Software engineer, here. Yep, the burnout is real. I consider myself fortunate, however; with the skyrocketing cost of AI, my employer has been urging us to do as much as possible by hand lately to cut back on token usage.
I think that’s pretty much where the entire industry will go soon.
Huh. Maybe I will have a shot at getting a job… Oh, wait, I have 35 years experience, am over 50 and have been unemployed for 16 months. Never mind.
I gave up the humiliating shit show called a job search 3 months ago, and frankly my last job killed any interest in software development anyway.
It’s all idiots telling professionals they’re wrong and incompetent while blaming them for the ongoing production failures we solved and explained every month for a year but still can’t get the code past review because “it does too much”. 30 fucking lines of code “does too much”. Pompous morons.
We’re a threat of competence, and they’re excising us relentlessly. I will laugh bitterly as I watch the soon to be torrent of fiascos and lamentations these idiots spout while still finding a way to blame software engineers.
I’m sorry that happened to you. I’ve also seen it happen to a lot of very good engineers I’ve known over the years. It’s truly insane. I know some people who’ve had to dip into their 401k accounts early just to keep their heads above water, and it’s going to be an economy-wide disaster soon.
Yeah, I didn’t want to retire yet, but like my father before me, the choice was not mine. I saved enough that I should be able to actually retire and survive on part-time low income jobs. Unless the market crashes for a year straight cuz after that I got to start selling stocks.
Hey are you me?!
Yeah I wonder how low I will go for a job, it’s not bright exactly…
If, like me, you took it on faith (at the age of 23) that social security will be gone by the time I retire, you have been saving and investingcas much as possible. Then you can get by on low-end work.
Remember, jobs don’t really give you prestige. A job is a job. The issue is whether it can help you pay your bills or not.
Note that Social Security is slated to not have enough money for full payments 3 years before I’m due to enroll (for full payments). You’d think I’d have earned Millions with my precognitive skills.
¯_(ツ)_/¯
A bit different over here in the EU I guess, but similar too; got my apartment almost paid off, social security is guaranteed, retirement will be like 1k€/m in like 9 years…
Hopefully RAM prices will have fallen by then 😁, or maybe we old C/C++ devs will be the new COBOL guys…
Hope springs eternal. There seems to be a strong movement to make Rust replace both C++ and C#. I should have taken python more seriously when I first saw it in Linux about 20 years ago, given the fever dream that grips the world now.
If I can rekindle the joy I used to have in software, I am going to just do game mods and Android FOSS app development.
Right now the thought of doing development practically gives me hives. Talk about PTSD. The thing I loved since writing assembly on a commodore 64 now brings dread.
I suppose the fact (ha!) that I no longer have to know a programming language (but I have to have several memorized to get through the first interview) should make it easy.
I have to admit my brief forays into local LLM assisted programming impressed me. I just can’t motivate right now to “get serious”.
Remember when Java was going to replace C/C++?
Also, machincode before getting an assembler on the C64! JMP=32 JSR=96
IIRC…
PEEK and POKE mostly, and typing hex codes into a special editor. Remember the games and utilities in the magazines? Also, a page of basic 2.0 code to draw a line And the amazing never before available Sprite Development.
however; with the skyrocketing cost of AI, my employer has been urging us to do as much as possible by hand lately to cut back on token usage.
and the Slop companies are still losing money… the end result still seems to be more expensive, crappier code, yet most companies seem to be so nearsighted they are not jumping into the spike pit face first
Ours is trying to cut everything to the bone to avoid admitting AI is not the future.
It’d be funny if it weren’t so sad.
Cory Doctor’s recent book on Centaurs and Reverse Centaurs is worth reading.
The core idea of that is that centaurs are a human top and machine / alien body, they’re effectively augmented humans with all this technology to help them excel.
Reverse Centaurs are human bodies and machine / alien tops, where the humans are just checking the work of systems and are subservient to them. He points out that that’s one of the fundamental differences between Amazon and the Postal Service is that in the case of Amazon drivers, they basically function as a reverse Centaurs where they are just an appendage of the delivery car, tracked and managed by that car, to do the tasks the car can’t do on its own.
Imagine being a horse waking up with a human torso and micropenis.
Anybody who has worked through the life-cycle of large projects knows that as time passes and the software gets adjusted and expanded, code just accumulates problem and brittleness - especially because multiple different people change it and they tend to each do it their way, often without full understanding of the code base - not just at the code level but also at the software design level - and eventually that code gets so hard to change or fix that a whole new system has to be built from the ground up.
In my experience this happens maybe at around 5 - 8 years of age of a codebase.
