> Fwiw, a non-technical employee in my workplace has begun submitting ai-generated prs to internal repos I maintain & they're of excellent quality, with review feedback graciously received & expediently addressed, so this isn't a matter of the idiots not being technical, it's an attitude problem.

It is hard for me to imagine another engineering discipline that would be totally fine accepting work from those who don't have the actual engineering background required to do the work.

If I had to push this take to the extreme: software engineers never learned class solidarity and it's now biting the industry in the ass.

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dcrazy an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Man, you must hate those handymen who put up YouTube videos showing how to do basic home maintenance. A truly class-conscious handyman would insist that the homeowner hire them to replace a light switch.

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Based-A an hour ago | parent [-]

Come on, are you really going to strawman "engineering should be inherently disqualifying" into "so people shouldn't DIY in their own home"? Please try a little bit harder.

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dcrazy an hour ago | parent [-]

I’m not strawmanning anything. I’m pointing out what I believe to be ridiculous gatekeeping. Software engineering isn’t some holy magic that must be kept from the masses.

I can go on YouTube and get step-by-step instructions on how to safely wire an entire house. In many jurisdictions I would even be allowed to do that.

I can get instructions on how to completely redo a bathroom, down to the studs and up through the waterproofing and tiling. I can get instructions on how to do foundation repair, which might be a bit much for me but can help me ask the right questions to keep the contractor I hired honest.

These are all examples of experts acting as “traitors” to their particular group. In reality, technology enables both specialization and despecialization. Some people try to cling to their specializations and cry “class warfare” when threatened.

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Based-A 28 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Assuming you're being genuine (which I have a hard time believing because your argument is quite literally a strawman, please read the definition), you're missing the context entirely. You can't conflate small DIY projects done around the house with developing software that thousands of people and institutions rely on. By all means you can go and watch a video on software development, but that does not entitle you to expect that PRs you make will be accepted to any project other than the ones you control yourself.

	▲	dcrazy 15 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Please re-read the specific comment I replied to. It was someone expressing indignation that a software engineer would accept “high-quality” PRs from a non-software engineer, accusing the poster of lacking “class consciousness.”
	▲	lukan 16 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		"You can't conflate small DIY projects done around the house with developing software that thousands of people and institutions rely on. " Who claimed that? That was the context: "Fwiw, a non-technical employee in my workplace has begun submitting ai-generated prs to internal repos I maintain & they're of excellent quality, "

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Klonoar 15 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

Alright, I guess I'll take the bait. Not much else going on today anyway.

> I’m pointing out what I believe to be ridiculous gatekeeping.

I am not gatekeeping. I am stating that we collectively exist in a professional caste and that will go away or lose influence if you let it do so. Other professional castes do this exact same brain exercise and that is why they have protections in place.

> Some people try to cling to their specializations and cry “class warfare” when threatened.

I'll be blunt and just state that I am post money and not remotely threatened by this stuff anymore. I am observing that software engineering as a profession is blindly giving away a ridiculous amount of leverage in the world - in the form of dollars and influence, the value of their labor - and more crucially doing it to themselves.

I will be fine whichever way this shakes out, and I don't really have a dog in this fight short of having spent decent time in the OSS space and finding it sad what it is turning in to.

	▲	dcrazy 11 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> I am stating that we collectively exist in a professional caste and that will go away or lose influence if you let it do so. Other professional castes do this exact same brain exercise and that is why they have protections in place. I consider this mode of thinking selfish and anti-progress. It’s pretty much exactly what Americans decry about unions.

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thewebguyd 29 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

> hard for me to imagine another engineering discipline....

Well, that's already the case because you cant just call yourself an engineer and start signing off on projects. It's a legally protected title in a lot of places. You need a professional license, and can face legal liability for your decisions.

Software engineering is not engineering. Software craftmanship or even architecture would be a more accurate term. There are no devs that will go to prison if what they produce has, say, a major vulnerability. That alone disqualifies it from being engineering. There's no licensure, there's no liability, so already software development is not gatekept in any way like other engineering disciplines.

I mean, just go into an aerospace engineering office and say you want to move fast and break things, you'll get laughed out of the room.

No idea what you mean by class solidarity. There are only two; the capital owning class, and then everyone else (the working class). Most devs are working class just like everyone else.

Unless you're proposing that software should be gatekept to the level of other engineering disciplines?

	▲	Klonoar 12 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> Well, that's already the case because you cant just call yourself an engineer and start signing off on projects. It's a legally protected title in a lot of places. You need a professional license, and can face legal liability for your decisions. This was part of the implication of my point, yes. > No idea what you mean by class solidarity. There are only two; the capital owning class, and then everyone else (the working class). Most devs are working class just like everyone else. Yes, albeit a highly compensated portion of the working class. Software engineers should protect their own field a bit more. > Unless you're proposing that software should be gatekept to the level of other engineering disciplines? I do not like or want to use the term "gatekeeping" here, but yes, I think that software engineering should be held to a higher standard. You can't have it both ways.