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Why is everyone trying to replace Software Engineers?
- padseeker 2y agowe are expensive to employ
- lesuorac 2y agoI think it's mostly a lack of ideas. If I sold you a device for $1 and it minted $5 using $2 of electricity then you'd buy absolutely as many as you could as fast as you can. However, if the devices stopped working when you had 100 of them you'd buy exactly 100 and if somebody made ones that only needed 50 cents of electricity you'd be looking to switch to those ones. A company that is looking to downsize it's employee count is saying we are out of growth ideas and we're just going to do the same thing but more efficiently. Nothing really wrong with this except then your stock price shouldn't be like 100 P/E since there's no growth.
- pphysch 2y agoSaaS and consultants are also expensive to rent.
- pianoben 2y agoThey aren't trying to replace us in earnest, yet. They are using the threat to beat down wages, and to more generally tilt the power balance further in favor of ~capital~ employers. "Replacement" is smoke and mirrors at this point; anyone who seriously tries it will quickly fail, with today's technology.
- cogman10 2y agoIt's very similar to offshoring. We currently have an offshore dev team that is frankly just a money pit. Still, the C levels keep trying to make us use them and it's never been successful. Our offshore devs are simply incompetent because we hired for cheap and not quality.
- rented_mule 2y agoI've been at a company that did hire overseas for competence. It was still very difficult, primarily because of the communication bottleneck imposed by timezone differences. At times, we had significant parts of these remote teams move to the US, and they were great contributors once they were in the same timezone. Low latency communication is a big deal. Teams across communication divides like this must own their own piece of the system with a small, well-designed, well-documented interface. Conway's Law is in extreme force in these situations and must be respected if there is to be meaningful success. I think you're right that LLMs have similar issues. There are no timezone issues, but communication is still very difficult on anything that isn't completely concrete. I think this is part of why they can be good on 1-10 line snippets, but get much worse if you try to get to dozens or hundreds of lines of code that aren't filled with boilerplate and redundancies. Taking that drudgery off our hands (where we can't eliminate it) is a real productivity win, but it's a far cry from replacing us.
- SavageNoble 2y agoHave you met any software engineers?
- Hizonner 2y agoNope. Tons of programmers, though.
- windward 2y agoI have an EE degree. Pleasure to meet you.
- Hizonner 2y agoThat's nice. Electrical engineering is engineering and "software engineering" is not.
- windward 2y agoYet I write software 3:
- reaperducer 2y ago3: I had no idea there was an emoticon for "butthead." I'm going to start using this.
- Hizonner 2y agoIf an MD writes software, does that make it "software medicine"?
- windward 2y agoDid you choose not to give the reverse analogy upon discovering that EEs working on medicine are already called medical engineers?
- codingwagie 2y agoits completely over for this field. anyone that doesnt think so has their head in the sand, we are 18 months out from the value proposition of a 50-85th percentile software engineer dropping to the floor
- teeray 2y agoI’ll believe it when I can page an AI at 3AM, go back to sleep, and have it autonomously root-cause and fix a production outage no matter the cause.
- Yenrabbit 2y agoWhat percentage of human software engineers would you guess pass this bar?
- teeray 2y agoIrrelevant. It's greater than the AI's percentage.
- Capricorn2481 2y agoI'd say most of my teammates could do this. It's not a unique skill to debug a prod error. I would say 0% of AI does? What AI can even read production environment vars, find logs in arbitrary parts of the file system, measure usage statistics, and fix the code without causing another bug?
- pphysch 2y agoCode monkeys can essentially be replaced by GenAI (that is, a competent SWE team needs fewer or zero low-skill code monkeys going forward) but the "field" goes way beyond code monkeys. Replacing piles of expensive crappy SaaS with a small team of expert SWE will continue to be a massive arbitrage opportunity for many mid/large orgs.
- StefanBatory 2y agoAnd then the thing is, how do you train new employees? Any juniors will be useless. Year, or two of unpaid internships? It's nothing new. In my country it works like this for doctors or pharmacists - they have to do half a year of unpaid work if they want to get diploma (and I use work and not internship for reason) Because as a junior you don't bring anything of value to company, you're a loss to them.
