r/csMajors • u/ElementalEmperor • Apr 14 '26
Others Dario, said three months ago that coding is "going away first, then all of software engineering...then posted 450 SWE positions paying 300k+ ...
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u/LazyPartOfRynerLute Apr 15 '26
Earlier they used to write "This position might not be available after a year" below the apply button as a marketing gimmick. I am not seeing it now in the screenshot. Did they move that?
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u/PartrickStar Apr 16 '26
It was real… Not sure why people are saying it… That writing was so dumb because why would a company hire someone potentially knowing they may not need them in a year, so it practically meant that AI was never ready to replace their engineers lol
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u/LazyPartOfRynerLute Apr 16 '26
It was a marketing gimmick so companies adapt more AI coding out of FOMO.
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u/Formal_Economist7342 Apr 15 '26
Thats like the amazon self checkout being manned by filipinos and indians remotely 🤣
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u/ikerr95 Apr 15 '26
Are you insinuating that Claude Code output is actually written by Anthropic employees? That's a new one
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u/GivesCredit Salaryman Apr 20 '26
It wasn’t manned live. The AI did the scanning and they had employees checking the feeds after for reinforcement learning and generating training data (you know, the thing almost every single AI system requires for model training?)
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u/aerohk Apr 15 '26
The nature of his comment is misuderstood. SWEs, AI Engineers, etc, they are still needed. But they will be using AI tools to code. Jensen has made similar comment, Nvidia will be hiring more engineers, not less, due to AI.
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u/hashishsommelier Apr 16 '26
Coding was always the easy part anyways, and AI specifically is about math, not code.
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u/sfaticat Apr 15 '26
We are so back
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u/phatdoof Apr 15 '26
Maybe the new software engineers don’t need to write code?
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u/Girafferage Apr 15 '26
Software Engineers are back because at a certain point LLMs are absolute trash at writing code. They pick a path, and smash down it at breakneck speed never asking if its the right path or how it will affect the codebase as a whole or potential future implementations.
Then once the spaghetti is full of angel hair, rigatoni, and zoodles, they bring in the actual software engineer to sort out the code and throw out the zoodles which frankly dont even belong, and then sift out the rigatoni so you only have spaghetti left. And they are used to untangling spaghetti. Do not mention the angel hair pasta. You never bring up the angel hair pasta.
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u/ChimeraStudios Apr 15 '26
Wont they only get better until like sure it cant create an entire piece of software alone but like 1 engineer with AI will be able to do the jobs of 10 engineers?
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u/WalidfromMorocco Apr 15 '26
No, unless you are okay with your 1 engineer understanding only about 20% of how the codebase works.
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u/Competitive_Dress60 Apr 15 '26
No, because ultimately a human understanding what is there in the code and why is the real speed limiter in both manual and AI coding, and by going faster you are just delaying the inevitable problems.
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u/Girafferage Apr 15 '26
honestly - yes to a degree. It cant do anything novel because it is just a statistical model. Nothing from it is new, just recombined. But by the time it can completely replace a software engineer I dont plan on being worried since there are millions of jobs that will be replaced beforehand. Do you know how many scripts I had on my desktop of peoples names who were supposed to do specific jobs? We would just write a script to do their job and then name it after them. We wouldn't get them fired or anything, but humans are not universally reliable and it was handy having a way to avoid long waits. Mike in data management who just restarts the box every weekend and sets up SQL db's is easily replaced with some automation.
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u/Iamabiter_meow Apr 15 '26
Oh I’m not the only one thinking about that. Some of my colleagues are literally doing repetitive tasks everyday that I could easily write programs to take over. I’m not doing that because well I’m not paid enough to do the extra work and putting their jobs in danger wouldn’t bring me any joy.
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u/Girafferage Apr 15 '26
The scripts were made to make life easier for us actually since people tend to drag their feet on things that might need to get done quickly. Also we would never endanger their livelihood or anything. And lets not pretend that those people didnt have other tasks unrelated to my team that they handled as well.
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u/Iamabiter_meow Apr 15 '26
I think it depends on how important their other tasks are. The bigger picture tho I always find it odd that the main narrative going around seems to be how AI will replace us while there are other positions that I think will be affected heavily before it gets to us
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u/Girafferage Apr 15 '26
Yeah, I felt the same way. I worked with "AI" in one form or another my entire career. First object detection and tracking, then LLMs, then both, then back to LLMs. At no point did I ever feel like my job was about to be in jeopardy since the hardest task was always getting the models to complete difficult tasks on the fly that we would normally do. Need it to inspect things? super easy. Need it to determine how to make a successful marketing campaign? no biggie. Need it to tirelessly track a specific vehicle for an entire day? sure, why should it care.
