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Software Programming

The Software Engineering 'Squeeze' (manager.dev) 104

Posted by msmash from the closer-look dept.
Software developer Anton Zaides argues that software engineers have had it easy over the decades and the "best profession" on earth deserved the wake up call. He writes:It's not just one of the hardest times, it's also one of the most exciting.

I'm hugely optimistic about the software engineering career. All those companies started by vibe-coders all around you? Many will succeed, and will need great engineers to scale up.

Some engineers understand this, and use the chance to skill up. To succeed, you'll probably need all the skills of an engineer, some of a PM, and even a bit of design taste. It's not just about shipping code anymore.

But if you work as a code monkey, getting detailed tickets and just shipping them, you've done this to yourself. You won't be needed pretty soon.

I believe there are too many mediocre engineers, but also not enough great ones.

The Software Engineering 'Squeeze' More | Reply

The Software Engineering 'Squeeze'

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  • I agree (Score:5, Insightful)

    by SuperKendall ( 25149 ) on Friday July 04, 2025 @03:04PM (#65497242)

    Yes AI may be generating a lot of code now. But you need someone to find where what was generated was weak, or inefficient.

    Over time the quality of generated stuff will improve, but since so many companies are generating a lot of code today that is a LOT of technical debt that is building up rapidly.

    I especially agree that now is the time to round out your skills - as stated, study design, study platforms you connect to but do not develop on. Study AI tools, find out when they work for things you work on and know well - and when they do not.

    Good luck out there everyone!

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Probably not. For very simple business code, code review by somebody really competent may be faster and cheaper than writing the code. At a pretty low threshold, code review gets more expensive and harder to do than assuring correctness by design. Generating code bt AI and then fix it is not an approach that can work beyond very simple things.

    • Yes AI may be generating a lot of code now.

      I'd love to have a world graph of code reuse. I predict that the number of LOC under maintenance is increasing hugely as automated interns (AI) keeps making it much easier to make many slightly different and carefully incompatible variants of the same code. Whilst I'm sure you could also use the AIs to find duplication, that will be harder and more dangerous than just leaving it in most cases so won't get done.

    • Re:I agree (Score:5, Insightful)

      by PPH ( 736903 ) on Friday July 04, 2025 @04:59PM (#65497508)

      Yes AI may be generating a lot of code now. But you need someone to find where what was generated was weak, or inefficient.

      Ever work with a couple of clowns who can't code worth shit? I have. And most of the time it's easier to throw their stuff out and start over.

      • There was one guy we had, every time I came across any of his code I just immediately deleted it. If it even remotely worked it was usually an accident.

    • But you need someone to find where what was generated was weak, or inefficient.

      You need processes and tools to do that, not a person doing it directly.

      And this isn't a new problem that AI created, it's always been an aspect of software development on large projects.

  • Yea. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by SlashbotAgent ( 6477336 ) on Friday July 04, 2025 @03:06PM (#65497244)

    But if you work as a code monkey, getting detailed tickets and just shipping them, you've done this to yourself.

    I've seen this sort of victim blaming used to excuse automation sending people to unemployability in the past.

    Fuck this jackass and every other one like him. Fuck them right in the head. I hope he vibe codes himself off a cliff. That's my sentiment and I'm not even a programmer/developer.

    • Here's the key:

      Some engineers understand this, and use the chance to skill up.

      Yeah, I've seen this before. They want you to get "skilled up" then don't give you any more pay for being a better worker. Thing to look out for are those very expensive training courses the company selected and then "pays for" which are utterly useless. But it puts you on the hook for a multi-year commitment and no raises because you got that very expensive training for free out of the goodness of their heart!

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by uncqual ( 836337 )

        Being "skilled up" mostly just means that you keep your skills matched to the relevant skills for today's job market, not yesterday's job market. In a field that changes fairly quickly, that is a continuous process for anyone who wants to remain employed in the field over a full 45-50 year career.

        One problem is that people who are attracted to a field may have unique skills and, more critically, interests that align with the field at the time the enter it. However as the field changes in what it requires, t

        • Indeed. I used to love web work, but then came React, and other oh-so-clever traditional software engineer derived tools...totally ruined the wonderfully quick feedback. Now it isn't any better than any of the more traditional software development stuff...

          Fortunately, it coincided with retirement, so all this is rather interesting to watch.

