[xienze]

> Because a machine can never take accountability.

A business leader can though.

> Compared to another software engineer who directed prompts to expand the system and generate extra revenue streams.

I think you're missing the point. Why can't an LLM advance sufficiently to be a REAL senior software engineer that a business person/product manager is prompting instead of YOU, a software engineer? Why are YOU specifically needed if an LLM can do a better job of it than you? I can't believe people are so naive to not see what the endgame is: getting rid of those primadonna software engineers that the C-suite and managers have nothing but contempt for.

[ej88]

> A business leader can though.

If a 'business leader' is prompting out software through their agents, ensuring it works, maintaining it, and taking accountability... they're also a software engineer

These titles are mostly semantics

[rdevilla]

By this definition, pre-LLM "business leaders" circa 2008 with not even an understanding of Excel were already "software engineers" this whole time - just prompting out software through their meatspace agents, instead of their silicon ones.

Dismissal of arguments as "just semantics" is high school level argumentation.

[ej88]

clearly not the same when they were abstracted from the realities of building software and.. directly taking accountability for it!

by semantics, i mean the definition and pool of tasks, responsibilities, and outcomes a job is comprised of is shifting so fast that the borders of what is a 'software engineer' and 'business person' are melding together. software engineers are business people in their own way

[rdevilla]

I don't understand why humans abstract a business leader away from the realities of building software, while LLMs do not.

If the rhetoric is to be believed, the set of responsibilities falling to the role of "software engineer" is shrinking to zero, and all engineers are being forcibly "promoted" to the managerial class of shepherding around agents.

[ej88]

i would say theres more nuance than that (disclaimer: dont have a crystal ball)

software engineers who are comfortable doing business work - managing, working with different stakeholders, having product and design taste, being sociable, driving business outcomes are going to be more desired than ever

likewise, business leads who can be technical, can decompose vague ideas into product, leverage code to prototype and work with the previous person will also be extremely high value.

i would be concerned if i was an engineer with no business acumen or a business lead with no technical acumen (not counting CEOs obviously, but then again the barrier to starting your own business as a SWE has never been lower)

[nradov]

It's funny, that's why COBOL was originally developed in 1960: so that business people could write software themselves without needing software engineers. And it sort of worked, to an extent. History repeats itself.

[doubled112]

Between then and now, what ever happened to "no code development" or whatever they called it, where all of the world's APIs could be connected with lines in a diagram?

[seniorThrowaway]

low code / no code, and it's been around in one form or fashion since the 1990's, at least.

[nemomarx]

why would it be a manager? hire a cheap intern to be the scapegoat, if the job market is bad enough. no reason for liability to fall on the suits

[cucumber3732842]

That's how things work already in every workplace where there's any real danger. The companies construes its policies and paper trail in bad faith so that the employees are always operating contradictory to policy/training and then when something happens blame can be shifted on them.

[mattmanser]

You can say this about every single role.

Why can't VCs feed your pitch deck into an AI and get a business they own 100%?

If the only thing you're paying for is compute time...

Some.people are claiming it's about taste. Why can't an AI learn taste?

[nradov]

It's funny how we see some people who claim to have "taste" walking around in public wearing horrible Balenciaga shoes. Are they really just tasteless, or are they doing it ironically to troll the rest of us? I guess we'll never know. Maybe someday AI robots will achieve the same level.