They want to decimate software engineering because after unionized government employees have been obliterated it’s the last well-paying job where employees sometimes feel bold enough to take principled stands against management.
It started with Visual Studio — the concept was to make programming “easy” enough for a manager to do it and cut out software engineers. Then it was off-shoring. Then it was coding bootcamps (note it isn’t software engineering bootcamps).
Now it’s AI.
The claims of efficiency or productivity are baloney. Companies demand RTO because it’s more satisfying for middle managers to throw their weight around IRL, not because commuting two hours to sit on Zoom calls is more efficient.
They care about control, not efficiency or productivity.
Thankfully we’re really good at reviews. Right?
Oh everyone absolutely loves reviews to bits
I’m fine reviewing, if I’m familiar with the task, codebase and especially if I’ve been involved with the proposed technical solution.
reviewing gen code? Hell, NO!
Because they make loads of code that looks correct (it’s LLMs) but has issues.
I’m not reviewint that butload of code. Just today I had to rollback some shit I “reviewed” a month ago. Huge ass refactor. I reviewed for 1 hour and then I just yolo’d it.
I’m not reviewing anymore.
I believe for simple, common tasks and small projects, it’s at least manageable. Even good, if you are not forced to use AI and can simply choose to what extent you use the tools and its results.
But with enterprise-level coding agents that are supposed to handle issues in long-term projects, the work is shifted to every other phase really, before and after the coding. Initially I thought that proper documentation at least benefits everybody, but prompts and instructions optimized for AI are not necessarily good documentation for humans to read.
Let the AI do the review as well.
