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We do this every 15 years. For anyone less than 15 years into their career, welcome to the party.
Let’s see if I can save you some energy:
- Yes, it made my job massively easier.
- No, it didn’t replace me.
- Yes, it allowed a bunch of new people to also do the job I do. Welcome newbies!
- No, my salary didn’t go down, relative to inflation.
It turns out that the last mile to a successful product delivery is still really fucking hard, and this magic bullet tool also didn’t solve that.
Now… Am I talking about…?
- AI?
- Web frameworks?
- English like programming language syntax?
- A compiler with built-in type checking?
- All of the above.
Edit: Formatting for readability.
I mean honestly for things like tech, the jobs are going away due to these innovations, just piecemeal. Each of these innovations have shaved hours off of projects. Now someone’s salary might be the same and they might still have to go into the office 40hrs a week (or be just as productive working from home, go figure) but the actual work they’re doing is that much easier than it used to be, they might only have to work 4 hours a day now to accomplish what might have taken 2 days in the past.
Sure, certain companies put more demand on employees than others, and as you mentioned there are still human components to the system that remain untouched by technology, but if the tech world was honest with itself tech employees do far less work now than they did 10-20 years ago, disregarding the general expansion of the tech industry. I’m just talking about individual jobs.
Of course I don’t think those employees should be making less. I think if we innovate so much that a person’s job disappears we should be able to recognize that that person still deserves to be clothed and fed as if they still had that job.
Yes, except for the fact that the flip side of those is that software, almost by definition, is automating away jobs in other industries.
So when it gets easier / cheaper to write software, other industries will spend an increasing amount on it to replace their workers. That’s one of the reasons the software industry has continued to grow, even though it’s gotten easier to write.
Sure, but also almost by definition, using tech to replace workers in other industries will reduce the total amount of workers needed for that job as you made the tech presumably to make the job easier or faster. My post was talking about the tech industry just because that was the topic, but as you mention, tech definitely replaces jobs in all sectors.
almost by definition, using tech to replace workers in other industries will reduce the total amount of workers needed for that job
The data on this is actually uncertain. Installing ATM machines to replace bank tellers should have been a slam dunk, but didn’t really cut into bank teller total employment.
https://www.aei.org/economics/what-atms-bank-tellers-rise-robots-and-jobs/
Don’t get me wrong, the ATM was the first step in a long chain of improvements that still ought to soon make bank tellers obsolete, and the dept of labor predicts 15% lower demand next year.
But even this relatively one-for-one swap of machines for people has taken half a century, so far.
That goes back to the point I was making earlier. For some reason a bank teller is hired for the same wage for the same hours, but I can almost guarantee you that because of the ATM they spend significantly less of their work day “working” because the ATM was designed to do a significant portion of their job. There certainly is an excuse to keep them around all day, there are some unavoidable tasks that only a human can do and they come up at random times throughout the day, but the ATM has replaced many of the working hours the bank tellers used to have even if the job didn’t go away.
tech employees do far less work now than they did 10-20 years ago
Agreed!
Of course, if we had truly understood the situation 10-20 years ago, we could have admitted that they were primarily being paid to know how to get the thing* to work, and not actually for the hours they spent typing in new code. Hence the rise of “Infrastructure Engineer” and “DevOps Specialist” as titles.
*I omiitted the technical term, for brevity. But to be clear, by ‘thing’, I mean what professionas typically call the “damned fucking piece of shit webserver, and this fucking bullshit framework”.
When AI is good enough to replace all of IT we all better hold onto our butts because we’re all going to fucking die
No, my salary didn’t go down, relative to inflation.
I’m calling bullshit on that one.
Everybody’s salary except executives has gone down relative to inflation going all the way back the the 80s.
Not mine. Every year if I don’t get a “cost of living” increase that meets or exceeds inflation, I go complain about it to my boss who then negotiates with HR on my behalf and I get a bigger raise. I’m not gonna let inflation kill my salary, and my boss is not gonna risk me leaving for another company. I do wish they would just give it to me up front and stop making me ask each year. We all know what the outcome is gonna be.
