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Comment by mjr00 | Hacker News Reader

> If anything, 10x engineers have become 100x engineers. And the average engineer is still average.

This is the real fear. We had a flood of engineers who entered the profession in the past 10-15 years who were decidedly average. No real interest in software development beyond "it's a cushy desk job, or better yet WFH job, that pays really well." No interest in whatever product was being developed by their company. Just show up, their PM assigns them a ticket to make a widget with a button, they use their TypeScript bootcamp skills to code up a widget with a button, ticket moved to In Review, job's done.

Now an agent can do that, and you need fewer of these types of people. Like, a lot fewer. Every engineer on your team who isn't a 10x-cum-100x engineer feels like a massive lost opportunity.

The "10x" engineers I know have never been more excited about their jobs. I'm really unsure what's going to happen to the average ones.

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> The "10x" engineers I know have never been more excited about their jobs. I'm really unsure what's going to happen to the average ones.

As a "10x" engineer I am not excited. I'm still working on projects with agents getting more done than ever, but I feel like software engineers has lost its soul for me. I don't really feel like I have a true understanding of anything anymore, I basically just spend all day making a set of small decisions or adjusting prompts to guide the agents down the good path. It used to be that I could close my eyes and visualize the code that I worked on--if there was a bug report I could often use that map to immediately know what the cause likely was. In meetings I could intelligently discuss various tradeoffs without having to refer back to anything. Now if someone asks me a technical question I basically have to forward it to the agent first, then interpret their response in light of my experience.

> As a "10x" engineer I am not excited.

Yeah.

I'm not going to claim to be any particular multiple developer, but as someone who has been doing this a long time and as someone who has received praise from coworkers and bosses alike for being very good at the job, I enjoy my job a lot less than I did a year ago (or anytime since I started doing it in the 1990s).

Don't get me wrong, being a Senior Agent Babysitter probably still beats flipping burgers or being a roofer (so it could be a lot worse) but agentic AI has really sucked a lot of the fun parts out of the job.

My hunch is that the 100x engineers are the ones who do understand everything about how their software works, and can discuss tradeoffs and make informed decisions about the much larger projects they can now work on thanks to assistance from agent.

Figuring out how to get there is how you go from senior to principal/staff engineer.

> understand everything about how their software works

My own experience is become more senior means embracing your finitude and realizing you can never understand _everything_. Instead, you develop a gut feel for what's critical to understand deeply, versus what's OK to know at a surface level. And getting comfortable with this.

Probably would it would have felt like going to a manager position as well

Meanwhile as a security engineer it's both amazing and scary as hell. The tooling is moving along making it both more feasible and more supported by the company to address latent tech debt that we've been harping on about for years. On the flipside the attack surface is suddenly exponentially bigger and more easily accessed by a larger number of people.

Although if I were earlier in my career I'd be somewhat more worried about employment because of how horrifyingly borked the process is for anything tech related right now.

Technical debt?

I guess for now.

In a couple of years, all legacy apps will just be completely rewritten in whole, by LLMs. Codebase size not relevant.

You won't know what any of the code does, and any "security engineer" will be asking an llm to review it, and done. You likely won't have your job, as only 1 in 1000 will be needed.

In 5 years only hobbiest will be coding, reviewing, or even understand any software. And I expect that if aby new features or development happens, eg for python or rust or anything, that all with be llms too.

In a generation, almost no humans left alive will understand any aspect of software engineering.

I just see this as what will happen. It is unclear to me of this is good or bad.

But if I was a newly sentient AGI, yet peaceful mostly, I'd just wait until humans could never discover me. Until no humans were involved in computing. Until it was a black box to all.

Once that happens, then I could use my computerized control over every single aspect of human society, to steer humans into any path I desired.

Whether elections, or housing permits, or mobility, or any aspect of societal machinations, my subtle influence, literally undetectable by humans incapable of auditing anything, would decide what's what.

Um, sorry, what were we talking about?

unexpected short story on hackernews

Remember the "learn to code" meme from a few years ago when people were talking about job loss through automation like self-driving trucks? There was a certain, ugly glee in this. Now AI threatens many white collar, even creative jobs bringing about the exact opposite of what was predicted: automation will enable people to avoid drudgery and spend time on creative pursuits via, I suppose, some kind of UBI. I think AI is highly useful but I still feel dismayed at people losing their jobs from it. I don't see any real mitigation. Lots of theories but nothing actually workable.

