It’s funny to hear developers whine about AI-related job loss. Software typically exists to do things humans would have done manually (and been paid to do). Anyone who’s been a professional engineer long enough has effectively eliminated thousands of jobs. I don’t see a future with fewer engineers than today, but the barriers to entry and the optimal skill sets are changing. That will push some folks out, but it’ll open the door to many who just never groked code.
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On the whole I agree with the article. If orgs push AI onto their devs, the least they can do is enable them to say "NO!" to a massive 5K+ line PRs of gibberish. If you have to use LLMs for coding, at least spend some time producing code that's easy to review (smaller stacked PRs come to mind here). The job has changed either way however. leaddev.com/career-development…
My favourite bit is where “extra lines of code” are touted as productivity gains in software development. No real developer thinks that just producing more code is meaningful. It has to translate to what the customer gets eg more features, less bugs. Thankfully the article points out that the actual returns are marginal.
I can remember a time when the attitude of what I consider good software enngineers was something like: We apply good engineering practices to minimize failure while accepting that failure will sometimes happen, and if it does, we apply equally good engineering practices to deal with it. Listening to some people now, I get the vibes that because there always were bad engineers (true), and we need to be able to deal with failure anyway (true), the first set of engineering practices does not matter and we should focus solely on catching and correcting failure after the fact (😱). This feels akin to saying that we should do away with safety engineering for cars because we should focus our efforts on patching up accident victims instead. #softwareEngineering #softwareDevelopment #programming