Wow must be nice
I’m not saying that the average wage in the country has not fallen against inflation. Data indicates that it has. But what I’m saying is that In the tech industry, if you provide good value to your company and the managers have half a brain, you should be able to negotiate annual raises to AT LEAST match inflation. If your company won’t, consider moving to a new company.
I know this is a privilege that most workers do not have, but this thread is about jobs in tech, where this is a more common case. It’s also one of the reasons why the aren’t more unions.
I’m not saying that the average wage in the country has not fallen against inflation. Data indicates that it has.
It actually hasn’t; the data has shifted since this talking point was created. There’s still other issues at work, though; the argument needs to be reframed around productivity.
This is comment makes me want to move to US. In Canada what you said is so unrealistic
In every country but the US, really. Someday, big tech companies will realise that a person in any other Western country can code just as well for half the price, but for now they won’t even consider it cause 'Murica.
They do. They’re looking mostly to Eastern Europe. India is the classic place to look, but the quality of the tech education there is mixed (at best). I’ve worked with a lot of competent people from Romania.
This got passed around as a common fact in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. Wages from the early 70s through 2010 or so were flat (not negative, but flat) due to inflation. Things have shifted since then.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q
Note that the graph shows median wage; it isn’t as affected by a few high earners as average wage would be. The 2010s were a period of relatively low inflation and wages had a chance to catch up a bit.
What is true is that productivity has leaped massively since the 70s, but median wages have only crept up somewhat. The argument needs to shift to be around how the working class was screwed out of their share of productivity improvements. That’s not likely to change until we have more unions and overall something closer to Socialism.
Two mitigating factors for me:
- For many years my skillet expanded faster than inflation ate away at my pay. I’ve been in a high demand specialty (Cybersecurity) for awhile.
- I’m now a manager, which does come with extra pay. Perhaps more importantly, it puts me in a position to throw my weight around to get my team and myself better raises.
There are other countries than the US of A.
Isn’t the US the one place that actually pays devs properly?
No. Plenty of places pay devs well. Top end jobs are mostly in the US. There are plenty of well paying jobs elsewhere.
Even if ai took over 90% of all coding work, that still wouldn’t affect more than maybe two hours a day.
Writing the actual code is the easy part. Thinking about what to write and how to organize it so it doesn’t become spaghetti is the hard part and what being a good developer is all about.
Question is: how many developers are actually good? Or better, how many produce good results? I wouldn’t call myself a great programmer, just okayish, but I certainly pushed code I knew was absolute garbage, simply because of external pressure (deadlines, legacy crap, maybe just a bad day,…).
I’m more of a mechanical engineer than a coder, and for me it’s been super helpful writing the code. The rest of our repo is clear enough that even I can understand what it actually does by just reading it. What I’m unfamiliar with are the syntax, and which nifty things our libraries can do.
So if you kinda understand programs but barely know the language, then it’s awesome. The actual good programmers at my company prefer a minimal working example to fix over a written feature request. Then they replace my crap with something more elegant.
Wait until AI start to summarize meetings into email
This is basically a thing now with how good transcription become, it’s wonderful
That’s when AI crashes because the secret cabal of middle management will direct their brainwashed execs to divest. /s
I am waiting… with bated breath.
I’ll just spend most of my time rejecting AI generated PR’s.
That sounds awful. Imaging going back and forth requesting changes until it gets it right. It’d be like chatting with openai only it’s trying to merge that crap into your repo.
Yes, but your bosses don’t know/understand that, why pay you when they can have 3 interns & AI for freeeeeeeeeeee???
The bosses will figure it out when they never receive a working product.
Our team lead recently sent out two fresh juniors to tackle a task, with no senior informed. And of course, they were supposed to build it in Python, even though they had no experience with it, because Python is just so easy. Apparently, those juniors had managed to build something that was working …on one machine, at some point.
On the day when our team lead wanted to show it to the customer, the two juniors were out of house (luckily for them) and no one knew where a distribution of that working state was. The code in the repo wouldn’t compile and seemed to be missing some commits.
So, a senior got pulled in to try to salvage it, but the juniors hadn’t set up proper dependency management, unit tests, logging, distribution bundling, nor documentation. And the code was spaghetti, too. Honestly, could have just started over fresh.
