
That’s not true. The actual means of production are the data centers. It’s true they didn’t use to be hugely expensive either, but now with AI being the backbone of everything we now have really expensive data centers again.
if we're just going to loop this properly, the modern means of production is the stock market's inflated capital. Most of AI floats on cash that does not exist for any purpose except market speculation.
The means of producing an AI is a huge data centre for training. Having a lot of money but no chips of any kind wouldn't get you an AI. We had money 10 years ago, but they did not make AIs out of them.
Something I've always puzzled over is whether the means of production are our laptops, or our knowledge and expertise. I still work for a wage, but expect to be paid above subsistence. I don't own the laptop that I use at work, but also don't own the carpeting on the floor. Both are commodities.
Is the concept of "intellectual capital" a figment of my imagination, or a flaw of the traditional class identifiers? Or both?
The means of production are the software you produce, the servers they run on, and the patents, proprietary data, algorithms, and other intellectual property that are the byproduct of your labor.
For factory workers, the means of production is the factory.
What’s “the factory” for software? Our equivalent of the factory is the organization we work in, and our connection to the people who turn our software into money.
You can write software at home by yourself, just like you can do machining on your own. But there are a lot of steps between making software, or machining, and turning that output into money. By working for a company, you can have other people handle those steps. The tradeoff is that this structure is something owned by someone else.
This might be the definition in Marxist theory but in normal colloquial language “working class” absolutely does not mean the same thing as “anyone who doesn’t own the means of production”. But I think you know what OP meant and are just derailing the conversation.
Engineering is always boom/bust. Ask a retired aerospace engineer who got purged in the 90s.
Technology always automates jobs away. I had a dedicated database systems team 25 years ago that was larger than an infrastructure team managing 1000x more stuff today. Dev teams are bloated in most places, today.
Yeah, I don't see any real difference between "Shut up and take it or we'll outsource your job overseas," which they've been saying since the 90s, and "Shut up and take it or we'll replace you with AI." Same threat, same motives.
Caring is part of it. Having good measures is another. Older measures that worked might need updating to reflect the new, higher spaghetti risk. I expect Amazon to figure it out but I don't see why they necessarily already would have.
A lot of it is perception. Writing software was long considered somewhat difficult and that it required smart people to do so.
AI changes this perception and coding starts to be perceived as a low level task that anyone can do easily with augmentation from AI tools.
I certainly agree that writing software is turning more into a factory job and is less intellectually rewarding now.
Yeah that’s what really worries me, many people have been clinging to this ability as something that’s really special and AI is really going to disillusion them.
When I started working in the field (1996), I was told that I would receive detailed specs from an analyst that I would then "translate" into code. At that time this idea was already out of fashion, things worked this way for the core business team (COBOL on the AS/400) but in my group (internal tools, Delphi mostly) I would get only the most vague requirements.
Eventually everyone was expected to understand a good deal of the code they were working on. The analyst and the coder became the same person.
I'm deeply skeptical that the kind of people that enjoy software development are the same kind of people that enjoy steering and proofing LLM generated code. Unlike the analyst and the coder, this strike me as a very different skill set.
> I'm deeply skeptical that the kind of people that enjoy software development are the same kind of people that enjoy steering and proofing LLM generated code. Unlike the analyst and the coder, this strike me as a very different skill set.
indeed. people generally hate foreign/alien code, or rather - love their style too much. it is not hard to recognize this pattern - ive seen it with colleagues, with my students, with some topnotch 10x-coders back in the day. so proofing is a skill one perhaps develops by teaching others do things right, but is not something most people entertain about.
on the other hand, people who lack time and patience to implement complex stuff may benefit from this process. particularly if they are good code-readers, and some seasoned devs become such people. i can see little chance they wont be using llms to spit code out.
but the two groups largely don't overlap and are different as astronomers and astronauts.
For me it dependa on scale. Asking AI for something small and specific is a joy. Asking it to make a big change is a nightmare I so far only try every time a new model comes out.
Not everyone gets to code the next ground breaking algorithm at some R&D department.
Most programming tasks are rather repetitive, and in many countries there is hardly anything to look up to software developers, it is another blue collar job.
And in many cultures if you don't go into management after about five years, usually it is seen as a failure to grow up on their career.
Of course it is true. The thing was 90% of Amazon engineers made far more money at their job while essentially doing typical enterprise software work. This money led them believe it is some creative work. And now those task management and time monitoring tools are catching up to Amazon IT workers so they are realizing it is similar to another low end IT job/ factory work.
The pay and benefits at Amazon always seemed to offset the shit work/life balance and on-call rotation. What a gauntlet that was. The only engineers that got recognition were those that fixed high profile bugs, preferably after hours. Shipping a feature was always just "business as usual"
It means that the company is more likely to fire that person on the logic that they "failed" to be promoted to management, that they're "treading water" as a developer.
Have you wondered why japan, which is a powerhouse of electronics and manufacturing does not have any large software companies ?
Software is different from manufacturing.
The mindset, mentality, and culture required to do new software for an ambiguous problem is different from the mentality to produce boilerplate code or maintain an existing codebase. The later is pure execution and the former is more like R&D.
> if you don't go into management after about five years, usually it is seen as a failure to grow up on their career
I don't see how that's possible. Wouldn't such a norm result in something like a 7:1 ration of managers to engineers (i.e., assuming a 40ish year career, the first 5 years are spent as an engineer, and the remaining 35 as a manager)? For team managers, I've generally seen around a 1:10 ratio of engineers to managers. So a 7:1 ratio of managers to engineers just doesn't seem plausible, even including non-people leaders in management.
It's been like this for awhile now. Aside from companies like Google and Facebook, most companies are using some CRUD web app where the development consists of gluing code together for multiple third-party services and libraries.
It's these sorts of jobs that will be replaced by AI and a vibe coder, which will cost much less because you don't need as much experience or expertise.
Even before AI I've always had the perception that writing software felt more intellectually on the level of plumbing. AI just feels like a having one of those fancy new tools that tradespersons may use.
Organizations have long had a preference for 'deskilling' to something reliable through bureaucratic procedures, regardless of the side effects or even if it results in it costs more due to needing three people where one talented could do it before. Because it is more dependable, even if it is dependably mediocre. Even though this technique may lead to their long-term doom and irrelevance.
I feel like managers are having a heyday over tools like cursor having a user-by-user breakdown on AI code generation stats. I feel this is only the beginning and a whole new world of in-editor workplace monitoring will pop up.
The number of organizations that continue to use tedious languages like Java 8 and Golang...
Like, they hadn't realized they were turning humans into compilers for abstract concepts, yet now they are telling humans to get tf out of the way of AI
From the 19th century onwards, businesses have wanted to replace high-skilled craftsmen with low-skilled workers who would simply follow a repeatable process. A famous example is Ford. Ford didn't want an army of craftsmen, who each knew how to build a car. He wanted workers to stay at one station and perform the same single action all day. The knowledge of how to build a car would be in the system itself, the individual workers didn't have to know anything. This way, the workers have limited leverage because they are all replaceable, and the output is all standardized.
You can see this same approach everywhere. McDonalds for instance, or Amazon warehouses, or call centers.
I wonder about codebase maintainability over time.
I hypothesize that it takes some period of time for vibe-coding to slowly "bit rot" a complex codebase with abstractions and subtle bugs, slowly making it less robust and more difficult to maintain, and more difficult to add new features/functionality.
So while companies may be seeing what appears to be increases in output _now_, they may be missing the increased drag on features and bugfixes _later_.
My new favourite genre of schadenfreude are solo-preneur SaaS vibe-coders.
They burn a pile of money. Maybe it’s their life savings, their parents’ money or their friends or some unlucky investors. But they go in thinking they’re going to join the privileged labourers without putting any of the time to develop the skills and without paying for that labour. GenAI the whole thing. And they post about it on socials like they’re special or something.
Then boom. A month later. “Can everyone stop hacking me already, I can’t make this stop. Why is this happening?”
Mostly I feel sorry for the people who get duped into paying for this crap and have their data stolen.
There’s like almost zero liability for messing around like this.
Up until now large software systems required thousands of hours of work and efforts of bright engineers. We take established code as something to be preserved because it embeds so my knowledge and took so long to develop. If it rots then it takes too long to repair or never gets repaired.
Imagine a future where the prompts become the precious artifact. That we regularly `rm -rf *` the entire code base and regenerate it with the original prompts perhaps when a better model becomes available. We stop fretting about code structure or hygiene because it won't be maintained by developers. Code is written for readability and audibility. So instead of finding the right abstractions that allow the problem to be elegantly implemented the focus is on allowing people to read the code to audit that it does what it says it does. No DSLs just plain readable code.
I can imagine that, but... given your prompt(s?) will need to contain all your business rules, someone will have to write prompt(s?) in a way that make it possible for the AI to produce something that works with all the requirements.
Because if you let every stakeholder add their requirements to the prompts, without checking that it doesn't contradict others, you'll end up with a disaster.
So you need someone able to gather all the requirements and translate it in a way that the machine (the AI) can interpret to produce the expected result (a ephemeral codebase).
Which means you now have to carefully maintain your prompts to be certain about the outcome.
But if you still need someone to fix the codebase later in the process, you need people with two sets of skills (prompts and coding) when, with the old model, you only needed coding skills.
My guess is that the discussion trended around performance and not correctness since compilers are pretty well understood. Why a LLM output what they do are not understood by anyone to the same degree.
Yes, big-tech-internally I also see a lot of desire to get us to come up with some great AI achievements, but they are so far not achieving far far more than already existing automations and bots and code generators can do for us
Right. What the article is unsurprisingly glossing over (per usual) is that just because AI is perceived (by higher-ups that don’t actually do the work) to speed up coding work doesn't mean it actually does.
and that probably to some extent all involved (depending on how delusional they are) know that it's simply an excuse to do layoffs (replaced by offshoring) by artificially so-called raising the bar to what is unrealistic for most people
How is the impact of this assessed? How is system quality / performance changed? Is there an increase in high severity defects as more code gets pushed out more quickly?
Companies will always try to capture the productivity gains from a new tool or technique, and then quickly establish it as the new standard for everyone. This is frustrating and feels Sisyphean: it seems like you simply cannot get ahead.
The game is to learn new tools quickly and learn to use them better than most of your peers, then stay quietly a bit ahead. But know you have to keep doing this forever. Or to work for yourself or in an environment where you get the gains, not the employer. But "work for yourself" probably means direct competition with others who are just as expert as you with AI, so that's no panacea.
Another game is to distribute the gains from increased productivity more equally. E.g. in Europe as late as early 2000s working hours were reduced in response to technological development. But since then the response even from workers seems to be to demand increasingly shittier bullshit jobs to keep people busy.
