Two days ago, I wrote about how some nontechnical folks seem oddly excited about the idea of engineers being replaced by AI. Some people said I was projecting. Since then, I’ve seen someone mock a 25-year-old student pursuing a double master’s, saying AI will take his job before he graduates. I’ve seen someone say engineers should “enjoy their high salaries” while they last, because the clock is ticking. This is exactly what I was talking about. AI isn’t making engineers irrelevant. It’s just revealing who never respected the work in the first place.
I think the non-technical leaders are getting too much heat for this. I know a lot of you techies out there are like "Nobody who is non-technical should be able to tell me what to do" and blah blah blah. When you have experience working for real businesses - not just companies that push software or other online services - but companies that sell real products to people, you get a different perspective. Can communication issues arise between a dev and a business person? Sure. Does your project manager or lead on a project have to be highly technical? Absolutely not. We all have our gifts. Keeping a software development project on track does not require the project head to have an intimate understanding of software engineering. The project lead(s) have to keep things on track and communicate with stakeholders. Done well the devs dev, report to the project leads and your project owners deal with the rest. Most companies of any size don't have devs talking to the CEO or President of company directly. If those top level business leaders had to talk to highly technical devs all day they'd chew their own leg off to get out of the meeting.
"Did we just become best freinds?" 😀
Engineering is not coding, coding is a low level task that is why ai can code . Engineering requires problem solving skills , architecture, design and understanding requirements and drafting solutions before coding
Every time someone post this gleeful bs about AI, check their education. 99% of the times it’s MBA.
You’ll make a ton of money fixing the code for companies that let a vibe coder over promise and under deliver at scale.
I am a Senior Level Software Engineer (with 35 years experience) who had been using A.I. for 7 months straight now for 8-10 hrs. a day. Much of it is good, but even more of it is bad. The Scrum masters, managers and up have no earthly idea of the potential trouble it will bring. It is a disrupter for sure, the industry will never be the same again. It will allow the higher ups to fire the trench workers once again because A.I. doesn't fit the already (destroyed agile model they bastardized). Harsh words? No just the truth. Dear Jesus please be with those who become victims to A.I. My article here describes what's happening but unknown. https://dev.to/jwp/the-platform-explosion-a-fragmented-tech-landscape-117g
in most companies tech departments arent respected or thought of an asset until something breaks or something needs to be developed, engineers, IT workers etc... are an expense on the books until they need a one
I wish more non-technical people understood that programming is to software engineering what stacking bricks is to civil engineers... Could I stack enough bricks to build a 'bridge'? Sure. Would you want to cross it during heavy winds, floods, snowstorms? Probably not. Anyone can write code that 'works' (even AI!), but what happens when the conditions stop being ideal? That's engineering - planning for failures that will inevitably happen, and building resilient/scalable/malleable systems that won't collapse at the first inconvenience.
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5dIt is hard to respect the work that someone does, when whenever they speak about their work, it sounds like they are an alien, speaking some out of this world language. The gatekeeping that software engineers participate in hasn't helped their reputation.