6 ms·

AI and globalisation are shaking up software developers' world

72 points by belter 2y ago

yapyap 2y ago
soo… just like every other job, they’re getting 3rd country workers to work for pennies and trying to pretend it’s a fair thing?
- dartos 2y ago
  They tried this in the early 00s too.
  - mooreds 2y ago
    One of my first blog posts was on this topic: https://www.mooreds.com/wordpress/archives/47 https://www.mooreds.com/wordpress/archives/47 I'm not saying that the job of developers won't change or they won't be forced to be more efficient, but the work of turning abstract requirements into something a computer can execute isn't going away any time soon, even in countries with expensive labor.
- changoplatanero 2y ago
  I don’t see what’s unfair about it if every employment agreement is voluntarily entered into.
  - keybored 2y ago
    Starving can be voluntary.
  - belter 2y ago
    I wonder why Silicon Valley companies had to collude on salaries... https://equitablegrowth.org/aftermath-wage-collusion-silicon-valley/ https://equitablegrowth.org/aftermath-wage-collusion-silicon...
- pipes 2y ago
  Who are they?
CalRobert 2y ago
https://archive.is/xKFFJ https://archive.is/xKFFJ
evilfred 2y ago
the execs are just salivating to commodotize us. my experience with outsourcing tells me we are fine.
- ben_w 2y ago
  It's fine right up until it isn't. The chance that "this time it's different" can't even be reasonably inferred from the inside. Induction from the perspective of the seasonal turkey: https://mashimo.wordpress.com/2013/03/12/bertrand-russells-inductivist-turkey/ https://mashimo.wordpress.com/2013/03/12/bertrand-russells-i...
  - from-nibly 2y ago
    If offshore humans can't beat on shore humans what chance does AI have in the near future?
    - cr125rider 2y ago
      The “paradox” (or whatever you might want to call it) with software is if I can describe the business case, with all of its side effects and outputs for unhappy paths, in enough detail, I’ve just done all the hard part of writing software. If AI can help with that last 20ish percent then great. The challenge with offshoring, and now LLMs, is that it takes as much time to describe the problem and outputs than it doesn’t to just write the dang code.
      - wakawaka28 2y ago
        It is rare to ever see a software project with all behaviors spelled out in English. I think the effort required to do that is rarely necessary, and people just write code instead. "Documentation" usually means that you wrote down how to use the thing, plus some non-obvious details.
    - ben_w 2y ago
      If I could predict that, I could beat the market. Inventing the difference would be both a fun technical challenge and a way to get a terrifying lynch mob at my door. Merely knowing how far away it is would help me know how to plan early retirement (kinda already could except for being a migrant).
dartos 2y ago
> engineers helped build Teams, Microsoft’s video-streaming service, as well as designing chips and software for “connected cars”, Ah yes, software famously loved by users. Microsoft teams and in-car software.
ldjkfkdsjnv 2y ago
People also dont realize that this will kill SAAS margins. If anyone can quickly build working software, the whole moat is gone. If you dont think this will not happen, you have not used cursor.sh with sonnet 3.5. I am working on a startup that is effectively a copy of existing products. My flow goes: 1. Screen shot competitor UX 2. Drop screen shot into cursor.sh, ask it to code it (there will be issues) 3. Screen shot individual components in the above screenshot 4. Have cursor.sh fix each component one by one 5. Go back through and tell it each issue by highlighting the code 6. Iterate a bit 7. 90% of the UI has been copied in one day, with a working backend. This is with a next.js/supabase app deployed on vercel. For complex B2B saas. Its over. In a year the models will get so much better
- chipsrafferty 2y ago
  Copying has never been a hard problem.
  - ldjkfkdsjnv 2y ago
    Yeah but you couldn't copy major functionality in one day. The same can be done from a figma. This will bleed into every area of software
- sgt101 2y ago
  What if you want to make things that are new?
  - ldjkfkdsjnv 2y ago
    Just put it in Figma. Its not that much different. This is going to kill software margins, any piece of saas can be quickly copied
    - meow_catrix 2y ago
      Poor on-call guys
- 2y ago
wanderingbit 2y ago
We are going to see a massive creativity expansion with the many, many people who will have access to amateur level coding. Think of it like the expansion of visual images once the first personal camera was widely adopted. There are still professional photographers, but they are now dwarfed by the number of amateurs (everyone with a modern phone). Except this analogy breaks down because photography is but a sliver of what is possible with ubiquitous programmability. It's going to be more, different, and somewhat unexpected. Get ready!
- HarHarVeryFunny 2y ago
  I doubt it ... most people are by nature consumers not makers. It's like the web which was originally thought to be the means for people to be creating their own web sites rather than consuming TV content, but look how that went. I guess nowadays there are an elite few professional youtubers making regular content, and teenagers posting TikTok videos, but that's about it.
  - vunderba 2y ago
    This a 1000%. Go to CivitAI and look up the list of most recently submitted images over the past year. 99.99999% of them are porn or porn-adjacent banal drivel.
eliben 2y ago
Whenever one reads articles like this, it's a bit of a consolation to remember that the same factors are shaking up the journalists' world much more and much sooner. This article, like many of its kind, could've easily been written by AI or by a contractor in a cheap country; in fact, this time it just may have been. My friend dubbed this effect "AIrony"
- nkozyra 2y ago
  Well seriously what profession is immune? Robotics took a lot of manufacturing and farming away in the 80s and 90s, AI added to that will kill off swaths of designers. Most of this country checks out their own groceries and AI has started stocking shelves. Creative industries are becoming commodities due to tooling. All I can come up with when I search for safe jobs is athletes, politicians, and live music performers.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - ben_w 2y ago
