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The end is whether the code meets the functional and non functional requirements.

And guess how much shoe companies make who manufacture shoes in sweatshop conditions versus the ones who make artisanal handcrafted shoes?

by kennywinker5 hours ago|

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Ah yes - we should all strive to maximize shareholder value - triangle shirtwaist be damnned.

Btw in my metaphor, we - the programmers - are the kids in the sweatshop.

by raw_anon_11115 hours ago|

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If you are a “programmer” you are going to be the kids in the sweatshop. On the enterprise dev side where most developers work, it’s been headed in that direction for at least a decade where it was easy enough to become a “good enough” generic full stack/mobile/web etc dev.

Even on the BigTech side being able to reverse a btree on the whiteboard and having on your resume that you were a mid level developer isn’t enough either anymore

If you look at the comp on that side, it’s also stagnated for decade. AI has just accelerated that trend.

While my job has been at various percentages to produce code for 30 years, it’s been well over a decade since I had to sell myself on “I codez real gud”. I sell myself as a “software engineer” who can go from ambiguous business and technical requirements, deal with politics, XYProblems, etc

by pjmlp5 hours ago|

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What do you think programmers in offshoring consulting shops are? Sadly.

by raw_anon_11115 hours ago|

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Exactly. I work in a consulting company as a customer facing staff consultant - highest level - specializing in cloud + app dev. We don’t hire anyone less than staff in the US. Anything lower is hired out of the country.

That’s exactly my point. “Programming” was clearly becoming commoditized a decade ago.

by kennywinker41 minutes ago|

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Ah, so you’re happy with the sweatshop existing - and you look down on those who work there. Good to know.

by raw_anon_111117 minutes ago|

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I said nothing about looking down on them - I assure you developers in other countries don’t see themselves in sweatshop conditions.

But while you are clutching your pearls, where do you think your computer, clothes etc are being made?

by bdangubic10 minutes ago|

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I worked with developers from 6 other countries (the “america first” slogan of the ruling part is missing a fine print that should read “americans last”) and not only are they not in sweatshop conditions, most of them live like kings on salaries they are making and are more “white collar” in their country than most SWEs here

by uoaei4 hours ago|

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Functional requirements are known knowns.

Out of bounds behavior is sometimes a known unknown, but in the era of generated code is exclusively unknown unknowns.

Good luck speccing out all the unanticipated side effects and undefined behaviors. Perhaps you can prompt the agent in a loop a bnumber of times but it's hard to believe that the brute-force throw-more-tokens-at-it approach has the same level of return as a more attentive audit by human eyeballs.

by raw_anon_11114 hours ago|

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Are you as a developer 100% able to trust that you didn’t miss anything? Your team if you are a team lead who delegates tasks to other developers? If you outsource non business things like Salesforce integrations etc do you know all of the code they wrote? Your library dependencies? Your infrastructure providers?

by xpe3 hours ago|

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It seems like ^ and ^^ agree to me. Am I missing something?

by raw_anon_11112 hours ago|

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I don’t know. I’m making a point that the only people whose sole responsibility is code that they personally write are mid level ticket takers.

I don’t review every line of code by everyone whose output I’m responsible for, I ask them to explain how they did things and care about their testing, the functional and non functional requirements and hotspots like concurrency, data access patterns, architectural issues etc.

For instance, I haven’t done web development since 2002 except for a little copy and paste work. I completely vibe coded three internal web admin sites for separate projects and used Amazon Cognito for authentication. I didn’t look at a line of code that AI generated any more than I would have looked at a line of code for a website I delegated to the web developer. I cared about functionality and UX.

by pjmlp5 hours ago|

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Yet the people voting with their wallets seem to go with cheaper option, regardless of what hides behind it.

Being shoes, offshoring, Webwidgets or AI generated code.

by kennywinker1 hours ago|

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Sure. People go for the cheapest option that fits their requirements, mostly.

But we’re the shoemakers, not the consumers. It’s actually our job to preserve our own and our peers quality of life.

Cheapest good option possible doesn’t have to be the sweatshop - tho the shareholders of nike or zara would have you believe that - the labor movements of the 19th century proved that’s not the case.