Bro lol. You were this close - you're channeling Marx (literally saying the same stuff he was) and instead of coming to the obvious conclusion (unions) you're like nah I'm just gonna alienate myself further. It's just amazing how thoroughly people have been brainwashed. I'm 100% sure nothing will ever improve.
Interesting to see A imagine what B meant, then assert that A believes some metric will always go up because they always saw it go up? It's not clear what they meant, making this response as nonsensical as the response. An AI level exchange.
I know reading skills are in short supply in a group of people that only read code but I thought it was pretty obvious what I was alluding to. But even if it weren't (admittedly you have to have actually read Marx for it to jump out at you) by the time you responded there was another comment that very clearly spells it out, complete with citations.
> you're channeling Marx (literally saying the same stuff he was)
Marx is the originator of precisely none of those thoughts, you couldn't find an economist that disagrees with them. "Unions" is also not the obvious solution for the problems of an individual. Unless you have a specific, existing union with a contact phone number that you're referring to, one that has a track record of making sure that individuals are not affected negatively by technological progress over the span of their entire careers, you're just lazily talking shit.
If it's the solution, so much easier than keeping ahead of the technology treadmill, and it's so obvious to you, it's strange that you haven't set up the One Big Union yet and fixed all the problems.
> "Unions" is also not the obvious solution for the problems of an individual.
Right, but the observation here is that many, maybe most, individuals in a particular field are having this same problem of labor autonomy and exploitation. So... unions are pretty good for that.
SWE is somewhat unique in that, despite us being the lowest level assembly-line type worker in our field, we get paid somewhat well. Yes, we're code monkeys, but well-paid code monkeys. With a hint of delusions of grandeur.
I'm talking about labor theory of value vis-a-vis this comment
> Companies will always try to capture the productivity gains from a new tool or technique
Ie "capitalists" are not rewarded for deploying capital and mitigating risk but for extracting as much from the labor as possible.
And yes Marx is absolutely the "originator" of these ideas and yes absolutely you ask any orthodox economist (and many random armchair economists on here) they will deny it till they're blue in the face. In fact you're doing it now :)
Edit: it's the same thing that plagues the rest of American civil society: "voting against your [communal] interests because someone convinced you that your exceptional". Ie who needs unions when I'm a 10x innovator/developer. Well I guess enjoy your LLM overlords then Mr 10x <shrug>.
Gains from productivity will accrue to those with the most bargaining power. Whether that’s the employee or the employer is going to depend on the exact circumstances (realistically it will be some mix). Hence why factory workers today get paid more than in the 1800s (and factory owners as well!)
> Gains from productivity will accrue to those with the most bargaining power.
That's true. And employers have been consistently the one with more bargaining power, and that's why our wages haven't kept up with the productivity gains. This is also known as productivity-pay-gap.
We, the working class, are supposed to be paid roughly 50% more than we are paid now, if the gains from productivity were properly distributed. But they are not, concentrated to a large extent in the owning class, which is what's unfair and why we, the workers, should unite to get what's rightfully ours.
right; the "ancap" mentality in computing could only last for so long. Eventually, and especially with the refusal of incorporating any ethics or humanity into it, it's now an established industry affecting all walks of life just like every other that has preceded it, and the belief that its technological superiority/uniqueness was a good reason to essentially exempt it from regulation (TV broadcasts for children are required to have "bumper" sections that would clearly define the show vs the advertisement; Why was computing/the internet treated differently? A high-horse mentality that stemmed from "complexity olympics"? no child could ever use or comprehend a sophisticated machine like this!!) has really fucked us. The labor is decentralized at such a scale that I also have a hard time believing anything could be rectified; open source software is mostly just corporate welfare, putting anything at all on the internet has become corporate welfare, and there is no real purpose or goal for building all of this. The computer was supposed to allow us to do less work, right?
> But know you have to keep doing this forever. Or to work for yourself or in an environment where you get the gains, not the employer
Or, you know, being a member of society, you can find other members of society who feel like you, and organize together to place demands on employers that...you know...stops them from exploiting you.
But, you know, you can always hustle against your fellow SEs, and try to appease your masters. Where others work the bare minimum of 8 hours, why not work 12, and also on the weekend? It's also fine.
Generating shareholder value is very important for the well-being of society! /s
By all means “organize together to place demands on your employers”. I didn’t say don’t do that. But there are 24 hours in a day — maybe strive to be good at your job AND organize instead of doing just one or the other?
I'd argue we'll be better at our jobs if we took pride in our craft and were treated with dignity and respect rather than like replaceable cogs in a machine that have to compete with one another to stay "competitive".
Should I be worried about the shareholders? While we are it, how about also removing the few environmental regulations and worker protection laws we still have, just so the poor poor shareholders can buy another yacht? /s
"Stonks go up" is not a proxy for success. Success is when pharma executives don't tremble like the villains they are from hearing the name of Mario's little brother. Success is when normal people get from the social contract at least as much as they put in. If we, the people, get less than from the social contract that we put in, as we nowadays observe, I can guarantee you we will break down the social contract, and the ones having most to lose from that are your precious stakeholders.
The first is that the entire global codebase starts to become an unstable shitpile, and eventually critical infrastructure starts collapsing in a kind of self-inflicted Y2k event. Experienced developers will be rehired at astronomical rates to put everything back together, and then everyone will proceed more cautiously. (Perhaps.)
The second is that AI is just about good enough and things muddle along in a not-great-not-terrible way. Dev status and salaries drop slowly, profits increase, reliability and quality are both down, but not enough to cause serious problems.
The third is that the shitpile singularity is avoided because AI gets much better at coding much more quickly, and rapidly becomes smarter than human devs. It gets good enough to create smart specs with a better-than-human understanding of edge cases, strategy, etc, and also good enough to implement clean code from those specs.
If this happens development as we know it would end, because the concept of a codebase would become obsolete. The entire Internet would become dynamic and adaptive, with code being generated in real time as requirements and condition evolve.
I'm sure this will happen eventually, but current LLMs are hilariously short of it.
So for now there's a gap between what CEOs believe is happening - option 3. And what is really happening - option 1.
I think a shitpile singularity is quite likely within a couple of years. But if there's any sane management left it may just about be possible to steer into option 2.
I agree with you three scenarios. But I would assign different probabilities. I think the second option is the most likely. Things will get shittier and cheaper. Third option might not ever come to pass.
Just like clothing and textile work. They are getting cheaper and cheaper, true, but even with centuries of automation, they are still getting shittier in the process.
There are many more scenarios, though. One of them is that AI slop is impressive looking to outsiders, but can't produce anything great on itself, and, after the first wave of increased use based on faith, it just gets tossed in the pile of tools somewhere above UML and Web Services. Something that many people use because "it's the standard" but generally despise because it's crap.
The whole thing with gen AI is so depressing to me.
For the first time now I can feel the joy of what I do slipping away from me. I don't even mind my employer capturing more productivity, but I do mind if all the things I love about the job are done by robots instead.
Maybe I'm in the minority but I love writing code! I love writing tests! If I wanted to ask for this stuff to be done for me, I would be a manager!
Now, I'll need to use gen AI to replace the fun part of the job, or I'll be put out to pasture.
It's not a future I look forward to, even if I'm able to keep up and continue working in the industry.
The fun part for me was coming up with ideas for new things, then architecting those things, creating the high level systems to implement them, and iterating on them to make them better. Figuring out why some test harness wasn't mocking some random thing correctly, remembering which api call had which syntax, or just writing a bajillion almost-boilerplate endpoints was always drudgery and I'm glad to be rid of it.
I'm a software engineer at Amazon and I'm directly and indirectly involved a lot in programs related to GenAI tooling.
I can safely say this article is bullshit. While there are a lot of programs ongoing to allow builders to adopt GenAI tooling, and while there is definitely a lot of communication ongoing around those programs, nobody is, at all, forced to use any of the AI tools. None are installed by default or enabled by default anywhere, and everyone is free to completely ignore them.
That said, is there an increase in expectations? Yes. But that's just normal Amazon in an employer's market, and has nothing to do with LLMs and GenAI.
The comparison to Microsoft where we can witness in public the .Net maintainers fighting with the shit code generated by Copilot on their repos is ridiculous. Amazon is probably one of the companies pushing the least and being the most prudent about GenAI adoption.
If you truly believe what you’re saying, then you’re uninformed as to what is going on outside your own team. And just because it’s not happening in your team does not mean it isn’t happening.
Q is installed by default in all browsers on Amazon laptops now, and literally cannot be uninstalled. If you don’t have it installed in your IDE, you get a non-dismissible popup nagging you to install it until you do. Many teams are being told they must use AI every single day (some VPs have sent out org-wide emails saying that AI must be used), and engineers have to tell their managers how they are making use of it day-to-day. In my org, OP1 docs must include at least one section about how the team will increase use of AI. Hackathons aren’t allowed to happen anymore unless they are AI-themed. I could keep going. Amazon is absolutely forcing AI usage, and the article undersells how egregious it is.
Your comment stated “nobody is, at all, forced to use any of the AI tools”, which is entirely false - I’m looking at an email in my inbox from my VP right now saying everyone must use AI every day.
You said “None are installed by default or enabled by default anywhere” - this is also false. I’m looking at an installed by default (and uninstallable) AI browser addon on my work laptop right now.
It’s not hearsay, you’re either commenting in bad faith or you’re just clueless about what’s going on at your own company.
> There is absolutely no company-wide mandate to use GenAI.
There is an STeam goal for adoption and usage. There is a QS dashboard for SDMs to see statistics on their org's adoption and abandonment rates. There is BT guidance being propagated out to VPs and directors on how to roll out programs. As placardloop said, there was a mandatory OP1 FAQ question on GenAI usage.
Amazon is going down. 20 years ago they had excellent customer service, now they are violating EU laws and cheat the gmp developers out of a CPU replacement:
> 20 years ago they had excellent customer service, now
... you will use them anyway because, customer service or no, there’s a good chance you don’t have a choice that doesn’t cost half again as much. (Regional availability may vary.)
In terms of usage, maybe, in terms of service, probably not. Often the biggest dogs are not the best. They have inertia and marketing, and that's why they're the big dogs. Not because they're providing the best, or the cheapest, good or service.
Depends on how local you go, there are local alternatives that are bigger in their domain for almost every domain in most parts of Europe. Amazon is much much smaller outside of USA and there are plenty of alternatives with better and cheaper service.
Also not true in Switzerland. Amazon was ranked #4 overall, #2 in tech, based on sales in 2024, with a massive distance to the leaders. It's not that popular around here, and with current U.S. boycotts I expect it to drop further this year.
They aren’t cheaper anymore. The “real” branded stuff is usually more expensive on amazon than straight from the manufacturers website. The “cheap” fake aliexpress stuff is just that charged at a premium. You can find the same exact product images even on the same products on ebay from probably the same merchants listing on both marketplaces.