    > All I can come up with when I search for safe jobs is athletes, politicians, and live music performers. Anything where the point is specifically human effort rather than the actual result, plus ones that set their own rules. So yes, athletes and politicians; for the moment also prostitutes (pending better bioprinting, not because it's in either category); but also some art — not all art, just the art where the point is to show off how rich you are; most live music was automated away a century ago, what remains is likely also the category of art where the expense is the point.
    - the_af 2y ago
      There exists art where the human connection and effort is the point, and this is not because you want to show off how rich you are ("owning" this kind of art is not what most of us are after). However, Transformers movies and equivalent "art as a product" will be made by algorithm or GenAI, if they aren't already.
sgt101 2y ago
I think Cursor is great, it's really boosted what I can do. I think it's made me 3 -> 5x more valuable. Now, maybe it's done the same for other people as well, but I think my co-efficient was high, and I continue to insist that I've never worked anywhere that had enough resource focused on software development. The demand has always massively exceeded the organisations ability to fund supply. And, as many have noted lower costs can also boost demand. Finally, off shore devs are on a longer cycle time for many reasons. If cost onshore are reduced then that cycle time will crush offshore competitive advantage. I don't see any prospect of me getting work from India or Indonesia, but I do see AI as a driver that will reduce work leaving the UK for other places.
- Cannabat 2y ago
  3 to 5 times more valuable is a huge leap. How do you measure this? Are you a software engineer?
  - sgt101 2y ago
    I'm a managing consultant, so I don't have much time to do actual work (due to having to chat up clients and tell other people what to do). With cursor I can do what would have taken me an afternoon, previously, in an hour. This is huge for me, because I can realise ideas and show people how to solve problems whereas bc (before cursor) I was reduced to saying "I'm sure that will work if we do it that way" and hoping that my folks would follow through on the thinking themselves. Cursor supports me in two ways. 1) It gets things moving - I can put all the boilerplate and infrastructure to build something in place in a few minutes. 2) It removes road blocks. When I get stuck it gives me fixes. Now I recognise it's all from Stack Exchange, basically, but it's a terrific interface for that knowledge. What it doesn't do is provide new knowledge or ideas for fixing things. That has to come from upstairs still, but that's never been an issue for me.
- layer8 2y ago
  > I think it's made me 3 -> 5x more valuable. You should negotiate a corresponding raise!
stana 2y ago
This might help with building new software. But large part of the job is maintenance and changes. How long will next outage take to understand without people with deep understanding of the code.
aleph_minus_one 2y ago
In the second chart "Software developer median salary", the bar for Germany is very likely wrong: I am very sure that the wages are quite a lot lower (rather in the 5-figure range instead of low 6-figure range).
mrtksn 2y ago
What I don't get is, how on earth developers in the USA jumped on the boat of WFH. Isn't it obvious that if a job can be done from anywhere that would mean that you are opening yourself to world wide competition when subsidizing your company with your own facilities? Was it hubris? Do Americans believed that only they can do this coding stuff? Not only that the job market was opened to global competition, it allowed tech and capital transfer. On the grand scheme its great, now everyone does all these things but from workers perspective its very bad idea. It has been quite some time to see some outstanding American innovation. OpenAI and the generative AI was one but it didn't took much time for China to leap ahead. Maybe its nationalism, maybe its the language barrier but I see a lot of Asian innovations that don't catch much attention in the Anglosphere. American techies pumping Sora on Twitter over some demos when Chinese are having it open to use by the public was amusing. There's this narrative on Twitter and elsewhere about how EU over regulated tech and fell behind US but this whole narrative is based on dismissing the Asian innovations. You have to omit China and other Asian countries from the graphs that show Europe is falling behind so to claim that free market and libertarianism is driving innovation and growth, because if you include Asia you end up claiming that its communism and centralized economies are actually the big success stories.
- linotype 2y ago
  Companies are going to offshore no matter where US employees work.
- salawat 2y ago
  >You have to omit China and other Asian countries from the graphs that show Europe is falling behind so to claim that free market and libertarianism is driving innovation and growth, because if you include Asia you end up claiming that its communism and centralized economies are actually the big success stories. See, you have to realize that China is "still in the process of democratizing from free market exposure" and "the world is more peaceful now than it ever has been because of economic interdependence". Thanks Milton Friedman! /s Admitting that offshoring was actually prioritizing lower prices (through regulatory arbitrage and human suffering based subsidies) over national economic and skills maintenance security will get you shooed out of the room. Yeah. Look at all the Indians lifted out of poverty... Shipbreaking multi-decade old ships, rebuilding lead batteries by hand (without PPE). Look at all the uplifting of the Global South! ...Often ruining their own environment to do things that absolutely would not fly here. Look at all the inroads we've made making the world more peaceful by shipping all the most advanced manufacturing infra over to a hostile regime that culturally values patience and tends to think further ahead than a 200 year old upstart. There was a period of complete retardation in full swing in the 80's to early 10's that I truly wish it were easier to articulate in media res as opposed to in hindsight. But that's life for ya.
