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My take for SE roles is that it's a combination of AI giving enough gains[0] to reduce head count requirements, combined with the higher interest rates cutting

My take for SE roles is that it's a combination of AI giving enough gains[0] to reduce head count requirements, combined with the higher interest rates cutting off the tap of free money for startups that never really made economic sense. There's also the absolute flood of CS graduates in recent years contributing to the number of applicants. I know governments have been screaming for more STEM graduates, but I suspect the numbers are far higher than what is actually required. IMHO, the outcome of all this is that those devs who can't actually code are going to be pushed out of the SE market, and things will normalise in 12-36 months. (I say this all this sitting on the couch waiting for the results of second of three interviews after submitting my 30th application - I've literally never had to submit more than five - and that was where I didn't get poached directly.) [0] I'm not going to say it's a _massive_ gain, but even a 10-20% increase in productivity from something off the shelf like Github Co-pilot would show up in employment numbers

mech987876 2y ago
I've been thinking about the AI gains a lot. If individual developers became, say, 20 percent more efficient at coding, the organization would potentially see even more gains, because all of the reduction in time spent coordinating between people. I.e. a 2-man task that needed 20 man-hours of work, 8 of which hours of work were just communicating, becomes a 1-man 10 hour task. Kind of an extreme example, but communication and coordination is extremely inefficient a lot of the time!
- creer 2y ago
  > communication and coordination is extremely inefficient a lot of the time To the point where in many places it's optimizing communication and management that might be the low lying fruit - as far as programming efficiency.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
yladiz 2y ago
With respect to hiring, of the two points you mention - AI productivity gains for SWE and "no more free money" - I'm confident it's solely the latter, that higher interest rates cut off free money from startups, so they need to be more careful about who they hire. Additionally, there was substantial overhiring during COVID which combined with the interest rate changes lead to a lot of layoffs, and subsequently lead to the conservative hiring in a lot of companies. This leads to a lot more competition than there was previously, both to even get an interview in the first place and to get to the end with an offer. It's possible that AI may have some kind of impact on the industry too with respect to productivity, but I'd bet that it's nowhere near a 10-20% gain and it's not a factor at all in the difficulty of finding a job.
- SlightlyLeftPad 2y ago
  I agree. Working as a manager in the industry my take is that AI has had a near-zero actual increase in SE productivity. That’s not to say the C-level perception matches that actual number though. It hasn’t happened at my company but I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that some layoffs from big companies were driven by that perception. I would interpret more as an excuse to get rid of low performers in general.
  - Terr_ 2y ago
    I think LLMs spitting out code will probably supercharge the "if engineering showed a toy demo, that means we're 90% done and can start taking pre-orders" problem.
    - lazide 2y ago
      Yup - while creating massive tech debt, and weird edge case bugs that are even less sensical than typical ones you’d get.
  - jordanb 2y ago
    From what I've seen, AI is used as an answer to the question: "how are we going to be expected to maintain the same velocity with fewer people."
nine_zeros 2y ago
> My take for SE roles is that it's a combination of AI giving enough gains[0] to reduce head count requirements It is not giving enough gains. It is only giving ammunition to board members and execs to cut headcount. What is really happening is that the current cohort of tech companies has been living in the era of free money for so long that they have forgotten competent practices. They only thing they learned was more headcount==more revenue. This was partially possible by delivering large number of features and charging for each one of them e.g. AWS has a ton of useless crap services. Of course that is horseshit logic that only worked in the era of free money. And of course market caps going up, up, and away was fantasy. At some point, markets shift and cannot be tapped any further. And that is what is causing headcount reduction - there are no saleable features to produce. There is still a large amount of maintenance to do. But companies loathe paying for maintenance. They'd rather have customers suffer and quit than pay up front for headcount to maintain what has been built in the last decade. They would much rather scam customers with poor billing practices than provide quality and support. Thus, we end up with lower headcount, lower quality, and a generally third world quality existence - all because execs want to protect margins over anything else aka shareholder primacy.
nerdix 2y ago
