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AI's Impact on Engineering Jobs May Be Different Than Expected

https://semiengineering.com/ais-impact-on-engineering-jobs-may-be-different-than-initial-projections/
44•rbanffy•1h ago

Comments

ihuzaifazahoor1•1h ago
I’ve noticed teams don’t replace engineers, they redistribute work. Senior engineers often gain leverage while junior roles shift toward tooling and review.
cbyteai•1h ago
Mostly reads like another abstraction shift, not a sudden replacement of engineers.
Ancalagon•1h ago
I still feel like with all of these tools I as a senior engineer have to keep a close eye on what they're doing. Like an exuberant junior (myself 10 years ago), inevitably they still go off the rails and I need to reign them in. They still make the occasional security or performance flaw - often which can be resolved by pointing it out.
englishspot•49m ago
I keep hearing about how they're "really good" now, but my personal experience has been that I've always had to clear sessions and give them small "steps" to execute for them to work effectively. thankfully claude seems really good at creating "plans", though. so I just need claude code to walk through that plan in small chunks.
chasd00•42m ago
I was experimenting this morning with claudecode standing up a basic web application (python backend, react+tailwindcss front end, auth0 integration, basic navigation, pages and user profile).

At one point it output "Excellent! the backend is working and the database is created." heh i remember being all wide eyed and bushy tailed about things like that. It definitely has the feel of a new hire ready to show their stuff.

btw, i was very impressed with the end result after a couple hours of basically just allowing claudecode to do what it wanted to do. Especially with front-end look/feel, something i always spend way too much time on.

kevin_thibedeau•27m ago
I asked a niche technical question the other day and ChatGPT found fora posts that Google would never surface in a million years. It also 100% lied to me about another niche technical question by literally contradicting a factual assertion I made in my question to prime it with context. It suffers from lack of corpus material when probing poorly documented realms of human experience. The value for the human in the chain is knowing when to doubt the machine.
XenophileJKO•55m ago
I think one thing here is, don't be fooled by past performance. Capabilities ramp, usage can't mature until capability plates.

I fear the true impact is much different than extrapolating current trends.

tracerbulletx•51m ago
I am very tired of seeing every random person's speculation (framed as real insight) on what's going to happen as they try to signify that they are super involved in AI and super on top of it and therefore still worthy of value and importance in the economy.
jstummbillig•51m ago
Then don't.
Avicebron•44m ago
"Temporarily embarrassed AI hypebeasts"
DiscourseFan•27m ago
Yeah if you actually work in AI you usually can’t say much at all about what’s going on.
volkk•7m ago
the wonderful modern world of "everyone must build their personal brand"
pousada•3m ago
The worst thing is that it works.

(As a musician) i never invested in a personal brand or taking part in the social media rat race and figured I concentrate on the art / craft over meaningless performance online.

Well guess who is getting 0 gigs now because “too few followers/visibility” (or maybe my music just sucks who knows …)

Lramseyer•6m ago
You have to understand the people in the article are execs from the chip EDA (Electronic Design Automation) industry. It's full of dinosaurs who have resisted innovation for the past 30 years. Of course they're going to be blowing hot air about how they're "embracing AI". It's a threat to their business model.

I'm a little biased though since I work in chip design and I maintain an open source EDA project.

I agree with their take for the most part, but it's really nothing insightful or different than what people have been saying for a while now.

Swizec•47m ago
The main thing to understand about the impact of AI tools:

Somehow the more senior you are [in the field of use], the better results you get. You can run faster and get more done! If you're good, you get great results faster. If you're bad, you get bad results faster.

You still gotta understand what you're doing. GeLLMan Amnesia is real.

simonw•35m ago
Right: these things amplify existing skills. The more skill you have, the bigger the effect after it gets amplified.
mikkupikku•29m ago
Agreed. How well you understand the problem domain determines the quality of your instructions a s feedback to the LLM, which in turn determines the quality of the results. This has been my experience, it works well for things I know well, and poorly for things I'm bad at. I've read a lot of people saying that they tried it on "hard problems" and it failed; I interpret this as the problem being hard not in absolute terms, but relative to the skill level of the user.
victrflow•21m ago
Word.
SecretDreams•18m ago
> Somehow the more senior you are [in the field of use], the better results you get.