gatinsama 2y ago
This again? What year is it? We need to move past this type of thinking. Most professional services could be automated and yet they are not for a number of reasons. For developers, the unescapable complexity that keeps creeping into projects if you don't know what you are doing will keep us employed.
- stana 2y ago
  Code generation was a thing for decades but there are still jobs writing CRUD based apps by hand.
trash_cat 2y ago
I think we can all agree on those points but this is a very superficial analysis. Now that the barriers to coding are lowered, will that increase or decrease supply, what types of new tasks (or job titles) will AI create? Everyone is getting accelerated learning and task completion, but what does that mean for the market? I think there are more fundemental things to this change that are needed to be fleshed out. Pre LLM programmers and post LLM programmers will be very different.
- redleggedfrog 2y ago
  More software is not better. Software is a burden that must be maintained to keep its value. Having more software, written by people who don't know how to write software, will not be creating value. It will be creating an ongoing maintenance burden. That they will attempt to address with AI, which digs the hole deeper.
warrenmiller 2y ago
not sure where they got that info for the "software developer median salary" but pretty sure thats not the median salary for software developers in the Netherlands. It's about half that.
- sgerenser 2y ago
  Yeah the fine print says developers with 3-5 years experience. Even the US numbers are inflated for devs with that level of experience. Certainly outside of the Bay Area and maybe NYC.
somethoughts 2y ago
I feel like creating software applications is not what leads to high salaries as a software developer. Its creating software applications and then signing up to support said software codebase for 100K+ users and agreeing to pager duty and triage management for it for more than a 5-10 years. Perhaps AI purveyors should focus on automating customer/bizdev support by creating frameworks/workflows for AI pager duty and AI triage management.
jillesvangurp 2y ago
This is a bit sensationalist of course. But the notion that AIs are enhancing developer productivity is real. I use LLMs for different tasks with coding. Is it perfect or amazing? No. Does it save me time. Yes. Document this code; write me test for x. Cover these cases as well. Give me some quick feedback on what I just wrote. Did I overlook anything? Etc. If you look at my chatgpt history, I'm constantly interrogating it about whatever I'm working on. That saves me a lot of time. It's a productivity enhancer. Of course the history of computer science is that we've had a continuous stream of productivity enhancing things that helped us become more productive. Whenever that happens, what doesn't happen is a decline in demand for programmers. As what we do becomes cheaper or easier, people want more of it. So far, there's little sign of demand for programmers declining. If anything, it's now so easy that lots of non programmers start getting their hands dirty as well. And why not? That just frees me up to do a bit higher level, more interesting stuff. A lot of programming work is tedious and repetitive. Getting some help with that is very welcome as far as I'm concerned. That just means I can build whatever I have in my head faster. So, it costs less for whomever is buying that. So, they might get back for some more; or raise the ambition level a bit. It's not a zero sum game. The second thing that the article brought up (outsourcing) is an interesting one. Because they missed one important thing that LLMs also do: which is translating. Outsourcing programming work has been historically hard because of language barriers. Miscommunication due to people not speaking each other's language very well is a big challenge. You can make it work but it takes a bit of effort. I've worked with people that I can barely understand or that barely understand me. It's tedious and frustrating if you can't understand each other. That language barrier is melting away as translating between languages gets easier. We're not quite at the babelfish level just yet but you can get pretty close if you have some patience. Meetings can get transcribed & subtitled (imperfectly) and those transcriptions can be translated. Anything in text form is easy to translate into whatever. In short, we still have cultural barriers but the language barriers are becoming less of a hurdle. The quality and speed of the translations keeps getting better. Real time conversation translations are basically no longer science fiction. And the quality of the translations is more than good enough for a lot of things now. Certainly better than two non native speakers trying to speak English with each other (I'm not a native speaker). The value of hiring locally is mainly in that you can communicate with people directly. And that's just hard if you don't speak the same language. But that's not going to be as big of a deal as it used to be. The value of being local is still there but it's worth less. The two added together means a vast increase in the number of programmers. But also in the number of customers. There are a lot of growth economies in the world. And they are all going to need programming work done. And they will want to hire the best they can afford and won't be hiring locally necessarily. We're not talking impoverished third world countries here either. So, I'm not that worried. The opposite actually.
bookofjoe 2y ago
https://archive.ph/jkpl6 https://archive.ph/jkpl6
penguin_booze 2y ago
In my observation, the software written even now--by people who are bothered to both learn the language and put their brain to work--are of potato quality. Brace ourselves for a world where the authors don't have even the same qualification producing even worse: autocomplete-driven development. A world of zero accountability, responsibility, and traceability.

