7 ms·

This is so common in many types of business, and usually a very difficult point to articulate so thank you for that. It's something to be shown to those ringing

by quitit 4y ago

This is so common in many types of business, and usually a very difficult point to articulate so thank you for that. It's something to be shown to those ringing the death-knell for programmers, artists, and the like. Those death-knell types seemingly aren't aware of what day to day operations looks like and how AI makes a great tool, but doesn't necessarily deal with the very human factors of whims, uncertainty, reactive business mentalities and the phenomenon that is best summarised by this webcomic: https://theoatmeal.com/comics/design_hell https://theoatmeal.com/comics/design_hell In my field they like to call this "hurry up and wait", a nonsensical but fitting description that summarises everything from changing scope to the unjust imbalance of time between the principal and the agent. (There is a comment further down which suggests that we could just train AI to deal with this variability, I hope that's humour... sweet summer child thinks you can train AI to predict the future.)

IKLOL 4y ago
I think the fear should be less about AI taking 100% of jobs but it should be AI making a single programmer do the job of 5, which would wipe a majority of the market out and make it a non-viable career option for most. Companies are already bloated, imagine when they realize one overworked highly paid senior can replace 10 juniors.
- SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
  I don't know if that's going to be the case - companies can never have enough software and typically they just go until the budget runs out as the software is never "done". I think being able to build 5x the software with one dev means that each company is going to build 5x the software.
- gonzo41 4y ago
  You're not thinking that companies will not just spin up 5 projects, so 5 programmers produce a notional 25 person's worth of work. And hey, maybe they sack the expensive old guy and the AI spend isn't so great. Seems like a win.
- vages 4y ago
  If increased productivity equaled job loss, there would be two programmers alive today, doing the same job as the fewer than 10000 programmers using punch cards as we entered the year 1950. A lot of projects today are not even greenlit because they would be too expensive to make. For instance, there are a lot processes in almost every country that require you to file paper forms, even though we have had web forms and databases for 25 years. This goes even for rich countries. If one programmer is able to do the job of 5 others, we will probably have 5 times as many systems to tend to now that businesses and institutions can afford them.
  - coldtea 4y ago
    >If increased productivity equaled job loss there would be two programmers alive today, doing the same job as the fewer than 10000 programmers using punch cards as we entered the year 1950. The only reason it's not the case in this example is because computers at the time were a tiny early adopter niche, which massively multiplied and expanded to other areas. Like, only 1 in 10,000 businesses would have one in 1950, and only big firms would. Heck, then 1 in 100 million people even had a computer. Today they've already done that expansion into all businesses and all areas of corporate, commerce, and leisure activities. Now almost everybody has one (or a comparable device in their pocket). Already cloud based systems have made it so that a fraction of programmers and admins are needed. In some cases eliminating the need for one altogether. There are tons of other fields, however, more mature, where increased productivity very much equaled job loss...
    - cguess 4y ago
      Have no doubt, we will find new places to put computers. In the 80's and even the 90's everyone said the same thing, "Why do I need a computer? I can do everything I do already without a problem?" Well, turns out with computers you could do 12 more things you can never considered. Consider the interoffice memo: it'd take what, 1-2 hours to get a document from one floor to another through the system? Cool, you can work on 2-3 projects at a time maybe, because that's all the bandwidth allowed. Along comes email and ups that to 5-6 because now the communications can be pretty consistent. It's still not perfect, because what if you're at lunch or the gym? Then came Blackberries and all of a sudden its 12-15 projects at once. Then Slack because you don't even have to think. Now add this. Notice that during that time there weren't all of a sudden less programmers, or managers or sysadmins, if anything there's more. If anything everyone is even more stressed with more to do because of the context switching and 24/7. That's why this will do, I'd bet money on it.
- nemo44x 4y ago
  Wouldn’t this actually create more demand for programmers? More businesses can exist that have a need for software. To date every advance in programming efficiency has resulted in more tech, not less. Additionally there’s the math behind it. If Company A fires 50% of their staff because AI lets the remaining 50% work at twice the productivity then how will they compete with Company B that keeps their staff and now gets 200% efficiency? The math is in favor of getting more, not fewer, developers.
  - yonaguska 4y ago
    Yep, I personally see the cost of doing a start-up going way down for individual developers or even junior developers.
    - anon7725 4y ago
      This is the ray of sunshine in all this AI stuff, to me.