      • Yeah, I've seen this before. They want you to get "skilled up" then don't give you any more pay for being a better worker.

        This is a very basic part of software development and always has been. There's always some framework, API, or concept that you have to learn to get some particular job done. They're paying you because you have the aptitude to pick up new skills quickly. I've only been doing this four'ish years and found that out before I even started (I am entirely self-taught -- no CS to speak of -- the only credential I can offer you is that I'm paid within the top 5% of software engineers at roughly $277k gross on my las

        • If you think you deserve more pay, then ask for a raise. If you don't get one, but you still think you deserve more anyway, then go apply for another job, either within the same company or with another company.

          My dad worked mostly in supermarkets, both on the floor and in management and he told me once that when somebody asks for a raise it's because they need/want more money and if you turn them down, they're still going to need/want that extra cash, so if you turn somebody down for a raise, start looki

      • Skilling up gives you more flexibility in looking for a new job, or for growing into a new role at your current employer. Life isn't instant ramen that is finished after 90 seconds in the microwave. There's no set time for the pay off of your efforts in your own education and career growth.

        Thing to look out for are those very expensive training courses the company selected and then "pays for" which are utterly useless.

        Thankfully my own employer usually avoids that nonsense. But we are big enough to have developed a lot of in-house introductory courses and self-directed programs. Sadly, most of the commercial courses are total garbage a

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by djinn6 ( 1868030 )

      So much anger over something very few people even want to do in the first place and even fewer with the capability to do.

      The reality is, writing the code has always been a small part of a software developer's job. I for one am quite happy that I will never have to fully type out "for (int i = 0; i size; i++) {" ever again, or have to Google how to filter the results from "element.querySelectorAll(...)" because some idiot decided that returning a list of items as an array was not exciting enough.

      • The reason why that function doesn't return an array is because that would invoke tons of overhead, not because some idiot was trying to be fancy.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by djinn6 ( 1868030 )

          So their implementation sucked and the guy couldn't be bothered to fix it properly.

          Optimization is almost always a bad reason to design an API a certain way. Over time, the reason for the optimization will most likely disappear, but the API design will live on for a very long time, especially when you're talking about something as widely used as a core language feature.

          • The functionality is fine, you can iterate that object the same way as an array. You just can't "filter" it because that's a weird thing to do. And if you don't want to type out for loops or google those things you can set up snippets in your editor.

    • skill up to what? To being a middle management douchebag that sells and defends shit products?

      Being a code monkey is a coping mechanism : give me work, I do work, I don't care about product. That's life in a bigtech company.

    • Life is competitive, and always has been. And nobody owes you a job.

      Tech changes over time and everyone must adapt to it. That's going to put some people out of work. It's not a happy moment for them, but seriously, that's is how it has always been.

      There is this nice theory that, by working together, we can all make sure everyone has enough without ever facing the horror of being put out of a job and needing to take unpleasant work to earn a living. Well, human nature doesn't really make this tenable, w

      • I know a few programmers. Personally I am glad AI is threatening their job a little. Of course plenty are nice and mature people, but... a lot are also just over confident arrogant pricks. Low people skills, think they are on the top of the world (Rockstar programmer!) because they can use pointers. Loud and oversimplified opinions on any topic. You get the picture. Of course these kind of people work everywhere, but in my little world they seem to be more prevalent in programming related jobs. You do not n

  • Sleazy McToolbag (Score:5, Informative)

    by ihavesaxwithcollies ( 10441708 ) on Friday July 04, 2025 @03:17PM (#65497254)
    This "author" is a sleazy toolbag. Just some rando spouting a stupid opinion. This idiot probably has a slashdot account.

    Great software engineers are not afraid that AI will take their jobs - because they know it just can’t.

    His logic in his writing invalidates his whole thesis. Rambling moron.

    Also, I don't need to do 3 fucking jobs to succeed!

  • I will defend the mods/editors until the cows come home. But, obviously a slow news day. Thanks for trying to find something!

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward
      It is a reasonable exercise of editorial judgement to raise an article from yet another in the legion of grandstanding narcissistic cunts, to give us vultures something easy to feed upon.

  • Not all of us can be the genius this guy clearly thinks he is. We do our job, work hard and earn money to pay the bill's. What we dont need is to be patronised by self regarding arrogant Gen Z foetuses like this who presumes the little people didnt do enough to help themselves when they had enough on their plate just making ends meet.