Everyone has been trying to get into tech for the last 4 years. My wife works in healthcare. There are whole facebook groups dedicated to healthcare workers trying to transition into tech. A lot of these people are clinicians (Occupational Therapists, Physical Therapists, Speech Pathologists, etc). There are a lot of people looking for WFH jobs and tech seems to be where they turn first. Honestly, I blame the glut of low effort "Day in the life of a Software Engineer" youtube videos where the "worker" spends most of the video walking their dog and going for a casual afternoon jog while fast forwarding through the actual work. There has been a lot of glamorizing of tech jobs on social media that doesn't typically really match reality. Obviously, we all know about the trend of bootcamps promising six figure jobs after 2 months (though that seems to have tapered off a bit). I've read a lot of resumes over the last 4 years and I feel like I've seen it all. I've had multiple senior developer openings and I've seen resumes with just about every background you can think of. Waiters, fast food workers, mechanics, pest control, construction workers. No actual real word programming experience, only a list of a few bootcamp group projects with a link to a github profile where they pushed their bootcamp homework. It was especially bad if you included React in the job description at all (I noticed a dramatic reduction in these types of resumes when the job description focused on backend work). It reminds of that anecdote about stock bubbles: when your taxi driver is giving you stock tips then you know its time to sell. Well, when your waiter is talking to you about JavaScript because you wore an AWS shirt to dinner, you know that we're in a tech hiring bubble that is going to pop. There are/were a lot of people looking for tech jobs that frankly have no business doing so. Some of them may have spent 5 figures on a bootcamp of dubious value.
- tcmart14 2y ago
  Doesn't match reality at all. If only these people can see the daily insanity. I just got through 2 weeks, where at the end the owner of the company had to ask me why I haven't had much progress and trying to explain that everyday for the last two weeks he has shifted the requirements so much, anything I wrote had to get thrown out the window. Literally, get updated requirements, get 75% of the way through implementation. Bam, email in my inbox telling me to forget what was last said and do something completely different.
kimixa 2y ago
The use of Copilot and similar tools has been explicitly banned where I worked - we tested it out and the gains were minimal if any, and the possible cost of liability and licensing considered not worth it. There is no short-term intent to re-assess this either. I was recently laid off with "Efficiencies gained by AI" explicitly stated as one of the reasons. Either it's complete PR BS (most likely), or C-level execs are putting the cart before the horse - preparing for "productivity gains" that haven't actually materialized.
- solraph 2y ago
  I have found Copilot to be useful enough to use if someone else pays for it. In some cases it was useful (writing Golang functions that perform basic SQL CRUD functions). Others times, not so much. As I said above, I'm not claiming it's a massive increase, only that it is there. If AI moved the productivity needle 2%, and a given market has 100,000 software engineers, then that's possibly 2000 devs that are spamming the heck out of every job out there. > Either it's complete PR BS (most likely), or C-level execs are putting the cart before the horse - preparing for "productivity gains" that haven't actually materialized. All of the above is also a real possibility.
  - kimixa 2y ago
    Honestly, I suspect the industry I'm in (System Software/Driver Development) is a poor fit for the current state of "AI Assistants" - there's too much specific that's just not got the depth of training data to "learn" from, it's a mature system so not much "boilerplate" needs to be generated, and much of the real complexity is managing the state of the hardware interface and expectations from a constantly-changing documented-mostly-in-some-hardware-engineer's-head-only specification. Or time debugging why the stated specification doesn't actually match the behavior of the hardware. I don't think anyone in our group who was asked to trial it had much positive to say about it in that situation.
ofcrpls 2y ago
Let alone startups - the higher interest rates are hurting everyone across the board. For example in my world - Telco Infra and MSPs which did a lot of Capex spend in light of 5G deployments aren't able to keep up with the interest rate hikes putting pressure on repayments for cash raised for the spectrum auction spend and the like. 5G FWA may be in the industry news, but there hasn't been a killer application that has allowed for revenue growth to match those payments. Only way to handle that has been layoffs.
Eumenes 2y ago
> There's also the absolute flood of CS graduates in recent years contributing to the number of applicants. I know governments have been screaming for more STEM graduates, but I suspect the numbers are far higher than what is actually required. Alot of these grads want fancy silicon valley free lunch ping pong jobs. Those are super competitive. Cities across the US have plenty of "boring" software jobs - in medical billing software, at insurance companies, at credit unions, for hospitals, in defense, etc. But those aren't in SF bay area or Seattle or NYC or wherever these young people want to live.
griomnib 2y ago
After 24 months of LLM code seeding very subtle and confusing bugs into production codebases, the cracks will start to show, and we’ll probably need to hire 2x as many engineers to unwind the mess.
matrix87 2y ago
I don't think "AI" reduces head count, I think software that's built correctly can reduce headcount (by a lot)