- StefanBatory 2y agoBecause: 1) We're expensive (at least for Poland, I can aim for ~6-8k PLN monthly after few years of experience. Other, even civil/mech engineers will have around 4-6k monthly with similar experience) [edit: and minimal wage is 3.5k after taxes] 2) It appears to be replaceable (you can replace us with LLMs to an extent, you can't do that with other jobs)
- kklisura 2y ago> 1) We're expensive I reckon we're cheap. Even with the current wages software engineers have, the margins in software companies/industry is large.
- bilbo0s 2y agothe margins in software companies/industry is large. Margins, are never large enough for a certain class of owners. That's the unfortunate reality. No one at an average board meeting is gonna say, "Hey guys, let's stay at this 40% margin level instead of going to 60%!"
- Sharlin 2y agoBut the high salaries are just a question of supply and demand, because for 20 or so years there was always a need for more programmers (well, at least senior ones). Reduced demand should naturally be reflected by reduced salaries (or benefits).
- bilbo0s 2y agoThis. It's not software engineers per se. It's any labor component that is expensive and "automate"-able. Companies are always trying to optimize labor costs. The theoretical Holy Grail is a company that requires 0 labor input where all profits accrue to the owner of the business. That's just business 101. I'd anticipate a concerted effort to make LLMs better and batter at software development tasks until you only need the top 0.5% of developers and maybe a few technicians to support them. That's how you juice profitability.
- datadrivenangel 2y agoBean counters don't like specialists, because they can't evaluate the value of specialists without having that specialist knowledge themselves...
- TheGRS 2y agoDisagreed, competent businesses analyze this stuff at least a high level. Its why many of us spend so much time classifying various projects and efforts into capital expenditures. Large corps understand the value of a lawyer these days, who are highly specialized, because they can see the sort of returns it gets them. But at the end of the day they need to see why any effort is either earning them more money or costing them less money.
- vagab0nd 2y agoThis is either delusional, or trying to sell a course. That aside, it's interesting that software engineering will probably be among the first to be destroyed by ASI. This is simply because it's easy to do reinforcement learning on.
- kevin_thibedeau 2y agoJust like robotic cars, the first 90% of the effort will come easy and the remaining 10% will take decades to perfect. They're going to need AGI to fully replace the intuition and knowledge integration of a dev.
- freecodyx 2y agoExactly, self driving for example on paper seems like an easy task to automate, you only need to make a decision for the upcoming 2 seconds, and still sucks at it, because it needs 100% accuracy, 90% is fatal and useless
- vagab0nd 2y agoIt's easy to compile and run a program. It's hard to accurately simulate driving.
- datadrivenangel 2y agoFrom 2011: "Don’t call yourself a programmer: “Programmer” sounds like “anomalously high-cost peon who types some mumbo-jumbo into some other mumbo-jumbo.” If you call yourself a programmer, someone is already working on a way to get you fired. You know Salesforce, widely perceived among engineers to be a Software as a Services company? Their motto and sales point is “No Software”, which conveys to their actual customers “You know those programmers you have working on your internal systems? If you used Salesforce, you could fire half of them and pocket part of the difference in your bonus.”" [0] 0 - https://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/10/28/dont-call-yourself-a-programmer/ https://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/10/28/dont-call-yourself-a-pr...
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- bogdan 2y agoGood thing everybody hates Salesforce.
- snuxoll 2y agoI dislike the company, I like the product - I have built several small apps on the platform and nothing has ever been "no code" as they like to advertise, but hot damn was I able to throw together something useful for the business in less than a day and have people using it as quickly. As an engineer I find it incredibly valuable for making these low-to-medium value LOB apps that don't justify the man-hours to build, deploy, and fight tech debt for a full-stack web application, at least when factoring in the tradeoff for license costs.
- datadrivenangel 2y agoIt's a valuable product. Salesforce knows this, and prices accordingly, which is why everybody hates salesforce but still pays them.