It has changed dramatically over the past 5 or so years into this.
At least for stuff like electronics, random plastic household items etc EU Amazon isn't particularly cheap. Branded stuff costs about the same in many smaller stores, and random Chinese no-name brands can be bought from Aliexpress cheaper.
>This shift from writing to reading code can make engineers feel as if they are bystanders in their own jobs. The Amazon engineers said that managers have encouraged them to use A.I. to help write one-page memos proposing a solution to a software problem and that the artificial intelligence can now generate a rough draft from scattered thoughts.
This feels like we are forcing people who rather look at code to start talking in plain language, which not every dev likes or is proficient in.
Devs won’t be replaced by AI. Devs will be replaced by people that can (and want to) speak to LLMs.
> Companies seem to be persuaded that, like assembly lines of old, A.I. can increase productivity. A recent paper by researchers at Microsoft and three universities found that programmers’ use of an A.I. coding assistant called Copilot, which proposes snippets of code that they can accept or reject, increased a key measure of output more than 25 percent.
> The engineers said that the company had raised output goals and had become less forgiving about deadlines.
There are two issues this article brings to mind:
1. Feels like we are back when lines of code was a measure of productivity.
2. We’ve heard this tune before, and the problem we have now is that you don’t understand what you didn’t write. Software development is in large part about understanding the system from the highest level to its smallest details, and this takes away a key part of how our world works, in favor of a “cattle not pets” view of code.
Now, if you don’t expect your programmers to have an understanding of the system they built, and you treat code as disposable, then you’ll center around a world where folks aren’t trained to learn a system, and I don’t see that as a world that is compatible with increased reliance on A.I.
Feels like this could be part of a broader shift towards dis-empowering knowledge workers.
The cog in machine effect has always been there in the corporate world, but somehow it feels like the technique has been refined in the last couple of years.
I'm seeing the speed up and it's forcing out people with disabilities who are able to do the work at the previous slower speeds. I wonder if there are any solutions to this or if people like me are just expected to be walmart greeters.
Why would any company want to pay a software engineer to do repetitive / factory like work? It would be better to automate that and not have any engineers from the company's perspective.
Will AI also start developing creative tools such as new VST plugins or photoshop filters? What about low-level low-latency tools needed for some industries or for aerospace. I guess at some point we won't need so many humans to run our Kubernetes clusters or maintain our WordPress sites but won't there always be something to do that pushes the boundaries of human needs and desires that can't be done by AI?
> won't there always be something to do that pushes the boundaries of human needs and desires that can't be done by AI?
No why would there be? Unless you are spiritual, there isn't any reason any of the physical processes that make up human thought can't be done artificially, probably much more efficiently. Society needs to confront the myth that automation is going to always open up more jobs that need human labor. It's comforting for people who hate the idea of UBI or other safety nets that people can keep "retraining". Eventually there's going to be nothing to retrain to (at least of nothing of economic value)
I keep meaning to experiment with vibe-coded VSTs. The shell and UI parts should be easy to automate, because they're basically boilerplate. But I doubt AI knows enough about DSP to design an incredible new reverb algorithm, or is an expert on bandwidth-limited oscillator design.
Or maybe it is? When I have some time, I'll find out.
I'm sure it could replicate any existing algorithm or riff on combinations, but a good plugin is made carefully by hand by an artisan who knows what they are looking to achieve, who knows what to listen for. I'm skeptical that a pure AI algorithm would be anything but plagiarism on existing designs.
I am optimistic longer term, pessimistic near term
What needs to happen is the education of "junior programmers" needs to be revamped to embrace generative AI. In the same way we embraced google or stackoverflow. We're at a weird transition state where the juniors are being taught to code with an abacus, while the industry has moved on to different tools. Generative AI feels taboo in education circles instead of embraced.
Now there will eventually be a generation of coders just "born" into AI, etc, and they will do great in this new ecosystem. Eventually education will catch up. But the cohort currently coming up as juniors will feel the most pain.
You raise a good point. Ba k in the early 90s when i started with programming, my source of knowledge were magazines with code, a "programming with C/C++" book, and a lot of time.
Then the internet came, and it felt like 'cheating'.
Then forums came and it felt like cheating, Then SO, and so on and so forth.
Now AI is eating the [software] world, and to a lot of people, it feels like cheating. I am just amazed of what i can build.
In 10-15 years software will become a commodity, along with books/stories and maybe even music/art. I don't know how it looks like. But darn im excited to be here to experience it.
I was there for those changes too (I taught myself programming a couple years before we got internet), and I disagree that the internet and SO felt like cheating. No matter what resources you had, you could never get very far if you didn’t understand what your code was doing.
That’s no longer true. And that democratizes these skills, which I agree could be a great thing.
But do you agree that it’s important for kids to learn to think critically and systematically? Because it’s super hard to stay motivated to learn those things when LLMs do that for you (and you’re too young to tell when they’re doing a bad job of it).
As a potential solution, do you think formal/semi-formal software development education (undergrad programs, colleges/polytechnics, dev bootcamps, etc) should lean super heavily into AI? To the extent that it's not just "use ChatGPT to help you complete this assignment" but rather "complete this assignment using *only* ChatGPT: you're not allowed to write any of the code by yourself".
CS degree programs have never been about learning to code. They are learning about computers, data structures, machine structures, algorithms. The code was always done on your own time at least that's how my school did it. I never had a class in "Java" or "Python" or "C" or any other languge, that was always incidental to the particular course. I could have used ChatGPT (had it existed) or hired a friend to write the code but that wouldn't help me on the exams (written on paper, at that time). Dev bootcamps? Yeah they should probably be leaning hard into AI as that's just what junior devs are going to be asked to do from here on out.
I agree. I always wondered at what point I will feel old and that I can't keep up with technology. Afterall I grew up with Internet. But this might be it.
I'm optimistic long long long term, but long term our industry is screwed.
The current LLM based "AI" isn't good enough and we're already seeing way to many unable to code without the assistance of an AI agent. Sure, many of these people couldn't code at all before, or only very poorly, but at least their output was limited. We're producing way to much code (and to much content in general). The heavy leaning into AI at this point is going to set us back 10 - 15 years, for a short term profit. It's the dotcom bubble all over again in that respect. Way to many unskilled people are producing garbage code, and there aren't enough skilled people around to fix it, because the output volume is to high.
> Google recently told employees it would soon hold a companywide hackathon in which one category would be creating A.I. tools that could “enhance their overall daily productivity,” according to an internal announcement. Winning teams will receive $10,000.
If it's really that great, why the competition? Shouldn't this happen pretty organically? Companies are pushing "AI" hard, why to hard, it's not yet there where it can realistically deliver what is expected on the business side. I think even Google developers know this, but hey, $10,000 is $10,000.
I'm very concerned that we eroding trust, safety and quality long term, for a short term profit. It's not that LLMs can't be helpful, save money or improve quality, but you have to be a fairly skilled developer to get those advantages safely.
With all the changes coming up, I am happy that I am retiring soon. Since I started in the 90s, SW dev has become more and more tightly controlled and feels more like an assembly line. When I started, you could work for weeks and months without much interruption. You had plenty of time for experimentation and creativity. Now everything is ticked based and you constantly have to report status and justify what you are doing. I am sure there will always be devs who are doing interesting work but I feel these opportunities will be less and less.
In a way it's only fair. Automation has made a lot of jobs obsolete or miserable. Software devs are a big contributor to automation so we shouldn't be surprised that we are finally managing to automate our own jobs away,
I also started in the 1990’s and agree the evolution has been as you describe it. It does highly depend on where you work, but the tightly managed JIRA-driven development seems awfully popular.
But I fall short of declaring the 1990s or 2000s or 2010s were the glory days and now things suck. I think part of it is nostalgia bias. I can think of a job I spent 4 years and list all the good parts of the experience. But I suspect I’m forgetting over a lot of mediocre or negative stuff.
At any rate I still like the work today. There are still generally hard challenges that you can overcome, people that depend on you, new technologies to learn about. Generically good stuff.
Ex-cobol guy here, the work was a blast! I was working on the Lawson erp for a non-profit, mostly customizing the software for their specific use case. I loved it because the tools were crazy, the language limited, and the system itself was high value to the org. Debugging took forever but the fixes were often really small changes. I often had to go into the database (oracle) and clean up the data by hand. Such fun!
I crave novelty and have a love for bad technology. I was an early nodejs adopter and loved es4 but newer versions of the language is too easy to use lol!
Thanks for pointing out JIRA. I think the problem comes from needing to keep the codebase running next month while trying to up scalars / numbers, not thinking years ahead or how to improve both inside culture and outside image of a company which are more complex structures with lots of little metrics and interdependent components than a win/loss output or an issue tracker that ignores the fact issues solved != issues prevented.
I guess these strategies boil down to having some MBA on top or an engineer that has no board of MBAs to bow down to. I strive to stay with private owned companies for this reason but ofc these are less loud on the internet, so you can easily miss them while jobhunting.
> Since I started in the 90s, SW dev has become more and more tightly controlled and feels more like an assembly line. When I started, you could work for weeks and months without much interruption. You had plenty of time for experimentation and creativity. Now everything is ticked based and you constantly have to report status and justify what you are doing
Yeah the consistent "reporting" of "status" on "stand-ups" where you say some filler to get someone incapable of understanding what it is that you're doing off your back for 24 more hours has consistently been one of the most useless and unpleasant parts of the job.
> you say some filler to get someone incapable of understanding what it is that you're doing off your back for 24 more hours has consistently been one of the most useless and unpleasant parts of the job
This sucks for the 50% or so who are like you, but there's another 50% who won't really get much done otherwise, either because they don't know what to do and aren't self-motivated or capable enough to figure it out (common) or because they're actively cheating you and barely working (less common)
> there's another 50% who won't really get much done otherwise, either because they don't know what to do and aren't self-motivated or capable enough to figure it out (common) or because they're actively cheating you and barely working (less common)
Idk I barely ever work with people who are like this, and if people become like this, it's usually obvious to everyone that it's happened and they get a talking to in the office then get shown the door
I assume you are in a country with fire-at-will policies. In Germany you have a job security, you can't just fire people without a reason. The difficulty is actually proving their incompetence or unwillingness to work. Thus in my experience (working a self-employed contractor in Germany) this group is far larger than 50%. Also one of my reasons why no good software comes out of germany (and this includes SAP, as long as you show me a single end-user that is happy with working with SAP software).
You have to prove it is the employees fault by intentionally not completing the task. Incompetence or incapability is not the employees fault, because well, you hired them and judged their ability - probably due to their education (it is a little more complex than that of course). As a concrete example, if you have a CS degree from the 80s and job as a COBOL programer and your employer decides to assign you to a new team doing react+js, the employee is still formally qualified. You couldn't fire him for incompetence, just because a 22 year old bootcamp graduate delivers 10x the results.
