Comment by JohnFen

Comment by JohnFen a day ago

> Solving problems for real people. Isn't the answer here kind of obvious?

No. There are a thousand other ways of solving problems for real people, so that doesn't explain why some choose software development as their preferred method.

Presumably, the reason for choosing software development as the method of solving problems for people is because software development itself brings joy. Different people find joy in different aspects even of that, though.

For my part, the stuff that AI is promising to automate away is much of the stuff that I enjoy about software development. If I don't get to do that, that would turn my career into miserable drudgery.

Perhaps that's the future, though. I hope not, but if it is, then I need to face up to the truth that there is no role for me in the industry anymore. That would pretty much be a life crisis, as I'd have to find and train for something else.

simonw a day ago

"There are a thousand other ways of solving problems for real people, so that doesn't explain why some choose software development as their preferred method."

Software development is almost unique in the scale that it operates at. I can write code once and have it solve problems for dozens, hundreds, thousands or even millions of people.

If you want your work to solve problems for large numbers of people I have trouble thinking of any other form of work that's this accessible but allows you to help this many others.

Fields like civil engineering are a lot harder to break into!

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JodieBenitez a day ago

> That would pretty much be a life crisis, as I'd have to find and train for something else.

There's inertia in the industry. It's not like what you're describing could happen in the blink of an eye. You may well be at the end of your career when this prophecy is fulfilled, if it ever comes true. I sure will be at the end of mine and I'll probably work for at least another 20 years.

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jll29 a day ago

The inertia argument is real, and I would compare it to the mistaken believe of some at IBM in the 1970s that SQL would be used by managers to query relational databases directly, so no programming was needed anymore.
And what happened? Programmers make the queries and embed them into code that creates dashboards that managers look at. Or managers ask analysts who have to interpret the dashboards for them... It rather created a need for more programmers.
Compare embedded SQL with prompts - SQL queries compared to assembler or FORTRAN code is closer to English prose for sure. Did it take some fun away? Perhaps, if manually traversing a network database is fun to anyone, instead of declaratively specifying what set of data to retrieve. But it sure gave new fun to people who wanted to see results faster (let's call them "designers" rather than "coders"), and it made programming more elegant due to the declarativity of SQL queries (although that is cancelled out again by the ugliness of mixing two languages in the code).
Maybe the question is: Does LLM-based coding enable a new kind of higher level "design flow" to replace "coding flow"? (Maybe it will make a slightly different group of people happy?)

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- submain 19 hours ago
  
  This echoes my sentiment that LLMs are higher level programming languages. And, as every layer of abstraction, they add assumptions that may or may not fit the use case. The same way we optimize SQL queries by knowing how the database makes a query plan, we need to optimize LLM outputs, specially when the assumptions given are not ideal.
  
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threatofrain a day ago

> No. There are a thousand other ways of solving problems for real people, so that doesn't explain why some choose software development as their preferred method.

I don't see why we should seek an explanation if there are thousands of ways to be useful to people. Is being a lawyer particularly better than being an accountant?

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fragmede a day ago

I'm probably just not as smart or creative as you, but say my problem is I have a ski cabin that I want to rent it to strangers for money. Nevermind a thousand, What are 100 ways without using software that I could do something about that, vs listing it on Airbnb?

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JohnFen 18 hours ago

I was speaking about solving people's problems generally. It's easy to find specific problems that are best addressed with software, just as it's easy to find specific problems that can't be addressed with software.

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