It's a K-type curve. People that know things will benefit greatly. Everyone else will probably get worse. I am especially worried about all young minds that are probably going to have significant gaps in their ability to learn and reason based on how much exposure they've had with AI to solve the problems for them.

9rx•7m ago
> You still gotta understand what you're doing.

Of course, but how do you begin to understand the "stochastic parrot"?

Yesterday I used LLMs all day long and everything worked perfectly. Productivity was great and I was happy. I was ready to embrace the future.

Now, today, no matter what I try, everything LLMs have produced has been a complete dumpster fire. Not even Opus will follow basic instructions. My day is practically over now and I haven't accomplished anything other than pointlessly fighting LLMs. Yesterday's productivity gains are now gone, I'm frustrated, exhausted, and wonder why I didn't just do it myself.

This is a recurring theme for me. Every time I think I've finally cracked the code, next time it is like I'm back using an LLM for the first time in my life.

xXSLAYERXx•47m ago
Senior dev here 15 years experience just turned 50 have family blah blah. I've been contracting for the last two years. The org is just starting to use Claude. I've been delegating - well copy pasting - into chatgpt which has to be the laziest way to leverage AI. I've been so successful (meaning haven't had to do anything really except argue with chatgpt when it goes off on some tangent) with this approach that I can't even be bothered to set up my Claude environment. I swear when this contract is over I'm opening a mobile food cart.
SockThief•39m ago
That is the most down to earth summary of all things AI I've heard so far! Good luck with the cart and be good. :)
xXSLAYERXx•31m ago
Thank you SockThief!
citizenpaul•38m ago
Can you expand on the tech stack and languages used?
xXSLAYERXx•33m ago
C# / Web Sockets / React. Lots of legacy code. Great group of engineering folks.
chasd00•32m ago
I'm similar ( turning 50 in a couple month, wife+2 kids etc) and was telling my wife this morning that the world of software development has definitely changed. I don't know what it will look like in the future but it won't look like the past. It seems producing the text that can be compiled into instructions for a computer is something LLMs particularly good at. Maybe a good analogy is going from a bare text editor to a modern IDE. It's happening very fast though, way faster than the evolution of IDEs.
falloutx•26m ago
I was saying this yesterday, There will be people building good software somewhere, but chances to it happening in current corporate environment is nearing zero. Change is mostly in the management, and not in the Software Development itself. Yeah we may be like 50% faster but we are expected to be 10x devs.
hibikir•32m ago
You'd have to do even less copy-pasting. The switch to some agent that has access to your source code directory speed things up so much, the time spent pays for itself in the first day.
SecretDreams•20m ago
> I swear when this contract is over I'm opening a mobile food cart.

This is the way. I think I'd like to be a barista or deliver the mail once all the jobs are gone.

Isamu•16m ago
Same, except I am over 60 and when I think of opening a mobile food cart it is sort of a Blade Runner vibe, staffed by a robot ramen chef that grumbles at customers and always says something back to you in some cyber slang that you don’t understand.
jimbo808•7m ago
I have read this same comment so many times in various forms. I know many of them are shill accounts/bots, but many are real. I think there are a few things at play that make people feel this way. Even if you're in a CRUD shop with low standards for reliability/scale/performance/efficiency, a person who isn't an experienced engineer could not make the LLM do your job. LLMs have a perfect combination of traits that cause people to overestimate their utility. The biggest one I think is that their utility is super front-loaded.

If a task before would take you ten hours to think through the thing, translate that into an implementation approach, implement it, and test it, and at the end of the ten hours you're 100% there and you've got a good implementation which you understand and can explain to colleagues in detail later if needed. Your code was written by a human expert with intention, and you reviewed it as you wrote it and as you planned the work out.

With an LLM, you spend the same amount of time figuring out what you're going to do, plus more time writing detailed prompts and making the requisite files and context available for the LLM, then you press a button and tada, five minutes later you have a whole bunch of code. And it sorta seems to work. This gives you a big burst of dopamine due to the randomness of the result. So now, with your dopamine levels high and your work seemingly basically done, your brain registers that work as having been done in those five minutes.