Yes I work in the US but my company has extreme time wasting practices designed to have engineers explain every thing they do and why it's worth it. I never found this helpful and find it causes more problems than it solves.
Those people should not have been hired, or should have been let go at 6 months when that became obvious. The real solution to this problem doesn't fit with most management methodology though.
The mediocre unmotivated person is dragging down the other, killing their motivation. You'd be better off without them even if you couldn't replace them.
>> Yeah the consistent "reporting" of "status" on "stand-ups" where you say some filler to get someone incapable of understanding what it is that you're doing off your back
In my experience it is human nature to think you are doing something that people around you can't or don't understand. The graveyard is full of irreplaceable people is an old saying. Sometimes the people you report to are morons, but if you consistently report to a moron its time for introspection. There's more that you can do than just suffer that. One place to start is to have some charity for the people you work with.
I am not special and make no claims of it; I am entirely replaceable and I'd make no claims to the contrary.
This has nothing to do with me or anyone like me, and everything to do with the "adult daycare" style of project managers.
I'm tired of re-iterating to non-technical project managers that status of tickets, why things are "blocked" or why the ask isn't feasible given constraints, over and over again. Time is a flat-circle.
If they understood the problem scope better, such questions would not arise. I know this from experience.
The majority of them are completely stateless and I'll repeat things daily for weeks on end, explaining the same things over and over again, while they make 0 effort to "unblock" issues.
I've had one good project manager in my career that advocated for his technical staff and understood the both the project and business deeply; he was invaluable and a pleasure to work with.
I've had many many others that served no tangible purpose whatsoever.
My frustration is ostensibly there is a purpose for these jobs beyond employing people with the role of "attending meetings"; I've rarely seen it.
Your username is apt, because working with you sounds like encountering the Crawling Chaos Himself, an eldritch being of pure condescension and disdain who unknowingly makes everybody else's lives miserable because they fundamentally do not respect anybody else except themself. Best of luck to you.
Project Manager here. I wish software were an industry where my job was not needed! Where the software team could just directly tell the boss: "It will be done in 3 months. Trust us, bro!" and they go off to do work without a single status report or a single meeting, and come back exactly 3 months later with a finished, tested and working product, ready for distribution! God that would be so great. I could just chill out, tell my boss and boss's boss to chill out, that the software team's got this, with 100% confidence that it was true. Or, I could go find some more useful career!
But it's never true. Team A depends on Team B, who is busy with work for Team C, and none of these teams are talking to each other because they're too busy writing code. Team D just lost two people and can't make the date that they promised, which sets Teams E and F back a few months unless we can figure it out. Or they're behind because they up and decided to do a big refactoring in the middle of the project without telling anyone. Or people just estimated poorly, like orders-of-magnitude poorly, and while the marketing team is ready, and the trade shows are scheduled, and the factory is ramping the device that the software should be flashed on, but the software won't be ready for another three months.
I empathize with engineers since I was once one, and can understand why some of them see us as adversarial. We tend to interact with them in places that Software Engineers hate, like in meetings and standups and via "update" E-mail blasts. Or we're sending them JIRA tickets which they also hate. I do my best to shield my teams from these things that I know they don't like, but sometimes they have to happen.
Knowing Amazons backends this is just their technical debt creeping up. Coders do repetetive work there because extending from their architecture means lots of code simply to keep the machine running. I would be surprised if they did not assign ASIN (which come from the need to keep ISBN compatibility everywhere) to not only Apps but other virtual goods lol.
From my integrations pov Ebay was ahead of their time with their data structure and pushed for deprecation fast to not keep the debt. Amazon ooth only looks more modern through acquiring new market fields instantly followed by throwing a lot of money to facade up the mess. Every contact like key account managers there were usually pushed for numbers, this has nothing to do with coders being coders.
Bosses always look for ways to instantly measure coders output which is just short-sighted way of thinking. My coworkers were measured by lines of code obviously. I wonder how you measure great engineering.
So no, this has not changed, you can still work uninterrupted on stuff for months or years if you want and skip these places, maybe even proved over your career that previous designs are stable for years to come.
Now everything is ticked based and you constantly have to report status and justify what you are doing.
The weird thing about this is, many developers wanted this. They wanted the theater of Agile, JIRA tickets, points etc.
I'm in the same boat yet still need to squeeze out another 10 years or so but personally working om multiple-side projects so I can get out of this boring, mundane shit.
I think what you are describing is the difference between being among the people to engineer the first car to being in the factory trying to make the 100 millionth car as cheaply as possible. Forty years ago people mostly learned to program because they were interested in it. People starting software / tech companies were taking a chance on something most didn't understand. That self selected for a type. Now its the most common major in school. I am sure its possible to recreate what you felt in the '90s but probably in a different field or a subset of this one.
> One Amazon engineer said his team was roughly half the size it had been last year, but it was expected to produce roughly the same amount of code by using A.I.
I am sick of these verbose articles that boil down to nothing basically. What the f does it mean to "produce code"? Like are we just churning out LoCs daily just for the sake of doing so?
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[ 2.0 ms ] story [ 343 ms ] thread> “It’s more fun to write code than to read code,” said Simon Willison, an A.I. fan who is a longtime programmer and blogger, channeling the objections of other programmers. “If you’re told you have to do a code review, it’s never a fun part of the job. When you’re working with these tools, it’s most of the job.”
> This shift from writing to reading code can make engineers feel as if they are bystanders in their own jobs. The Amazon engineers said that managers have encouraged them to use A.I. to help write one-page memos proposing a solution to a software problem and that the artificial intelligence can now generate a rough draft from scattered thoughts.
> They also use A.I. to test the software features they build, a tedious job that nonetheless has forced them to think deeply about their coding.
Maybe I'm weird, but chasing down bugs is like solving a puzzle. Writing green-field code is maybe a little bit enjoyable, but especially in areas I know well, it's mostly boring now. I'd rather do just about anything than write another iteration of a web form or connect some javascript widget to some other javascript widget in the framework flavor of the week. To some extent, then, working with LLMs has restored some of the fun of coding because it takes care of the tedious part, and I get to solve the interesting problems.
I solve a problem, let the AI mull on the next bit, solve another problem etc.
Have coders really psyopped themselves into thinking their job is somehow that much more special than the rest simply because it paid better due to temporarily market conditions?
I thought that was a joke where everyone was in on it, not that they were serious. I assumed it was clear we're all replaceable cogs in a machine, baring a few exceptions of brilliant and innovation people.
Yes. We don't need to pay $$$ for simply changing elements on a page or adopting the next web framework to replace another. The hype in many web technologies that lots of developers that have fell for also contributed to the low quality of the software that you use right now.
All of this work to pay developers to over-engineer inefficient solutions and to give a false sense of meaningful work contributed to the "psyop" of how highly inflated their salaries were to do their jobs in the ZIRP era.
And AI has shown which developer jobs it is really good at, and it is consistently good at web developer roles.
So I'd expect those roles to be significantly less valuable.
I am not a software engineer and have never felt stable in my 30 year career.
It always feels like the rug could get pulled out from under me at any time.
So what? It is still better than working in coal mine. It is still more interesting than working at a gas station.
Hard to feel sorry for people basically complaining the work ping pong table doesn't have quite the quality ping pong balls they were expecting.
It is an interesting mix of being both super elitist and completely infantile at the same time.
You need way way less people for that.
I've been in Amazon for close to a decade, and I constantly think "I can't believe X hasn't been automated in the 30 years that Amazon has existed and is still done on Excel".
Most engineers will work on new features for at least half of the year, and I personally work on brand new projects or at least features constantly.
horrified to think the totes are done the same way.
[1] https://docbarraiser.com/annual-business-planning-what-the-o...
Now we’re going to set up a whiteboard test here and you can demonstrate to us your best copying and pasting.”
“errrr, do I do any actual coding in the job?”
“Well, yes, inasmuch as anyone does these days. It’s mostly copying and pasting though, but hey that’s what coding IS now, right?”
“OK are you ready for your coding test, here it is: what key is COPY? And what key is PASTE?”
“Bad programmers worry about the code. Good programmers worry about data structures and their relationships.” — Linus Torvalds
- High degree of warehouse injuries (https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/16/business/economy/amazon-w...)
- Making its delivery drivers piss in bottles (https://www.forbes.com/sites/katherinehamilton/2023/05/24/de...)
- Illegally busting unions (https://www.thenation.com/article/activism/amazon-union-bust...)
- Forcing people back into their offices on five day RTO (https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-5-day-rto-mandate-pol...)
Is now making its white-collar employees' life resemble ...warehouse work? Unthinkable!
I found this ultra-depressing, and far from what coding was for me - a creative role with great creativity and autonomy. Coding was always solving problems, and never felt like some sort of assembly line. But in a lot of companies, this is how it was constructed, with PMs setting up sprints and points, etc.
Similarly, I spoke to a doctor about how much they loved being able to work remotely at their role - with 2-3 days a week where they just responded to email and saw patients over telehealth. It felt very "ticket" focused and not at all the high status doctor role I imagined.
I suspect that both those roles will be lost to AI. If your role is taking a ticket that says "the box should be green, not red", and nothing more, that's the sort of thing that AI is very capable of.
Based on my experience with sprint teams, breaking things down into just a couple hours of work per ticket implies that someone else is doing an enormous amount of prep work to create a dozen tickets per feature. I agree that your friend is performing the work of a development system. I've heard this called "programming in Developer" as opposed to whatever language the developer is using.
It's incredibly frustrating to try and get anything done in a team like that. The reality of most software jobs I've had is that problem discovery is part of it. The only people who know the code well enough to know the problens it has are the developers.
Where do I sign up?
Only a minority of dev jobs are automating people out of work. There are entirely new industries like game dev that can't exist without it.
Software development has gained such a political whipping-boy status, you'd be forgiven for forgetting it's been the route to the middle classes for a lot of people who would otherwise be too common, weird or foreign.
Yes? I know I did, still do, and will continue to at least.
Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
The electrician is more like the person laying fibre optic cable.
Assemblers, Linkers, Compilers, Copying, Macros, Makefiles, Code gen, Templates, CI & CD, Editors, Auto-complete, IDEs are all terms that describe types of automation in software development.
LLM-generated code is another form of automation, but it certainly isn't the first. Right now most of the problems are when it is inappropriately used. The same applies to other forms of automation too - but LLMs are really hyped up right now. Probably it will go through the normal hype cycle where there'll be a crash, and then a plateau where LLMs are used to drive productivity but expectations of their capability are more aligned to reality.
