Hacker News Reader

Comment by ldjkfkdsjnv | Hacker News Reader

I think we are underestimating the change that is about to occur in this field. There is a certain type of mind that is good at programming, and the field will no longer reward that type of mind as AI takes over. The smaller, gritty details of making something work will be smoothed over. Other types of person will be able to build, and might even surpass traditional "10x engineers", as new skill sets will take precedence.

View on HN

There is no such a thing as a 10x engineer. Anyone who appears as 10x only do whatever that maintains that illusion. (don't help anyone else, don't do support, keep all knowledge in head, bad documentation, etc)

But many would list the things you've just listed as table stakes for any 10x engineer.

After a wave of AI-written slop floods the software supply chain, there will be even greater demand for 10x software engineers.

This is cope, fixing ai slop will just be what software engineering becomes. Its the new requirements of the job, not a failure state

Eh, it's a great tool, but I'm still interested in understanding the world rather than proudly being incurious of it.

How are you going to tell spam from ham if you don’t understand the underlying systems and their constraints? And how are you going to gain that understanding if software engineering doesn’t value that anymore, and won’t educate people to gain it?

I dunno, it just doesn’t seem, like, all that thought out to me.

You act like software engineering is a respected field.

Most of our job is fixing slop. Previously this was slop produced by low quality cut rate developers in countries known for outsourcing. Now it’s just fixing AI slop and foreign outsourced slop.

And you act like software engineering is whatever it is you're apparently doing for a living. This field is big, and there are more corners in it than just line-of-business CRUD apps.

dude businesses already outsource software to the lowest wages possible. they just check to see if it works, and if it does, they ship it

Offshoring adoption, and the low quality of related projects, has proven this is not the case.

How so? The number of American software jobs is still way up from when people said software was "dead" thanks to offshoring. By something like 50x!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com