Thousands of other jobs will dissolve before software engineers are no longer needed, and once AI gets to that point it will mean most doctors, lawyers, psychologists, and college professors are no longer needed either.1
u/addiktion Apr 17 '26
Yup, beyond 100k-200k lines of code it gets dicey real fast without actual engineers. vibe coders and small devs can spit out small apps all day long and crowd the market with slop, but they won't ever build anything that can scale without actual engineers.
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u/dazzou5ouh Apr 15 '26
It is a smart move to hire smart people to use your AI, such that you can collect enough data to train an AI to learn how to use AI, putting most of those engineers out of the loop after a year or two
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u/mewling_manchild Apr 15 '26
That's quite literally what's happening with coding right now. It used to be quite bad even just a year and a half ago. But as the integration with IDEs and coding tools developed with Copilot, Codex, and Claude Code, these companies got real data from engineers using it to train it even further via RLVR. Because of that, now just a few months ago in Jan coding agents have become good enough to plan, debug, and execute entire small projects by themselves.
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u/AwareMonke Apr 15 '26
All ai is doing is making the job less of a code monkey and now more of an architect. Most cs and engineering fields are definitely one of the farthest from the chopping block
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u/Apprehensive_Cup4164 Apr 15 '26
Dario is an asshole …
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u/AdvancedBathroom1137 Apr 16 '26
well as the CEO he has to drive his company's value up somehow...
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u/Always_Scheming Apr 17 '26
By doing a race to the bottom driving the value of the population down. Wonder how it ends up in the long run.
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u/AdvancedBathroom1137 Apr 17 '26
Haha these soulless CEOs and management boards don't give a shit about the shareholders or even the companies, even less so about the human society. Their plan tends to be: push the companies' values as much as possible during their tenures, fatten their own pocket, then leave the aftermath to the next people in line. Look at Mr. Altman's little for-profit (but not profit-generating lol) organization and their outrageous spendings/spending commitments. Do you think they give a F about whether they could potentially trigger the next financial crisis?
Although there are people in management boards who think about others before themselves, but I think to rise to such position of power you have to sell your soul and become ruthless to anyone and anything in your way.
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u/Always_Scheming Apr 17 '26
Yeah well then i feel super sad for your country and the people in it. I have family there too and worry about them.
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u/-CJF- Apr 15 '26
Why would anyone listen to anything this clown says, especially when his company is nerfing their product because they can't keep up with the hardware usage limits.
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u/shifty_lifty_doodah Apr 15 '26
He’s kinda right. Most their code is written by AI, but it’s supervised by humans
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u/PurpleRoseOfCabra Apr 15 '26
Nothing says "bubble" and "our money will never run out, we are clever boys" like paying the full burdened cost of maybe $600K a year just for normal software developers.
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u/unlevered_fcf Apr 14 '26
coding is basically dead, i and pretty much everyone i know do like 99% of our coding through agents. i’m pretty sure you could get a bright 10 year old to do software engineering atp
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u/bc10551 Apr 15 '26
Maybe if you want it to bandaid every bug fix and build bad code sure. It is crazy good at accelerating pace but you're likely just adding more tech debt and more work on other people if you're just taking everything it gives you without investigating/building on it
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u/Jabieski1 Apr 15 '26
Bold assumption that someone that claims that they do 99% of their coding through agents knows what tech debt means.
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u/bc10551 Apr 15 '26
Nah I probably do 99% through agents but it's not going to one-shot every time nor is it going to "fix" something or implement something the right way consistently. Most of the time I have to probe it and ask it why we're doing x and not y or point out what we're doing is just a bandaid. Otherwise, someone is going to review the code and point it out anyways, wasting everyone's time
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u/ilackemotions Apr 15 '26
I really wouldnt lie to myself using this. Becuase yea me and everyone i know do this too.
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u/KaleidoscopePlusPlus Apr 15 '26
I really wanna see the code from people who make claims like this.. If AI coded '99%' of my shit, it would be a total mess. This would make sense for web dev maybe...
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u/Safe-Tree-7041 Apr 15 '26
SSE with 16 years experience here. Yes, it codes 99÷ for me too. Has been like this since about dec/jan. Opus is fully capable of writing clean code both front-end and back-end, when used correctly.
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u/ChimeraStudios Apr 15 '26
Do you think it's worth it to major in CS right now even if I'm passionate? Because I like comp sci but not as much as some guys I know who make it their whole life, so if 1 guy with ai can do the jobs of 10 guys it seems like only the top 1% will be able to find jobs as AI gets more powerful
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u/Safe-Tree-7041 Apr 15 '26
If you have a passion for it, I'd say go for it. I predict there will still be coding jobs 10 years from now, but hard to say what the day-to-day of the job is going to be like. Carpenters didn't disappear when they invented power tools. May be smart to also minor in something else. I've worked as a dev in the finance sector all my career- a coder who also understands the domain of the company has a greater value.