The whole field is about automating yourself out of a job, and it's right in the name.
https://grodiko.fr/informatique?lang=en
German site claims that "Informatik", which is practically the same, is a contraction of "Information" and "Mathematik":
https://www.pctipp.ch/praxis/gewusst/kam-begriff-informatik-...
https://www.larousse.fr/dictionnaires/francais/informatique/...
This cites the same person (Philippe Dreyfus) but with "automatic":
https://www.caminteresse.fr/societe/quelle-est-lorigine-du-m...
> Il faut attendre 1962 pour réentendre parler d’informatique dans les médias. « Informatique » est en effet le terme utilisé pour la première fois par un scientifique français pour désigner le traitement automatique des données. Il s’agit de Philippe Dreyfus, fondateur de la société SIA, acronyme pour « Société d’Informatique Appliquée ».
And then enters the dictionary in 1966.
In 1957 in Germany, Karl Steinbuch describes Informatik as Automatische Informationsverarbeitung.
Another option would be to join forces to collectively demand more equitable distribution of the fruits of technological development. Sadly it doesn't seem to be very popular.
Strange enough the people that have the most to gain from keeping things the same, are really successful at convincing the masses who have the most to benefit from change in this regard to vote against it.
https://pjhollis123.medium.com/careful-mate-that-foreigner-w...
The problem I have with unions is that they can be too unreasonable. They're too much on the other side, they're too hardline just like the ultracapitalists/neoliberals but on the other side. In a good system we wouldn't have to fight for our rights because we'd already have them anyway.
You have fallen for capitalist propaganda. Time to re-evaluate.
Note: I'm not living in the US obviously :)
I do say a balance because of course we're not living in a communist state. So even with a socialist government there is still capitalism. Just not unrestrictedly so as it is in the US.
I'm not sure how it works in the US but in our company the union is many bitching about stupid stuff like breastfeeding rooms (when there are no women who bring their babies to work anyway - they just work from home after their 6 months maternity leave). All our basic rights are already sorted. We can't work too many hours, we have unlimited sick leave (though of course validated by a doctor for long absences), we're entitled to a lot of money when fired etc. But this is all national law level stuff. Not industry level.
Having strong and independent unions is how you keep a good socialist government. Almost anytime you hear “With a good government, you don’t need <whatever>”, you are hearing a recipe for guaranteeing that good government is an exceptional, transitory state. If your society isn't prepared for bad government, it will have one sooner than you’d like, and it will be difficult to dislodge it.
A true committed exclusionary socialist.
The bad thing is they converted the welfare room for this which was used all the time :(
I really needed that place because of the move to hotdesking so I'm constantly sitting besides blabby sales people. Formerly we had an IT floor where people knew concentration is sometimes needed. So I'd go there to sit in silence and de-stress for a while.
But I have to say the company is good otherwise, I told them about my difficulty and the H&S people let me work from home much more than others.
I hate the way companies are going back from full remote to hybrid hotdesking though because that is the worst of both worlds.
Nothing about your example is an overreach of unions. In fact, it is a perfect example of the value of organised labour.
In honour of recent comments by dang, I won't be as direct as I'd historically be and instead invite you to think about - in the grand scheme of things - how accessibility, including expressing mothers, may be a societal and absolute good.
As a secondary exercise, maybe it's worth thinking about the ethics of presence sensors.
You claim you’re trying to balance individualism and collectivism but don’t actually support things that make collectivism work so you end up de facto supporting individualism.
Its a way to support individualism while allowing people to feel extra good about themselves for supporting collectivist ideas, on paper.
But where I live we just have strong labour rights from the government so individual unions fighting for each type of labour's rights are not needed as much. Sometimes they are, when there are specific risks like chemicals that they work with. But for overall "not get taken advantage of" stuff, it's just not needed so much.
It might have been a selling point, but the status quo is that we are inventing new jobs faster than phasing out old ones. The new jobs aren't necessarily more enjoyable, though, and there are no more smoking breaks.
It is not in fact law in the US.
If directors consistently chose "do less with more" - they'd certainly lose under virtually any legal standard?
Edit: I guess it's technically Michigan law, but as far as I'm aware is de facto? Even Aronson v. Lewis wouldn't allow that. (IANAL)
FWIW, I spent many years as a cashier. It's not something I find inherently more valuable to the world. If we could trust people not to steal, we wouldn't need them.
Web dev for e-commmerce displaced brick and mortar retail. Web dev for streaming displaced video rentals and audio sales.
Ergo, web devs are directly contributing to the outcomes that e-commerce enables.
If it sounds like I'm including a lot of jobs, it's because every non-service job in the history of the post-industrial revolution economy has revolved around making things more efficient. Software development is not some uniquely evil domain.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I don't want to ban you, so if you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44089951
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44089808
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44088236
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44088105
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44040448
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44040666
If you don't like the phrase "personal attack" we can call it something else, but the point is you can't treat other commenters this way on HN, regardless of how wrong anyone is or you feel they are.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Is that dramatic? No.
More specifically: Things can be inevitable and also horrible. It is not some kind of cognitive dissonance to care about people losing their livelihoods and also agree that it had to happen. We can structure society to help people, but instead we hate the imaginary stereotypes we've generalized every conceivable grouping of real people into, politics being the most obvious example, but we do it with everything, as you have.
The electrician doesn't "deserve" punishment for "advocating" away the jobs replaced by electricity. The engineer doesn't "deserve" punishment for "advocating" away the jobs replaced by engineering. A person isn't an asshole who deserves his family to suffer because he committed his life to learning to write application servers, or whatever.
Modern AI encroaches upon what software engineers consider to be interesting work, and also adds more of what they find less enjoyable — using natural language instead of formal language (aka code) for detailed specification — which creates a conflict that didn’t previously exist in software technology.
If you are the person who lost their job, you get all the downside.
Overall, over the whole of the economy, the entire population, and a reasonable period of time, this increasing efficiency is a core driver of the annual overall increase in wealth we know as economic growth.
When an economy is growing, there is in general demand for workers, and so pay and conditions are encouraged; when an economy is shrinking, there is less demand than supply, and pay and conditions are discouraged.
This is only true while wealth inequality is decreasing, which it is not.
If everyone is becoming better off, but at different rates such that there is increase in inequality, then everyone experiences economic growth.
Thought experiment.
We have two people, one with 1000 wealth one with 100.
We have 10% growth per year.
So we see;
1000 -> 1100 -> 1210 -> 1331 100 -> 110 -> 121 -> 133.1
Difference in wealth;
900 -> 990 -> 1089 -> 1198
The ratio of wealth remains 10:1, but the absolute difference becomes larger and larger.
I do not know, and I would like to know, how numbers for wealth inequality are being computed.
It will change the job yes but it also can mean the job can go in new directions because we can do more with less.
This is naive of course. Once you have identified yourself as corporate servants (like for example the CPython developers) the companies will disrespect you and fire you when convenient (as has happened at Google and Microsoft).
It will cause a displacement of job types for sure. But I think it means change more than decline. When industrialisation happened, lots of factory workers were afraid of their jobs and also lost them. But these days nobody even wants to do a menial factory job, slaving away on the production line for minimum wage. In fact most people have a far better life now than the masses did before industrialisation. We also had the computer automation that made entire classes of jobs obsolete. Yet it's almost impossible to find skilled workers in Holland now.
And companies need customers with purchasing power. They can't replace everyone with AI because there will be nobody left with money to sell things to. In the end there will be another balance. The interim time, that's the difficult part. Though it is temporary, it can really hurt specific people.
But I don't see AI as a downward spiral that will never recover. In the end it will enable us to look more towards the future (and I am by no means an "AI bro", I think current capabilities of AI have been ridicuously overhyped)
I think we need to redraw society too to compensate. Things like universal basic income, better welfare etc. Here in Europe we already have that but under the neoliberal regimes of the last 20 years (and the fallout from the American banking crisis), things have been austerised too much.
In America this won't happen as it seems to go only the other way (very hardline capitalism, with a fundamentalist almost taliban-like religious streak) but well, it's what they voted for.
Now what needs to be done is to give back the profits to everyone, inclusively, as a kind of "universal basic income", so that we all enjoy it together, and not just the billionaires
Hum yeah, because it's insanely hard to properly review a CR that's more than a few pages long?
Seems indeed to be like Warehouse work, which is why Web developers will be the first to be affected by AI.
Doesn't matter if you are "senior" or "staff" in Web development. AI is already senior staff level in that.
Please don't put others down like that on HN. It's mean and degrades the community.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
A) a coal miner with $60 000/y salary
B) Elon Musk: $381 000 000 000
Sources: - https://www.indeed.com/career/software-engineer/salaries
- https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/coal-miner-salary-SRCH_KO...
- https://finance.yahoo.com/news/elon-musk-rich-6-8-170106956....
Is the average amount of properties (1-2) owned by a software developer closer to those of:
A) a worker at Walmart
B) Mark Zuckerberg?
> Well, for the time SEs are substantially better paid than working-class jobs, they are not the working class.
That's what they have been telling SEs to prevent us from unionizing :) All so they can put you where you stand now, when they (wrongly) think they don't need you. SE jobs are working class jobs, and have always been.
Also "working class" has a historical, social component, by which programmers are certainly not included.
When ownership of things can keep you and your family fed, clothed, and sheltered in comfort, you're part of the owning class. If it can't, you're a worker. Maybe a skilled worker, maybe a highly paid worker, maybe a worker that owns a lot of expensive 'tools' or credentials, or licenses, or a company truck, or a trillion worthless diluted startup shares that have an EV of ~$50, but you're still a worker.
If you're the owner of a small owner-operated business, and the business will go kaput because you didn't show up to do work, you're also a worker. The line is drawn at the point where most of your contribution to it is your own (or other peoples') capital, not your own two-hands labour.
Now, if you're some middle manager, with no meaningful ownership stake - you are still a worker. You still need to go to work to get your daily bread. It just so happens that your job is imposing the will of the owners on workers underneath you.
If you have somewhere between $5M and $10M in a HCoL American city, you are probably no longer working class insofar as you could quit, get on ACA healthcare, and rent a decent house or buy / mortgage a decent house and live a pretty comfortable life indefinitely. But you're on the very low end of not-working-class and are living a modest life (if you quit and stop drawing a salary).
If you have under that threshold (in a big expensive US city), you are probably still working class.
A lot of software engineers can get to $5M-$10M range in like 10-30 years depending on pay and savings rate. But also a lot of software engineers operate their budgets almost paycheck-to-paycheck, and will never get there.
Over 50% of that $160k floor is eaten up by just housing and private or ACA insurance.
So your housing costs for like a 1k-2k sqft spot, all in (rent, or if owning then insurance, upkeep, etc) costs you something like $50k+, your health insurance for two people on ACA costs you like $40k yr assuming kids are out of the picture (more if not), and you have a decent chunk leftover to spend on living a decent life, but not like egregiously large amounts. You're not flying first class, probably not taking more than 2 big vacations a year, driving nice but not crazy expensive car, etc.
