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by raw_anon_11114 hours ago |
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upvoteby kennywinker4 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.

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upvoteby raw_anon_11114 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

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upvoteby pjmlp4 hours ago|
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What do you think programmers in offshoring consulting shops are? Sadly.
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upvoteby raw_anon_11114 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.

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upvoteby uoaei3 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.

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upvoteby raw_anon_11112 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?
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upvoteby xpe2 hours ago|
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It seems like ^ and ^^ agree to me. Am I missing something?
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upvoteby raw_anon_11111 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.

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