Scott Hanselman 👸🏽🐝🌮Feb 22

Last year Mark Russinovich and I wrote a paper on how Software Engineering will redefine the profession, and how early in career engineers may see an “AI Drag,” while seniors will see a significant boost. This paper was published today in the Communications of the ACM, Association for Computing Machinery

The real story though, is that we propose a program where companies must invest deeply in our EiC pipeline, not just hiring juniors but giving them formal *preceptors* (modeled after nursing) such that we create a strong pipeline of new senior engineers to take on the coming industry challenges.

Please read and share if it resonates with you!

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3779312

Show threadkdacarFeb 23

@shanselman hey Scott, very good analysis and solution to a problem that might work well in a different society. In fact, that's the society I would prefer to live in. I would love to help the EiCs along, as I already try to do, but there are very few in our society.

I know you are the academics in this discussion but we have to address the real-world problem that the EiCs face. It's not the lack of support from the experienced, it's the lack of support from employers.

Show threadkdacarFeb 23

Our bosses tell us they would love to hire more help, but they don't have the money. They want us to use AI *instead* of hiring less efficient EiCs and mentoring them.

Mentoring may be a requirement for long-term success and stability but the Venture and Equity owners of just about everything are not concerned about anything long-term. Make it big and brash so that some other poor slob or maybe wallst will buy the company and then if the products die, fine. Get us to IPO or sale, and no further

Show threadkdacar

Sure, a small company without the VC/PE overlords could build infrastructure to support the future of Software Engineering but they would be smashed, stolen, or bought out long before they could be helpful.

I weirdly long for the days before automated trading (that I cut my teeth on) and back to the before times, when you invested in a company for more that a few hundred microseconds.

Feb 23 at 3:57amWeb
Show threadkdacarFeb 23

When the requirements were for solid return, rather than constant growth, and the owners at least appeared to care about customers.

We live in a society that gets stuck every few Tuesdays because of a vibe coding aesthetic that allows big companies to rush updates and not test for the wide swath they take up in the landscape.

Show threadkdacarFeb 23
I'm sorry. I'm afraid we don't live in the society that can hear a good solution to an existential problem and think, "yes, let's spend more and work slower so that someone else can do this when we retire." Instead, the idea will, at best, be given quiet lip-service and ignored during the next 5 quarters of layoffs by which time the books will look good enough to hand the whole thing over to someone else.
Show threadkdacarFeb 23
[Please note, I don't think I'm the kind of person who usually walks in and shits on everyone else's fun. I just feel really strongly that as good as your ideas are, they have to be sold to a small number of people who likely don't care about the problem you are trying to solve. I think you have to add a crazy amount of economic result for the powers to take it seriously. Without their buy-in, ... well, I've got to tell the AI to hit the backlog now, there's no one below me to do it.]