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Who knows if software engineers will be paid the same in the future but doctors will most likely have a strong "moat" till the day they die. Software engineers

Who knows if software engineers will be paid the same in the future but doctors will most likely have a strong "moat" till the day they die. Software engineers lucked out in this era not because they are smarter / harder working than people like mechanical engineers but they just chose a profession that naturally scales, and scaling is really how you can make a lot money.

dylan604 3y ago
eventually, the cost of a team of software engineers will be the monthly fee to chatGPT
- mianos 3y ago
  Maybe, but how longs is eventually? I love GPT, use it every day but it is pretty flawed. 10 years?
  - dylan604 3y ago
    who knew what chatGPT was 2 years ago? things are moving fast, and gaining speed. will they plateau before getting to being ubiquitously useful?
    - rgifford 3y ago
      LLMs have been around since the 50s. Chomsky has plenty to say on them [1]. It's not half as rosy as the current hype cycle. 1. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/08/opinion/noam-chomsky-chatgpt-ai.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/08/opinion/noam-chomsky-chat...
    - randomdata 3y ago
      Thing is, GPT is just another programming language. It no doubt brings a leap forward in approachability, like Javascript was a leap forward from assembly, but at the end of the day it still relies on programmers to use it. No matter how advanced it becomes, as long as it exists to serve the interests of humans, and not other machines, it is going to require programmers to describe what humans want to see carried out. It is possible that everyone will become a programmer, like everyone has become an elevator operator, but unlike an elevator button press that takes milliseconds and you're done, does it behoove "the boss" to spend their day describing their ideas to GPT? I suspect, like today, they will still want to hire other humans to bridge that gap so that they can spend time doing more important things.
  - rgifford 3y ago
    The machine building itself is end game. At that point you're suggesting singularity. I don't see how any profession survives that. There's so much hype around AI right now, it's absolutely unhinged. Yes, we have semi-conversational AI. Yes, image detection is pretty good. It's all supervised. Can we please touch grass?
- anonporridge 3y ago
  At that point, the same will likely be true of most doctors, with DoctorGPTs making most of the cognitive decisions and a team of lower knowledge technicians and nurses doing most of the hands on work. Other than surgeons, a ton of what we would traditionally think of as doctoring has already been abstracted away and work specialized and divvied up to technicians, with MDs pulling strings in the background.
ShamelessC 3y ago
> they just chose a profession that naturally scales, and scaling is really how you can make a lot money. They chose a profession that appears to scale to investors. When software _actually_ scales rather than being a subpar substitute for an existing mechanism is when the people involved were indeed smarter and worked much harder (typically).
SkyPuncher 3y ago
I'm actually expecting doctor's moat to break in our life time. We're already seeing the beginnings of it. Essentially, physicians have been so bottlenecked for so long that a bunch of states has simply said "screw it" and started paving the way for mid-levels (NPs and PAs) to operate in certain roles physicians have previously covered. The physician lobbies seem unwilling to address this, so I expect that mid-levels will continue to move up the chain. They know the market is desperate for a solution and physician interest groups are completely unwilling to provide that.
- naveen99 3y ago
  Midlevels don’t necessarily hurt doctor compensation, because they are supervised by the doctor, who gets a cut for managing them in private practice. In hospitals it frees up doctor to do more high value procedures instead of lower value follow up visits in clinic.
  - SkyPuncher 3y ago
    > they are supervised by the doctor I think this is the part that's going to break. IMO, a model where a doctor leads a group of mid-levels seems pretty much ideal. It's like the senior dev leading junior engineers. Unfortunately, it seems AMA has been so resistant to any change that enough places are simply saying screw it to oversight and allowing mid-levels to practice independently (with limited scope). i
    - naveen99 3y ago
      Midlevels are partly making up for the doctors who go part time / retire soon after finishing their training. Yeah, rural areas that can’t support a full time doctor have no choice but to let midlevels practice medicine if they can even get a midlevel.
VirusNewbie 3y ago
>e. Software engineers lucked out in this era not because they are smarter / harder working than people like mechanical engineers do you believe this is the case now?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
randomdata 3y ago
> [...] harder working than people like mechanical engineers but they just chose a profession that naturally scales The product of mechanical engineering also naturally scales. Once you design a machine, you can build it an infinite number of times. However, in neither case does the labour scale. One engineer, whether their focus be on software or mechanical, can only do so much in a day. Software engineers lucked out in this era because it is a new, relative to other industries, field that saw a rapid rise in demand for labour, with comparatively few people able to fulfill the need for that labour. By virtue of supply and demand, incomes had to run high to attract workers. > and scaling is really how you can make a lot money. That is true, but engineering doesn't scale. It is highly doubtful that engineers will continue to benefit into the long future. The owners of the software built by engineers will be able to continue to reap the benefits of scalability, but the labourer – who does not scale – will undoubtedly start to get squeezed as the industry matures and demand is no longer growing exponentially.