If you elect to leave the big expensive US city, then of course you can do it with substantially lower amounts (especially so long as you can swing ACA subsidies and are willing to risk your "not-working-class" existence on the whims of the govt continuing that program).
Obviously if you live in some place (read: everywhere except the US?) where the floor for medical costs of two people not working but still having income from capital isn't around $40k/yr, then the amount can go wayyyy down.
$5-$10M for 30 years, but only if you save every penny in between? Wow, that's very impressive and totally life-changing! Reminds me of the story how millennials are not able to afford buying a house because of avocado toast!
Oh, really? Is that why both "white-collar worker" and "blue-collar worker" contain the word "worker"? Working class is everyone who has to work for their money. Can most programmers, on a whim, afford to never work again? An average programmer's salary is 2x the average coal miner's. A CEO is nowadays paid 339 the salary of their average worker https://www.epi.org/publication/ceo-pay-in-2023/.
Programmers are just one prolonged sickness or medical debt away from being destitute, the same as every other member of the working class. Lawyers, teachers, doctors, programmers, those are all working class, along with agriculture, mining, utilities and all people who have to get up and work for their daily bread and a roof over their head. Sure, there is a discrepancy in pay, but it's not as glaring as it is between a worker and the oligarchs like Trump and Elon Musk. The biggest con in society is that you are so far distanced from the obscene wealth of the rich, that it's not in your face to see how little you have and how much they do.
Both the guy in an old Dodge and the guy in the new Tesla are stuck in traffic, and you fail to realize realize there are people out there right now flying on a private jet for a cocktail? You think the guy living in an apartment is so much different than a guy living in a house in suburbia? How about the guy whose real-estate company bought the whole development and now is cranking up prices?
You make $200k yearly as a welder? Still working class.
You own a small business with 10 workers working for you? Still working class.
You manage a team of devs in a FAANG and are doing alright for yourself? Still working class.
Your parents donated a wing to Yale and own a hotel chain? Not working class.
Your savings account and stocks generate enough for you that you never have to work again? You are not working class.
This is because wealth wise, you are still closer to how much an unemployed person on benefits than to a CEO of a multinational company, and that's a fact.
("A CEO is nowadays paid 339 the salary of their average worker" you say? If we are nitpicking, that's obviously false; only a tiny, tiny fraction of CEOs are paid that well.)
Aside from that, I'd wager a rather large fraction of HN can easily afford never to work again. This place is crawling with millionaires and they're definitely not embarrassed about it, temporarily or otherwise. Good luck convincing them.
We are nitpicking, and you are wrong:
https://therealnews.com/average-ceo-makes-339-times-more-tha...
https://www.epi.org/publication/ceo-pay-in-2023/
https://www.statista.com/statistics/261463/ceo-to-worker-com...
"In 2022, it was estimated that the CEO-to-worker compensation ratio was 344.3 in the United States. This indicates that, on average, CEOs received more than 344 times the annual average salary of production and nonsupervisory workers in the key industry of their firm."
> Aside from that, I'd wager a rather large fraction of HN can easily afford never to work again. This place is crawling with millionaires and they're definitely not embarrassed about it, temporarily or otherwise. Good luck convincing them.
You can wager whatever you want, but statistically you'd be wrong.
https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20240404-global-retirem...
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/retirement-crisis-savings-short...
So, while 350 seems to be a small number, these 350 companies employ the largest chunk of the US market, and that's why they are the most representative to do the study with.
And that's my point! If you select a random worker in the US, there is a HUGE chance they are employed by Amazon, Walmert or one of the big-s. And there is a HUGE chance their salary is 339 times less than their CEO's.
The boundary between working class and not working class is not at the 99th percentile where you would have it. The diminishing marginal utility of money means you get 90% of the security of being wealthy at 0.1% of the net worth of a billionaire.
Bullshit.
https://edition.cnn.com/2024/07/23/business/inflation-cost-o...
https://ssti.org/blog/large-percentage-americans-report-they...
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/01/18/amid-inflation-more-middle-c...
Between 30 and 70% of Americans can't make ends meet. What used to be called "middle class" is disappearing, making way to only 1%-ers and us, the rest. The fact that I drive a Tesla and some guy drives a Dodge, doesn't mean we are not both stuck in traffic while there is some shcmuck flying on their private jet to reach their yacht.
The objective level of reproduction of labor force is about $2 per day. Cheaper for warm climates, slightly more expensive for cold ones.
So by that logic there is no working class in the US whatsoever because you don't have to work to survive. At all. Maybe half a year in your entire lifetime.
You just choose to spend all your money on things you don't need to survive, that's the only reason you needed to work. But that doesn't make you a worker class any more than Elon Musk becomes a worker class by buying 10 companies like Twitter.
So, using your logic, "You are making more than 50 cents an hour? You're not working class. You don't have to work most of your life to survive yourself or to provide for your children. You're closer to Elon Musk than to workers forced to work for $2 a day to survive."
I also like making random numbers up. Here are other numbers. 420. 1337. 1911.
> So by that logic there is no working class in the US whatsoever because you don't have to work to survive. At all. Maybe half a year in your entire lifetime.
I have no words to express how weak this argument is. The US has MOSTLY working class people because less and less people can survive on their salaries.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/cost-of-living-income-quality-o...
> So, using your logic, "You are making more than 50 cents an hour? You're not working class. You don't have to work most of your life to survive yourself or to provide for your children. You're closer to Elon Musk than to workers forced to work for $2 a day to survive."
I am not sure if this sentence is a troll, or comes from genuine misunderstanding. I don't know what to advice. I genuinely chuckled. Here are a three numbers, elementary math:
7.25
53
1 600 000
Which two of these numbers are closer to one another? 7.25 and 53, right (I hope)? Well, let's look what those numbers mean:
7.25 - minimum wage https://www.dol.gov/general/topic/wages/minimumwage
53 - average hourly salary of a software engineer: https://www.indeed.com/career/software-engineer/salaries
1 600 000 average hourly wage of Elon Musk: https://moneyzine.com/personal-finance/how-much-does-elon-mu...
So...who is a software engineer closer in terms of income to? Elon Musk or a minimum wage worker?
Comparing those in unions who are more likely to be in the video game making or industry or government to faangs like Amazon where you work day and night for a 4 year vesting offer that pays out very little until the 4th year and where on average most worker work less than 2 years at Amazon.
Please tell me a union SWE shop that has better benefits and comp than I get?
Do you own businesses, land, investments, and other forms of capital that generate wealth independently of direct labor? Enough wealth so you don't have to work for the foreseeable future? Is this the average software engineer for you (in or out of a union)? Because that's the definition of NOT being a part of the working class.
I don't think it makes sense to group the "don't have to go to work anymore" people with the "can buy anything" people, but they don't have a lot in common with the working class, either.
To what extent are SWEs working class? I guess that depends on how many of them still have to go to work. A salary of $350k certainly puts you on the road to never having to work again.
You use that word, it does not mean what you think it means when you immediately talk about income.
The working class is those who own no significant means of production and thus must sell their labor at whatever price the market bears.
That the market for SE labor is good(for the workers), doesn't mean SE's don't need to work to earn money.
American popular usage defers from traditional economic role-based class analysis to be instead do income-based “class” terminology which instead of defining the middle class as the petit bourgeois who apply their own labor to their own capital in production (or otherwise have a relation to the economy which depends on both applying labor and ownership of the non-financial means of production) defines middle class as the segment around the median income, almost entirely within the traditional working class.
This is a product of a deliberate effort to redefine terminology to impair working class solidarity, not some kind of accident.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional%E2%80%93manageria...
I agree. Let's hope it will have much less impact on the 21th century.
Core economic concepts are things like elasticity of demand, market equilibrium, externality, market failure, network effect, opportunity cost and comparative advantage, and AFAIK Marx and his follower had essentially no role in explaining or introducing any of those.
If this seems like an absurd comparison, I would suggest reading both Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica and Das Kapital.
Petite bourgeoisie: small business owners, shopkeepers
Haute bourgeoisie: industrialists, financiers
Managerial class (in some frameworks): high-paid non owners who control labor
Within the proletariat, you can distinguish:
Lumpenproletariat[3]: unemployed, precarious
Skilled laborers vs unskilled laborers
Labor aristocracy: better-paid, sometimes ideologically closer to capital
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proletariat [1]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bourgeoisie [2]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lumpenproletariat [3]
> Within the bourgeoisie, you can distinguish: [...] Managerial class [...] non owners who control labor
Contradiction?
Managerial Class != Bourgeoisie
This was a loose usage of the term “bourgeoisie”, meant in the sociological rather than economic sense. Sorry.
In late capitalism, the PMC (Professional Managerial Class) occupies a weird liminal space:
Economically they're proletariat
Socially/culturally they're aligned with bourgeois values
Politically they often acts in defense of capital (because of career dependency)
Hence: managerial class != bourgeoisie, even if they act like them or aspire to be them.
The distinction here is "do you get your money from owning assets or do you get your money from working" because where you get your money is where you get your incentives and the incentives of owning are opposite the incentives of working in many important regards.
The economy is inhabited by people who work for a living but it is controlled by people who own things for a living. That's not a conspiracy theory, it's the definition of capitalism. If you do not own things for a living and do not know people who do, spend some time pondering "the control plane." It should seem like an alien world at first, but it's an alien world with a wildly outsize impact on your life and it behooves you to understand it in broad strokes even if you aren't trying to climb into it.
I have a bridge to sell you if you're interested. Let me know.
The means of producing an AI is a huge data centre for training. Having a lot of money but no chips of any kind wouldn't get you an AI. We had money 10 years ago, but they did not make AIs out of them.
Is the concept of "intellectual capital" a figment of my imagination, or a flaw of the traditional class identifiers? Or both?
What’s “the factory” for software? Our equivalent of the factory is the organization we work in, and our connection to the people who turn our software into money.
You can write software at home by yourself, just like you can do machining on your own. But there are a lot of steps between making software, or machining, and turning that output into money. By working for a company, you can have other people handle those steps. The tradeoff is that this structure is something owned by someone else.
Therein lies the propaganda.
Technology always automates jobs away. I had a dedicated database systems team 25 years ago that was larger than an infrastructure team managing 1000x more stuff today. Dev teams are bloated in most places, today.
Yes, the people who were prone to dying already did so years ago. But the rate of long term disability in every single country is skyrocketing.
The average person has had 4.7 covid infections by now. Now look into the literal thousands of studies of long term effects of that.
Future generations will never forgive us for throwing them under the bus.
Eventually everyone was expected to understand a good deal of the code they were working on. The analyst and the coder became the same person.