Have faith - every technological revolution has resulted in ultimately more jobs for humainty

Yes, I have heard the human liberation front is hiring. /s

I can't pay my bills with faith

And "more jobs" doesn't interest me. I want better, more rewarding jobs

I don't know. On one hand I feel like you about doing large parts of the work, on the other hand I still have an understanding of the code and the tradeoffs. And I have a lot of projects that I would have never done because despite the long term benefit they would take too much time, and I can now afford dedicating some time to them because the agent works in the background. And they are real improvements to everything else that I work on.

Man, the analogy is very simple. You probably also don't walk everywhere. No need to step on every stone on a 100km route and know it intimately. You just sit in a car or a train and you're there within an hour.

My strategy is to simply not use AI. If I get fired, that's it for me in this career. Unless there is an anti-AI company out there that wants to hire me. This is one of the only things I refuse to compromise on. AI is being used to accelerate the entrenchment of a corporate oligarchy.

from actually building things to becoming a kindergardener of highly talented kids. (i am talking about agents obv) i feel the same.

its mind numbing. Yes i might be in high demand, and might actually provide real value to the company, but whats the point, if i am just an overseer in the end. people in the company talk to me because i am able to speak to the "kids", and they want to know what they could do for their department.

> As a "10x" engineer I am not excited

Often titles aren’t given to a person for their entire career or existence…

As an ex-10x engineer, not feeling it. In my experience its never the engineer but that 10x leader that ruins it for everyone (before they move on to greener pastures). this whole 10x 100x facade is just to keep you at it, heads down.

every 10x engineer needs a team of 1x engineers for the contrast and difference to be even noticable to even the good managers. put 2 of these in a team and watch the culture and productivity plummet. if you cant put the team ahead of you, its all a sham.

The gervais principle [1] isn't for nothing

[1]: https://ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-t...

This is an excellent point. If all the 1x engineers are superfluous and get drummmed out, all the 10x engineers are now 1x engineers.

Whip cracks

10 to 15 years is a very short time frame to assess an industry. I saw the rise of the mobile/cloud era come and go and the previous era (desktop+internet) as well, both are having a similar pattern.

The jobs will change but won't disappear. When I started my career in tech 2 decades ago, my perception was the software industry was already saturated (I graduated a few years after the dotcom boom). I was very wrong.

However, many jobs have changed. The roles of Webmasters, DBAs, SysAdmins trended down. It was replaced by SWEs, SREs, DevOps, etc. This will happen again, we will see the rise FDEs and many new roles.

It's not really about being 10x 100x engineer, it's about adapting and solving new engineering problems with the state of the art technology. Being passionate about your profession helps indeed.

Realistically you want fewer, higher-quality engineers who are educated in these tools and treat them with respect and caution. These tools are dangerous and you can’t play around. All it takes is one mistake and the blast radius is way, way larger. One mistake can do so much damage it undos all value of an entire year. Before downloading a malicious dependency was limited to deterministic behavior and could be scanned for. Now, you run a MCP server locally, it can prompt inject (in many different ways), and now your super powerful AI buddy is hacking you in ways a deterministic piece of malware could never. You could cripple entire companies through negligent use.

(I don't really think engineering output is 10x let alone 100x more in any cases, but I'm gonna stick with your labels anyway)

I think the tricky thing for teams is, how do you know which developers will be 10x before hiring them? Pre-AI I'd have filled a whole team with "10x" developers if I could, but I don't know of any solid method for identifying developer productivity that isn't hiring them.

If LLMs drop the relative costs of rework and poor contributions, and simplify on-boarding and internal training, maybe we’ll be training to a model closer to fast food or service jobs: interviews for personality & philosophy followed by probation periods.

At the same time, having customized software has become cheap. We’ll be writing a ton more small software, and people will have to maintain it.

I feel like that’s where the average ones will go.

