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I think some of us have our head in the sand about how disruptive this will be to software engineering as an industry. I find the applied stats-yness of ML real

I think some of us have our head in the sand about how disruptive this will be to software engineering as an industry. I find the applied stats-yness of ML really boring, but I also want to hedge against some of these companies creating run away hits that make my current job obsolete.

throwawaygh 5y ago
If you're writing the sort of code copilot generates, you should be more worried about things like wix.com, RPA products, WordPress, or high school kids. (No hate, my summer job in high school was PHP CRUD stuff, but it's definitely the burger flipping of the software development world.)
- distribot 5y ago
  Is there any reason to think there's a ceiling on these types of products or a big distinction between different types of engineering? I understand there will still be software engineers to validate, supervise, etc. But what if every team of 10 people today can be reduced to 3? What will that do to the industry? I have two FANG companies on my resume, so I'm pretty confident that if there were a decimation I'd survive, but I think life would be very different.
  - throwawaygh 5y ago
    > But what if every team of 10 people today can be reduced to 3? This article uses the phrase "Automating Programming", but that phrase is not new. The term "Automatic Programming" was coined in 1958 by John Backus, and he was referring to his FORTRAN compiler. Think about the tens of billions of humans who could have been employed writing Assembly over the past half century if we hadn't invented high-level programming languages. What happens to programmers? They move up the abstraction ladder and tackle bigger problems, faster. Some people get left behind, sure. But then, ask the operators of punchcard machines how life is going. So maybe the "learn Python+HTML+JS in six months and become employable" status quo evaporates. But for at least another century there will always plenty of work for clever problem solvers who know how to tell computers to do things. (FWIW, I'm not a programmer and haven't been employed as one since I was in school as an undergraduate, but I do I employ/manage a fair amount of people who program.)
  - visarga 5y ago
    > But what if every team of 10 people today can be reduced to 3? We would do 3x the projects we're doing now, and salaries would go up as well as hiring.

throwawaygh 5y ago

If you're writing the sort of code copilot generates, you should be more worried about things like wix.com, RPA products, WordPress, or high school kids. (No hate, my summer job in high school was PHP CRUD stuff, but it's definitely the burger flipping of the software development world.)

distribot 5y ago
Is there any reason to think there's a ceiling on these types of products or a big distinction between different types of engineering? I understand there will still be software engineers to validate, supervise, etc. But what if every team of 10 people today can be reduced to 3? What will that do to the industry? I have two FANG companies on my resume, so I'm pretty confident that if there were a decimation I'd survive, but I think life would be very different.
- throwawaygh 5y ago
  > But what if every team of 10 people today can be reduced to 3? This article uses the phrase "Automating Programming", but that phrase is not new. The term "Automatic Programming" was coined in 1958 by John Backus, and he was referring to his FORTRAN compiler. Think about the tens of billions of humans who could have been employed writing Assembly over the past half century if we hadn't invented high-level programming languages. What happens to programmers? They move up the abstraction ladder and tackle bigger problems, faster. Some people get left behind, sure. But then, ask the operators of punchcard machines how life is going. So maybe the "learn Python+HTML+JS in six months and become employable" status quo evaporates. But for at least another century there will always plenty of work for clever problem solvers who know how to tell computers to do things. (FWIW, I'm not a programmer and haven't been employed as one since I was in school as an undergraduate, but I do I employ/manage a fair amount of people who program.)
- visarga 5y ago
  > But what if every team of 10 people today can be reduced to 3? We would do 3x the projects we're doing now, and salaries would go up as well as hiring.