I'm deeply skeptical that the kind of people that enjoy software development are the same kind of people that enjoy steering and proofing LLM generated code. Unlike the analyst and the coder, this strike me as a very different skill set.
The real software engineering role, with architecture, customer management, discovery phase, risk analysis and all the other kind of stuff, not yet.
Reading and debugging slop code is not the same thing, not even close.
indeed. people generally hate foreign/alien code, or rather - love their style too much. it is not hard to recognize this pattern - ive seen it with colleagues, with my students, with some topnotch 10x-coders back in the day. so proofing is a skill one perhaps develops by teaching others do things right, but is not something most people entertain about.
on the other hand, people who lack time and patience to implement complex stuff may benefit from this process. particularly if they are good code-readers, and some seasoned devs become such people. i can see little chance they wont be using llms to spit code out.
but the two groups largely don't overlap and are different as astronomers and astronauts.
Not everyone gets to code the next ground breaking algorithm at some R&D department.
Most programming tasks are rather repetitive, and in many countries there is hardly anything to look up to software developers, it is another blue collar job.
And in many cultures if you don't go into management after about five years, usually it is seen as a failure to grow up on their career.
What does that mean?
The mindset, mentality, and culture required to do new software for an ambiguous problem is different from the mentality to produce boilerplate code or maintain an existing codebase. The later is pure execution and the former is more like R&D.
I don't see how that's possible. Wouldn't such a norm result in something like a 7:1 ration of managers to engineers (i.e., assuming a 40ish year career, the first 5 years are spent as an engineer, and the remaining 35 as a manager)? For team managers, I've generally seen around a 1:10 ratio of engineers to managers. So a 7:1 ratio of managers to engineers just doesn't seem plausible, even including non-people leaders in management.
It's these sorts of jobs that will be replaced by AI and a vibe coder, which will cost much less because you don't need as much experience or expertise.
Seeing Like a State by James Scott
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seeing_Like_a_State
Explains a lot of the confusing stuff I've experienced, in that eureka sort of way.
Like, they hadn't realized they were turning humans into compilers for abstract concepts, yet now they are telling humans to get tf out of the way of AI
I'm not sure what: "'deskilling' to something reliable through bureaucratic procedures" ... means.
I'm the Managing Director of a small company and I'm pretty sure you are digging at the likes of me (int al) - so what am I doing wrong?
From the 19th century onwards, businesses have wanted to replace high-skilled craftsmen with low-skilled workers who would simply follow a repeatable process. A famous example is Ford. Ford didn't want an army of craftsmen, who each knew how to build a car. He wanted workers to stay at one station and perform the same single action all day. The knowledge of how to build a car would be in the system itself, the individual workers didn't have to know anything. This way, the workers have limited leverage because they are all replaceable, and the output is all standardized.
You can see this same approach everywhere. McDonalds for instance, or Amazon warehouses, or call centers.
We give a shit.
I hypothesize that it takes some period of time for vibe-coding to slowly "bit rot" a complex codebase with abstractions and subtle bugs, slowly making it less robust and more difficult to maintain, and more difficult to add new features/functionality.
So while companies may be seeing what appears to be increases in output _now_, they may be missing the increased drag on features and bugfixes _later_.
They burn a pile of money. Maybe it’s their life savings, their parents’ money or their friends or some unlucky investors. But they go in thinking they’re going to join the privileged labourers without putting any of the time to develop the skills and without paying for that labour. GenAI the whole thing. And they post about it on socials like they’re special or something.
Then boom. A month later. “Can everyone stop hacking me already, I can’t make this stop. Why is this happening?”
Mostly I feel sorry for the people who get duped into paying for this crap and have their data stolen.
There’s like almost zero liability for messing around like this.
Imagine a future where the prompts become the precious artifact. That we regularly `rm -rf *` the entire code base and regenerate it with the original prompts perhaps when a better model becomes available. We stop fretting about code structure or hygiene because it won't be maintained by developers. Code is written for readability and audibility. So instead of finding the right abstractions that allow the problem to be elegantly implemented the focus is on allowing people to read the code to audit that it does what it says it does. No DSLs just plain readable code.
Because if you let every stakeholder add their requirements to the prompts, without checking that it doesn't contradict others, you'll end up with a disaster.
So you need someone able to gather all the requirements and translate it in a way that the machine (the AI) can interpret to produce the expected result (a ephemeral codebase).
Which means you now have to carefully maintain your prompts to be certain about the outcome.
But if you still need someone to fix the codebase later in the process, you need people with two sets of skills (prompts and coding) when, with the old model, you only needed coding skills.
People may worry that the "ASM" codebase will be bit-rot and no one can understand the compiler output or add new feature to the ASM codebase.
and that probably to some extent all involved (depending on how delusional they are) know that it's simply an excuse to do layoffs (replaced by offshoring) by artificially so-called raising the bar to what is unrealistic for most people
The game is to learn new tools quickly and learn to use them better than most of your peers, then stay quietly a bit ahead. But know you have to keep doing this forever. Or to work for yourself or in an environment where you get the gains, not the employer. But "work for yourself" probably means direct competition with others who are just as expert as you with AI, so that's no panacea.
Interesting to see A imagine what B meant, then assert that A believes some metric will always go up because they always saw it go up? It's not clear what they meant, making this response as nonsensical as the response. An AI level exchange.
I know reading skills are in short supply in a group of people that only read code but I thought it was pretty obvious what I was alluding to. But even if it weren't (admittedly you have to have actually read Marx for it to jump out at you) by the time you responded there was another comment that very clearly spells it out, complete with citations.
This kind of statement does not make a point, nor is it appealing to engage with. Good luck with whatever.
> It's not clear what they meant, making this response as nonsensical as the response. An AI level exchange.
Does this kind of statement make a point? Is it appealing to engage with?
I saw this on Reddit and it captured this phenomenon beautifully: you're not a victim here, you're just starting a fight and then losing that fight.
Marx is the originator of precisely none of those thoughts, you couldn't find an economist that disagrees with them. "Unions" is also not the obvious solution for the problems of an individual. Unless you have a specific, existing union with a contact phone number that you're referring to, one that has a track record of making sure that individuals are not affected negatively by technological progress over the span of their entire careers, you're just lazily talking shit.
If it's the solution, so much easier than keeping ahead of the technology treadmill, and it's so obvious to you, it's strange that you haven't set up the One Big Union yet and fixed all the problems.
Right, but the observation here is that many, maybe most, individuals in a particular field are having this same problem of labor autonomy and exploitation. So... unions are pretty good for that.
SWE is somewhat unique in that, despite us being the lowest level assembly-line type worker in our field, we get paid somewhat well. Yes, we're code monkeys, but well-paid code monkeys. With a hint of delusions of grandeur.
> Companies will always try to capture the productivity gains from a new tool or technique
Ie "capitalists" are not rewarded for deploying capital and mitigating risk but for extracting as much from the labor as possible. And yes Marx is absolutely the "originator" of these ideas and yes absolutely you ask any orthodox economist (and many random armchair economists on here) they will deny it till they're blue in the face. In fact you're doing it now :)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_theory_of_value
Edit: it's the same thing that plagues the rest of American civil society: "voting against your [communal] interests because someone convinced you that your exceptional". Ie who needs unions when I'm a 10x innovator/developer. Well I guess enjoy your LLM overlords then Mr 10x <shrug>.
That's true. And employers have been consistently the one with more bargaining power, and that's why our wages haven't kept up with the productivity gains. This is also known as productivity-pay-gap.
We, the working class, are supposed to be paid roughly 50% more than we are paid now, if the gains from productivity were properly distributed. But they are not, concentrated to a large extent in the owning class, which is what's unfair and why we, the workers, should unite to get what's rightfully ours.
https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/
Or, you know, being a member of society, you can find other members of society who feel like you, and organize together to place demands on employers that...you know...stops them from exploiting you.
- That's how you got the weekend: https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20200117-the-modern-phe...
- And that's how you got the 8-hour working week: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight-hour_day_movement
- And that's how you got children off the factories: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_labour
But, you know, you can always hustle against your fellow SEs, and try to appease your masters. Where others work the bare minimum of 8 hours, why not work 12, and also on the weekend? It's also fine.
Generating shareholder value is very important for the well-being of society! /s
"Stonks go up" is not a proxy for success. Success is when pharma executives don't tremble like the villains they are from hearing the name of Mario's little brother. Success is when normal people get from the social contract at least as much as they put in. If we, the people, get less than from the social contract that we put in, as we nowadays observe, I can guarantee you we will break down the social contract, and the ones having most to lose from that are your precious stakeholders.
In fact, most people would have a version of this pyramid in order of importance:
1. Personal mental and physical well-being and the same for your loved ones
2. Healthy and functioning society and robust social safety nets, e.g retirement, paid leave, social housing, public transport etc
...
1337. The composition of sand on Mars
...
...
...
...
4206919111337. Shareholder value
The first is that the entire global codebase starts to become an unstable shitpile, and eventually critical infrastructure starts collapsing in a kind of self-inflicted Y2k event. Experienced developers will be rehired at astronomical rates to put everything back together, and then everyone will proceed more cautiously. (Perhaps.)
The second is that AI is just about good enough and things muddle along in a not-great-not-terrible way. Dev status and salaries drop slowly, profits increase, reliability and quality are both down, but not enough to cause serious problems.
The third is that the shitpile singularity is avoided because AI gets much better at coding much more quickly, and rapidly becomes smarter than human devs. It gets good enough to create smart specs with a better-than-human understanding of edge cases, strategy, etc, and also good enough to implement clean code from those specs.
If this happens development as we know it would end, because the concept of a codebase would become obsolete. The entire Internet would become dynamic and adaptive, with code being generated in real time as requirements and condition evolve.
I'm sure this will happen eventually, but current LLMs are hilariously short of it.
So for now there's a gap between what CEOs believe is happening - option 3. And what is really happening - option 1.
I think a shitpile singularity is quite likely within a couple of years. But if there's any sane management left it may just about be possible to steer into option 2.
Just like clothing and textile work. They are getting cheaper and cheaper, true, but even with centuries of automation, they are still getting shittier in the process.
For the first time now I can feel the joy of what I do slipping away from me. I don't even mind my employer capturing more productivity, but I do mind if all the things I love about the job are done by robots instead.
Maybe I'm in the minority but I love writing code! I love writing tests! If I wanted to ask for this stuff to be done for me, I would be a manager!
Now, I'll need to use gen AI to replace the fun part of the job, or I'll be put out to pasture.
It's not a future I look forward to, even if I'm able to keep up and continue working in the industry.
This will work until the capitalists realize the stock market let's plebs do well and they'll unlist the best companies.