mech987876 2y ago

I've been thinking about the AI gains a lot. If individual developers became, say, 20 percent more efficient at coding, the organization would potentially see even more gains, because all of the reduction in time spent coordinating between people. I.e. a 2-man task that needed 20 man-hours of work, 8 of which hours of work were just communicating, becomes a 1-man 10 hour task. Kind of an extreme example, but communication and coordination is extremely inefficient a lot of the time!

creer 2y ago
> communication and coordination is extremely inefficient a lot of the time To the point where in many places it's optimizing communication and management that might be the low lying fruit - as far as programming efficiency.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

yladiz 2y ago

With respect to hiring, of the two points you mention - AI productivity gains for SWE and "no more free money" - I'm confident it's solely the latter, that higher interest rates cut off free money from startups, so they need to be more careful about who they hire. Additionally, there was substantial overhiring during COVID which combined with the interest rate changes lead to a lot of layoffs, and subsequently lead to the conservative hiring in a lot of companies. This leads to a lot more competition than there was previously, both to even get an interview in the first place and to get to the end with an offer. It's possible that AI may have some kind of impact on the industry too with respect to productivity, but I'd bet that it's nowhere near a 10-20% gain and it's not a factor at all in the difficulty of finding a job.

SlightlyLeftPad 2y ago
I agree. Working as a manager in the industry my take is that AI has had a near-zero actual increase in SE productivity. That’s not to say the C-level perception matches that actual number though. It hasn’t happened at my company but I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that some layoffs from big companies were driven by that perception. I would interpret more as an excuse to get rid of low performers in general.
- Terr_ 2y ago
  I think LLMs spitting out code will probably supercharge the "if engineering showed a toy demo, that means we're 90% done and can start taking pre-orders" problem.
  - lazide 2y ago
    Yup - while creating massive tech debt, and weird edge case bugs that are even less sensical than typical ones you’d get.
- jordanb 2y ago
  From what I've seen, AI is used as an answer to the question: "how are we going to be expected to maintain the same velocity with fewer people."

nine_zeros 2y ago

> My take for SE roles is that it's a combination of AI giving enough gains[0] to reduce head count requirements It is not giving enough gains. It is only giving ammunition to board members and execs to cut headcount. What is really happening is that the current cohort of tech companies has been living in the era of free money for so long that they have forgotten competent practices. They only thing they learned was more headcount==more revenue. This was partially possible by delivering large number of features and charging for each one of them e.g. AWS has a ton of useless crap services. Of course that is horseshit logic that only worked in the era of free money. And of course market caps going up, up, and away was fantasy. At some point, markets shift and cannot be tapped any further. And that is what is causing headcount reduction - there are no saleable features to produce. There is still a large amount of maintenance to do. But companies loathe paying for maintenance. They'd rather have customers suffer and quit than pay up front for headcount to maintain what has been built in the last decade. They would much rather scam customers with poor billing practices than provide quality and support. Thus, we end up with lower headcount, lower quality, and a generally third world quality existence - all because execs want to protect margins over anything else aka shareholder primacy.

