Software engineering was different, but it's over now
I was one of the lucky ones. Got into software engineering at the right time, rode the whole thing, watched friends do the same. For the last 30 years, this job was kind of an anomaly.
The pay was higher than almost anything else you could do without a graduate degree. You could work remote before anyone else did. You could switch jobs and get a raise every time. You could stay an individual contributor your whole career and still make good money. You didn't have to become a manager to advance. Companies treated engineers like they were hard to replace because they actually were.
Nothing else worked like that. Not finance, not law, not medicine, not any of the trades. Software engineers had a run no other field got.
And I think it's ending.
Not in a dramatic way. Not all at once. But the thing that made the whole setup work was that writing code was hard and required judgment that couldn't really be automated. Management spent 30 years trying to turn software into a factory. Waterfall, agile, offshore, low-code. None of it worked. The work itself kept resisting.
AI is what finally changes that. We can argue about where LLMs are right now. Whether Mythos can actually match a senior engineer. Whether Claude or Codex can ship production code without adult supervision. Whether the hallucination problem is solved or just managed. These are real debates and reasonable people disagree.
But none of it matters for the trajectory. If the models aren't good enough this year, they will be next year. If next year is too soon, the year after. The curve is obvious even if the timing isn't. And good enough is all it takes. Good enough that companies don't need as many engineers. Good enough that the ones they do hire get leveraged harder. Good enough that the pay premium starts to compress.
The irony is that software engineers themselves built the thing that's ending the run.
It's just the end of a weird period where one specific type of work paid better than it should have, for longer than it should have, because the work was unusually hard to systematize. Now it isn't. So will software engineers, who thought of their work as a craft, accept becoming floor supervisors?