But you now (if you're doing work people are willing to pay you for), you probably have to actually verify that it didn't break things or cause huge security holes, and clean up the redundant code and other exceedingly verbose garbage it generated. This is not the same process as verifying your own code. First, LLM output is meant to look as correct as possible, and it will do some REALLY incorrect things that no sane person would do that are not easy to spot in the same way you'd spot them if it were human-written. You also don't really know what all of this shit is - it almost always has a ton of redundant code, or just exceedingly verbose nonsense that ends up being technical debt and more tokens in the context for the next session. So now you have to carefully review it. You have to test things you wouldn't have had to test, with much more care, and you have to look for things that are hard to spot, like redundant code or regressions with other features it shouldn't have touched. And you have to actually make sure it did what you told it to, because sometimes it says it did, and it just didn't. This is a whole process. You're far from done here, and this (to me at least) can only be done by a professional. It's not hard - it's tedious and boring, but it does require your learned expertise.

wallstbot•6m ago
That you started at around 35 is a salient point, no? What did you do before?
boogrpants•44m ago
The biggest impact in engineering jobs is end of ZIRP fueled trickle down Ponzi schemes.

It's why Elon and others had been pushing the Fed to lower them.

Am in my late 40s working in tech since the 90s. The tech job economy is way closer to the pre-2010s.

Whole lot of people who jumped into easy office job money still living in 2019.

llmslave•43m ago
Its pretty clear that any white collar work where the outputs can be verified and tested in a reinforcement learning environment, will be automated
3vidence•14m ago
Ironically I feel like our QA team is busier than ever since most e2e user-ish tests require coordinating tools that is just beyond current LLM capabilities. We are pumping out features faster that require more QA to verify.
llmslave•6m ago
this is just an intermediate thing until the tooling and models catch up
firasd•41m ago
It's puzzling to me that all this theorizing doesn't just look at the actual effects of AI. It's very non-intuitive

For example the fact that AI can code as well as Torvalds doesn't displace his economic value. On the contrary he pays for a subscription so he can vibe code!

The actual work AI has displaced is stuff like: freelance translation, graphic illustration, 'content writing' (writing seo optimized pages for Google) etc. That's instructive I suppose. Like if your income source can already be put on upwork then AI can displace it

So even in those cases there are ways to not be displaced. Like diplomatic translation work can be part of a career rather than just a task so the tool doesn't replace your 'job'.

relaxing•37m ago
Really dislike this style of clickbait headline where there’s zero indication of what the point of the article is.

What impact, what expectation, how uncertain is this assessment of “may be”? Are you feeling understimulated enough to click and find out?

simonw•30m ago
Important to note that this article is specifically about chip design engineering jobs - it's on an industry publication called Semiconductor Engineering.
RicoElectrico•20m ago
If AI would ever become sentient, it surely will kill itself after having to endure Cadence and Synopsys tools.
SoftTalker•19m ago
"Most people who drive cars now couldn’t find the radiator cap if they were paid to, and that’s fine."

That's not fine IMO. That is a basic bit of knowledge about a car and if you don't know where the radiator cap is you will eventually have to pay through the nose to someone who does know (and possibly be stranded somewhere). Knowing how to check and fill coolant isn't like knowing how to rebuild a transmission. It's very simple and anyone can understand it in 5 minutes if they only have the curiosity.

megaman821•7m ago
I have never cared for decades and now my car doesn't even have a radiator. Seems to have worked out well for me.
linuxftw•7m ago
Ironically, many cars don't have radiator caps, only reservoirs.

Modern cars, for the most part, do not leak coolant unless there's a problem. They operate a high pressure. Most people, for their own safety, should not pop the hood of a car.

ericmcer•19m ago
"in the 1920s and 1930s, to be able to drive a car you needed to understand things like spark advance, and you needed to know how to be able to refill the radiator halfway through your trip"

A car still feels weirdly grounded in reality though, and the abstractions needed to understand it aren't too removed from nature (metal gets mined from rocks, forged into engine, engine blows up gasoline, radiator cools engine).

The idea that as tech evolves humans just keep riding on top of more and more advanced abstractions starts to feel gross at a certain point. That point is some of this AI stuff for me. In the same way that driving and working on an old car feels kind of pure, but driving the newest auto pilot computer screen car where you have never even popped the hood feels gross.

JasonSage•5m ago
Do you think nobody felt that way about cars?

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