72 points by belter 2y ago

soo… just like every other job, they’re getting 3rd country workers to work for pennies and trying to pretend it’s a fair thing?

dartos 2y ago
They tried this in the early 00s too.
- mooreds 2y ago
  One of my first blog posts was on this topic: https://www.mooreds.com/wordpress/archives/47 https://www.mooreds.com/wordpress/archives/47 I'm not saying that the job of developers won't change or they won't be forced to be more efficient, but the work of turning abstract requirements into something a computer can execute isn't going away any time soon, even in countries with expensive labor.
changoplatanero 2y ago
I don’t see what’s unfair about it if every employment agreement is voluntarily entered into.
- keybored 2y ago
  Starving can be voluntary.
- belter 2y ago
  I wonder why Silicon Valley companies had to collude on salaries... https://equitablegrowth.org/aftermath-wage-collusion-silicon-valley/ https://equitablegrowth.org/aftermath-wage-collusion-silicon...
pipes 2y ago
Who are they?

CalRobert 2y ago

https://archive.is/xKFFJ https://archive.is/xKFFJ

evilfred 2y ago

the execs are just salivating to commodotize us. my experience with outsourcing tells me we are fine.

ben_w 2y ago
It's fine right up until it isn't. The chance that "this time it's different" can't even be reasonably inferred from the inside. Induction from the perspective of the seasonal turkey: https://mashimo.wordpress.com/2013/03/12/bertrand-russells-inductivist-turkey/ https://mashimo.wordpress.com/2013/03/12/bertrand-russells-i...
- from-nibly 2y ago
  If offshore humans can't beat on shore humans what chance does AI have in the near future?
  - cr125rider 2y ago
    The “paradox” (or whatever you might want to call it) with software is if I can describe the business case, with all of its side effects and outputs for unhappy paths, in enough detail, I’ve just done all the hard part of writing software. If AI can help with that last 20ish percent then great. The challenge with offshoring, and now LLMs, is that it takes as much time to describe the problem and outputs than it doesn’t to just write the dang code.
    - wakawaka28 2y ago
      It is rare to ever see a software project with all behaviors spelled out in English. I think the effort required to do that is rarely necessary, and people just write code instead. "Documentation" usually means that you wrote down how to use the thing, plus some non-obvious details.
  - ben_w 2y ago
    If I could predict that, I could beat the market. Inventing the difference would be both a fun technical challenge and a way to get a terrifying lynch mob at my door. Merely knowing how far away it is would help me know how to plan early retirement (kinda already could except for being a migrant).