Our team lead was fuming, but they’ve been made to understand that this was not the fault of the juniors. So, yeah, I do think on that day, they found some new appreciation for seniors.
Heck, even I found new appreciation for what we do. All of that stuff is just the baseline from where we start a project and you easily forget that it’s there, until it’s not.
- Bosses
- Figuring out why a project failed
Name a less iconic duo.
They tried it with offshoring and those bosses are now out of work.
It would probably mean the amount of coding work that companies want done would multiply 10 fold as well. I’m sure the content of the work developers do will change somewhat over time (analogous to what happened during the industrial revolution), but I doubt they’re all out of a job in the near future.
Where I’m really not sure is, what percentage of the software written today actually needs human work?
I mean, think about all the basic form rendering, inputs masks, CRUD apps. There’s definitely a ton of work in them and they’re widely used, but I’m pretty sure that a relatively basic AI-assisted framework could recreate most of these apps with hardly any actual coding. Sure, it won’t be super efficient or elegant, but let’s be honest: nobody cares about that, if they’re good enough.
Just look at Wix, Wordpress, Squarespace etc. Website builders basically imploded the “low effort” web design market. Who would pay hundreds for a website made by a human, if you can just click together something reasonably good looking in 2h?
There’s definitely a ton of work in them and they’re widely used, but I’m pretty sure that a relatively basic AI-assisted framework could recreate most of these apps with hardly any actual coding
Any shop that’s not incompetent switched to using frameworks for that stuff 10-20 years ago, so there’s hopefully very little work left there for the AI.
Even at a company where it’s a massive amount, that company “benefitting” from AI, really just managed to defer their “use a framework” savings 20 years late.
Frameworks still require work. And tons of that. Even just defining all the form fields, add basic validations, write all the crud stuff, tests, etc.
Yea, I tried to use AI for my work, it seems to have zero clue about the software I asked about but it pretends it does. I think I’m safe.
Sounds good enough for my boss to me
I’ll start worrying about artificial intelligence when customers can generate requirements specific enough for actual intelligence to decipher.
Kinda hard to build a prompt when they don’t even really know what they want until they’ve seen what they asked for.
lol, I’d love to see the fucking ruin of the world we’d live in if current LLMs replaced senior developers. Maybe it’ll happen some day, but in the meantime it’s job security! I get to fix all of the bugfuck crazy issues generated by my juniors using Copilot and ChatGPT.
It’ll be like when we were all supposed to lose our jobs to outsourcing
And when “web frameworks means we don’t need web developers anymore” and when “COBOL is basically plain English, so anyone can code, so we don’t need specialists anymore”.
Millions did. It’s just that after a while the advantages stopped being convincing and the trend reversed. If the same thing happens here, expect to go jobless for a while until you’re needed again.
I was helping someone with their programming homework, every time copilot suggested anything he just blindly added it, and every time i had to ask him “and why do you need those lines? What do they do?”, and he could never answer…
Sometimes those lines made sense, other times they were completely irrelevant to the problem, but he just add the suggestions on reflex without even reading them
So much hallucinated crap and shoddy answers. Just because it was AI generated doesn’t mean it was a good solution
There is a reason Microsoft has branded it copilot…
Headline: airline fires every second pilot; says the copilot is good enough to fly the machine.
I had to pull aside a developer to inform him that he “would be” violating our national security by pasting code online to an AI and that there were potentially repercussions far beyond his job.
He’s a lot slower now, but the code is better.
One of my uni lecturers does the whole “You are out of a job” thing. He’s a smart guy but he’s barley written a line of code in his life. This comes up frequently and everytime I ask him “Get CHATGPT to write fizz buzz in X86 ASM.” Without fail it will crash when trying to build everytime. This technology is very advanced but I find people get it to the the simplest tasks and then expect it to solve the most complex ones.
I tried using AI tools to do some cleanup and refactoring of some legacy embedded C code and was curious if it could do any optimization or knew any clever algorithms.
It’s pretty good at figuring out the function of the code and adding comments, it did some decent refactoring of some sections to make them more readable.
