3 ms·

I think I’m having the same experience as you. I’ve heard multiple times from execs in my company that “software” will have less value and that, in a few years,

I think I’m having the same experience as you. I’ve heard multiple times from execs in my company that “software” will have less value and that, in a few years, there won’t be as many developer jobs. Don’t get me wrong—I’ve seen productivity gains both in LLMs explaining code/ideation and in actual implementation, and I use them regularly in my workflow now. I quite like it. But these people are itching to eliminate the cost of maintaining a dev team, and it shows in the level of wishful thinking they display. They write a snake game one day using ChatGPT, and the next, they’re telling you that you might be too slow—despite a string of record-breaking quarters driven by successful product iterations. I really don’t want to be a naysayer here, but it’s pretty demoralizing when these are the same people who decide your compensation and overall employment status.

adamredwoods 2y ago
>> But these people are itching to eliminate the cost of maintaining a dev team, and it shows in the level of wishful thinking they display. And this is the promise of AI, to eliminate jobs. If CEOs invest heavily in this, they won't back down because no one wants to be wrong. I understand some people try to claim AI might make net more jobs (someday), but I just don't think that is what CEOs are going for.
- nicoburns 2y ago
  > If CEOs invest heavily in this, they won't back down because no one wants to be wrong. They might not have to. If the results are bad enough then their companies might straight-up fail. I'd be willing to bet that at least one company has already failed due to betting too heavily on LLMs. That isn't to say that LLMs have no uses. But just that CEOs willing something to work isn't sufficient to make it work.
  - Yoric 2y ago
    Yes, but don't forget that higher-ups also control, to a large extent, the narrative. Whether laying off developers to replace them with LLMs was good for the company is largely uncorrelated to whether the person in charge of the operation will get promoted for having successfully saved all this money for the company. Pre-LLM, that's how Boeing destroyed itself. By creating value for the shareholders.
- subw00f 2y ago
  It makes sense—we all know how capitalism works. But the thing is, how can you not apply the law of diminishing returns here? The models are getting marginally better with a significant increase in investment, except for DeepSeek’s latest developments, which are impressive but mostly for cost reasons—not because we’ve achieved anything remotely close to AGI. If your experienced employees, who are giving an honest try to all these tools, are telling you it’s not a silver bullet, maybe you should hold your horses a little and try to take advantage of reality—which is actually better—rather than forcing some pipe dream down your bottom line’s throat while negating any productivity gains by demotivating them with your bullshit or misdirecting their efforts into finding a problem for a given solution.
mostertoaster 2y ago
I think with LLMs we will actually see the demand for software developers who can understand code and know how to use the tools sky rocket. There will be ultimately be way more money in total going towards software developers, but average pay will be well above the median pay.
chefandy 2y ago
Just another way for the people on top to siphon money from everyone else. No individual contributor is going to be rewarded for any productivity increase beyond what is absolutely required to get them to fulfill the company’s goals, and the goal posts will be moving so fast that keeping up will be a full time job. As we see from the current job market, the supply of problems the commercial software market needs more coders to solve maybe isn’t quite as bountiful as we thought it was, and maybe we won’t need to perpetually ramp up the number of developers humanity has… maybe we even have too many already? If a company’s top developer can do the work of the 10 developers below them, their boss is going to happily fire the extra developers— not think of all the incredible other things they could use those developers for. A lot of developers assume that one uber-productive developer left standing will be more valuable to the company than they were before— but now that developer is competing with 10 people that also know the code base willing to work for a lot cheaper. We get paid based on what the market will bear, not the amount of value we deliver, so 100% of that newfound profit goes to the top and the rest of it goes to reducing the price of the product to stay competitive with every other company doing the exact same thing. Maybe I’m being overly cynical, but assuming this isn’t a race to the bottom and people will get rich being super productive ai-enhanced code monsters, to me, looks like a conceited white collar version of the hustle porn guys that think if they simultaneously work the right combo of gig apps at the right time of day in the right spots then they can work their way up to being wealthy entrepreneurs. Good luck.
- dasil003 2y ago
  Writing code isn’t the bottleneck though. What LLMs do is knock out the floor because you used to need a pretty significant baseline knowledge of a programming language to do anything. Now you don’t need that because you can just spray and pray prompts with no programming knowledge. This actually works to a point since most business code is actually repetitive CRUD. The problem comes with the fact that implicit expectations that the higher level system run with a certain uptime, level of quality, and conform to any number of common sense assumptions that no one but a good programmer was thinking about until someone uses the system and says “why does it do this completely wrong thing”. There are huge classes of these types of problems that an LLM will not be capable of resolving, and if you’ve been blasting ahead with mountains of LLM slop code even the best human programmers might not be able to save you. In other words I think LLMs will make it easy to paint yourself into a corner if you gut the technical core of your team.
nyarlathotep_ 2y ago
Yeah it seems pretty obvious where this is all going and yet a sizable proportion of the programming population cheers on every recent advancement that makes their skills more and more of a commodity.
ukoki 2y ago
> I’ve heard multiple times from execs in my company that “software” will have less value and that, in a few years, there won’t be as many developer jobs. If LLMs make average devs 10x more productive, Jevon's Paradox[1] suggests we'll just make 10x more software rather than have 10x fewer devs. You can now implement that feature only one customer cares about, or test 10x more prototypes before building your product. And if you instead decide to decimate your engineering team, watch out because your competitors might not. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