    - cguess 4y ago
      You know, until that AI code breaks and you have no idea what's going on internally. You know how hard it is to start debugging a project you haven't been onboarded to? Now imagine that every time something has a hiccup.
  - marstall 4y ago
    yes - and in another way, too. a lot of the demand for programmers is driven by successive waves of new technology adoption and investment - and AI is looking to be a motherload that should keep us going for awhile.
- cosmodisk 4y ago
  I'm kind of on the fence with this one. As someone who does programming at work,I don't want to be partially replaced by a prompt, however there are also lots of sectors, where the problems are big and solving them could help a lot of people but money is an issue,so being able to access resources on a scale of large tech companies would be amazing.
- korijn 4y ago
  If as GP says AI could automate 1% of a single programmer's job (the boring part where you write code), then how on earth can you derive that a single programmer could do the job of 5 with AI? It's completely illogical.
  - diab0lic 4y ago
    I suspect the post you’re replying to disagrees with the 1% figure.
  - coldtea 4y ago
    The GP estimate is way off... If they indeed wait for input from other departments/companies 99% of the time (so they just need to actually program 5 minutes in their 8-hour workday), then they can be already thrown out of a job and have the company do with 1/10 the programmers, no AI required...
    - koolba 4y ago
      Clearly the company needs to dedicate a programmer to wait on each customer individually. You can’t have the same person waiting for two things simultaneously.
      - intelVISA 4y ago
        Can't believe companies are still single-threaded in 2023.
    - korijn 4y ago
      Exactly!
  - marstall 4y ago
    many programmers (most?) spend hours a day coding and see it as the best part of their day?
- zeroonetwothree 4y ago
  How much more efficient is programming in Python with modern tools vs assembly? I would bet more than 5x
  - lebuffon 4y ago
    That's an interesting case and use of the word efficient. Developer time reduced by 5X CPU time increased by 500x When CPU cycles are cheap it's a logical tradeoff but it still grates against my sensibilities.
    - jdminhbg 4y ago
      5X is a gigantic underestimate of how much developer time has improved. How long would it take a good assembly programmer to implement a CRUD web server connected to a database? Way more than 5x longer what a mediocre Python programmer would need.
      - ruined 4y ago
        an assembly programmer wouldn't write a web server connected to a database, they would implement a tui over tty, and it would be faster.
        jdminhbg 4y ago
        How good would it be at letting business users attach photos and emailed documents?
      - Jensson 4y ago
        > How long would it take a good assembly programmer to implement a CRUD web server connected to a database? You know you can call import functions and call libraries in other languages than python? If everyone was programming in assembly then there would be plenty of libraries to make database calls or make web servers in assembly, and there would be plenty of tutorials online that you could copy and paste to get things going, meaning it wouldn't take much work at all. It would be more work, but not orders of magnitude more work.
- intelVISA 4y ago
  > Companies are already bloated, imagine when they realize one overworked highly paid senior can replace 10 juniors. That is already possible without AI and has been the case for a long time... the issue is nobody will stay to be that highly paid senior running entire projects because at that point you can just run your own shop and pocket the full profits.
  - Art9681 4y ago
    It also causes a "single point of failure". If that senior gets hit by a bus then what? Can the company afford to bring in another senior that will take ~6 months to become productive? I'm not disagreeing with you. Im thinking of going solo myself.
    - onemoresoop 4y ago
      The biggest problem going solo is getting the projects/contracts. Now it will become even harder so one has to charge less and less to compete.
  - LouisSayers 4y ago
    I wanted to say the same thing - except that the senior can't actually perform 10x because they're too busy trying to train the next gen devs while attempting to deliver stories themselves in the fractions of time available to them. Not to say that this is a bad thing, but the difference between a junior and senior is often much more than the difference in their salary.
- mbesto 4y ago
  > imagine when they realize one overworked highly paid senior can replace 10 juniors This already happens, the market is just not very efficient about it, e.g. a highly paid senior dev is not working at a company that only needs 2-3 developers, they're working at Google with 100's of devs.
  - jjkeddo199 4y ago
    Disagree -- I think chatGPT will make juniors more palatable to hire. ChatGPT will basically give juniors a free pair programmer to baby-sit their work/progress. Why pay extra for senior devs when juniors can become much more efficient thanks to ChatGPT becoming stack-overflow on steroids. I think the wage gap between junior and senior will actually drop massively. I predict teams will keep 1-3 architect level positions for designs and reviews and replace all seniors with cheaper juniors.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - kaoD 4y ago
      I predict the wage gap will actually widen. StackOverflow-on-steroids can only give your so much, so seniors will still be in demand for what they do. It's just the competition between juniors will be fiercer so junior wages will drop.