It has no clue about how to work in a resource constrained environment or about the main concepts that separate embedded from everything else. Namely that it has to be able to run “forever”, operate in realtime on a constant flow of sensor data, and that nobody else is taking care of your memory management.
It even explained to me that we could do input filtering by using big arrays to do simple averaging on a device with only 1kB RAM, or use a long long for a never-reset accumulator without worrying about what will happen because “it will be years before it overflows”.
AI buddy, some of these units have run for decades without a power cycle. If lazy coders start dumping AI output into embedded systems the whole world is going to get a lot more glitchy.
This is how AI is a threat to humanity. Not because it will choose to act against us, but because people will trust what it says without question and base huge decisions on faulty information.
A million tiny decisions can be just as damaging. In my limited experience with several different local and cloud models you have to review basically all output as it can confidently introduce small errors. Often code will compile and run, but it has small errors that can cause output to drift, or the aforementioned long-run overflow type errors.
Those are the errors that junior or lazy coders will never notice and walk away from, causing hard to diagnose failure down the road. And the code “looks fine” so reviewers would need to really go over it with a fine toothed comb, which only happens in critical industries.
I will only use AI to write comments and documentation blocks and to get jumping off points for algorithms I don’t keep in my head. (“Write a function to sort this array”) It’s better than stack exchange for that IMO.
- People vastly overestimate the abilities of AI.
- Developers vastly overestimate their own abilities.
- There are people on any level of seniority that would be perfectly replaced by a noise generator.
There are people on any level of seniority that would be perfectly replaced by a noise generator.
Im fairly certain that this is what happened I my CISO.
The company had avoided certain destruction, after having fired the previous CEO and putting a new one in it’s place. The new CEO had managed to bring a newfound calm to the company and it’s ranks, and brought an air of meditative discipline to board room meetings.
Some said it was crazy, but making the LectoFan EVO the new CEO was the best decision the company board had ever made.
I’ve had it with fan shills.
Glorious leader box fan is sufficient. Glorious leader box fan is perfect.
Overestimate now, but I think that AI is going to be insane within like 5 years, given current investment trends
I find it very hard to believe that AI will ever get to the point of being able to solve novel problems without a fundamental change to the nature of “AI”. LLMs are powerful, but ultimately they (and every other kind of “AI”) are advanced pattern matching systems. Pattern matching is not capable of solving problems that haven’t been solved before.
Replace “AI” with “metaverse” or “Bitcoin”. Same bullshit
Not really. Crypto is a pyramid scheme.
If they stick around, maybe. If it falls into a rut, then investors are going to pull out and we’ll be in another AI winter.
Being a programmer is a lot like being a tradesperson. A tradesperson has a lot of flexibility in what they can do. They can work for a company, work freelance, or start their own business.
Programming gives you the same flexibility, the most important bit being that you can do it for yourself.
AI is going to struggle with larger complex tasks for a long time coming. While you can go to it and say ‘write me a script to convert a png to a jpg’ you can’t go to it and say ‘Write me a suite of tools to support business X’ or ‘make me a fun and creative game’ A good programmer isn’t going to be out of work for a long time.
Most of the work software developers do is comprehending the problem, formulating a solution that addresses the problem, and doing it in a maintainable, performant, and security conscious manner.
I think AI can write a killer
isEven()method, I think it’s shit at everything I listed… it’s extremely shit at being security conscious, any dev can tell you that it’s easier to write code and confirm it’s following best security practices then it is to review someone’s code and confirm it’s following best security practices… I think AI actively makes it harder to have confidence in security.The first real part of my job I think AI will help with is performance tuning. We’re not there yet but I think we’re not unimaginably far from being able to give an AI a working but slow function and have a computer spin up a million randomized test inputs and outputs… then start scrambling the algorithm in a plethora of ways and testing the performance while confirming that the test cases pass.
Then again, you’ll need to confirm the algorithm is still secure - but I think the realm of performance is the first place we’d see a tool that I’d demand a license for.
All the AI does is match the request to solutions it was trained in.
It just stackoverflow in your ide. It has a little more flexibility in answering and isn’t as corrupted by SEO result when googling the equivalent answer. Its not informed and thinking.
