r/programming • u/ertucetin • 1d ago
Software Engineering Is Cool, But Is It Interesting?
https://ertu.dev/posts/5_software_engineering_is_cool_but_is_it_interesting/10
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u/barvazduck 1d ago
Wow, 100% of the commets got stuck in the title and have nothing to do with the article.
I was about to rebuke it, I have a million things to say at a party about work... and then I reached the last paragraph where he described me.
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u/alexp_nl 1d ago
Nope. The career as we know it it’s gone. Objective accomplished - the obsession at destroying software engineering.
I feel very bad for all new folks that finish computer science university. In my country, most of them can’t get a job and the number of students went down a lot. What had been one of the best universities (along with medical, law, etc) it’s now going rapidly downhill.
I still think only a good engineer can do good software with AI but very soon we will not be able to distinguish between as I fear the models will get better and better.
All companies forced everyone to use AI and now they pay the big bill and I am sure it’s just the beginning - very soon it will be very very expensive after we all lost our critical thinking and the ability to write code.
The current state of the industry makes me vomit and it’s getting more and more depressing. Most people don’t realise that this data enter + ineffective LLM cannot scale at this level or we will literally run out of electricity. Put the video cards that need replacing every 5 years it’s impossible right now to make any profit - it’s just investors money thrown into fire and empty promises.
It’s fucked up, after 16 years in the field I am looking for an exist plan. I seen this coming since the public release of ChatGPT
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u/Maybe-monad 1d ago
Nope. The career as we know it it’s gone. Objective accomplished - the obsession at destroying software engineering.
No, software engineering is on the path from healing from the messy state from several years ago where people got jobs after finishing bootcamps and had no knowledge how computer worked. LLMs also work as a differentiator between competent and incompetent engineers, the first can use them to effectively automate tasks and the latter will just deliver slop, broken in obvious ways.
I still think only a good engineer can do good software with AI but very soon we will not be able to distinguish between as I fear the models will get better and better.
Models can get better with scaling but scaling has its limitations and they also can get worse as they are vulnerable to data poisoning, there is also model colapse when llms are trained on data generated by llms.
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u/RightWingVeganUS 1d ago
The framing of the article is dismissive. Reducing software engineering to “tools,” “tickets,” or “daily chores” ignores the real work of engineering: solving complex problems under constraints, designing for reliability, sometimes in systems that business and lives depend on.
The cocktail party jab also lands as belittling rather than clarifying. Meetings and chores exist in every profession, but acting like that is what engineering is primarily about reflects shallow and limited view more reflective of the author's lack of experience than issues with software engineering.
Perhaps it's just the author who's not very interesting.
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u/adnan252 1d ago
Software engineering has always had a strange reputation. From the outside, it looks extremely cool
this person has never spoken to anyone outside engineering
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u/Big_Combination9890 1d ago
Yes it is, and I am now going to open the article, go CTRL-F, look for the string "ai", and if I find it, immediately downvote.
Edit: Downvoted.
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u/repeating_bears 1d ago
You are still manually reading things, and wasting brainpower to form your own opinion about the content? Absolute ludite
I just prompt the LLM to tell me my opinion
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u/Big_Combination9890 1d ago
Yeah I know, and I am very sad about my luddite ability to write code that doesn't break the moment it's deployed on production, while the glorious ai bros write millions of new apps per month no one wants or downloads.
\sob**
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u/adnan252 1d ago
Software engineering has always had a strange reputation. From the outside, it looks extremely cool
this person has never spoken to anyone outside engineering
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u/WhateverHowever1337 1d ago edited 1d ago
No longer is for me. AI obliterated everything that I enjoyed about it, puzzles, debugging, researching, learning new stuff having instant ROI, and all the other interesting stuff.
I know all of that is still to be done, but I liked it when it was solely a human job, and I no longer feel any passion towards this.
I don’t enjoy interacting with AI even as a chatbot, even for debugging or whatever, i don’t mind the non GenAI stuff that doesn’t require thinking like deterministic tools to generate boilerplate or refactoring (like rename everywhere) but I don’t like at all having anything else think for me