      - Gene_Parmesan 4y ago
        I think dev wages will stagnate across the board. I think the simple existence of the fear of being replaced by never-tiring, always-working AI will subconsciously prime devs to be willing to work for less. Devs have been in a market with a significant shortage of skilled labor; can we say that remains true after GPT hits the mainstream even more than it already has?
        roguas 4y ago
        Right now? It made a splash but who uses ai for building their software this very moment? Nobody knows how the industry will land on this. Adoption will take time - it's not gonna be a year. I remember after ruby on rails first demo, next day people had their websites up in ror. Here we will see, but it will be a bigger shift.
- pydry 4y ago
  Companies were bloated because of the profit potential of tech and organizational dysfunction. AI wasnt needed to cut down on bloat - some combination of a few companies reaping the majority of the profit and reduced dysfunction is enough.
- soperj 4y ago
  Yeah, but they would then just start 10 times the number of projects at once and watch the majority of them fail.
- Art9681 4y ago
  I think this fear is unfounded because history shows this is not the case. We will adapt to the new level of productivity and our goals will adapt accordingly. What we are expected to produce will adapt. You were able to pump out 4 solid production grade pull requests per sprint? Then the expectation increases to a single dev being able to pump out 10. The company's ambition will grow as a result of the newfound efficiencies, and management will continue to request things that cannot be reasonably delivered on time with the people and tooling we have.
- olalonde 4y ago
  Fixed pie fallacy. More likely, there will be 5x as many apps / companies with just as many jobs available. And the cost of everything will go down, except truly scarce things like Manhattan real estate.
- nicholasjarnold 4y ago
  > Companies are already bloated, imagine when they realize one overworked highly paid senior can replace 10 juniors. Yep. This is where I'm at in terms of personal armchair predictions of the future. I expect the labor market will be tough for more junior software engineers in the coming years. This might indeed cause backpressure in the supply of new grads/new labor force entrants in this family of fields ("software development"). However, the "highly paid senior" is only around for so long before achieving financial independence and just not working anymore. Then what? The company didn't hire juniors because the "highly paid senior" did all the work. Whoops. Now the company lacks the pipeline of people to replace that senior. It'll sort itself out in time, but the next decade will be interesting I think. Some companies will realize that they must make investments into the future of the labor force and will do better in the longer term. Other companies might indeed "fire the juniors" for some short term gains and find themselves lacking replacement staff later.
  - kneebonian 4y ago
    I see it the other way around the senior engineer is expensive and costs a lot 2 juniors are cheap. Who cares if their code is crap they produce it really fast so they find a bug, just fix it quickly. If anything the time a Sr. spends thinking about things to do things "right" is seen as a waste of time. Whereas the jr. will produce an enormous amount of buggy code but they can fix the bugs quickly by just throwing another prompt to ChatGPT to solve. Now some might say that the code will be terrible quality and buggy and full of holes and the users will hate it, it is never economically viable to build enormous systems on a house of cards like that. To which I respond, you just described every piece of enterprise software I've ever used ever.
    - adamauckland 4y ago
      Because as soon as you tilt from producing features to fixing bugs, you are losing traction and your competitors will win and now you are bankrupt. I've seen entire businesses collapse because of this mentality.
      - 4y ago
- xwdv 4y ago
  If you can have one programmer do the job of 5, then you will be defeated by companies using 5 programmers to do the job of 25. Also, if your one programmer dies you now have no programmers and loss of all institutional knowledge, whereas the other company can lose several programmers and still be OK. There is value in having redundant programmers.
- bcrosby95 4y ago
  That would be awesome. We have a never-ending list of things to do and not enough time to do it all. What you're saying to me is that we can get through our list of priorities even faster, and stuff won't continually rot at the end of the list.
- risyachka 4y ago
  Companies will continue to hire even more people. Their single point is growth. If one can go the job of 5 - they revenue per employee will increase. They will hire even more employees.
- scruple 4y ago
  > making a single programmer do the job of 5 I mean, I already do? And for totally mundane and benign reasons. This has been my experience in this industry for the last 8 years or so, though my first 9 years I felt like the pace was maintainable. Do more with less. It's so common to come across situations where so and so left, their position won't be backfilled, the targets don't adjust to compensate for the productivity hit, and we can put up or shut up.
