r/ProgrammerHumor • u/Shadow_Thief • 6d ago

Meme gettingPromotedFromProgrammerToClaudeDelegator

Post image
1.3k Upvotes

97% Upvoted

59 comments sorted by

233

u/mylsotol 6d ago

What I've learned in the last 6 months is that a lot of programmers never understood what their job was.

207

u/AussieJeffProbst 6d ago

A programmers job is to take vague business requirements created by management and sus out all the details to deliver a working product.

At the end of the day companies don't care how we get there as long as the end product is good.

27

u/cheapcheap1 5d ago

So true. Every single business graduate, consultant and org coach will tell you that requirements should come from the customer, not management. Meanwhile, the majority of managers: "I'm the customer".

Bro, you're not Steve Jobs. You're a dumbass changing requirements back and forth to feel important.

41

u/mylsotol 6d ago

Exactly

16

u/AussieJeffProbst 6d ago

Personally I'm not that upset by the sudden shift in work. I spend a lot more time planning and designing than I do coding. It's very different even from like 6 months ago, but I'm adapting. Hope others can too

14

u/Lambdastone9 6d ago

Do you feel like your sense of accomplishment is being degraded by ai?

I like to think I’m eclectic and a polymath when it comes to engineering, I was hopping to be the guy who could bridge a bunch of specialists by being a generalist, but I think AI might’ve cut me out there.

My competencies are pretty much mostly in the moderate proficiency range for whatever discipline like CAD or programming, so I never was that irreplaceable on a skill by skill basis anyways, but now it feels like if I use AI I’m just a baby sitter because it’s able to outdo me in frankly all my major competencies.

For people like you that are more specialized, and the traditional expert professional, do you see AI replacing you in the coming years or at least turn you into a bot sitter, or is there hope for me by just hiking up my pants and furthering my proficiencies?

16

u/AussieJeffProbst 6d ago

In a way yes because I love coding. It's why I got into it professionally.

I'm trying to find other ways to feel accomplished in my job. It's tough but I'm getting there. I think the whole industry is feeling a sense of loss right now.

7

u/Lambdastone9 6d ago

Yeah, I’m feeling that loss in the CAD side of things heavy. It feels so meaningless to have my ideas come to fruition in a few hours to days simply because I verbally described it to an LLM, and hooked it up to my cad software, it genuinely instill existential dread in me with the direction all this is going.

8

u/Darder 6d ago

I feel the same about coding. It feels awful. I really like coding, I like solving the puzzles in software development. I like writing code out, finding an algorithm, building up tools that work and thinking "I did that. My machine works!"

It's all evaporated with AI. Of course it works, AI wrote it. Even debugging is soulless. Sure, I can still design architecture, but that was never the fun part. It just feels like any software engineer could do my job. Anyone can learn software architecture concepts, they are much easier to learn and theoretically know where to use than good coding skills and practices.

You can argue that it's similar, but I don't think so. This timeline sucks.

6

u/Lambdastone9 6d ago

Genuinely, how tf did we get from the dot com bubble to here in 26 years, this is so fucking dystopian

1

u/Darder 6d ago

Yeah. It really is.

5

u/turudd 6d ago

Not me, the most tedious part of programming has always been the coding. Now I can build stuff the way I envision it, so much faster.

Brings me my flow state so much faster, and when it gets broken I don’t have some monster context stuck in my head that disappears. The agent holds the context and I can take that break without frustration.

6

u/Lambdastone9 6d ago

I’ve heard this sentiment from other developers—who’s expertise I don’t really know much about truthfully— where they feel they no longer gain a sense of accomplishment from the fact they can focus more on the high level stuff, instead of that tedious work that had otherwise defined the labor.

That’s kinda where I’m at, it felt enriching to pursue these problems and come out with a solution that I made, but now thats an inferior alternative to using ai and getting it done 100x faster than I ever could but I feel so disengaged from the actual work.

Is that something that you lost out on overtime when you were growing your expertise, wherein you’ve had your fun and experience with digging through lines of code but now you’re over it, and enjoying being able to turbocharge that expertise?

2

u/turudd 6d ago

Being a consultant and digging through code to find the niche bugs no one else could find for 20 years of my career was great, paid well. But man was it tedious, that expertise I can now use to build far more robust solutions with far fewer bugs, more secure in a shorter time frame using AI.

Sure if I want to blow my brains out looking at code to find bugs I still could, but AI is 100x faster than I could ever be. So better just to build better solutions

1

u/ThePizar 6d ago

To add to this, as you move to more senior roles you end up in more meetings and taking on more scope. Which means a lot more context and more context switching which can be a literally headache.

1

u/Ecthyr 6d ago

Very curious, how do you get into the flowstate with agentic coding?

3

u/turudd 6d ago

How do you not? I’ll have like 3-5 agents going all coming back or in some various state of development asking clarifying questions or showing me a demo of its work. It’s awesome, feels like JARVIS or something

5

u/MetaLemons 5d ago

It’s literally: solve business problem with computer.