dartos 2y ago

> engineers helped build Teams, Microsoft’s video-streaming service, as well as designing chips and software for “connected cars”, Ah yes, software famously loved by users. Microsoft teams and in-car software.

ldjkfkdsjnv 2y ago

People also dont realize that this will kill SAAS margins. If anyone can quickly build working software, the whole moat is gone. If you dont think this will not happen, you have not used cursor.sh with sonnet 3.5. I am working on a startup that is effectively a copy of existing products. My flow goes: 1. Screen shot competitor UX 2. Drop screen shot into cursor.sh, ask it to code it (there will be issues) 3. Screen shot individual components in the above screenshot 4. Have cursor.sh fix each component one by one 5. Go back through and tell it each issue by highlighting the code 6. Iterate a bit 7. 90% of the UI has been copied in one day, with a working backend. This is with a next.js/supabase app deployed on vercel. For complex B2B saas. Its over. In a year the models will get so much better

chipsrafferty 2y ago
Copying has never been a hard problem.
- ldjkfkdsjnv 2y ago
  Yeah but you couldn't copy major functionality in one day. The same can be done from a figma. This will bleed into every area of software
sgt101 2y ago
What if you want to make things that are new?
- ldjkfkdsjnv 2y ago
  Just put it in Figma. Its not that much different. This is going to kill software margins, any piece of saas can be quickly copied
  - meow_catrix 2y ago
    Poor on-call guys
2y ago

wanderingbit 2y ago

We are going to see a massive creativity expansion with the many, many people who will have access to amateur level coding. Think of it like the expansion of visual images once the first personal camera was widely adopted. There are still professional photographers, but they are now dwarfed by the number of amateurs (everyone with a modern phone). Except this analogy breaks down because photography is but a sliver of what is possible with ubiquitous programmability. It's going to be more, different, and somewhat unexpected. Get ready!

HarHarVeryFunny 2y ago
I doubt it ... most people are by nature consumers not makers. It's like the web which was originally thought to be the means for people to be creating their own web sites rather than consuming TV content, but look how that went. I guess nowadays there are an elite few professional youtubers making regular content, and teenagers posting TikTok videos, but that's about it.
- vunderba 2y ago
  This a 1000%. Go to CivitAI and look up the list of most recently submitted images over the past year. 99.99999% of them are porn or porn-adjacent banal drivel.

eliben 2y ago

Whenever one reads articles like this, it's a bit of a consolation to remember that the same factors are shaking up the journalists' world much more and much sooner. This article, like many of its kind, could've easily been written by AI or by a contractor in a cheap country; in fact, this time it just may have been. My friend dubbed this effect "AIrony"

nkozyra 2y ago
Well seriously what profession is immune? Robotics took a lot of manufacturing and farming away in the 80s and 90s, AI added to that will kill off swaths of designers. Most of this country checks out their own groceries and AI has started stocking shelves. Creative industries are becoming commodities due to tooling. All I can come up with when I search for safe jobs is athletes, politicians, and live music performers.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- ben_w 2y ago
  > All I can come up with when I search for safe jobs is athletes, politicians, and live music performers. Anything where the point is specifically human effort rather than the actual result, plus ones that set their own rules. So yes, athletes and politicians; for the moment also prostitutes (pending better bioprinting, not because it's in either category); but also some art — not all art, just the art where the point is to show off how rich you are; most live music was automated away a century ago, what remains is likely also the category of art where the expense is the point.
  - the_af 2y ago
    There exists art where the human connection and effort is the point, and this is not because you want to show off how rich you are ("owning" this kind of art is not what most of us are after). However, Transformers movies and equivalent "art as a product" will be made by algorithm or GenAI, if they aren't already.

sgt101 2y ago

I think Cursor is great, it's really boosted what I can do. I think it's made me 3 -> 5x more valuable. Now, maybe it's done the same for other people as well, but I think my co-efficient was high, and I continue to insist that I've never worked anywhere that had enough resource focused on software development. The demand has always massively exceeded the organisations ability to fund supply. And, as many have noted lower costs can also boost demand. Finally, off shore devs are on a longer cycle time for many reasons. If cost onshore are reduced then that cycle time will crush offshore competitive advantage. I don't see any prospect of me getting work from India or Indonesia, but I do see AI as a driver that will reduce work leaving the UK for other places.