- 908B64B197 4y ago
  This was already the case 10 years ago. Except, there was no AI, but an alternative called an offshored development center. You would send your spec and design document and get, via email or FTP if they were really cutting-edge a number of files that would sometime compile and even, according to the legends, actually work. The way this tech worked is that you generally had to wait overnight for your spec to "mature" into code. Some places figured out they could hire local engineers for about 5-10x what they paid for this "offshored development center" tech and get better results.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

by quitit 4y ago

IKLOL 4y ago

I think the fear should be less about AI taking 100% of jobs but it should be AI making a single programmer do the job of 5, which would wipe a majority of the market out and make it a non-viable career option for most. Companies are already bloated, imagine when they realize one overworked highly paid senior can replace 10 juniors.

SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
I don't know if that's going to be the case - companies can never have enough software and typically they just go until the budget runs out as the software is never "done". I think being able to build 5x the software with one dev means that each company is going to build 5x the software.
gonzo41 4y ago
You're not thinking that companies will not just spin up 5 projects, so 5 programmers produce a notional 25 person's worth of work. And hey, maybe they sack the expensive old guy and the AI spend isn't so great. Seems like a win.
vages 4y ago
If increased productivity equaled job loss, there would be two programmers alive today, doing the same job as the fewer than 10000 programmers using punch cards as we entered the year 1950. A lot of projects today are not even greenlit because they would be too expensive to make. For instance, there are a lot processes in almost every country that require you to file paper forms, even though we have had web forms and databases for 25 years. This goes even for rich countries. If one programmer is able to do the job of 5 others, we will probably have 5 times as many systems to tend to now that businesses and institutions can afford them.
- coldtea 4y ago
  >If increased productivity equaled job loss there would be two programmers alive today, doing the same job as the fewer than 10000 programmers using punch cards as we entered the year 1950. The only reason it's not the case in this example is because computers at the time were a tiny early adopter niche, which massively multiplied and expanded to other areas. Like, only 1 in 10,000 businesses would have one in 1950, and only big firms would. Heck, then 1 in 100 million people even had a computer. Today they've already done that expansion into all businesses and all areas of corporate, commerce, and leisure activities. Now almost everybody has one (or a comparable device in their pocket). Already cloud based systems have made it so that a fraction of programmers and admins are needed. In some cases eliminating the need for one altogether. There are tons of other fields, however, more mature, where increased productivity very much equaled job loss...
  - cguess 4y ago
    Have no doubt, we will find new places to put computers. In the 80's and even the 90's everyone said the same thing, "Why do I need a computer? I can do everything I do already without a problem?" Well, turns out with computers you could do 12 more things you can never considered. Consider the interoffice memo: it'd take what, 1-2 hours to get a document from one floor to another through the system? Cool, you can work on 2-3 projects at a time maybe, because that's all the bandwidth allowed. Along comes email and ups that to 5-6 because now the communications can be pretty consistent. It's still not perfect, because what if you're at lunch or the gym? Then came Blackberries and all of a sudden its 12-15 projects at once. Then Slack because you don't even have to think. Now add this. Notice that during that time there weren't all of a sudden less programmers, or managers or sysadmins, if anything there's more. If anything everyone is even more stressed with more to do because of the context switching and 24/7. That's why this will do, I'd bet money on it.
nemo44x 4y ago
Wouldn’t this actually create more demand for programmers? More businesses can exist that have a need for software. To date every advance in programming efficiency has resulted in more tech, not less. Additionally there’s the math behind it. If Company A fires 50% of their staff because AI lets the remaining 50% work at twice the productivity then how will they compete with Company B that keeps their staff and now gets 200% efficiency? The math is in favor of getting more, not fewer, developers.
- yonaguska 4y ago
  Yep, I personally see the cost of doing a start-up going way down for individual developers or even junior developers.
  - anon7725 4y ago
    This is the ray of sunshine in all this AI stuff, to me.
  - cguess 4y ago
    You know, until that AI code breaks and you have no idea what's going on internally. You know how hard it is to start debugging a project you haven't been onboarded to? Now imagine that every time something has a hiccup.