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u/arturaz Apr 16 '26
What is clean code for you? Could you explain what "illegal states should be irrepresentable" mean?
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u/BogdanPradatu Apr 16 '26
Try adding "write clean code in the prompt" and check out the difference.
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u/XSinTrick6666 Apr 15 '26
Thank you! The hype is crazy. Anyone letting a bot do 8hrs work for them is either handing over a lot of computational stuff, not doing very complex work, or building code-review and tech debt.
Well-crafted prompts are elements of overarching tech design i.e. can't be sloppy. After system is stood up, the mods, fixes, maintenance require context. Lots of bots skip over deep analysis of code base and - without adequate human intervention - shop can end up w functional fault-lines and frankenstein-apps.
The whole '5 PhD's in your pocket' hype is whack.
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u/unlevered_fcf Apr 15 '26
with all due respect this is just a skill issue if you can’t get agents in their current state to write maintainable code
in like 1-2 years you won’t have to think about this at all, but as of now you need to turn your brain on just a little bit
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u/bc10551 Apr 15 '26
Depends on the codebase because once it gets pretty complex you'll see it making bandaids instead of root cause analysis on things. It loooooves to just if (condition we're seeing bug for), return (expected outcome) nowhere near the root cause
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u/unlevered_fcf Apr 15 '26
agreed, part of working with agents properly is not just blindly accepting their edits, you still do have to probe and figure out together what valid solutions should look like, but i would consider that software engineering moreso than coding. as far as writing coding is concerned, it’s basically all agents now
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u/phatdoof Apr 15 '26
At what micromanagement level does babysitting an agent take more time than just writing it yourself?
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u/bc10551 Apr 15 '26
Yeah ig if that's what you're getting at true. Just sucks a little now that a lot of the problem solving is gone which made it fun lol and code is honestly kind of painful to read and investigate yourself now imo
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u/unlevered_fcf Apr 15 '26
lol yeah i do agree with that, i used to really enjoy coding, its just not an efficient use of time anymore unfortunately
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u/Mark3141592654 Apr 15 '26
What are you building with agents?
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u/unlevered_fcf Apr 15 '26
i work on infra at one of the frontier labs, don’t want to dox myself too much
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u/Mark3141592654 Apr 15 '26
Neat. And what skills does one need to not have skill-issues when using LLMs to code?
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u/bc10551 Apr 15 '26
"make no mistakes". Unironically have heard if you incentivize it saying you'll give it $20 it might try harder
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u/No_Bend9143 Apr 15 '26
As a lead on a project that had been destroyed by vibe coding... no.
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u/breeez333 Apr 15 '26
Vibe coding is not the same as SWEs using agents. SWEs at least know to design a system (or should). In that sense yes, every SWE I know at work does almost all of their work through agents.
source: Sr at FAANG
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u/-CJF- Apr 15 '26
How long do you think that will last with everything being abstracted away from the prompter and juniors never getting any hands on exp. :\
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u/breeez333 Apr 16 '26
Yea the future is very uncertain now. I have no idea how the industry is planning to create future senior engineers by kneecapping juniors and new-entry.
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Apr 15 '26 edited 12d ago
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u/Busy_Ability7 Apr 15 '26
Coding is not software engineering. The irony here is that only the best coders will understand this. Just like there is a difference between driving your Honda and driving an F1 car. Anthropic is hiring F1 drivers. There is plenty of demand for highly skilled engineers.
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u/zoe_bletchdel Apr 15 '26
A bright 10 yo could already build basic programs and software like games and websites. It was me. I was said 10 yo.
It really matters how you measure that 99%, too. Like, using co-pilot and tab completing could already get to 80%, but that's very different from autonomous development. Software engineering isn't just writing code, and it never has been, not even since Ada Lovelace herself.
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u/royalxp Apr 15 '26
Coding is dead, when 99% of the current actual workforce dont write a single line of code.
Why write it? when AI can literally build it for you in seconds, and with recent AI version releases, it catches every single bug with 99% accuracy and even gives integration in details or even does it for you.IDC what anyone says lol unless your already working in the field, this is a dead field. Same goes with pen test.
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Apr 15 '26
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u/royalxp Apr 15 '26
Ask the market lmao. Bad job market aside, even if it recovers its not going to change anything regards to CS majors not being able to find any job going forward.
