I’ve been thinking about the SWE employment conundrum in a post-LLM world for a while now, and since my livelihood (and that of my loved ones’) depends on it, I’m obviously biased. Still, I would like to understand where my logic is flawed, if it is. (I.e I’m trying to argue in good faith here)
Isn’t software engineering a lot more than just writing code? And I mean like, A LOT more?
Informing product roadmaps, balancing tradeoffs, understanding relationships between teams, prioritizing between separate tasks, pushing back on tech debt, responding to incidents, it’s a feature and not a bug, …
I’m not saying LLMs will never be able to do this (who knows?), but I’m pretty sure SWEs won’t be the only role affected (or even the most affected) if it comes to this point.
Where am I wrong?