Software engineers worry about losing coding skills
12 posts across 5 communities in the last 60 days; 67% from r/cscareerquestions.
“The other gotcha is, devs are super addicted to this stuff. We can see major productivity boost. As a SWE myself, i can't imagine having these tools removed. Business folks too probably see the velocity and things being shipped (sans all the quality control etc). So it's very…”
“A true software engineer would have automated this if it became his day job [re: Software engineers now]”
“What are some good signs that SWE is not the right job for you? I enjoy coding when I’m doing things that interest me (ie making a game) but at work, I do CRUD applications and websites. I love designing the websites and learning about UX principles and web accessibility…”
Some software engineers are concerned that they've lost their ability to code effectively, relying on configuration instead of fundamental understanding. This raises questions about long-term skill retention and the potential for errors in complex systems.
SOURCES (13)
“The other gotcha is, devs are super addicted to this stuff. We can see major productivity boost. As a SWE myself, i can't imagine having these tools removed. Business folks too probably see the velocity and things being shipped (sans all the quality control etc).…”
“A true software engineer would have automated this if it became his day job [re: Software engineers now]”
“What are some good signs that SWE is not the right job for you? I enjoy coding when I’m doing things that interest me (ie making a game) but at work, I do CRUD applications and websites. I love designing the websites and learning about UX principles and web accessibility. However, I don’t enjoy CRUD applications. Databases bore me, backend bores me, if I get stuck I can’t focus and I get distracted from my work. I feel ungrateful for sitting here and not enjoying what I’m doing when the market i”
“I feel like this all happened because companies want everything to move faster and employees are afraid of falling behind their companies' expectation. Also they are expected to adapt to new technologies and trend that can help their company gain competitive advantage. And so when AI came no one knew it would be this bad both for companies and employees in technical debt and cognitive performance (managing agents, cleaning code, outsourcing thinking).”
“Add 50K, maybe not even, and this is most SWEs period. People who make themselves aware of actual competitive salaries are a minority, and incredibly overrepresented in these subs.”
“People need to get paid, and in this economy people will take whatever job they can. But that’s not what the majority of SWEs are doing, and I don’t think it’s what the majority of SWEs will be doing in a couple of years time either. I think what we will ultimately end up with is going to be AI used as a productivity tool, rather than being seen as a replacement for human workers and companies boasting that they’re “ai first” or what ever buzzwords CEOs use to impress investors.”
“There's obviously a ton of anxiety among developers about AI reducing SWE jobs, especially junior jobs. But at the same time there's now an entire category of work where programmers get paid to write coding problems, review model answers, build evals etc specifically to train AI to replace them. So many experienced devs are helping pull the ladder up on juniors. And apparently you don't even know where that work ultimately ends up. Forbes recently reported that these data annotation”
“Is it? Or does it encourage judicious use of a tool and maintain the engineer’s focus on quality outputs? We do have some engineers with larger monthly budgets ($200-$400+), but those were only increased after the engineer requested it and their workflow & code quality was reviewed. My partner’s company handed significantly larger budgets to their engineers, with no oversight or guardrails. And the product, design, and QA teams are now battling absolute code slop in every single PR, because”
“I dunno man. A lot of SWEs I’ve worked with didn’t know much more than their preferred language/framework/tooling. It’s rare to find SWEs who actually understand architecture, networking, etc. They’re out there, just not a lot from what I’ve seen. I’m a “Platform Engineer” / DevOps type, so I might just be biased.”
“SWE has also been unrealistically inflated in demand for years due to a transitionary period, it was already starting to contract before they released the program that could do their jobs cheaper”
“True but the difference between software engineers and more conventional engineering disciplines is in the value of the work done. SWEs don’t necessarily pump out “more valuable” work but the work they do is much more permanent in a sense. A civil engineer designs a bridge and a software engineers refines a search algorithm. Arguably the bridge is the more impressive feat but once the software engineer puts the code into production the rewards are reaped forever.”