    Well here's a heads up Anton - one day YOU will be surplus to requirements too. Enjoy.

  • My perspective (Score:5, Insightful)

    by MpVpRb ( 1423381 ) on Friday July 04, 2025 @03:25PM (#65497274)

    I learned software engineering in the 70s. Back then there were not very many of us and even fewer who were good at it. Based on the laws of supply and demand, we were paid well. Then the word spread that software engineering paid well and a flood of people of varying talent jumped in. The word on the street was that everybody should learn to code. The truth is, talent is real. It takes a special kind of mind to be good at designing software. During the peak of boom times, lesser talented people got hired. Now, powerful tools are making the job easier. Change is coming and the best of the best will adapt and thrive. The others, not so much

    • i agree. I am both software and hardware. For example, I did design and build a Z80 computer, and wrote software for it. It seemed so easy for others to claim what a Software Engineer is, but they really have no idea what it is.
    • The problem is that a lot of people became programmers, even though they don't enjoy programming. And that makes the job less enjoyable for those of us who do.

  • yep. Vibe coding is no joke. 100% of my code is now generated, no more team needed, delivered in a fraction of time and money.

  • manup and go union the big boss man gets big tax cuts works need an union to get higher wages!

    • Software aint like that. It is just a gut feeling, but if you are good at software, you are apart from other professions. Unions are not factored into this. It seems wrong, and weird, but this is a different age than that of car assemblers.

  • Software engineers are usually not engineers (Score:4, Insightful)

    by gweihir ( 88907 ) on Friday July 04, 2025 @03:51PM (#65497336)

    Most are low-talent technicians that lack any real engineering education. This comes from lack of requirements and lack of liability.

    And no, "vibe coding" is just one more crappy method that will make things worse.

    • they know a few function calls, are some script kitties, almost anybody can do that.

      • Re:Software engineers are usually not engineers (Score:4, Insightful)

        by gweihir ( 88907 ) on Saturday July 05, 2025 @06:21AM (#65498628)

        Yes. The problems start when you go beyond one simple functionality, when usability, reliability, security, performance, portability or maintainability become a factor. If I remember my Software Engineering class right, maintenance is 80% of the effort put into code and initial creation is only about 20%. Hence you can create a lot of crap with "vibe coding" in a short time and cheaply, but that will get hugely expensive some time later and may even have to be thrown out.

        Does not strike me as somethign that is viable.

  • Author ignores business fundimentals (Score:5, Interesting)

    by sdinfoserv ( 1793266 ) on Friday July 04, 2025 @04:06PM (#65497384)
    I wanted to test AI and and used it develop a time card entry system. I purchased a subscription to Anthropic to get a fell for capabilities. It took literally 4 days from LAMP server spin up to completed system. The AI built the AD authentication, style sheets, database modification, lots of JavaScript for page manipulation, reports and CRUD for about a dozen tables. As I wanted to add features ~ by entering things like, "now add a last updated field on screen X for table y"... Anthropic would spit out the updated SQL to modify the database, updated CSS additions, changes/additions to JavaScript, and new entry screens. Sometimes it would give code sniplets and instruct me where to paste it, other times it would regen the entire page. I thought it was pretty amazing. Overview - the code functional, but not phenomenal, junior programmer stuff. There we some errors and some "why the f*ck did you do that?" moments that I had to fix, and somethings it just didn't understand. For example it was bad at effectively using stylesheets and wanted to put the style in every php page..
    From a business perspective - All business care about is profit. period. If they can slash programmer jobs, they will. Using AI will allow them to easily reduce the number of developers by 1/5 or more. The fact the QA will suffer and in 10 years nobody will understand what's under the skin doesn't matter.- companies will be producing code at less $$ and time per application, which is all that matters and next quarters 10Q report will woo shareholders. The bottom line, there will be fewer developers, the entry market is on it's way to being decimated. And by the way, "vibe coding" is bullshit.
    • A good software Engineer should also learn how to speak, in my humble opinion, to speak in clear, easy to understand terms.
    • By your logic, all code would be written in the poorest parts of Asia or Africa. Why does anyone hire software engineers in Silicon Valley? NYC? Seattle? etc. It seems like the most expensive cities in the world have the most programmers. When money is on the line, cheaper is not better. All it takes is one customer breach to kill your sales for a long time or open you up to some very EXPENSIVE lawsuits. In your example, a time card system...what happens when someone breaks in and tweaks their hours?
      • That already happened. You must not be old enough to remember the millions of programmer jobs that were "off shored" to low wage geographical regions. The trend slowed in the mid 2010's when corporations realized the cost of remote project management, cultural challenges in communication, time zone disparity problems and increasing wages in those once low cost areas.