- red-iron-pine 2y agobut still uses it
- taylodl 2y ago> Your job was never to write code, it is to solve problems for your users. They are why we have a job. You need to talk with the users, empathize with them, understand their problems and feel their pains. This is much too important to be left exclusively in the hands of product managers and designers. You are the problem solver, so you need to fully understand the problem. Adding to this point, LLMs won't fully understand the problem, so they're simply incapable of developing complete solutions. I've had a lot of success with these tools in developing functions, but at that point I've already architected and designed the solution. Even so, it saves time. These should be regarded as developer productivity tools, not developer replacement tools.
- cogman10 2y agoI've honestly never had that success. LLMs for me more often get in the way than actually help anything. It may be that it's because I deal mostly in very large code bases with their own nuances.
- eatsyourtacos 2y agoCounter point though- what if it was trained on your specific code base? Wouldn't it be able to then help with those given nuances? The code base I have I would love to be able to just give some AI free reign and learn the structure since a lot of it is fairly repetitive; I know it would be so easy to say "hey add X just like Y" and it would be able to do it easily.
- throw-qqqqq 2y agoThe rare times where I have no good idea what to do, it is faster to code with an LLM. The rest of the time, when I know just what I want, it takes longer for me to formulate it, query the LLM and discuss and validate its output. My more experienced/senior colleagues all say roughly the same. It’s great help for our juniors though. They learn a lot and are more capable on their own with the AI assistance. It’s improving all the time though, so I’m not writing it off at all. I am developing an evaluation suite so I can keep watching the progress in a systematic way..
- whiplash451 2y ago"Not all programming problems can be solved with pattern matching" Says who? How do you know if solving programming problems is not just advanced pattern matching? The fact that we find most (if not all) of our solutions on SO or talking to colleagues points towards the pattern matching hypothesis quite strongly. To be clear: I am talking about the programming aspect of the job only, not the other important things (talking to customers/product managers, crafting solutions, etc.)
- tayo42 2y agoI think it's just software engineers that are making the ai software. They make it do what they know how to do. It's fun in a hacker kind of way to make the computer write code. Well slowly see more Ai intersect with other jobs as people with hobbies that can engineer make things. Assuming Ai actually delivers what it promises in the first place
- pjc50 2y agoObvious point: we're the most expensive kind of non-finance individual-contributor employee. Equally obvious: nobody is going to replace the most expensive kind of employee, the CEO. Less obvious point: software engineers sometimes say no. LLMs don't. They'll always give you something, even if it doesn't work or has security holes. The idea of shipping worse products at higher speed is incredibly tempting to sales types. If you think the app store is bad now, wait until you see what level of AI sloppification is possible when anyone can turn out hundreds of clones of any popular apps.
- paulsutter 2y agoSoftware engineering is exactly the skill needed to think of, design, and debug large valuable systems. AI will become a better and better tool to give us more leverage to make a dent in the world. We’re just going to do much bigger things. Much much bigger The job won’t last forever, but it will outlive almost every other job
- ajkjk 2y agoI mean.. they're a big cost center that operates slowly and takes a lot of effort to keep functioning. Not to mention, you often need the engineers more than you, given how much time it takes them to ramp up, and how hard it is to find quality ones, so they get to demand high wages (often while not really doing that great of a job---looking at you, average college hire who's not aspiring to be any sort of leader or expert in their field). If you ran a company you'd want to replace them also. (None of that has anything to do with whether it's just for the world to operate this way. Personally I'd like to see all engineer wages go down and owner/shareholder returns go down and all that money go to lesser-paid roles or cheaper prices. But we lived in a version of capitalism that doesn't presently seem to present a way to do that...) Personally I think programming will be 10x as efficient in the not-so-distant future (25 years maybe), and that everyone vaguely understands this: that what we're doing today is in some sense a waste of effort. Similar to building a road or railroad with hundreds of manual laborers instead of a few big machines.
- MangoCoffee 2y ago>big cost center that operates slowly and takes a lot of effort to keep functioning This is pretty much the reason why companies want to replace their IT teams with business analysts who can use low-code/no-code. I understand why, they don't see IT as their core function. It's not how they make money, and in many cases, IT is where they lose money. If a company can have its own business people create reports, automate tasks, etc., using tools like Power BI and Power Automate, why would they need to hire a separate IT team just for that?
