what are your thoughts on Software engineer replacement. My team has already seen big reductions. Q/A team is gone. Software Engineer reduced by a third. Scared for the future
what are your thoughts on Software engineer replacement. My team has already seen big reductions. Q/A team is gone. Software Engineer reduced by a third. Scared for the future
Ditching the QA team when the single highest challenge is verifying that vibe-coded systems do what they're meant to is extraordinarily short-sighted.
Personally, the more time I spend working with coding agents the least worried I am for my career. Getting the best results out of them is really hard. They amplify existing skills and experience, so the more experience you have the better.
I believe that many of those saying that they "never write code anymore" or are experiencing "10x productivity," are heavily underestimating (or outright misrepresenting) how much they are guiding the model, and ignoring everything else that goes into shipping fit for purpose software. I frequently see zero measurements or factual arguments supplied to support such claims. I also see many people say that they are "vibe coding," when they are almost certainly reviewing, editing, or otherwise steering the output.
I wonder why there is such a mad dash to trump up the capabilities of coding agents. And why such loose terminology and lack of rigor? I thought programmers were supposed to be rational people (har har!)
Have you seen the automated tests that QA members deliver? My experience is that they are horrible, and it's not so hard to beat that low quality bar with an LLM.
I have a theory: if they were good at writing automated tests, they would have been developers instead of QA engineers.
Not saying that there aren't any high quality QA engineers, I worked with some. But LLM's raised the bar in a way that most QA engineers can't reach.
If you're famous, you'll be fine. If you're in retiring age, you don't care. Otherwise, good luck! We put ourselves on the street by not protesting what is happening.
I think there will be larger markets, more companies, more jobs than before due to AI, but also a very painful transition period
AI reduces the cost of producing software (and other intellectual tasks), which greatly improves the viability for more and more ambitious projects. As far as we know the amount of problems software (and humanity) can solve is unbounded
It feels like the market has shifted in SWE yet again to heavily prioritize a new set of skills, of which those in the top quartile are desired more than ever
What are these skills?
Being able to work with an infinite amount of dumb interns that work super fast and have a vast amount of knowledge.