The thing I keep worrying about is the fate of the store clerk.
Retail store clerk was a medium skill/medium prestige job up through the 1970's and 1980's. You needed someone who knew all of the prices for their part of the store (to prevent tag switching), who could recognize what was the expensive dress versus the cheap dress, and remembered all of the prices so they could work quickly without having to look things up (1). There would be stories of retail clerks rising up to CEO, and even if you weren't that ambitious it was a career path that could provide a comfortable middle-class lifestyle.
Then the laser/upc system came in and hallowed out the career path. UPC codes could be printed in a more permanent way (don't need to put 10c stickers on every orange) and then it was just a DB lookup to get the current price. And there was a natural language description that the register printed so you could do a quick confirmation.
This quickly hallowed out and destroyed the career path: once the laser/UPC/database system meant that almost anyone could be an okay retail clerk with very little training, companies quickly stopped caring about getting anyone above that level, experience no longer mattered- or was rewarded with pay increases, and it created the so-called "McJob" of the 1990s.
Karl Marx had actually written about this all the way back in the 19th Century, this was the alienation of labor, the use of capital investment to replace skilled labor with interchangeable repetition that kept people from feeling satisfaction or success at their jobs- and the pay and career satisfaction of retail clerks in 1990s America followed almost exactly the path of skilled weavers being replaced by machines in 19th Century Birmingham.
Will that happen with SWE? I don't know. But it is a thing that preys on my mind late at night when I'm trying to sleep.
Another historical example I find myself thinking about is the huge number of objects that moved into a disposable category in the last century or so. What used to be built entirely by skilled hands is now the prerogative of the machine and thus a certain base level of maintainability is no longer guaranteed in even the worst-designed widget.
Yes, AI will mean more software is "written" than before, but more will be thrown away too. The allure of the re-write is nothing new, but now we'll do it not because we think we can do it better the second time, but because the original is too broken to keep using and starting over is just so much cheaper.
Soon at CRUD App HQ (if not already): "Last year's pg_dump is this year's prompt."
OR will it mean software engineers will go back to also being product designers, as they once were, before increasing complexity caused them to focus only on engineering? Maybe it's the product managers who should be fearful?
This is the "AI soon becomes good enough" scenario.
Where is the version of this story where retail clerks enthusiastically learned the UPC scanner system and then leveraged that knowledge into better careers?
The inspiring tales of workers who "embraced the future" and thrived?
The technology was specifically designed to eliminate the need for worker expertise, not enhance it. They were learning to operate a system whose entire purpose was to make them replaceable.
I'm sure some clerks were skeptics back then. When technology did take over and replaced them, they probably got a big fat "I told you so." But everyone got the exact same outcome as everyone else: lower wages, fewer opportunities, less job security.
But imagine stores in the late 1980s realising their fancy new systems kept scanning steaks as bananas and designer jeans as dish soap. If databases crashed regularly and people were clueless as to what cost what.
Companies would have been desperately trying to retain and recruit back the very workers whose skills they'd just dismissed as outdated. The ones who knew every price would have become essential.
Unlike retail work, software engineering has multiple layers of skill. What happens if/when AI coding tools fail? Code can fail in subtle and catastrophic ways. Or what if it simply fails to live up to the hype and doesn't deliver?
The very tools that devalue coding skills might actually increase the value of deep engineering knowledge.
If AI replaces me, I'll be sad. I'll have to retrain, acquire new skills and find a new career. But at least that's a clean break, a clear transition point.
My nightmare scenario is that it turns me into a button-pusher who prompts AI without understanding what it's producing, making me as replaceable as those scanner-operating clerks.
Today, I have to make a choice. I can decide to become the best clerk I possibly can, or I can learn how to use the scanner. What I would like to know is: people who think the scanner will be good enough, why bother and not plan your career change instead?
Retail store clerk was a medium skill/medium prestige job up through the 1970's and 1980's. You needed someone who knew all of the prices for their part of the store (to prevent tag switching), who could recognize what was the expensive dress versus the cheap dress, and remembered all of the prices so they could work quickly without having to look things up (1). There would be stories of retail clerks rising up to CEO, and even if you weren't that ambitious it was a career path that could provide a comfortable middle-class lifestyle.
Then the laser/upc system came in and hallowed out the career path. UPC codes could be printed in a more permanent way (don't need to put 10c stickers on every orange) and then it was just a DB lookup to get the current price. And there was a natural language description that the register printed so you could do a quick confirmation.
This quickly hallowed out and destroyed the career path: once the laser/UPC/database system meant that almost anyone could be an okay retail clerk with very little training, companies quickly stopped caring about getting anyone above that level, experience no longer mattered- or was rewarded with pay increases, and it created the so-called "McJob" of the 1990s.
Karl Marx had actually written about this all the way back in the 19th Century, this was the alienation of labor, the use of capital investment to replace skilled labor with interchangeable repetition that kept people from feeling satisfaction or success at their jobs- and the pay and career satisfaction of retail clerks in 1990s America followed almost exactly the path of skilled weavers being replaced by machines in 19th Century Birmingham.
Will that happen with SWE? I don't know. But it is a thing that preys on my mind late at night when I'm trying to sleep.