- galacticaactual 2y agoI don't know. Why are you software engineers always trying to replace everyone else?
- skirge 2y agobecause everyone else has a tough and boring job and being replaced by computer program and some device they will be free from this tedious jobs and have more time to do what they like instead. World will be a better place.
- Capricorn2481 2y ago> have more time to do what they like instead With what money?
- skirge 2y agoMoney is only needed for paying taxes. with full automation taxes make no sense - no need to force people to work for government. Basic MMT.
- Capricorn2481 2y agoThat's a puzzling statement. What makes you think money is only for taxes
- skirge 2y agostate money is. You can use bitcoin for rest.
- Capricorn2481 2y ago... Where are you going to get the Bitcoin without a job.
- kevindamm 2y ago
- prododev 2y ago[dead]
- CharlieDigital 2y agoYou need strong guys to move things around because you don't have a pneumatic crane. Now you have pneumatic crane, you can move stacks and stacks of things around with ease. You need less strong guys around and instead there is a new need for fewer people that are well-trained on how to operate this pneumatic crane safely. You'll get more work done with less people. That's what's happening with software engineering and LLM copilots; it's an industrialization of coding. You don't need 20 engineers to get that product out. You need a few that are really good operators of the machinery. Adept at prompting and reviewing code instead of writing code.
- djmips 2y agoWe need to think next level. Not just prompting and reviewing code but debugging code. ( Side note: why does everyone overlook debugging from code automation to new languages etc )
- franktankbank 2y agoUnfortunately the new LLM stack is one hell of a dependency. I somewhat like what I've seen from it but its no guarantee it doesn't start to turn the screws back on you (in fact I expect it will turn out that way).
- saalweachter 2y agoIf there's one thing employers hate more than unskilled labor, it's skilled labor. Oh, now instead of ten unskilled laborers carrying shit, each being paid $N, you can have one crane operator getting paid $5N? Wait, why can't we pay him $N? What do you mean, if he fucks up it costs us millions? What do you mean, his skill or lack thereof can double or halve the time it takes to move shit around? Ok, what if we pay him $1.1N?
- taylodl 2y ago> it's an industrialization of coding That's a fantastic insight. There's a popular metaphor comparing software developers to blacksmiths, emphasizing the craft and trade aspects of the profession. Historically, blacksmiths were largely automated out of existence, replaced by highly skilled metallurgists and industrial automation engineers, albeit in much smaller numbers. As we look toward the future, we must consider what the equivalents for software development might be.
- codr7 2y agoSoftware developers are basically the only thing standing between the morons and profit at any cost to society, because some of us don't feel like playing that game and they couldn't do it without us if their life depended on it. I realize they think they they finally can do it by themselves, or rather by hooking up a bunch of fresh bootcamp devs with AI; and I look forward to watching them crash, burn and come back begging for help.
- amriksohata 2y agothis comment
- itishappy 2y agoI don't think software engineers are any more resilient to the profit incentives than the rest of us.
- 2y ago
- itishappy 2y agoSoftware Engineers build the tools, so I feel it shouldn't be surprising that one of the first areas it's being applied is the domain it's inventors are most familiar with.
- Workaccount2 2y agoSWE happens to have a massive training corpus readily available online, and is something that is done entirely with text. For other engineering disciplines, the data is much thinner and the methods tend to be heavily visual, i.e. mechanical drawings or electronic schematics. SOTA vision LLMs cannot read a schematic to save their life. The accuracy is <5%.
- ep103 2y ago> Scientist: Hurrah! We have created an algorithm that can mimic human speech! > CEO: Fantastic! I've already fired all of the doctors and nurses, how soon can it start doing surgeries? > Scientist: ...
