The defense industry lost the ability to make weapons when crisis hit. The same pattern is eroding software engineering skills. The timelines are identical.
  • Mihies@programming.dev
    672·
    4 months ago

    Author missed one aspect. Even if AI is one day reliable, it’ll most likely be owned by a few companies. What if those companies decide to cut you off?

    • Auli@lemmy.caEnglish
      1·
      4 months ago

      Still done by big companies we can’t afford the cost to train them.

  • skami@lemmy.ml
    211·
    4 months ago

    It’s really sad state programmers (especially juniors) are in right now, I guess it will get worse over time. I had a meeting with recruiters in my university, many of em just said to me send email and useless stuff that don’t go anywhere but couple of em said they’re don’t even hire developers anymore and make AI do the entire job (I went on one of their websites and it didn’t work :)). Also hackathons are really in bad state, most of em advertise ai and vibe coding, idk how anyone can learn from hackathons in this state they are in

    • MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip
      16·
      4 months ago

      Software engineering is comparable to architecture; if you give a rookie professional tooling, they can maybe build a safe shack or tree house. But you wouldn’t want to visit a skyscraper they’ve built.
      Except that architecture has safety codes written in blood. And AI is only good in building lots of walls.

    • HaraldvonBlauzahn@feddit.orgOP
      13·
      4 months ago

      I note that even job offers are written by AI. Every advertisement for, say, embedded developers, seems to use the same generic keywords and interfaces, sprinkled in with words that sound good (like “platform thinking”) but just don’t make sense.

      • Omgpwnies@lemmy.worldEnglish
        7·
        4 months ago

        that’s been job descriptions for software development for decades now, long before LLMs

  • humanspiral@lemmy.ca
    3·
    4 months ago

    I’m unsure the defense industry analogy is correct, although fewer hires does matter. Instead of hires, some people (often deeply unqualified) are now building software for spec to sell to industries that might be charmed/but unqualified to judge the software. Other’s making software for their own personal productivity, with self monetization ambitions, often copying what seems useful to others. It’s unclear whether there are fewer people working on software, or just bigger monolith companies shifting engineers to take on a more entrepreneurial role. That can mean trouble for the larger software companies.

    You could (many have) make the same argument against higher level languages all these years. If no one actually knows assembler and metal networking (or GPU for that matter now) protocols, they can’t possibly make optimized/knowledgeable architecture decisions. The only people allowed to program should be compiler contributors.