Cannabat 2y ago
3 to 5 times more valuable is a huge leap. How do you measure this? Are you a software engineer?
- sgt101 2y ago
  I'm a managing consultant, so I don't have much time to do actual work (due to having to chat up clients and tell other people what to do). With cursor I can do what would have taken me an afternoon, previously, in an hour. This is huge for me, because I can realise ideas and show people how to solve problems whereas bc (before cursor) I was reduced to saying "I'm sure that will work if we do it that way" and hoping that my folks would follow through on the thinking themselves. Cursor supports me in two ways. 1) It gets things moving - I can put all the boilerplate and infrastructure to build something in place in a few minutes. 2) It removes road blocks. When I get stuck it gives me fixes. Now I recognise it's all from Stack Exchange, basically, but it's a terrific interface for that knowledge. What it doesn't do is provide new knowledge or ideas for fixing things. That has to come from upstairs still, but that's never been an issue for me.
layer8 2y ago
> I think it's made me 3 -> 5x more valuable. You should negotiate a corresponding raise!

stana 2y ago

This might help with building new software. But large part of the job is maintenance and changes. How long will next outage take to understand without people with deep understanding of the code.

aleph_minus_one 2y ago

In the second chart "Software developer median salary", the bar for Germany is very likely wrong: I am very sure that the wages are quite a lot lower (rather in the 5-figure range instead of low 6-figure range).

mrtksn 2y ago

What I don't get is, how on earth developers in the USA jumped on the boat of WFH. Isn't it obvious that if a job can be done from anywhere that would mean that you are opening yourself to world wide competition when subsidizing your company with your own facilities? Was it hubris? Do Americans believed that only they can do this coding stuff? Not only that the job market was opened to global competition, it allowed tech and capital transfer. On the grand scheme its great, now everyone does all these things but from workers perspective its very bad idea. It has been quite some time to see some outstanding American innovation. OpenAI and the generative AI was one but it didn't took much time for China to leap ahead. Maybe its nationalism, maybe its the language barrier but I see a lot of Asian innovations that don't catch much attention in the Anglosphere. American techies pumping Sora on Twitter over some demos when Chinese are having it open to use by the public was amusing. There's this narrative on Twitter and elsewhere about how EU over regulated tech and fell behind US but this whole narrative is based on dismissing the Asian innovations. You have to omit China and other Asian countries from the graphs that show Europe is falling behind so to claim that free market and libertarianism is driving innovation and growth, because if you include Asia you end up claiming that its communism and centralized economies are actually the big success stories.

linotype 2y ago
Companies are going to offshore no matter where US employees work.
salawat 2y ago
>You have to omit China and other Asian countries from the graphs that show Europe is falling behind so to claim that free market and libertarianism is driving innovation and growth, because if you include Asia you end up claiming that its communism and centralized economies are actually the big success stories. See, you have to realize that China is "still in the process of democratizing from free market exposure" and "the world is more peaceful now than it ever has been because of economic interdependence". Thanks Milton Friedman! /s Admitting that offshoring was actually prioritizing lower prices (through regulatory arbitrage and human suffering based subsidies) over national economic and skills maintenance security will get you shooed out of the room. Yeah. Look at all the Indians lifted out of poverty... Shipbreaking multi-decade old ships, rebuilding lead batteries by hand (without PPE). Look at all the uplifting of the Global South! ...Often ruining their own environment to do things that absolutely would not fly here. Look at all the inroads we've made making the world more peaceful by shipping all the most advanced manufacturing infra over to a hostile regime that culturally values patience and tends to think further ahead than a 200 year old upstart. There was a period of complete retardation in full swing in the 80's to early 10's that I truly wish it were easier to articulate in media res as opposed to in hindsight. But that's life for ya.

gatinsama 2y ago

This again? What year is it? We need to move past this type of thinking. Most professional services could be automated and yet they are not for a number of reasons. For developers, the unescapable complexity that keeps creeping into projects if you don't know what you are doing will keep us employed.