- agentultra 2y agoIt's pretty simple if you take the view that there are only two classes in a capitalist society: those who profit from owning capital and those whose only capital is their bodies and thus profit from their labour. The former own land, companies, and such assets that they profit from the difference in value between what is sold and the wages they pay labourers to produce that value. Those people profit from wages going down. One way to do that is to gain leverage over the job market by threatening to remove access to labourers. Unless those labourers are willing to accept a lower wage they can be replaced by AI and nobody will need them anymore. Another way they can increase their profits is to force labourers to use GenAI tools to produce their work. There's constant pressure from the capital class to, "always improve productivity!" This is just another example of that. I suspect there will come a point, perhaps, where some companies will decide to let developers go who refuse to use GenAI (or simply not hire them to begin with). I don't know that we will see the technology become sophisticated enough to replace human developers entirely.
- ilikerashers 2y agoMy view is that Ai companies saw there was a huge volume of code online and decided coding was a text generation problem and easy to replace. I don't buy it. I also don't think it'll replace writers or artists. Just the low brow, chum bucket stuff which in programming terms is a todo app or web form.
- bilbo0s 2y agoJust the low brow, chum bucket stuff I think, as software devs, we sometimes kid ourselves with respect to how many of us are working on low brow, chum bucket stuff. Most of us are not working on GPU based real time physics engines. What most of us do is, well, not rocket science. Even people working in "hard" areas are not really doing the "hard" work. Most game engine developers are using libraries, they aren't developing shaders. Most AI developers are, in actuality, TF or PyTorch monkeys, not real AI experts. I think devs who move to writing code in areas where problems have not yet been solved will still be necessary. But yeah, not sure devs pushing out another web app will be all that necessary over the next decade.
- ilikerashers 2y agoWhile I agree we're not all implementing physics engines, there is a spectrum of complexity that is both business and technical between a todo app and a banking system. Developer brains are still much more efficient at holding the different layers of context involved to build systems.
- bigbones 2y agoThe frequency of AI cope posts appears set to keep increasing until the very last one of us is fired. The reality is that users simply don't care about any concern to be found discussed in the church of software engineering, they want an app with a pink button, and very shortly we will be a much higher friction means to achieve that than the sloppy text generator. It's the same force behind why you can't buy high quality furniture any more or consumer devices that survive more than a few years: the vast majority of people simply don't care, they want to click "Buy" at a price level they don't have to think about and get on with their lives, only now it applies to knowledge economy work and entire industries are trying their hardest to ignore the transition we're so painfully obviously already in. Even were it not the case for disposable CRUD Android/web apps that represent the bread and butter for half the industry, the effect on the structure of popular media is alarming in ways I don't think anyone has a hope of understanding yet. I imagine kids coming up now will not be glued to their phones anywhere nearly like the current batch are, or if they are glued to something, perhaps it is a conversational agent prompting them through an earpiece or similar. Hand-wringing about the quality of LLM-driven app development really misses the point of all of this. We're currently using an extremely novel technology to emulate aspects of our now-defunct technology (which I believe includes the web), in much the same way fax gateways at one time were a popular application for email.
- micromacrofoot 2y agobecause employees produce the most overhead, software engineers more than most non-execs we're living in times where enshittification is a reliable strategy to make money and the people doing it don't care about long-term outcomes as long as they can cash out before they happen this is almost the entire american business landscape today
- skirge 2y agoEnvy. Digital nomads, compradors of capitalism should die.
- excalibur 2y ago> The most recent generation of LLMs are already trained on all the code ever written. This can't possibly be true. But if it were it would be highly illegal.
- insane_dreamer 2y agoThe same reason all companies try to reduce labor: cut costs, better returns for shareholders. There's nothing special about SWEs vs any other class of worker. If they can be replaced or eliminated, they will be, just like any other worker.
- thr0waway001 2y agoThis is the sad truth. We like to think we're special but we're not. I'd argue a paramedic is more special. Those people save lives and get paid like shit compared to us.
- ge96 2y agoI wish I realized what financial independence is earlier, even making good money I'm still poor/negative net worth due to my dumb decisions earlier on. Trying to be better this time around then I won't be so concerned/can just pivot.
- insane_dreamer 2y agoYou know what job is safer than a SWE? A barber. Think about it -- what's the ROI on creating a robot so sophisticated that it can handle all the intricacies and special customer requests of hair cutting/styling? You're unlikely to save any money over hiring humans.