nerdix 2y ago

Everyone has been trying to get into tech for the last 4 years. My wife works in healthcare. There are whole facebook groups dedicated to healthcare workers trying to transition into tech. A lot of these people are clinicians (Occupational Therapists, Physical Therapists, Speech Pathologists, etc). There are a lot of people looking for WFH jobs and tech seems to be where they turn first. Honestly, I blame the glut of low effort "Day in the life of a Software Engineer" youtube videos where the "worker" spends most of the video walking their dog and going for a casual afternoon jog while fast forwarding through the actual work. There has been a lot of glamorizing of tech jobs on social media that doesn't typically really match reality. Obviously, we all know about the trend of bootcamps promising six figure jobs after 2 months (though that seems to have tapered off a bit). I've read a lot of resumes over the last 4 years and I feel like I've seen it all. I've had multiple senior developer openings and I've seen resumes with just about every background you can think of. Waiters, fast food workers, mechanics, pest control, construction workers. No actual real word programming experience, only a list of a few bootcamp group projects with a link to a github profile where they pushed their bootcamp homework. It was especially bad if you included React in the job description at all (I noticed a dramatic reduction in these types of resumes when the job description focused on backend work). It reminds of that anecdote about stock bubbles: when your taxi driver is giving you stock tips then you know its time to sell. Well, when your waiter is talking to you about JavaScript because you wore an AWS shirt to dinner, you know that we're in a tech hiring bubble that is going to pop. There are/were a lot of people looking for tech jobs that frankly have no business doing so. Some of them may have spent 5 figures on a bootcamp of dubious value.

tcmart14 2y ago
Doesn't match reality at all. If only these people can see the daily insanity. I just got through 2 weeks, where at the end the owner of the company had to ask me why I haven't had much progress and trying to explain that everyday for the last two weeks he has shifted the requirements so much, anything I wrote had to get thrown out the window. Literally, get updated requirements, get 75% of the way through implementation. Bam, email in my inbox telling me to forget what was last said and do something completely different.

kimixa 2y ago

The use of Copilot and similar tools has been explicitly banned where I worked - we tested it out and the gains were minimal if any, and the possible cost of liability and licensing considered not worth it. There is no short-term intent to re-assess this either. I was recently laid off with "Efficiencies gained by AI" explicitly stated as one of the reasons. Either it's complete PR BS (most likely), or C-level execs are putting the cart before the horse - preparing for "productivity gains" that haven't actually materialized.

solraph 2y ago
I have found Copilot to be useful enough to use if someone else pays for it. In some cases it was useful (writing Golang functions that perform basic SQL CRUD functions). Others times, not so much. As I said above, I'm not claiming it's a massive increase, only that it is there. If AI moved the productivity needle 2%, and a given market has 100,000 software engineers, then that's possibly 2000 devs that are spamming the heck out of every job out there. > Either it's complete PR BS (most likely), or C-level execs are putting the cart before the horse - preparing for "productivity gains" that haven't actually materialized. All of the above is also a real possibility.
- kimixa 2y ago
  Honestly, I suspect the industry I'm in (System Software/Driver Development) is a poor fit for the current state of "AI Assistants" - there's too much specific that's just not got the depth of training data to "learn" from, it's a mature system so not much "boilerplate" needs to be generated, and much of the real complexity is managing the state of the hardware interface and expectations from a constantly-changing documented-mostly-in-some-hardware-engineer's-head-only specification. Or time debugging why the stated specification doesn't actually match the behavior of the hardware. I don't think anyone in our group who was asked to trial it had much positive to say about it in that situation.

ofcrpls 2y ago

Let alone startups - the higher interest rates are hurting everyone across the board. For example in my world - Telco Infra and MSPs which did a lot of Capex spend in light of 5G deployments aren't able to keep up with the interest rate hikes putting pressure on repayments for cash raised for the spectrum auction spend and the like. 5G FWA may be in the industry news, but there hasn't been a killer application that has allowed for revenue growth to match those payments. Only way to handle that has been layoffs.

Eumenes 2y ago

> There's also the absolute flood of CS graduates in recent years contributing to the number of applicants. I know governments have been screaming for more STEM graduates, but I suspect the numbers are far higher than what is actually required. Alot of these grads want fancy silicon valley free lunch ping pong jobs. Those are super competitive. Cities across the US have plenty of "boring" software jobs - in medical billing software, at insurance companies, at credit unions, for hospitals, in defense, etc. But those aren't in SF bay area or Seattle or NYC or wherever these young people want to live.

griomnib 2y ago

After 24 months of LLM code seeding very subtle and confusing bugs into production codebases, the cracks will start to show, and we’ll probably need to hire 2x as many engineers to unwind the mess.

matrix87 2y ago

I don't think "AI" reduces head count, I think software that's built correctly can reduce headcount (by a lot)