The optimisation problems you are talking about is the process that is used to make AI models in the first place. I think you want an AI to configure optimisation routines for you rather than build the test cases and variables yourself. Or you want some system that implement all the individual components better, but an AI that can optimise the entire thing isn’t coming about soon. It would need to trained on very similar software. In which case you should just use that better software.
Basically any pro-AI argument seems to go “it will achieve AGI”. So funny that lots of people buy that, forgetting how hard a general intelligence is.
Still bizarre to hear this. It’s like they think the CEOs are gonna write a prompt. “Link customer data to visualization” and it’s gonna preemptively collect the info and then create useful insight for their future products which will then be made by the AI
It literally cannot come up with novel solutions because it’s goal is to regurgitate the most likely response to a question based on training data from the internet. Considering that the internet is often trash and getting trashier, I think LLMs will only get worse over time.
AI has poisoned the well it was fed from. The only solution to get a good AI moving forward is to train it using curated data. That is going to be a lot of work.
On the other hand, this might be a business opportunity. Selling curated data to companies that want to make AIs.
I said this a while ago but you know how we have “pre-atomic” steel? We are going to have pre-LLM data sets.
Low-background steel, also known as pre-war steel, is any steel produced prior to the detonation of the first nuclear bombs in the 1940s and 1950s. Typically sourced from ships (either as part of regular scrapping or shipwrecks) and other steel artifacts of this era, it is often used for modern particle detectors because more modern steel is contaminated with traces of nuclear fallout.[1][2]
Very interesting, today I learned.
The reason why chat gpt 3.5 is still great for anything previous to it’s cutoff date. It’s not constantly being updated with new garbage
Hi, I don’t want to say too much, but after being invited to some closed AI talks by one of the biggest chip machine manufacturers (if you know the name, you know they don’t mess around), I can tell you AI is, in certain regards, a very powerful tool that will shape some, if not all, industries by proxy. They described it as the “internet” in the way that it will take influence on everybody’s life sooner or later, and you can either keep your finger on the pulse or get left behind. But they distinguished between the “AI” that’s floating around in the public sector vs. actual purpose-trained AI that’s not meant for public usage. Sidenote: They are also convinced the average user of a LLM is using it the “wrong” way. LLMs are only a starting point.
Also, it’s concerning; I’m pretty sure the big boys have already taken over the AI market, so I do not trust that it will be to the benefit of all of us and not only for a select group (of shareholders) that will reap the benefits.
So Nvidia (or Intel or AMD) told you that you need to AI to stay competitive. Not only that, but you needed a bespoke solution. Not the toy version out on the net every can get access to.
Strangely enough, they have some wonderful products coming to market which would be just what you need to build a large training network capable of injesting all your company data. They’d be happy to help you on this project.
All they had to do to get you to drop your guard was invite you by name to a “closed talk”.
Haha, lol, whats happening why do you hate me, just sharing an experience, an opinion?
- it’s not NVIDIA or AMD or any chip manufacturer, or someone who has a product to sell to you. Most of them are not even publicly traded but are organized in family office structures. They don’t care about the B2C market at all; they are essentially private equity firms. You guys interpret anything to fit your screwed-up vision of this world. They don’t even have a product to sell to you or me; it was a closed talk with top industry leaders and their managers where they discussed their view of AI and how they will implement purpose-trained AI into manufacturing, etc. It has nothing to do with selling to the public.
I have already said too much - just let me tell you if you think LLMs are the pinnacle of AI, you are very mistaken, and depending on your position in the market, you need to take AI into account. You can only dismiss AI if you have a position/job with no real responsibility.
So weird how you guys think everything is to sell you something or a conspiracy - this was a closed talk to discuss how the leaders in certain industries will adapt to the coming changes. They give zero cares about the B2C market, aka you as an individual.
Again, none of the people at this talk have anything to do with selling a product or pushing an agenda or whatever you think. There is no press, there is no marketing - it was basically a meetup of private equity firms that discussed the implementation and impact of purpose-trained AI in diverse fields, which affects the business structure of the big single-family office behemoths.
