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Great, more midlevel engineers for me. I genuinely cannot see how AI is going to be bad for programmers. It doesnt do the entire job. It does snippits and you

Great, more midlevel engineers for me. I genuinely cannot see how AI is going to be bad for programmers. It doesnt do the entire job. It does snippits and you must integrate everything. (And if it does the entire job, amazing! Maybe we can spend extra time on a good UI or extra unit tests) AI could reduce our staff by half, but that isnt what happens. Instead we just get more work done. The productivity increase seems to warrent spending more money on programmers. If we made our company 500k/yr profit before, AI makes us 1M/yr profit now. What if we bring on 2x as many programmers, do we make 2M/yr profit? I understand not all jobs scale like this, but at least my industry has demand go up since we are more efficient.

tombert 2y ago
Thank you, this is what I've been trying to say for awhile now. It feels like people are assuming that there's only so much work that can actually be done, and I don't think that's what happens in practice; instead we figure out how to exploit the resources more instead of doing "the same with less". Basically I feel most people are not thinking in terms of Gustafson's Law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustafson%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustafson%27s_law
- MattGaiser 2y ago
  I can see it turning the job into a quasi-product/engineering manager role and for some, they may not have chosen the new social version of the career. For some of my smaller projects, AI makes them vastly more efficient to do, but it is far from the hacker-style type of work they started as. For many of them, the human communication, typing the change request into ChatGPT, and pasting the new code into the file are all that remain of the work. Memory and storage used to be precious resources in the computing world, but now nobody blinks at shipping webpages that are 5MB, APIs that take 3 seconds because there is now a spinner to distract people, or entire browser instances for a calculator. I know a few software devs that didn't take that transition well as they loved knowing the little details and then the paradigm changed to "nobody cares." Dev used to be an option for a quiet solitary job. I can see that type of role disappearing.
  - tombert 2y ago
    Oh definitely, no doubt that the world is changing, and of course not everyone is going to like the change. I wasn't exactly slap-happy that everyone decided to start writing their desktop apps in a rebranded version of Chrome, but it makes sense when memory is infinite and CPUs are fast. I just don't think it's quite as doom-and-gloom as everyone is paranoid about. I feel like most of the jobs that could be easily replaced by AI also could have already fairly easily been outsourced to India. If you already have a job in a rich country like the US, it's likely that your employer thinks that it's necessary.
IAmGraydon 2y ago
I think this is partly correct. It just allows you to do more work, and there is always more work to be done. That said, if every company does this, there isn't suddenly more money supply to just double everyone's profit. It's going to increase competition since the path from idea -> product is shorter, so you'll likely make the same amount of money while doing twice the work. In the end, your input effort and output profit will remain the same - the gearing in between will just be adjusted.
hackingonempty 2y ago
> AI could reduce our staff by half, but that isnt what happens. Instead we just get more work done. The productivity increase seems to warrent spending more money on programmers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
dinkumthinkum 2y ago
> And if it does the entire job, amazing! Can you explain this line of thinking a bit? I see this a lot but it never makes any sense. It's like being offended about being paid money or feeling that you make too much or that you will be excited once you can get paid minimum wage or better yet just be homeless; I don't see the appeal ...

tombert 2y ago

Thank you, this is what I've been trying to say for awhile now. It feels like people are assuming that there's only so much work that can actually be done, and I don't think that's what happens in practice; instead we figure out how to exploit the resources more instead of doing "the same with less". Basically I feel most people are not thinking in terms of Gustafson's Law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustafson%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustafson%27s_law

MattGaiser 2y ago
I can see it turning the job into a quasi-product/engineering manager role and for some, they may not have chosen the new social version of the career. For some of my smaller projects, AI makes them vastly more efficient to do, but it is far from the hacker-style type of work they started as. For many of them, the human communication, typing the change request into ChatGPT, and pasting the new code into the file are all that remain of the work. Memory and storage used to be precious resources in the computing world, but now nobody blinks at shipping webpages that are 5MB, APIs that take 3 seconds because there is now a spinner to distract people, or entire browser instances for a calculator. I know a few software devs that didn't take that transition well as they loved knowing the little details and then the paradigm changed to "nobody cares." Dev used to be an option for a quiet solitary job. I can see that type of role disappearing.
- tombert 2y ago
  Oh definitely, no doubt that the world is changing, and of course not everyone is going to like the change. I wasn't exactly slap-happy that everyone decided to start writing their desktop apps in a rebranded version of Chrome, but it makes sense when memory is infinite and CPUs are fast. I just don't think it's quite as doom-and-gloom as everyone is paranoid about. I feel like most of the jobs that could be easily replaced by AI also could have already fairly easily been outsourced to India. If you already have a job in a rich country like the US, it's likely that your employer thinks that it's necessary.

IAmGraydon 2y ago

I think this is partly correct. It just allows you to do more work, and there is always more work to be done. That said, if every company does this, there isn't suddenly more money supply to just double everyone's profit. It's going to increase competition since the path from idea -> product is shorter, so you'll likely make the same amount of money while doing twice the work. In the end, your input effort and output profit will remain the same - the gearing in between will just be adjusted.

hackingonempty 2y ago

> AI could reduce our staff by half, but that isnt what happens. Instead we just get more work done. The productivity increase seems to warrent spending more money on programmers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

dinkumthinkum 2y ago

> And if it does the entire job, amazing! Can you explain this line of thinking a bit? I see this a lot but it never makes any sense. It's like being offended about being paid money or feeling that you make too much or that you will be excited once you can get paid minimum wage or better yet just be homeless; I don't see the appeal ...