    • Re:Author ignores business fundimentals (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Tony Isaac ( 1301187 ) on Friday July 04, 2025 @06:04PM (#65497662) Homepage

      Great, now you've got the POC done! Just 99% of the work left to be done!

      I manage three dev teams at a company that builds and sells commercial time card entry systems. In all, we have a couple hundred developers working on the system. We have several million users spread among tens of thousands of companies. I guarantee your AI-built software isn't going to provide competition that our company needs to worry about.

      • You missed the entire point. You're building a monolithic, but likely very adaptable, time card system, and this cranked out likely a single page application (not literally but getting an idea of scale and complexity) with a $20-200 subscription. Your massive system won't mean crap if a business can get an app made to their specifications in a couple days vs the weeks, months, year's long process to spin up another copy of what you're peddling. HR needs to know how many hours employee X spent to pay them. A

        • You are saying a bunch of words that you think are true, but you have no idea how my company's time card software is constructed, or what it can do, or how long it takes to stand up a new customer.

          A small customer can be operational in less than a day. A big one, like a city or state government, or a university system, definitely takes time, and your AI-built software isn't going to be able to handle the complexities of such systems.

          Is the AI software capable of complying with California meal break rules? I

      • This was test project to learn some of the capabilities of AI, not a retail system. I do not work for an organization that sells any software. I believe the best way to understand something is to actually try it, rather that rely on the opinion of others.

        • I agree that's a good approach! For that reason, I use AI every day, throwing all kinds of prompts at it to see what it can and can't do. My experience with it tells me that it's a very, very immature product, and that it's going to take a long time before it can wipe away whole swaths of white collar jobs, including programmers.

  • Why, exactly, are we listening to someone who passed through software engineering on his way into management claiming that software engineers(presumably now his direct reports) are the most spoiled profession and how it's just terrible that nobody is willing to spend several years working for peanuts to get experience(because the argument from race to the bottom is persuasive now?)

    He then meanders over to the theory that if you are a real actually-good software engineer your job is clearly safe, because AI isn't set to replace you; ignoring the fact that entire teams, competent and all, get wiped out when the money sloshes a different way all the time; and 'AI' has seen some cataclysmic levels of frankly irrational money sloshing by some mixture of conmen, cultists, and the good old 'animal spirits' of that definitely rational market.

    It's basically the same story about 'web developers' who learned how to knock together some HTML at a bootcamp somewhere, or 'IT' back when that was something where the money attracted some people who had no interest, warmed over and presented as novel; with a side helping of boundless(but notably vague) optimism about all the cool new AI-things that are being created that will need real engineers at some point.

    Honestly, it's almost impressive how he manages to be so grating while being so vacuous.

  • This article reminds me of the many https:://joelonsoftware.com [https] blog articles from 20 years ago. (See the organized lists at the bottom of the front page.)

    Especially relevant to Zaides' article:

    "Hitting the High Notes" https://www.joelonsoftware.com... [joelonsoftware.com] is about the benefits of hiring the very top-notch developers, is especially relevant.

    "The Law of Leaky Abstractions" https://www.joelonsoftware.com... [joelonsoftware.com] is about how developers still need to understand details about how lower-level abstractions actually

  • Many will succeed, and will need great engineers to scale up.

    ... giving up on AI generated code already?

  • Don't deserve it (Score:4, Informative)

    by butlerm ( 3112 ) on Friday July 04, 2025 @05:02PM (#65497516)

    Very very few software developers deserve the title "engineer" at all, and not just because they haven't or couldn't pass the FE exam. Software quality has been in free fall for a couple of decades now for a variety of reasons. That is not all the software developers fault of course, but if you can't write code in some serious high performing programming language that could be put in ROM and perform according to spec without any serious bugs for at least a century you are basically incompetent compared to video game programmers who used to count cycles on 8 and 16/32 bit machines and produce reliable, nearly bug free software that was often burned into ROM and still works in emulation today or write code that could control safety critical embedded equipment where failure means death or injury, human spaceflight controls with similar consequences, or any kind of software where a major failure means a financial or other catastrophe that results in human suffering, major loss of life, disclosure of massive amounts of information like that you *definitely* do not deserve the title "software engineer" at all.