dylan604 3y ago

eventually, the cost of a team of software engineers will be the monthly fee to chatGPT

mianos 3y ago
Maybe, but how longs is eventually? I love GPT, use it every day but it is pretty flawed. 10 years?
- dylan604 3y ago
  who knew what chatGPT was 2 years ago? things are moving fast, and gaining speed. will they plateau before getting to being ubiquitously useful?
  - rgifford 3y ago
    LLMs have been around since the 50s. Chomsky has plenty to say on them [1]. It's not half as rosy as the current hype cycle. 1. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/08/opinion/noam-chomsky-chatgpt-ai.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/08/opinion/noam-chomsky-chat...
  - randomdata 3y ago
    Thing is, GPT is just another programming language. It no doubt brings a leap forward in approachability, like Javascript was a leap forward from assembly, but at the end of the day it still relies on programmers to use it. No matter how advanced it becomes, as long as it exists to serve the interests of humans, and not other machines, it is going to require programmers to describe what humans want to see carried out. It is possible that everyone will become a programmer, like everyone has become an elevator operator, but unlike an elevator button press that takes milliseconds and you're done, does it behoove "the boss" to spend their day describing their ideas to GPT? I suspect, like today, they will still want to hire other humans to bridge that gap so that they can spend time doing more important things.
- rgifford 3y ago
  The machine building itself is end game. At that point you're suggesting singularity. I don't see how any profession survives that. There's so much hype around AI right now, it's absolutely unhinged. Yes, we have semi-conversational AI. Yes, image detection is pretty good. It's all supervised. Can we please touch grass?
anonporridge 3y ago
At that point, the same will likely be true of most doctors, with DoctorGPTs making most of the cognitive decisions and a team of lower knowledge technicians and nurses doing most of the hands on work. Other than surgeons, a ton of what we would traditionally think of as doctoring has already been abstracted away and work specialized and divvied up to technicians, with MDs pulling strings in the background.

ShamelessC 3y ago

> they just chose a profession that naturally scales, and scaling is really how you can make a lot money. They chose a profession that appears to scale to investors. When software _actually_ scales rather than being a subpar substitute for an existing mechanism is when the people involved were indeed smarter and worked much harder (typically).

SkyPuncher 3y ago

I'm actually expecting doctor's moat to break in our life time. We're already seeing the beginnings of it. Essentially, physicians have been so bottlenecked for so long that a bunch of states has simply said "screw it" and started paving the way for mid-levels (NPs and PAs) to operate in certain roles physicians have previously covered. The physician lobbies seem unwilling to address this, so I expect that mid-levels will continue to move up the chain. They know the market is desperate for a solution and physician interest groups are completely unwilling to provide that.

naveen99 3y ago
Midlevels don’t necessarily hurt doctor compensation, because they are supervised by the doctor, who gets a cut for managing them in private practice. In hospitals it frees up doctor to do more high value procedures instead of lower value follow up visits in clinic.
- SkyPuncher 3y ago
  > they are supervised by the doctor I think this is the part that's going to break. IMO, a model where a doctor leads a group of mid-levels seems pretty much ideal. It's like the senior dev leading junior engineers. Unfortunately, it seems AMA has been so resistant to any change that enough places are simply saying screw it to oversight and allowing mid-levels to practice independently (with limited scope). i
  - naveen99 3y ago
    Midlevels are partly making up for the doctors who go part time / retire soon after finishing their training. Yeah, rural areas that can’t support a full time doctor have no choice but to let midlevels practice medicine if they can even get a midlevel.

VirusNewbie 3y ago

>e. Software engineers lucked out in this era not because they are smarter / harder working than people like mechanical engineers do you believe this is the case now?

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

randomdata 3y ago

> [...] harder working than people like mechanical engineers but they just chose a profession that naturally scales The product of mechanical engineering also naturally scales. Once you design a machine, you can build it an infinite number of times. However, in neither case does the labour scale. One engineer, whether their focus be on software or mechanical, can only do so much in a day. Software engineers lucked out in this era because it is a new, relative to other industries, field that saw a rapid rise in demand for labour, with comparatively few people able to fulfill the need for that labour. By virtue of supply and demand, incomes had to run high to attract workers. > and scaling is really how you can make a lot money. That is true, but engineering doesn't scale. It is highly doubtful that engineers will continue to benefit into the long future. The owners of the software built by engineers will be able to continue to reap the benefits of scalability, but the labourer – who does not scale – will undoubtedly start to get squeezed as the industry matures and demand is no longer growing exponentially.