- marstall 4y ago
  yes - and in another way, too. a lot of the demand for programmers is driven by successive waves of new technology adoption and investment - and AI is looking to be a motherload that should keep us going for awhile.
cosmodisk 4y ago
I'm kind of on the fence with this one. As someone who does programming at work,I don't want to be partially replaced by a prompt, however there are also lots of sectors, where the problems are big and solving them could help a lot of people but money is an issue,so being able to access resources on a scale of large tech companies would be amazing.
korijn 4y ago
If as GP says AI could automate 1% of a single programmer's job (the boring part where you write code), then how on earth can you derive that a single programmer could do the job of 5 with AI? It's completely illogical.
- diab0lic 4y ago
  I suspect the post you’re replying to disagrees with the 1% figure.
- coldtea 4y ago
  The GP estimate is way off... If they indeed wait for input from other departments/companies 99% of the time (so they just need to actually program 5 minutes in their 8-hour workday), then they can be already thrown out of a job and have the company do with 1/10 the programmers, no AI required...
  - koolba 4y ago
    Clearly the company needs to dedicate a programmer to wait on each customer individually. You can’t have the same person waiting for two things simultaneously.
    - intelVISA 4y ago
      Can't believe companies are still single-threaded in 2023.
  - korijn 4y ago
    Exactly!
- marstall 4y ago
  many programmers (most?) spend hours a day coding and see it as the best part of their day?
zeroonetwothree 4y ago
How much more efficient is programming in Python with modern tools vs assembly? I would bet more than 5x
- lebuffon 4y ago
  That's an interesting case and use of the word efficient. Developer time reduced by 5X CPU time increased by 500x When CPU cycles are cheap it's a logical tradeoff but it still grates against my sensibilities.
  - jdminhbg 4y ago
    5X is a gigantic underestimate of how much developer time has improved. How long would it take a good assembly programmer to implement a CRUD web server connected to a database? Way more than 5x longer what a mediocre Python programmer would need.
    - ruined 4y ago
      an assembly programmer wouldn't write a web server connected to a database, they would implement a tui over tty, and it would be faster.
      - jdminhbg 4y ago
        How good would it be at letting business users attach photos and emailed documents?
    - Jensson 4y ago
      > How long would it take a good assembly programmer to implement a CRUD web server connected to a database? You know you can call import functions and call libraries in other languages than python? If everyone was programming in assembly then there would be plenty of libraries to make database calls or make web servers in assembly, and there would be plenty of tutorials online that you could copy and paste to get things going, meaning it wouldn't take much work at all. It would be more work, but not orders of magnitude more work.
intelVISA 4y ago
> Companies are already bloated, imagine when they realize one overworked highly paid senior can replace 10 juniors. That is already possible without AI and has been the case for a long time... the issue is nobody will stay to be that highly paid senior running entire projects because at that point you can just run your own shop and pocket the full profits.
- Art9681 4y ago
  It also causes a "single point of failure". If that senior gets hit by a bus then what? Can the company afford to bring in another senior that will take ~6 months to become productive? I'm not disagreeing with you. Im thinking of going solo myself.
  - onemoresoop 4y ago
    The biggest problem going solo is getting the projects/contracts. Now it will become even harder so one has to charge less and less to compete.
- LouisSayers 4y ago
  I wanted to say the same thing - except that the senior can't actually perform 10x because they're too busy trying to train the next gen devs while attempting to deliver stories themselves in the fractions of time available to them. Not to say that this is a bad thing, but the difference between a junior and senior is often much more than the difference in their salary.
mbesto 4y ago
> imagine when they realize one overworked highly paid senior can replace 10 juniors This already happens, the market is just not very efficient about it, e.g. a highly paid senior dev is not working at a company that only needs 2-3 developers, they're working at Google with 100's of devs.
- jjkeddo199 4y ago
  Disagree -- I think chatGPT will make juniors more palatable to hire. ChatGPT will basically give juniors a free pair programmer to baby-sit their work/progress. Why pay extra for senior devs when juniors can become much more efficient thanks to ChatGPT becoming stack-overflow on steroids. I think the wage gap between junior and senior will actually drop massively. I predict teams will keep 1-3 architect level positions for designs and reviews and replace all seniors with cheaper juniors.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - kaoD 4y ago
    I predict the wage gap will actually widen. StackOverflow-on-steroids can only give your so much, so seniors will still be in demand for what they do. It's just the competition between juniors will be fiercer so junior wages will drop.
    - Gene_Parmesan 4y ago
      I think dev wages will stagnate across the board. I think the simple existence of the fear of being replaced by never-tiring, always-working AI will subconsciously prime devs to be willing to work for less. Devs have been in a market with a significant shortage of skilled labor; can we say that remains true after GPT hits the mainstream even more than it already has?