    Ask a real engineer sometime, someone that deserves the title - they operate under such constraints as a matter of course, if they fail to do their jobs bad things like I described happen, and the professional ones bear personal and professional liability if a design for something like a bridge or a building catastrophically fails. There was a time when if an architect or engineer designed a structure that failed and killed someone, the consequence was the death penalty or at least permanent revocation of their professional license.

    It would be nice to bring that level of seriousness and quality, reliability, and performance back instead of cutting and pasting random bits of (possibly low quality "AI' generated) code and tweaking it until it pretends to work like someone with a seventh grade education and then shipping the abysmally low quality result every couple of weeks and planning to fix the bugs sometime in the next decade if you or someone who works there or who calls the shots ever gets around to it at *all*. Some who claims to be a software developer (or worse a "software engineer") should act like they are smarter or at least more responsible than a fifth grader.

    • The quality level that you are talking about is not merely a matter of skill on the part of the developer, but also time. The formal methods used that produce that level of performance and perfection take a long time to apply, no matter how good one is.

      The *primary* reason why most software doesn't perform at that level is this: time costs money. Software that is thrown together quickly, and as a result has bugs, will be available for purchase much sooner, and will cost far less (mainly because it cost fa

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by butlerm ( 3112 )

        I generally agree with all that, but I am still not impressed. It is partly due to rapidly declining educational standards where newly graduating programmers need to have remedial classes so they know how and are not afraid to make a phone call or write an email in complete sentences. Writing a compiler for a serious programming language? Apparently that is just short of unheard of, and when I was in school you practically couldn't graduate in computer science without taking a class like that and almost

        • I remember once, back in the late '80s, doing some contract programming for an insurance company, as part of a team putting together a package for doctors to use to report claims. DOS was still king and the best CPU was a 486 so memory was limited. As we couldn't expect our customers to have huge amounts of RAM by those standards, or have their machines well optimized, there was a specific minimum amount of available RAM expected. In fact, we had one test machine with exactly that much memory and if the
  • cleaning up after idiots is what he's describing

  • "Vibe coding" makes POCs (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Tony Isaac ( 1301187 ) on Friday July 04, 2025 @06:06PM (#65497674) Homepage

    It's valuable to be able to throw together a POC in short order. But the journey from POC to finished software, is a long and winding one. These new startups are going to quickly find out that scaling up is *hard* and vibe coding won't get them there.

  • A lot of people work in scrum shops that try to do agile development. I've been there myself, you betcha.

    Everything is run using Jira. You attend a morning standup with your team and discuss the tasks and bugs related to the current sprint. You get assigned enough of it to keep you busy that day or the next. There is never a Jira ticket that says "design and build something cool that will take you several weeks, and use some new language or paradigm that the team isn't already familiar with but you would le

  • I really enjoyed working as a mediocre code monkey. Retired now, fortunately - good timing.

    I wonder how you get the set of skills he describes if it doesn't involve code monkey work at some time or other. Skills like that don't just appear out of nowhere...they require experience on lower levels.

  • which language or sub language or framework for vibe coding directions do you suggest?

  • > Every doctor youâ(TM)ve met could probably become a software engineer. Same for most lawyers.

    I dont know how many doctors or lawyers this guy has met, but I'm guessing zero.

    I have yet to find a single doctor or lawyer who could learn to code.

  • Has this guy ever held a real job with a company creating a product used by customers? I only get a vague description, and hopefully, I can figure out what the customer really wanted.
  • A co-worker told me that AI is like working with a jr programmer, who never says no, and constantly lies. AI has no ability to say "I don't know", it will always deliver an answer, because most AI is a neural network, which is just a giant pachinko machine. So whatever AI spits out, you have to be able to have programmed it to know if it is good code or not and fix any flaws. To me this seems exactly like the offshore developer craze in the 80s and 90s. I have worked with lots of very talented overseas
  • Software and engineering don't go in the same sentence. Peek under the hood, and you'll find a tangle of spaghettified, hastily patched code.

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