So I expect we’re headed for a spectacular industry-wide explosion because using AI code vastly accelerates this because for just about anything but small projects that can entirelly be generated in one go, AI isn’t consistent in coding style, much less software design.
Throwing software engineers at it right now only works if they end up spending even more time reviewing and ajusting the AI code than they would if they did the work themselves, since having AI coding is pretty much the equivalent of outsourcing to a pool of random junior developers.
Hell, even with smaller projects, you’re going to have debug cycles and if AI is driving those cycles, it will be acting as a new coder for each invocation (which happens multiple times per prompt for systems like claude code).
So you’ll get shit like duplicate helper functions, other code not using those helper functions anyways, debug code added and then not removed, errors and warnings using a variety of styles, overly verbose and redundant arguments, support for enhancements that don’t even make sense in that context, confidently incorrect assertions about what is and isn’t happening or possible, etc.
My manager wants me to make a presentation that sells some AI debug solution but the hand holding I have to do for it to actually understand and not give useless conclusions means I don’t even believe in it. Or the case where it did help, turns out it didn’t even use the tools provided by the solution and was just CC.
I’ve mentioned the cycle of being impressed with what these LLM-based systems can do and feeling like I might have been unfairly critical, and then running in to a major issue that justfies the earlier critical view. Last times I mentioned it, I said I was in the impressed (but skeptical) part of the the cycle. Well, I’m back to the “this might just be a complete waste of resources” part of the cycle.
I wonder how many engineers they’ll have to pull out of retirement in a few years to fix a lot flawed logic.
I remember back in the day when they had to pull Cobol programmers out of retirement to update mainframe software because of Year 2000 and they got paid a bundle for it.
Similar thing for customization of older SAP systems after SAP changed the language used to Java but those systems were still done in the old language.
So I expect that freelance senior designer-developers are going to get paid A LOT of money to come fix things in a few years’ time, especially since in places with high AI adoption this is going to be way bigger in terms of size, complexity and seniority of expertise needed that either mainframe code updating for Y2K and updating customizations in old SAP systems.
lol sure they are.
They’re desperately trying to pump this AI shit up with these fake stories before they go public
Investors really are dumber demographic than MAGA.
Well, they are, but not for the takeaway the article gives. The article is so close, but fails to extract the accurate conclusion.
First are what he calls the “lazy” engineers — workers who rely heavily on AI to write code, answer questions, prepare updates, and complete tasks with minimal engagement.
Then there are the “craftsmen,” experienced engineers who bear the burden of understanding, reviewing, and fixing the growing flood of AI-generated code.
This is accurate. You have a set of “developers” who just need to make a good showing on the telemetry, whether it’s “tokens used” and/or prominence in commit activity. They are not held to account on actual productive outcomes, just that they supervised a credible volume of AI activity. If the AI generates code and tests and the AI is satisfied that the code passes the tests, then their job is done. You have another set of developers that have to live with the nightmarish consequences of the first, because they just generated a pile of shit that would have been better not to exist at all.
‘The craft they loved is dead’
Wrong takeaway, the craft is alive, but mismanagement is diluting it with bullshit.
Incidentally, this isn’t new, but the magnitude is new. I have had significant segments of my career consumed by management insisting that I somehow make the bottom dollar offshored developers “productive”, and similar pattern, if they “looked busy”, management was happy, and management didn’t care about whether the work was useful, because frankly they couldn’t tell. They could tell if some volume of “stuff” was happening and they just settled on that, and if the “stuff” alienated customers, well that was the fault of those “craftsmen” for failing to properly manage the output from the “lazy” engineers.
I almost clicked the link until I saw the domain name.
Educate me?
Business Insider articles are generally trash content. They choose provocative headlines and hot-button issues to boost engagement, but once you’re on the site, there’s not actually that much to engage with.
Ahh so much of that nowadays. Probably AI written too, ironically.
Truth. Same with benzinga and Yahoo finance. Most are actually adverse for gold in disguise.
I used to work for a clickbait factory, so I’m familiar with the hallmarks.
They do a lot of “people in the industry are saying x” stories, like this one. The source then will often be a tweet or linked in post with a dozen likes or something, so not the height of journalism.
INB4 “Engineers can’t handle stress, let’s replace them with AI”
FUCKING GOOD.
STOP BUILDING EVIL SHIT.
Yeah, lots of them have been living in the lap of luxury building the tools and platforms that have ruined society, without a second thought about it.
Today software engineers and tomorrow software engineers minus one.
software engineers minus one
software engineerr?..I don’t get it
My old statistics lecturer would write x-¹ as shorthand meaning everything that is not x, I thought it was in more common usage but perhaps not. I know it more generally means the reciprocal, he just expected you to know which he meant by context.
Did they not think to develop a practical skill in case this fad died off?