adamredwoods 2y ago

>> But these people are itching to eliminate the cost of maintaining a dev team, and it shows in the level of wishful thinking they display. And this is the promise of AI, to eliminate jobs. If CEOs invest heavily in this, they won't back down because no one wants to be wrong. I understand some people try to claim AI might make net more jobs (someday), but I just don't think that is what CEOs are going for.

nicoburns 2y ago
> If CEOs invest heavily in this, they won't back down because no one wants to be wrong. They might not have to. If the results are bad enough then their companies might straight-up fail. I'd be willing to bet that at least one company has already failed due to betting too heavily on LLMs. That isn't to say that LLMs have no uses. But just that CEOs willing something to work isn't sufficient to make it work.
- Yoric 2y ago
  Yes, but don't forget that higher-ups also control, to a large extent, the narrative. Whether laying off developers to replace them with LLMs was good for the company is largely uncorrelated to whether the person in charge of the operation will get promoted for having successfully saved all this money for the company. Pre-LLM, that's how Boeing destroyed itself. By creating value for the shareholders.
subw00f 2y ago
It makes sense—we all know how capitalism works. But the thing is, how can you not apply the law of diminishing returns here? The models are getting marginally better with a significant increase in investment, except for DeepSeek’s latest developments, which are impressive but mostly for cost reasons—not because we’ve achieved anything remotely close to AGI. If your experienced employees, who are giving an honest try to all these tools, are telling you it’s not a silver bullet, maybe you should hold your horses a little and try to take advantage of reality—which is actually better—rather than forcing some pipe dream down your bottom line’s throat while negating any productivity gains by demotivating them with your bullshit or misdirecting their efforts into finding a problem for a given solution.

mostertoaster 2y ago

I think with LLMs we will actually see the demand for software developers who can understand code and know how to use the tools sky rocket. There will be ultimately be way more money in total going towards software developers, but average pay will be well above the median pay.

chefandy 2y ago

Just another way for the people on top to siphon money from everyone else. No individual contributor is going to be rewarded for any productivity increase beyond what is absolutely required to get them to fulfill the company’s goals, and the goal posts will be moving so fast that keeping up will be a full time job. As we see from the current job market, the supply of problems the commercial software market needs more coders to solve maybe isn’t quite as bountiful as we thought it was, and maybe we won’t need to perpetually ramp up the number of developers humanity has… maybe we even have too many already? If a company’s top developer can do the work of the 10 developers below them, their boss is going to happily fire the extra developers— not think of all the incredible other things they could use those developers for. A lot of developers assume that one uber-productive developer left standing will be more valuable to the company than they were before— but now that developer is competing with 10 people that also know the code base willing to work for a lot cheaper. We get paid based on what the market will bear, not the amount of value we deliver, so 100% of that newfound profit goes to the top and the rest of it goes to reducing the price of the product to stay competitive with every other company doing the exact same thing. Maybe I’m being overly cynical, but assuming this isn’t a race to the bottom and people will get rich being super productive ai-enhanced code monsters, to me, looks like a conceited white collar version of the hustle porn guys that think if they simultaneously work the right combo of gig apps at the right time of day in the right spots then they can work their way up to being wealthy entrepreneurs. Good luck.

dasil003 2y ago
Writing code isn’t the bottleneck though. What LLMs do is knock out the floor because you used to need a pretty significant baseline knowledge of a programming language to do anything. Now you don’t need that because you can just spray and pray prompts with no programming knowledge. This actually works to a point since most business code is actually repetitive CRUD. The problem comes with the fact that implicit expectations that the higher level system run with a certain uptime, level of quality, and conform to any number of common sense assumptions that no one but a good programmer was thinking about until someone uses the system and says “why does it do this completely wrong thing”. There are huge classes of these types of problems that an LLM will not be capable of resolving, and if you’ve been blasting ahead with mountains of LLM slop code even the best human programmers might not be able to save you. In other words I think LLMs will make it easy to paint yourself into a corner if you gut the technical core of your team.

nyarlathotep_ 2y ago

Yeah it seems pretty obvious where this is all going and yet a sizable proportion of the programming population cheers on every recent advancement that makes their skills more and more of a commodity.

ukoki 2y ago

> I’ve heard multiple times from execs in my company that “software” will have less value and that, in a few years, there won’t be as many developer jobs. If LLMs make average devs 10x more productive, Jevon's Paradox[1] suggests we'll just make 10x more software rather than have 10x fewer devs. You can now implement that feature only one customer cares about, or test 10x more prototypes before building your product. And if you instead decide to decimate your engineering team, watch out because your competitors might not. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox