SimonW is the king of hacker news clickbait these days.
He basically chooses the most clickbaity headline possible and then posts it up to hacker news. The actual content itself is almost always totally banal and adds nothing new or insightful to the world.
No one was arguing that AI was going to build an engineering team, I haven’t read or heard or seen this take from anyone.
Taking up this controversial notion as the premise of an article (as though it’s actually a thing), when no one was positing it in the first place, is a classic way of driving traffic to your blog.
I don't know Simon personally, I do know he has been blogging for a very long time and many of his posts are for his own benefit of recall, not necessarily intended for an external audience. Also He did not post this, a different person did.
I disagree. He posts on his blog all the time, and he has a whole section to just things he found interesting and thus reposted.
I know because when adding his RSS feed it was at first a bit overwhelming (multiple updates daily).
It's his own website – but it's not him who posted it here. Let the guy post on his website what he likes.
> No one was arguing that AI was going to build an engineering team
I don't think the CEO of NVIDIA agrees with your statement here[0] if he's advocating for nobody learning to code anymore because AI will do it all for the domain experts, which would remove the need for an "engineering team" in his view.
Do you think the CEO of NVIDIA is comfortable deeply cutting the engineers at NVIDIA because, after all, it is just a matter of time before the LLMs create better chips? Or is this puffery?
This is an awful take. As others have noted below, simonw didn't post this to HN, someone else did. Personally I love his blog, I love the humility of anyone posting out loud as they learn.
I saw someone posit this exact idea at EuroSTAR in Stockholm on Wednesday, fwiw. Two guys from an Australian company suggest this & how both development and testing will be totally prompt based. It got the reaction you’d expect, but it does exist.
Yeah, this one really isn't a good example of clickbait - it's a summary of a (really good) post written by someone else that I put on my linkblog, illustrated with some quotes (because I know many people wouldn't bother reading the whole thing) - with no intention of submitting to Hacker News.
> Software is an apprenticeship industry. You can’t learn to be a software engineer by reading books. You can only learn by doing…and doing, and doing, and doing some more.
Nonsense, software is the only industry where you can become a great engineer through sheer talent and hard work. Most other industries do not allow you to "skip" steps like software engineering. If you are talented, you can build software that changes the world and capture tremendous value. In fields like traditional engineering/accounting/medicine/ investment banking/law/management consulting, you have to "do your time" by playing gofer to seniors and working overtime. Software engineering is a true meritocracy than a lot of other similarly lucrative fields.
I think you and the author might agree in principle just not on the semantics.
Apprenticeships focus on learning by doing, which you can do without a mentor in a junior role, at a company with no seniors. The apprenticeship is not literal in that sense, the teacher is the projects you're working on and you sink or swim based on your merit. But regardless of how good you are, you need experiences to sharpen your skills, which you can only do over time.
It differs across the industry but programming skill is not most important in a senior anyway. You learn business logic, client relationships, team and project management over time and those soft skills are what sets seniors apart. Or should.
The article is more about getting people started in the industry than climbing the career ladder after they already landed a job. Unless you are implying people should just grind unpaid for years until they have enough experience to land a non-junior job.
Readit News
It's a compelling read for engineers, but I suspect it's not the kind of thing that managers will take note of.
He basically chooses the most clickbaity headline possible and then posts it up to hacker news. The actual content itself is almost always totally banal and adds nothing new or insightful to the world.
No one was arguing that AI was going to build an engineering team, I haven’t read or heard or seen this take from anyone.
Taking up this controversial notion as the premise of an article (as though it’s actually a thing), when no one was positing it in the first place, is a classic way of driving traffic to your blog.
It's his own website – but it's not him who posted it here. Let the guy post on his website what he likes.
I don't think the CEO of NVIDIA agrees with your statement here[0] if he's advocating for nobody learning to code anymore because AI will do it all for the domain experts, which would remove the need for an "engineering team" in his view.
[0] https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...
This one was clickbait: https://simonwillison.net/2023/Feb/15/bing/
Nonsense, software is the only industry where you can become a great engineer through sheer talent and hard work. Most other industries do not allow you to "skip" steps like software engineering. If you are talented, you can build software that changes the world and capture tremendous value. In fields like traditional engineering/accounting/medicine/ investment banking/law/management consulting, you have to "do your time" by playing gofer to seniors and working overtime. Software engineering is a true meritocracy than a lot of other similarly lucrative fields.
> First is the familiar pipeline argument - we need juniors in order to grow new intermediate and senior engineers:
The only thing worse than never hiring any junior engineers is hiring them into an awful experience where they can’t learn anything.
Apprenticeships focus on learning by doing, which you can do without a mentor in a junior role, at a company with no seniors. The apprenticeship is not literal in that sense, the teacher is the projects you're working on and you sink or swim based on your merit. But regardless of how good you are, you need experiences to sharpen your skills, which you can only do over time.
It differs across the industry but programming skill is not most important in a senior anyway. You learn business logic, client relationships, team and project management over time and those soft skills are what sets seniors apart. Or should.