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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Wait until AI start to summarize meetings into email
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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”.
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.
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.
- 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Didn’t ChatGPT become very bad recently? It used to give really working code but now it gets things wrong and doesn’t follow context. It gives code but when you ask it to improve by give more context, it ignores the previous answer and give wrong code.
It even sometimes answers by saying it does not have the answer for questions that it answered few months ago.
I keep telling the stupid thing to stop wasting time and space apologizing, and it won’t.
Last time I asked a niche api question it showed me how to formulate the question so I could post it on this GitHub issues…
Edit
How is that a niche api question? That’s a public api that is scraped up.
It’s also a terrible way to ask the question. It’s how a clueless newb asks questions. Anyone hoping to help needs to at least know: What are you attempting to use the end point for and What results are you receiving vs expecting?
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!
Who do they think will be using the AI?
AI threatens to harm a lot about programming, but not the existence/necessity of programmers.
Particularly, AI may starve the development of open source libraries. Which, ironically, will probably increase the need for employed programmers as companies accrue giant piles of shoddy in-house code that needs maintaining.
I can’t wait for my future coworkers who will be coding with AI without actually understanding the fundamentals of the language they’re coding in. It’s gonna get scary.
Why do you think AI will starve open source?
The amount of code I’ve seen copy-pasted from StackOverflow to do things like “group an array by key XYZ”, “dispatch requests in parallel with limit”, etc. when the dev should’ve known there were libs to help with these common tasks makes me think those devs will just use Copilot instead of SO, and do it way more often.
Bad devs will continue being bad devs, shocker
This is why I’ve sided with the enemy and my career involves educating people on how to build AI automation.
I was afraid of AI coming from my job, so I decided to learn about it. And by learning about it, I learned its limitations, which are numerous.
Someday maybe it will be strong enough to take on an entire engineer – but it’s going to be a very long time until that happens. If anything, I’ve spent more time screwing with prompts making sure that they’re perfect to try to get better outputs. Really where I see our jobs going is prompt engineering, DevOps, and fine tuning
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.
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.
Oh gosh I’m so afraid of the anonymous business daddy that told you AI is sexy.
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.
