Comment by vishal_new
6 days ago
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
6 days ago
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.
Yeah, I don't think the role of QA is to write automated tests - developers should be doing most of that work.
The best QA people I've worked with didn't write much code at all. You'd give them a new system and they'd find all of the bugs, testing obscure edge-cases that you'd never thought of.
Huh, never thought about QA writing unit tests.
In my limited experience they write test cases, test each story, do regression test, verify bugs from customers. All by hand.
At my current job I don't want to miss them.
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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 the general population earning median wages will have very little sympathy for first world software engineers earning vast amounts of money.
What are you going to tell them? Suddenly you're earning what they're earning for sitting at a desk every day?
General population, you mean non SWEs? Because there are many SWEs around the world who earn median wage and who stand to lose it all as the avalanche of firings is ramping up.
Non SWEs (salespeople, clerks, secretaries, assistants, taxi drivers, writers, 3D modelers, artists, designers) are of course going the same way. Unless they are protected (unionized or such), why would they have sympathy for SWEs? People of our ilk are the ones causing this (to them and to ourselves). What I will tell them is to not repeat our mistake, organize and protest.
There is an entire category of software engineers who exist entirely to knock out features on microservices or do easily automatible QA work whose jobs will disappear.
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
The problems in any domain are infinite. But, alas, money is not.
What are these skills?
This is the magic question that I'm very eager to hear the answer to.
Fundamentally, steering LLMs requires the same structured, logical thought process that is required to write code, regardless of abstraction level. Unlike what HN would have you believe this is not a skill that is equally distributed across the population.
But given the rapid pace at which this technology is evolving, "steering" may very well be ceded to the clankers. LLM agents are fantastic at logical reasoning & any inefficiencies relative to human experts can be circumvented by sheer compute.
Being able to work with an infinite amount of dumb interns that work super fast and have a vast amount of knowledge.