I can safely say this article is bullshit. While there are a lot of programs ongoing to allow builders to adopt GenAI tooling, and while there is definitely a lot of communication ongoing around those programs, nobody is, at all, forced to use any of the AI tools. None are installed by default or enabled by default anywhere, and everyone is free to completely ignore them.
That said, is there an increase in expectations? Yes. But that's just normal Amazon in an employer's market, and has nothing to do with LLMs and GenAI.
The comparison to Microsoft where we can witness in public the .Net maintainers fighting with the shit code generated by Copilot on their repos is ridiculous. Amazon is probably one of the companies pushing the least and being the most prudent about GenAI adoption.
Q is installed by default in all browsers on Amazon laptops now, and literally cannot be uninstalled. If you don’t have it installed in your IDE, you get a non-dismissible popup nagging you to install it until you do. Many teams are being told they must use AI every single day (some VPs have sent out org-wide emails saying that AI must be used), and engineers have to tell their managers how they are making use of it day-to-day. In my org, OP1 docs must include at least one section about how the team will increase use of AI. Hackathons aren’t allowed to happen anymore unless they are AI-themed. I could keep going. Amazon is absolutely forcing AI usage, and the article undersells how egregious it is.
There is absolutely no company-wide mandate to use GenAI. If some SDM is pushing it on his SDEs, that's an outlier and on that person alone.
You said “None are installed by default or enabled by default anywhere” - this is also false. I’m looking at an installed by default (and uninstallable) AI browser addon on my work laptop right now.
It’s not hearsay, you’re either commenting in bad faith or you’re just clueless about what’s going on at your own company.
> There is absolutely no company-wide mandate
And now you’re just moving the goalposts.
There is an STeam goal for adoption and usage. There is a QS dashboard for SDMs to see statistics on their org's adoption and abandonment rates. There is BT guidance being propagated out to VPs and directors on how to roll out programs. As placardloop said, there was a mandatory OP1 FAQ question on GenAI usage.
https://gmplib.org/
Granlund's gcc optimizations probably save Amazon millions in electricity each year. But evidently they don't care about real programmers.
... you will use them anyway because, customer service or no, there’s a good chance you don’t have a choice that doesn’t cost half again as much. (Regional availability may vary.)
https://geizhals.eu/
Amazon is not nearly the cheapest or most reliable one for hardware.
https://geizhals.eu/supermicro-h13ssl-n-bulk-mbd-h13ssl-n-b-...
The vendors with the cheapest price have good customer reviews as well, unlike Amazon, which has terrible ones.It has changed dramatically over the past 5 or so years into this.
This feels like we are forcing people who rather look at code to start talking in plain language, which not every dev likes or is proficient in.
Devs won’t be replaced by AI. Devs will be replaced by people that can (and want to) speak to LLMs.
> The engineers said that the company had raised output goals and had become less forgiving about deadlines.
There are two issues this article brings to mind:
1. Feels like we are back when lines of code was a measure of productivity.
2. We’ve heard this tune before, and the problem we have now is that you don’t understand what you didn’t write. Software development is in large part about understanding the system from the highest level to its smallest details, and this takes away a key part of how our world works, in favor of a “cattle not pets” view of code.
Now, if you don’t expect your programmers to have an understanding of the system they built, and you treat code as disposable, then you’ll center around a world where folks aren’t trained to learn a system, and I don’t see that as a world that is compatible with increased reliance on A.I.
The cog in machine effect has always been there in the corporate world, but somehow it feels like the technique has been refined in the last couple of years.
All these narratives about user freedom, for any purpose etc. are just propaganda these days.
No why would there be? Unless you are spiritual, there isn't any reason any of the physical processes that make up human thought can't be done artificially, probably much more efficiently. Society needs to confront the myth that automation is going to always open up more jobs that need human labor. It's comforting for people who hate the idea of UBI or other safety nets that people can keep "retraining". Eventually there's going to be nothing to retrain to (at least of nothing of economic value)
Or maybe it is? When I have some time, I'll find out.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-PTzq1bv9M
What needs to happen is the education of "junior programmers" needs to be revamped to embrace generative AI. In the same way we embraced google or stackoverflow. We're at a weird transition state where the juniors are being taught to code with an abacus, while the industry has moved on to different tools. Generative AI feels taboo in education circles instead of embraced.
Now there will eventually be a generation of coders just "born" into AI, etc, and they will do great in this new ecosystem. Eventually education will catch up. But the cohort currently coming up as juniors will feel the most pain.
Then the internet came, and it felt like 'cheating'.
Then forums came and it felt like cheating, Then SO, and so on and so forth.
Now AI is eating the [software] world, and to a lot of people, it feels like cheating. I am just amazed of what i can build.
In 10-15 years software will become a commodity, along with books/stories and maybe even music/art. I don't know how it looks like. But darn im excited to be here to experience it.
That’s no longer true. And that democratizes these skills, which I agree could be a great thing.
But do you agree that it’s important for kids to learn to think critically and systematically? Because it’s super hard to stay motivated to learn those things when LLMs do that for you (and you’re too young to tell when they’re doing a bad job of it).
No they don't. They need to actually learn how to use their brains first.
Nah, only the teachers feel this, Gen AI is extremely popular in students. In fact, you would look weird if you don't use Gen AI for school work.
What we need is teaching them how to use gen AI effectively.
The current LLM based "AI" isn't good enough and we're already seeing way to many unable to code without the assistance of an AI agent. Sure, many of these people couldn't code at all before, or only very poorly, but at least their output was limited. We're producing way to much code (and to much content in general). The heavy leaning into AI at this point is going to set us back 10 - 15 years, for a short term profit. It's the dotcom bubble all over again in that respect. Way to many unskilled people are producing garbage code, and there aren't enough skilled people around to fix it, because the output volume is to high.
> Google recently told employees it would soon hold a companywide hackathon in which one category would be creating A.I. tools that could “enhance their overall daily productivity,” according to an internal announcement. Winning teams will receive $10,000.
If it's really that great, why the competition? Shouldn't this happen pretty organically? Companies are pushing "AI" hard, why to hard, it's not yet there where it can realistically deliver what is expected on the business side. I think even Google developers know this, but hey, $10,000 is $10,000.
I'm very concerned that we eroding trust, safety and quality long term, for a short term profit. It's not that LLMs can't be helpful, save money or improve quality, but you have to be a fairly skilled developer to get those advantages safely.
In a way it's only fair. Automation has made a lot of jobs obsolete or miserable. Software devs are a big contributor to automation so we shouldn't be surprised that we are finally managing to automate our own jobs away,
But I fall short of declaring the 1990s or 2000s or 2010s were the glory days and now things suck. I think part of it is nostalgia bias. I can think of a job I spent 4 years and list all the good parts of the experience. But I suspect I’m forgetting over a lot of mediocre or negative stuff.
At any rate I still like the work today. There are still generally hard challenges that you can overcome, people that depend on you, new technologies to learn about. Generically good stuff.
I crave novelty and have a love for bad technology. I was an early nodejs adopter and loved es4 but newer versions of the language is too easy to use lol!
I guess these strategies boil down to having some MBA on top or an engineer that has no board of MBAs to bow down to. I strive to stay with private owned companies for this reason but ofc these are less loud on the internet, so you can easily miss them while jobhunting.
Yeah the consistent "reporting" of "status" on "stand-ups" where you say some filler to get someone incapable of understanding what it is that you're doing off your back for 24 more hours has consistently been one of the most useless and unpleasant parts of the job.
This sucks for the 50% or so who are like you, but there's another 50% who won't really get much done otherwise, either because they don't know what to do and aren't self-motivated or capable enough to figure it out (common) or because they're actively cheating you and barely working (less common)
Idk I barely ever work with people who are like this, and if people become like this, it's usually obvious to everyone that it's happened and they get a talking to in the office then get shown the door
The mediocre unmotivated person is dragging down the other, killing their motivation. You'd be better off without them even if you couldn't replace them.
In my experience it is human nature to think you are doing something that people around you can't or don't understand. The graveyard is full of irreplaceable people is an old saying. Sometimes the people you report to are morons, but if you consistently report to a moron its time for introspection. There's more that you can do than just suffer that. One place to start is to have some charity for the people you work with.
I am not special and make no claims of it; I am entirely replaceable and I'd make no claims to the contrary.
This has nothing to do with me or anyone like me, and everything to do with the "adult daycare" style of project managers.
I'm tired of re-iterating to non-technical project managers that status of tickets, why things are "blocked" or why the ask isn't feasible given constraints, over and over again. Time is a flat-circle.
If they understood the problem scope better, such questions would not arise. I know this from experience.
The majority of them are completely stateless and I'll repeat things daily for weeks on end, explaining the same things over and over again, while they make 0 effort to "unblock" issues.
I've had one good project manager in my career that advocated for his technical staff and understood the both the project and business deeply; he was invaluable and a pleasure to work with.
I've had many many others that served no tangible purpose whatsoever.
My frustration is ostensibly there is a purpose for these jobs beyond employing people with the role of "attending meetings"; I've rarely seen it.
But it's never true. Team A depends on Team B, who is busy with work for Team C, and none of these teams are talking to each other because they're too busy writing code. Team D just lost two people and can't make the date that they promised, which sets Teams E and F back a few months unless we can figure it out. Or they're behind because they up and decided to do a big refactoring in the middle of the project without telling anyone. Or people just estimated poorly, like orders-of-magnitude poorly, and while the marketing team is ready, and the trade shows are scheduled, and the factory is ramping the device that the software should be flashed on, but the software won't be ready for another three months.
I empathize with engineers since I was once one, and can understand why some of them see us as adversarial. We tend to interact with them in places that Software Engineers hate, like in meetings and standups and via "update" E-mail blasts. Or we're sending them JIRA tickets which they also hate. I do my best to shield my teams from these things that I know they don't like, but sometimes they have to happen.
From my integrations pov Ebay was ahead of their time with their data structure and pushed for deprecation fast to not keep the debt. Amazon ooth only looks more modern through acquiring new market fields instantly followed by throwing a lot of money to facade up the mess. Every contact like key account managers there were usually pushed for numbers, this has nothing to do with coders being coders.
Bosses always look for ways to instantly measure coders output which is just short-sighted way of thinking. My coworkers were measured by lines of code obviously. I wonder how you measure great engineering.
So no, this has not changed, you can still work uninterrupted on stuff for months or years if you want and skip these places, maybe even proved over your career that previous designs are stable for years to come.
The weird thing about this is, many developers wanted this. They wanted the theater of Agile, JIRA tickets, points etc.
I'm in the same boat yet still need to squeeze out another 10 years or so but personally working om multiple-side projects so I can get out of this boring, mundane shit.
I am sick of these verbose articles that boil down to nothing basically. What the f does it mean to "produce code"? Like are we just churning out LoCs daily just for the sake of doing so?