Comment by GrumpyYoungMan
17 hours ago
> "...stuck with hardware out of passion..."
At least you don't hate your job, I hope? The recent maturation of AI revealed how many people in software seemingly loathe their own profession.
17 hours ago
> "...stuck with hardware out of passion..."
At least you don't hate your job, I hope? The recent maturation of AI revealed how many people in software seemingly loathe their own profession.
> The recent maturation of AI revealed how many people in software seemingly loathe their own profession.
I always had an inkling this was the case, but man it's been depressing to see it laid so bare. So many proudly screaming "I hated programming!". Well, I don't, I love it, and have my entire life, and imagine I'll continue to as long as they will let me...
More relevantly to the article and comment we're replying to: I miss doing firmware engineering. Gosh that is so much fun.
> I miss doing firmware engineering.
I remember my Apple II days (different platform, similarly constrained environment) where every game had a hard real-time multitasking core under all the code. In the Apple II it was particularly critical, because you didn't have programmable sound generators - you had to programmatically change the voltage of the speaker. If you were really crazy, you could do PWM and expect the electronics of the board would coerce your output square wave into something pleasant.
It never worked well, but it was still super cool.
I can assure you the same thing is coming to fw and ee as well. If your in hw because you like building stuff its going to be a fun time to be alive, but there will be large chunks of engineering work that go away.
Oh I'm well aware. It's lagging behind "pure" software, but is catching up.
The only thing I can see that acts as a bulwark is liability, bascially. The FW work I was doing requires a human and a large amount of careful review before acceptance. The "throw slop at the wall" that my current job is okay with won't fly there.
But there's _lots_ of FW jobs in consumer gear that is already filled with god awful slop, so maybe it won't take as long as I think.
2 replies →
> I always had an inkling this was the case, but man it's been depressing to see it laid so bare. So many proudly screaming "I hated programming!".
For personal stuff? Sure.
But I certainly get why people get burned out on corporate programming. It's either tedious busywork following orders designed by architects whose last time writing code was 30 years ago and they never learned anything ever since, waterfall with glaring issues that the lowest rungs are supposed to magically make go away because upper management doesn't want to reset like they're supposed to, or it's "agile" in its various abominations. There's barely any time, budget or possibility left for actually experimenting a bit or for actually crafting out stuff that works. It's all output, output, output, and being micromanaged by Jira or whatever only adds to the dissatisfaction.
Personally, I left the field for good - I'm heading towards electrical engineering. Good luck coding a robot pulling physical wires.
Electrical engineers don't really pull wires ....
Electricians might be temporarily safe from AI but EEs are knowledge workers too.
> how many people in software seemingly loathe their own profession
There will always be people who work to pay the bills, not to answer some inner call. I am happy - don't tell my boss, but I would do my work for free, including meeting users and extracting requirements (some colleagues say I'd be a master interrogator in another universe).
And then there’s those of us that loved writing software and loathe what AI has reduced it to.
[dead]
I could say the same, ee graduate who majored in telecom/RF but there was no work in it (or rather nobody wanted to hire a graduate). I did get hired into power electronics, but the work they needed was in software. Since then it has been redundancies every few years, through automotive application development, some audio visual, and even dev-ops.
The AI trend and yet another redundancy foreced me to reckon with what I hate about software, which is a tech ethos of "move fast and break things" that runs contrary to "measure twice, cut once". AI also transforms my strengths into executive functioning tasks, which are a mental bottleneck.
I think you’re kidding yourself if you think the majority of software engineers are in it for anything other than the money.