- prewett 2y agoI was part of a group people that tended towards artsy (and definitely not rationalist). This was when everyone had an idea for a new app, and I kept getting people trying to get me to work for equity. They seemed to have these same kinds of unrealistic expectations. I eventually came to the conclusion that they saw software as like painting. It seems to take about 8 - 24 hrs to create a work of art (assuming the idea is complete and you are working within your skill level), so their mental price and timeline was something similar. A better metaphor for software is like writing a book. Everyone sees writing a book as borderline undoable, and the expectation is that it takes months and months. I think that software and writing have a lot in common (including lots of text, and even the verb used), and that explaining ourselves as book-writers would help set better expectations.
- gardenhedge 2y ago> Everyone sees writing a book as borderline undoable I would think the opposite. Surely everyone thinks they could write a book?
- TSUTiger 2y agoObviously this depends on _where_ you're working, but personally, I like the plumber metaphor -- nobody notices the plumber until things aren't working properly and by then you're in deep shit. Software is working great: Everything's working great, why do we pay you again!? Software is broken: Everything's broken, why do we pay you!?
- api 2y agoI've been predicting for some time that if AI makes it much easier and faster to write software, this will increase software engineer employment. It will grow the sector and massively inflate the combinatorial explosion of system X system X system. Programmers will use AI as a tool in their tool box -- I already do for boilerplate and tests and explaining code -- and they'll use it to write ever more software to work with ever more systems. What it may do though is cut the bottom off the field. Very junior programming jobs could vanish, creating more of a learning cliff to really get into it. This is happening in every discipline and has been for a while. It's a real problem for our traditional method of school followed by entry level job. I think the future's going to be some kind of school integrated with apprenticeship followed by internship followed by a real job. Unfortunately that may suck in a lot of ways. Fields that are like that require too much 'paying your dues.'
- dramadragon 2y ago[dead]
- Workaccount2 2y agoAI will not replace software engineers. But it will most likely lower their pay into "normal" engineering compensation territory.
- MangoCoffee 2y ago"Why is everyone trying to replace software engineers?" – Is this an oxymoron? Companies will always look for ways to save money, and headcount is usually the biggest cost
- la_fayette 2y agoI have my own side projects, which I hoped I could make much faster progress with LLMs. Didn't work... Actually, it decreased progress. LLMs don't code themselves and explaining things to them takes an enormous amount of time and they misunderstand things so much. How could somebody think a statistical parrot can replace any kind of knowledge work?
- dcchambers 2y agoOne word: money. They (CEOs and executives, shareholders, etc) don't like how much it costs to make software. They think software engineers make too much money. You (a human) are always a cost they will try to reduce.
- ashu1461 2y agoThey think software engineers make too much money and answer everything with it depends.
- Rury 2y agoYeah, this is pretty much the answer when it comes to jobs. I mean why do people do their own oil changes, instead of leaving the job to their mechanic? Why would anyone try to replace their mechanic? You might argue for trust, quality, or time reasons, but arguably only so because of how they relate to costs.
- AndreasMoeller 2y agoUnfortunately I think this is exactly true. It essentially means that many executives are completely incompetent. You product teams are where your company's value is generated. It is kinda scary to think that so many executives don't understand that.
- dcchambers 2y agoUnfortunately it seems like a large subset of execs can only think one quarter at a time.
- ratherbefuddled 2y agoCapitalism is always looking for ways to make complex, expensive work simpler and cheaper. Why wouldn't it? The thing is it doesn't really matter what tools you use. The problems are complex and they don't become simpler just because you use an LLM. We will gain a bit of efficiency and then spend that gain on whatever new problems LLMs throw up plus the constant stream of new problems the world generates. Software engineers are not getting replaced by LLMs any more than they are by UML, visual programming tools, RPA, MDD, code generators or any of the other fads that have come and gone over the years.
- kasajian 2y agoI'm a software developer. I've been trying to replace myself with code since I started writing code in the early 80s.