      - roguas 4y ago
        Right now? It made a splash but who uses ai for building their software this very moment? Nobody knows how the industry will land on this. Adoption will take time - it's not gonna be a year. I remember after ruby on rails first demo, next day people had their websites up in ror. Here we will see, but it will be a bigger shift.
pydry 4y ago
Companies were bloated because of the profit potential of tech and organizational dysfunction. AI wasnt needed to cut down on bloat - some combination of a few companies reaping the majority of the profit and reduced dysfunction is enough.
soperj 4y ago
Yeah, but they would then just start 10 times the number of projects at once and watch the majority of them fail.
Art9681 4y ago
I think this fear is unfounded because history shows this is not the case. We will adapt to the new level of productivity and our goals will adapt accordingly. What we are expected to produce will adapt. You were able to pump out 4 solid production grade pull requests per sprint? Then the expectation increases to a single dev being able to pump out 10. The company's ambition will grow as a result of the newfound efficiencies, and management will continue to request things that cannot be reasonably delivered on time with the people and tooling we have.
olalonde 4y ago
Fixed pie fallacy. More likely, there will be 5x as many apps / companies with just as many jobs available. And the cost of everything will go down, except truly scarce things like Manhattan real estate.
nicholasjarnold 4y ago
> Companies are already bloated, imagine when they realize one overworked highly paid senior can replace 10 juniors. Yep. This is where I'm at in terms of personal armchair predictions of the future. I expect the labor market will be tough for more junior software engineers in the coming years. This might indeed cause backpressure in the supply of new grads/new labor force entrants in this family of fields ("software development"). However, the "highly paid senior" is only around for so long before achieving financial independence and just not working anymore. Then what? The company didn't hire juniors because the "highly paid senior" did all the work. Whoops. Now the company lacks the pipeline of people to replace that senior. It'll sort itself out in time, but the next decade will be interesting I think. Some companies will realize that they must make investments into the future of the labor force and will do better in the longer term. Other companies might indeed "fire the juniors" for some short term gains and find themselves lacking replacement staff later.
- kneebonian 4y ago
  I see it the other way around the senior engineer is expensive and costs a lot 2 juniors are cheap. Who cares if their code is crap they produce it really fast so they find a bug, just fix it quickly. If anything the time a Sr. spends thinking about things to do things "right" is seen as a waste of time. Whereas the jr. will produce an enormous amount of buggy code but they can fix the bugs quickly by just throwing another prompt to ChatGPT to solve. Now some might say that the code will be terrible quality and buggy and full of holes and the users will hate it, it is never economically viable to build enormous systems on a house of cards like that. To which I respond, you just described every piece of enterprise software I've ever used ever.
  - adamauckland 4y ago
    Because as soon as you tilt from producing features to fixing bugs, you are losing traction and your competitors will win and now you are bankrupt. I've seen entire businesses collapse because of this mentality.
    - 4y ago
xwdv 4y ago
If you can have one programmer do the job of 5, then you will be defeated by companies using 5 programmers to do the job of 25. Also, if your one programmer dies you now have no programmers and loss of all institutional knowledge, whereas the other company can lose several programmers and still be OK. There is value in having redundant programmers.
bcrosby95 4y ago
That would be awesome. We have a never-ending list of things to do and not enough time to do it all. What you're saying to me is that we can get through our list of priorities even faster, and stuff won't continually rot at the end of the list.
risyachka 4y ago
Companies will continue to hire even more people. Their single point is growth. If one can go the job of 5 - they revenue per employee will increase. They will hire even more employees.
scruple 4y ago
> making a single programmer do the job of 5 I mean, I already do? And for totally mundane and benign reasons. This has been my experience in this industry for the last 8 years or so, though my first 9 years I felt like the pace was maintainable. Do more with less. It's so common to come across situations where so and so left, their position won't be backfilled, the targets don't adjust to compensate for the productivity hit, and we can put up or shut up.
908B64B197 4y ago
This was already the case 10 years ago. Except, there was no AI, but an alternative called an offshored development center. You would send your spec and design document and get, via email or FTP if they were really cutting-edge a number of files that would sometime compile and even, according to the legends, actually work. The way this tech worked is that you generally had to wait overnight for your spec to "mature" into code. Some places figured out they could hire local engineers for about 5-10x what they paid for this "offshored development center" tech and get better results.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]