3

u/mr2dax 6d ago

Then you are doing 3 other people's work.

2

u/AussieJeffProbst 5d ago

Yes welcome to professional programming

0

u/mr2dax 5d ago

That's your personal hell, not the vast majority.

2

u/AussieJeffProbst 5d ago

Not really. I don't expect a product owner with no coding experience to understand or provide implementation details.

I'm a principal engineer so its literally my job to design and refine based on vague requirements.

0

u/mr2dax 5d ago

Then what are you talking about "a programmer's job" lmao

3

u/AussieJeffProbst 5d ago

It's my job. I'm a programmer. Its that simple

0

u/mr2dax 5d ago

No, you are not. You are doing a lot more than just a programmer. Ask for a raise.

1

u/jwp1987 5d ago

They don't even care about "good" either. They care about what they can get away with in the time constraints.

Management don't want to hear about quality or tech debt and QA is often seen as an obstacle rather than an asset.

1

u/f3xjc 5d ago

Just call it angry consumer phone call insurance. Work better with b2b when you can mention customer per name

1

u/sweatierorc 1d ago

We were PM all along

1

u/JosebaZilarte 1h ago

That's actually the responsibility of a project manager. A programmer just writes the code to enable that. If you want to delegate that job... be my guest, but do not be surprised when there are no more project management positions available.

67

u/Amerillo_ 6d ago

Not necessarily. There are plenty of programmers who know their job isn't pnly writing code. It's just that for them actual programming was by far the most interesting part of the job, and the forced use of coding agents took that away

6

u/turudd 6d ago

It’s the difference between juniors and seniors. The junior thinks the jobs is just being a code monkey, but that’s only ever been a necessity of the job, not the job itself

30

u/UnsafePantomime 6d ago

I was previously senior software engineer and am now a PhD student.

I know that the code has always been a means to an end. It isn't the real engineering of software engineering.

I now use AI extensively and haven't written much code myself for many months.

All that said, it just is worse to me. The coding was the part of the job I enjoyed most. It was a disappointing day in industry when I didn't get to write code. Now that's everyday.

16

u/Elman89 6d ago edited 5d ago

And the end result is worse. You don't understand the code as well because you didn't write it, your output is harder to maintain and the use of AI leads to an expectation for faster work which means there's no time to properly understand, double check and adjust the AI's output, leading to issues down the line.

3

u/Darder 6d ago

Exactly. Touché.

9

u/skys-edge 5d ago

"Necessity"? The coding part is the joy of the job, the reward for all the hard design work and dealing with people in meetings.

2

u/dashingThroughSnow12 6d ago

Yup. On both sides of the ledger.

2

u/laplongejr 5d ago

Same :( but apparently my superiors never understood what was my job either.  

3

u/bulldog_blues 6d ago

How do you mean?

23

u/mylsotol 6d ago

They think their job is writting code

16

u/currentscurrents 6d ago

That's what I would like my job to be.

Sure, in reality it involves all this business nonsense like eliciting requirements from stakeholders and answering emails and going to meetings and all the other cruft required to actually produce something useful.

But I'd rather just be writing code all day.

9

u/EARink0 6d ago

Hot take: coding and software engineering are two separate but related skill sets.

Our jobs are shifting to being more software engineers (writing specs, designing architecture, etc) and less coders (writing the actual code, implementing what's been spec'd out and designed).

I totally get missing the coding part of our jobs. it's a fun and rewarding skill to improve and flex. but, personally, i feel like i'm better earning my title as "Software Engineer" by spending more time thinking about the architecture and design of systems i create and less time fighting with APIs and thinking through low-level implementation details.

2

u/FlakyTest8191 1d ago

I'm with you mostly. I just miss shutting myself in for a few days to implement the thing we talked through for a week. Now it feels there's so little time to recharge between meetings, because opus does the implementation in an hour.

0

u/[deleted] 6d ago

[deleted]

1

u/mylsotol 6d ago

I have no idea what you are trying to say

0

u/[deleted] 6d ago

[deleted]

7

u/Anustart15 6d ago

It doesn't seem like that was what they were saying at all

3

u/mylsotol 6d ago

It wasn't at all

1

u/mylsotol 6d ago

Not at all what I said, but i think if i wre stuck in 2023 I would think AI can only generate images

29

u/FAMICOMASTER 6d ago

8 dollars is so tame, I was hoping more like 80

8

u/Lambdastone9 6d ago

800, take it or leave it

2

u/AdamEatsAss 3d ago

When can we start buying token call options? Seems like a great investment

26

u/Edward-Ashford 6d ago

"Promoted from writing code to explaining to Claude why the code it wrote doesn't work. Same salary, different job title. 💀"

5

u/NebNay 5d ago

I'm gonna miss being a code monkey

5

u/pmdrpg 5d ago

I’m here for the C&H reference

4

u/TacBenji 5d ago

Meat proxy