- gmt2027 2y agoAI is an existential threat to tech companies not software engineers. In many domains, the scope and complexity of software systems goes beyond the ability of a single software engineer to manage. A coordination layer becomes necessary when the number of engineers required goes beyond a threshold (say 5 or so). When the development effort must be coordinated over extended periods (say several months or years), mechanisms to raise capital and manage risk become necessary. These functions are why companies exist. Consider that a massive increase in software engineer productivity will make coordination unnecessary for many kinds of software. In the market that opens up, companies with expensive executives, middle management and coordination inefficiencies will not be competitive. Smaller shops with a solo engineer or a team of less than 5 will outcompete larger players because their costs will be significantly lower. Massive one-size-fits-all products will be harder to justify when a small dev shop can quickly build or customise software for the unique requirements of a business or niche. Before the CEOs stop needing engineers, engineers will stop needing CEOs and managers to coordinate their efforts and raise capital.
- logtempo 2y agoIt's a threat to many workers imo, just like autonomous machine were to the workers during the industry revolution, and later with the factories moving to China. Many people suffered from unemployment and the solution so far have been solved by creating new needs and new jobs, as well as policies such as social security. But with the externalization of intelectual work (which happen without IA, for ex. India tech) I wonder if such solution is possible.
- sexyman48 2y agoBecause people suck? Everyone trying to replace everyone.
- burnte 2y agoBecause the rich would rather spend money on things they can own than spending on people. If I spend a million dollars on an AI cluster to replicate my programmer, it'll never need another vacation, never complain about conditions, never argue, never balk at unethical requests, etc.
- bob1029 2y agoI think the more realistic long term victims will be implementation specialists and business analysts. The middlemen who sit between product (developer) and customer. Giving your product the ability to talk & work directly with the customer seems to me a much more valuable activity than covering all the edge cases that would arise during the development of such a solution with an LLM. Remember, everything is a function [0] and LLMs support calling them. The trick is having the skill and domain expertise to establish bounded contexts and prompts that align with realistic product use cases and transition between them cleanly. I know there is a lot of doubt that users would enjoy using a chat interface, but I strongly believe it would be popular as long as it actually works. If it's not well designed and the GUI tools are faster even for a novice, you will have wasted a lot of time/money for nothing. [0] https://youtu.be/zHU1xH6Ogs4 https://youtu.be/zHU1xH6Ogs4
- ok123456 2y agoThey hate us and despise the fact they're forced to compensate us for our education and experience. Left to their own devices, software engineering would be just as abusive and exploitative as truck driving or automotive repair. They've already made great strides in this direction in terms of how people are hired (asking ACM/"Leet" code questions) and managed ("agile" nonsense).
- dakna 2y ago> The current AI hype might not actually pose a real threat to engineers but the fact that most of our colleagues do not understand the value that we bring is a serious problem that we need to address. > We need to start meeting our colleagues where they are and explain what we do in ways that make sense to them. The goal is not to turn them into engineers but to help them get a high level understanding of what it takes to build a software product. See, why stop at software engineers? Because coding is text based? There is a whole class of IT middle managers in non-tech companies making good money due to "responsibility" and "team supervision". How about they start explaining the value that they bring? If it is not more than the usual - check a list of incoming jobs to be done submitted by other departments - assign the jobs to be done to someone on their team, mostly the person who worked in the same area before - ask every person (daily/weekly) for status updates and an estimated completion date for the jobs assigned - ask if the job was done sufficiently and can be reported as completed - report the weekly/monthly completion rate and hours spent to their supervisor. - every now and then review contractor bids for open RFPs then the current state of LLMs can do this just fine. Is there a good reason not to eliminate most of the little kingdoms in a large org and instead invest the money saved into more AI supervision, better QA and a lot more marketing?
- palakkadan 2y agoWhat's with this assumption that software engineers are some special breed of worker immune to capitalism?
- RGamma 2y agoEconomically, everbody is friction from someone else's perspective.
- MattPalmer1086 2y agoBecause Devs are expensive and incomprehensible to most people.
- JoshuaTench 2y ago[flagged]
- from-nibly 2y agoThey are trying one last gamble to keep the bubble from popping. Most of the software companies don't make sense unless you can fire half your staff. The idea that this is possible justifies the AI bubble and the software bubble at the same time.