Yeah you definitely went to a marketing thing and got marketed to
Like when they claim your smart thermostat is now “AI powered” despite the fact it’s the same exact product it was 2 years ago
Again, none of the people at this talk have anything to do with selling a product or pushing an agenda or whatever you think. There is no press, there is no marketing, there is no product - it was basically a meetup of private equity firms that discussed the implementation and impact of purpose-trained AI in diverse fields, which affects the business structure of the big single-family office behemoths, like an industry summit for the private equity sector regarding the future of AI and how some plan to implement it (mainly big non-public SFOs).
Sometimes people just meet to discuss strategy; no one at these talks is interested in selling you anything or buying anything - they are essentially top management and/or members of large single-family offices and other private equity firms. They are not interested in selling or marketing something to the public; they are not public companies.
It’s weird how you guys react; not everything is a conspiracy or a marketing thing. It’s pretty normal in private equity to have these closed talks about global phenomena and how to deal with it.
These talks are more to keep the industry informed. I get that you do not like it when essentially the big SFOs have a meeting where they discuss their future plans on a certain topic, but it’s pretty normal that the elite will arrange themselves to coordinate some investments. It’s essentially just the offices of the big billionaire families coming together to put heads together to discuss a topic that might influence their business structure. But, in no way is it a marketing strategy; it would, on the contrary, be negatively viewed in the public eye that big finance is already coordinating to implement AI into their strategy.
But feelings don’t change facts. My point is if the actual non public big players are looking at AI in a serious matter, then so should you.
Its not a conspiracy… You are obviously not involved in the actual ML/AI, but another sector. You aren’t speaking in any technical explaination.
A lot of us are involved in the technical aspect and understand what is being said by management.
I never argued that I was in IT/Tech; I deal with investments and PE. I have nothing to do with IT or tech. My point is we, in the PE/FO sector, are going to invest in AI businesses in 24/25, not only in the “B2C market” but mainly in the B2B market and for internal applications. Whether you believe it or not, it’s gonna happen anyway.
Oh gosh I’m so afraid of the anonymous business daddy that told you AI is sexy.
Any gains from LLM now would barely offset the complexity bloat introduced in enterprise applications in the last decade alone. And that’s not even taking into account the sins of the past that are only hidden behind the topsoil lair of cargo cult architecture.
After the report that codes made by the assistance of copilot are actually shittier than code written manually I’m feeling safe until the next breakthrough in AI development. Meanwhile I’m saving up gold for the eventuality.
Someone needs to make, and maintain AI systems.
AI can’t exactly fix itself when it breaks.
Yup, they are only as good as their programming
Wait, y’all have parents that understand and/or care what you do for a living?
Mine care, but they have no idea what I do since the process of enterprise software development is totally foreign to them.
I spent a couple of years doing contract work in a team that built the APIs that ran behind a fairly complex site; they understood that I was helping build the site, but really didn’t get that I had nothing at all to do with the UI or content, and yes thank you for your suggestions about the layout but that’s not something that I can “just go fix it” because a) change control is a thing and b) that part of the site is maintained by an entirely different team, from a different company, and I don’t have access to their source code
This image macro is clearly illustrating that they do not.
Robots, maybe some jobs, but good luck eliminating the need for repair men and engineers.
I feel pretty secure in my job, because in the future I’ll talk to the customers so the AI doesn’t have to instead of the engineers.
Typical conversation between a non-programmer and a programmer about AI:
Won’t AI put you out of your job?
It probably won’t
Well, can’t AI write code much faster and more efficiently than humans?
How would it know what code to write?
I guess you would need to provide it with a description of the app that you want it to make?
So you’re telling me that in the future, there will be machines that can generate computer code based entirely on a description of the required functionality?
I guess so?
Those machines are called “compilers”, and “a description of the required functionality” is called “a program”. You’re describing programming.
I have no other skills that would pay anywhere close to what this career pays. I’d need to go back to school and become a surgeon or something. I don’t think they let people become surgeons at 50 years old, and I don’t have the energy for an internship and residency. I’m just hanging on and hoping that it doesn’t all vanish in the next few years. I’m also spending time learning how to leverage AI, since I think that’ll put me a step ahead. Good luck to all of us, we’re going to need it!