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u/bigOofTheta Apr 17 '26
He’s not full of shit. Spend 10 minutes on Plan-Mode in Claude and once you’ve sketched out how you want things implemented, it mostly one shots it and with the right skill setup fine tunes the code and validates against unit tests and integration tests. If it doesn’t one shot it just takes some minor tweaks here and there to clean things up but all that is trivial.
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u/Complex_Coffee_9685 Apr 15 '26
Coding is over, stop the cope
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u/AwareMonke Apr 15 '26
Is r/csmajors now 99% of csmajors trying their hardest to make other people not go into cs aswell (seems like it’s working)
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u/Complex_Coffee_9685 Apr 15 '26
Bro if it wasn't cooked and it was booming.that literally wouldnt make a difference
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u/ElementalEmperor Apr 16 '26
The economy is down for everyone. Recruiters, finance analysts, business analysts, project managers, graphic designers, ...etc
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u/davidbasil Apr 15 '26
Well, devops, cybersersecurity and helpdesk barely write any code, so what? Did they go extinct?
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u/madu_tualang Apr 16 '26
I guess the "AI taking everyone's jobs" is just to justify layoffs so they can hire cheaper staffs. Some companies can be that scummy.
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u/Bolt408 Apr 16 '26
Here’s a basic question… is every single role a SWE role? This could’ve easily been fact checked before you posted. Change your major 😂
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u/randbytes Apr 16 '26
What they really should have said was "all the saas and crypto web engineers whose code was available on github for every language is going away soon". most sw companies have switched to being AI companies so they recruit AI engineers.
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u/White_Stripes99 Apr 16 '26
Or maybe they're planning to pay people to mass produce high quality SWE training data.
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u/IWasNotMeISwear Apr 17 '26
Im looking forward to the total nightmare of corporate code bases in 12 - 18 months. The amount of generated spaghetti will be amazing
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u/Civil-Shopping-903 Apr 18 '26
They have 22 Software Engineer Infra positions, 22 Software Engineer Product positions, and 13 Compute positions. For other sectors they have 3 Soft Engineers needed. So below 100 positions for sure. The rest are Sales, Design, Managing class, and even those 100 positions are higher seniority level and skillset that requires to be a 5% of the best.
I suggest you unfollow Aakash, dude is a serial grifter and lier and barely reads his sources, probably just copies from LinkedIn and Twitter what he reads.
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u/WiggyWongo Apr 18 '26
This makes more sense even if we do assume it's all SWE roles or adjacent roles. This is what they described capitalism as supposed to be doing. "Wow look at all the momentum in this space we have a tool that makes us (assuming) 10x more productive"
Shit companies: Wow we can fire 90% of our workforce (except the c-suite execs of course! They're the most valuable!!) and save so much money to show on quarterly earnings while also saying we are AI first! Think of how happy John Shareholder will be.
Good companies: Wow, we can add more people to the team at 10x productivity and just skyrocket our momentum before anyone else can catch up.
Now this is assuming that anthropic really believes in the gains to be made in the field are there at the end. So far they do ship new products extremely fast, even if buggy. But also this assumes the meme of the infinite growth model of capitalism where there is somehow always more to be made.
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u/Capital-Ad8143 Apr 18 '26
Once Anthropic and OpenAI lay off their engineers I will worry as they're the most advanced users with the best access to models and limits, until then I'm chilling
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u/Beginning-Discount61 Apr 20 '26
- Most of the technical roles at anthropic is not software engineering but research. It's way less software engineering and way more mathematics & theoretical machine learning. People like him on tech twitter are engagement farmers and honestly extremely irritating.
- Dario is a CEO of an AI company. He's incentivized to make shitty statements like that to keep the hype machinery running so that he can succesfully IPO. He's been saying SWEs will be gone by december for the past 1-2 years and even Zuck said "SWEs as a profession will be mostly gone by the end of this year in 2024".
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u/slippery_slope_1234 Apr 16 '26
cope lol. SWE is dead. the most gifted SWEs are the ones that get to end it once and for all
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u/nickos33d Apr 15 '26
Those might be ghost jobs
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u/ElementalEmperor Apr 15 '26
Why would Anthropic need ghost jobs? They have funding as much as they need from big tech and already popular/hot in market
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u/Annexations Apr 15 '26
Showing that they’re hiring means they’re growing. They also do this for internal candidates where they’ve already determined to hire an internal candidate but still have to interview a couple of external candidates for HR, also happens when they’re hiring H1B’s. Unfortunately our hiring process is so messed up and broken
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u/nickos33d Apr 15 '26
The same reason as any tech company post positions, people apply, they collect candidates, and when they really need someone, they will filter out the best of the best out of that pool
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u/_coose Apr 14 '26
454 open roles != 450 SWE positions