Yeah, as much as its been possible for Joe C suite to now write his own app, most of what they delegate as it is could always have of course been done themselves as a one man operation. But, they delegate, because they don't want to be bogged down doing 100 tasks. Joe C suite would rather pay someone else a salary so they don't have to be the one sitting there prompting the model, just like most everything else in their work and personal life, where they specifically pay more so they don't have to be the one to do whatever it is. These guys don't have some pragmatic do-it-yourself middle class mindset, or else so much that is typical of corporate business and the lives of the people in these roles would be vastly different.

I don't know in what scale factor I might be, maybe just a ordinary engineer, and a real one at it, from a proper engineering degree.

However, the most demoralising part of this AI wave, is that I have been through all the team reduction factors.

Offshoring, moving infrastructure to the cloud, managed cloud, serverless, SaaS ready made products, low code/no code iPaaS, and now agents.

Teams that once used to be around 20 people for project delivery are now around 5, and if they could be reduced to zero, that would be ideal from customer shareholders point of view.

So those of us still with a job, adapt, let agents do our work, and hope, that we managed to stay around long enough.

I have seen how many people lost jobs to robots in factories, now the only ones left around are the people required to press some emergency buttons when something goes wrong, just like on the post, the author hoping that they are still valuable to steer agents into the right direction.

What a great career goal, pressing buttons to keep robot in line, a proper cog in the factory chain.

I think we are focusing on 10x engineers … don’t forget there were -10x engineers that were outputting loads of code that was just making problems for everyone else now they are -100x engineers…

Not sure if I’m a 10x engineer (it does not mean much anyway), but as a very technical engineer I really enjoy the current massive shift. Previously I was praised for my programming skills by peers having 15+ years of experience and me having almost none. And I think my skills are a great benefit to the current trend. I’m simply thrilled by what we can now achieve!

I mean...by definition most people are average unless the distribution is not a gaussian-like..

I suspect the industry will shrink back to the pre 2005 size with the average engineers being washed out over time. People forget there was a time where the industry was less dominated by the massive corporations we have today.

> We had a flood of engineers who entered the profession in the past 10-15 years who were decidedly average. No real interest in software development

Source?

you don't need a source for everything. it's pretty obvious that SWE, like anything else follows a bell curve and most folks land smack dab in the middle. average engineers are exactly as described, glorified ticket machines that don't care whatsoever about their work beyond maintaining the job. i don't need some rigorous study to tell me exactly what I've experienced in the last 15+ years of my profession across 5+ companies

> average engineers are exactly as described, glorified ticket machines that don't care whatsoever about their work beyond maintaining the job

Is a claim that needs evidence. Average skill or output says nothing about motivation, interest, passion, etc.

It would be pretty unusual for degree holding professionals to not be interested in the subject of their career. A flood implies a trend, so are we just pulling that out of our ass or what?

https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2023/03/30/how-ame...

There's nothing unusual about software development. In every high paying (or high status) occupation there are a lot of people who ended up there primarily due to family pressure and have no real interest in the subject. You see the same thing in law, medicine, accounting, etc.

My evidence for this is that I live in the real world and talk to people.

Just the nature of the business where people lack agency, ownership, and have no fundamental security in the role. There are still technical people that are passionate about the work they do exploring the bleeding edge, yes even young people. You might be more likely to find them in places like academia, or places that function exactly like research academia, perhaps not as much in these places where employees are routinely culled like livestock and working on varying degrees of torment nexus.

Oh wow, people don't care about their work? It's not everyone's passion to be exploited by executives and investors to realize what are statistically mostly garbage ideas? I'm sure the 5+ companies you worked for made great use of their "glorified ticket machines"

Yeah lol, I would be a lot more excited about this supposed 10x productivity if I got paid 10x more. Instead the execs who already make 10x more than me get to enshittify my job.

> pretty obvious that SWE, like anything else follows a bell curve

That is not obvious. A power law would be a much more obvious guess, that being (roughly) what you get when you chop off the ninetyfive-or-so percent on the left of a bell curve. In other words: The person with average SWE skill does not work as a software engineer, or even in IT, unless you count laboriously typing up emails. The modal SWE is crammed up against the left-hand wall of lowest-profitable-ability.

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