4 ms·

"Past performance is no guarantee of future results." Unlike the dot com bust, there's not much, if any, low hanging fruit left that could drive growth in empl

"Past performance is no guarantee of future results." Unlike the dot com bust, there's not much, if any, low hanging fruit left that could drive growth in employment of developers.

suzzer99 3y ago
That's what a lot of people thought before mobile and social media. I'm not saying it will happen. But something new could come along.
mytailorisrich 3y ago
Past performance has been fantastic and there is no indication that it will change. BUT, performance goes through boom and bust cycles. It is not unique to the tech industry. Hence the ant saves during times of plenty. New things will pop up and current things will pick up as well. It is cyclic. The dotcom crash, 9/11, 2008, covid, and that's just since 2000. So when I read that now it is really over I can't help but chuckle a little bit.
- nytesky 3y ago
  Except for a brief spike as the Fed tried to coral the housing bubble, we’ve had CRAZY low rates for 20 years. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FEDFUNDS https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FEDFUNDS A big part of that was inflation was bottled up by basically outsourcing manufacturing to low labor cost China, but that effect is declining for a variety of reasons. Inflation has been stubborn and even with higher rates the economy is roaring, so higher rates may persist and be a drag on tech employment.
  - mytailorisrich 3y ago
    I think that the claim that interest rates are dragging tech employment down is overblown. Rates were the same or higher during the dotcom boom. I don't think they impact VC that much and companies are still getting massive funding rounds.
    - nytesky 3y ago
      But dotcom was a bubble.
danielmarkbruce 3y ago
Try building a few applications which use LLMs. The complexity is high. There is going to be a lot of jobs.
- steve_adams_86 3y ago
  It will take a lot of trial, error, correction, and brains to glue together the future AI landscape. It isn’t going to glue itself, and novel, interesting uses for new technologies are unlikely to discover themselves. I think it’ll take time, but these jobs will appear, they’ll be interesting and challenging, and there will be a lot of them.
  - danielmarkbruce 3y ago
    So much glue required. Complicated glue that only sticks half the time. So many jobs.
    - rokkitmensch 3y ago
      AGI is the fear-meme distracting from the sophisticated shadow programmer union that is going to guarantee full employment until the heat death of the universe by virtue of controlled growth in complexity that must be managed.
      - danielmarkbruce 3y ago
        this
    - steve_adams_86 3y ago
      I tried making my own version of Devin (super rudimentary) when GPT 3.5 was new and holy shit, that was a lot of glue. I’m not a genius but I don’t think there’s a way around it. It’s also not as cheap as people imagine. You need a lot of prompts for so many scenarios, and prompts to verify the outputs of those, like loose abstracted decision trees to create the scaffolding of “thinking” about how to do the job and the workflows themselves. You end up needing to make calls to the AI a tremendous amount compared to when you query it yourself and do work in between responses. If single shot results improve dramatically then some glue and scaffolding might be able to be removed. I think that’s one thing we won’t see particularly fast improvements on in spaces like software engineering, though. Of course despite leaning on compute more than people think, it’s probably still orders of magnitude cheaper than a developer. But what’s the quality like? Devin still only succeeds less than 15% of the time. Reaching even 25% without significantly increasing compute and complexity is probably still quite far off, even with the steady advances we’ve been seeing.

"Past performance is no guarantee of future results." Unlike the dot com bust, there's not much, if any, low hanging fruit left that could drive growth in employment of developers.

suzzer99 3y ago

That's what a lot of people thought before mobile and social media. I'm not saying it will happen. But something new could come along.

mytailorisrich 3y ago

Past performance has been fantastic and there is no indication that it will change. BUT, performance goes through boom and bust cycles. It is not unique to the tech industry. Hence the ant saves during times of plenty. New things will pop up and current things will pick up as well. It is cyclic. The dotcom crash, 9/11, 2008, covid, and that's just since 2000. So when I read that now it is really over I can't help but chuckle a little bit.

nytesky 3y ago
Except for a brief spike as the Fed tried to coral the housing bubble, we’ve had CRAZY low rates for 20 years. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FEDFUNDS https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FEDFUNDS A big part of that was inflation was bottled up by basically outsourcing manufacturing to low labor cost China, but that effect is declining for a variety of reasons. Inflation has been stubborn and even with higher rates the economy is roaring, so higher rates may persist and be a drag on tech employment.
- mytailorisrich 3y ago
  I think that the claim that interest rates are dragging tech employment down is overblown. Rates were the same or higher during the dotcom boom. I don't think they impact VC that much and companies are still getting massive funding rounds.
  - nytesky 3y ago
    But dotcom was a bubble.

danielmarkbruce 3y ago

Try building a few applications which use LLMs. The complexity is high. There is going to be a lot of jobs.

steve_adams_86 3y ago
It will take a lot of trial, error, correction, and brains to glue together the future AI landscape. It isn’t going to glue itself, and novel, interesting uses for new technologies are unlikely to discover themselves. I think it’ll take time, but these jobs will appear, they’ll be interesting and challenging, and there will be a lot of them.
- danielmarkbruce 3y ago
  So much glue required. Complicated glue that only sticks half the time. So many jobs.
  - rokkitmensch 3y ago
    AGI is the fear-meme distracting from the sophisticated shadow programmer union that is going to guarantee full employment until the heat death of the universe by virtue of controlled growth in complexity that must be managed.
    - danielmarkbruce 3y ago
      this
  - steve_adams_86 3y ago
    I tried making my own version of Devin (super rudimentary) when GPT 3.5 was new and holy shit, that was a lot of glue. I’m not a genius but I don’t think there’s a way around it. It’s also not as cheap as people imagine. You need a lot of prompts for so many scenarios, and prompts to verify the outputs of those, like loose abstracted decision trees to create the scaffolding of “thinking” about how to do the job and the workflows themselves. You end up needing to make calls to the AI a tremendous amount compared to when you query it yourself and do work in between responses. If single shot results improve dramatically then some glue and scaffolding might be able to be removed. I think that’s one thing we won’t see particularly fast improvements on in spaces like software engineering, though. Of course despite leaning on compute more than people think, it’s probably still orders of magnitude cheaper than a developer. But what’s the quality like? Devin still only succeeds less than 15% of the time. Reaching even 25% without significantly increasing compute and complexity is probably still quite far off, even with the steady advances we’ve been seeing.