> Your real job as a software engineer isn’t to write code. It’s to translate hand-wavy business requirements into detailed specs that a computer can follow.
> Your job is to ask questions and to find edge cases that the product people didn’t think of. Your job is to help operations define processes well enough to be automated.
Right now it takes 5 to 10 years to train a human who already knows how to code to do this. Some never learn.
I think we're safe for a while.
Engineers don't "write code", they build solutions. We just happen to use code to do it. And we happen to manually type that code. Even if an AI could type it for you, you'd still need someone to build the solution.
Even with currently available programming techniques, simply getting many coworkers to move from "WET" to "DRY" can be a daunting challenge.
Many people just hate abstractions. ML / AI tools seem to often just boil down to larger aggregations of abstractions (which require some training and/or experience to learn). I guess the "we enjoy [lots of] typing" crowd will go the way of the dodo as the tooling moves up abstraction levels. I hope they don't suck me down with them :-(
(yes, I'm glossing over the requirements gathering aspect of the comment to carp about the construction aspect, but the same strategy of abstraction/investigation, or not, applies)
> Your job is to ask questions and to find edge cases that the product people didn’t think of. Your job is to help operations define processes well enough to be automated.
https://medium.com/swizec-s-nightowls/what-should-you-learn-...
Right now it takes 5 to 10 years to train a human who already knows how to code to do this. Some never learn.
I think we're safe for a while.
Engineers don't "write code", they build solutions. We just happen to use code to do it. And we happen to manually type that code. Even if an AI could type it for you, you'd still need someone to build the solution.