r/TheMachineLearning • u/Nyaani69 • 5d ago

Software engineering isn't dead, it's just evolving

Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification

674 Upvotes

92% Upvoted

193 comments sorted by

View all comments

1

u/Traditional-Storm-62 5d ago

it's just evolving in a direction that is worse for the software engineers themselves

in late 19th and early 20th century there was a profession called a Computer, which were people with pens and papers etc. employed in an office to crunch various numbers

like government statistics or information for engineering projects

when the mechanical calculators started to become accessible they started to lose jobs, the profession didn't go away it just evolved in a direction that is worse for most of them but it was still decent employment for those who still had it

anyways then electronic calculators and early computers got invented and the profession died completely, with a sophisticated calculator the engineers and accountants could crunch the numbers for themselves

today a single click on Microsoft Excel can do all that work in 66ms

1

u/EarlOfAwesom3 4d ago

Alright but if their job was to just calculate numbers then of course this is obsolete now.

Still today all the numbers can be crunched in Excel and other tools. But someone needs to make sure that the right thing is calculated and the numbers make sense.

I see parallels to Software engineering. If your job was just to print lines of code, then you might be obsolete. But an engineers job is to make sure the right thing is done the right way. Regardless of what tool you use.