stana 2y ago
Code generation was a thing for decades but there are still jobs writing CRUD based apps by hand.

trash_cat 2y ago

I think we can all agree on those points but this is a very superficial analysis. Now that the barriers to coding are lowered, will that increase or decrease supply, what types of new tasks (or job titles) will AI create? Everyone is getting accelerated learning and task completion, but what does that mean for the market? I think there are more fundemental things to this change that are needed to be fleshed out. Pre LLM programmers and post LLM programmers will be very different.

redleggedfrog 2y ago
More software is not better. Software is a burden that must be maintained to keep its value. Having more software, written by people who don't know how to write software, will not be creating value. It will be creating an ongoing maintenance burden. That they will attempt to address with AI, which digs the hole deeper.

warrenmiller 2y ago

not sure where they got that info for the "software developer median salary" but pretty sure thats not the median salary for software developers in the Netherlands. It's about half that.

sgerenser 2y ago
Yeah the fine print says developers with 3-5 years experience. Even the US numbers are inflated for devs with that level of experience. Certainly outside of the Bay Area and maybe NYC.

somethoughts 2y ago

I feel like creating software applications is not what leads to high salaries as a software developer. Its creating software applications and then signing up to support said software codebase for 100K+ users and agreeing to pager duty and triage management for it for more than a 5-10 years. Perhaps AI purveyors should focus on automating customer/bizdev support by creating frameworks/workflows for AI pager duty and AI triage management.

jillesvangurp 2y ago

This is a bit sensationalist of course. But the notion that AIs are enhancing developer productivity is real. I use LLMs for different tasks with coding. Is it perfect or amazing? No. Does it save me time. Yes. Document this code; write me test for x. Cover these cases as well. Give me some quick feedback on what I just wrote. Did I overlook anything? Etc. If you look at my chatgpt history, I'm constantly interrogating it about whatever I'm working on. That saves me a lot of time. It's a productivity enhancer. Of course the history of computer science is that we've had a continuous stream of productivity enhancing things that helped us become more productive. Whenever that happens, what doesn't happen is a decline in demand for programmers. As what we do becomes cheaper or easier, people want more of it. So far, there's little sign of demand for programmers declining. If anything, it's now so easy that lots of non programmers start getting their hands dirty as well. And why not? That just frees me up to do a bit higher level, more interesting stuff. A lot of programming work is tedious and repetitive. Getting some help with that is very welcome as far as I'm concerned. That just means I can build whatever I have in my head faster. So, it costs less for whomever is buying that. So, they might get back for some more; or raise the ambition level a bit. It's not a zero sum game. The second thing that the article brought up (outsourcing) is an interesting one. Because they missed one important thing that LLMs also do: which is translating. Outsourcing programming work has been historically hard because of language barriers. Miscommunication due to people not speaking each other's language very well is a big challenge. You can make it work but it takes a bit of effort. I've worked with people that I can barely understand or that barely understand me. It's tedious and frustrating if you can't understand each other. That language barrier is melting away as translating between languages gets easier. We're not quite at the babelfish level just yet but you can get pretty close if you have some patience. Meetings can get transcribed & subtitled (imperfectly) and those transcriptions can be translated. Anything in text form is easy to translate into whatever. In short, we still have cultural barriers but the language barriers are becoming less of a hurdle. The quality and speed of the translations keeps getting better. Real time conversation translations are basically no longer science fiction. And the quality of the translations is more than good enough for a lot of things now. Certainly better than two non native speakers trying to speak English with each other (I'm not a native speaker). The value of hiring locally is mainly in that you can communicate with people directly. And that's just hard if you don't speak the same language. But that's not going to be as big of a deal as it used to be. The value of being local is still there but it's worth less. The two added together means a vast increase in the number of programmers. But also in the number of customers. There are a lot of growth economies in the world. And they are all going to need programming work done. And they will want to hire the best they can afford and won't be hiring locally necessarily. We're not talking impoverished third world countries here either. So, I'm not that worried. The opposite actually.

bookofjoe 2y ago

https://archive.ph/jkpl6 https://archive.ph/jkpl6

penguin_booze 2y ago

In my observation, the software written even now--by people who are bothered to both learn the language and put their brain to work--are of potato quality. Brace ourselves for a world where the authors don't have even the same qualification producing even worse: autocomplete-driven development. A world of zero accountability, responsibility, and traceability.