6 ms·
I said it before and I'll say it again: it's high time we got the taste of our own medicine. Getting people out of jobs has been the main selling point of our i
by usrnm 1y ago
I said it before and I'll say it again: it's high time we got the taste of our own medicine. Getting people out of jobs has been the main selling point of our industry since its first days, this is what we've collectively been doing for decades. Do I want my job to be automated right in front of my eyes? Not really. Do I see some poetic justice in the whole thing? Absolutely.
- Braxton1980 1y agoHow is it poetic justice? Were we advocating for automation?
- Mistletoe 1y agoYou were writing all the code for automation.
- devnullbrain 1y agoThis is the message between the lines of much of the anti-dev schadenfreude, but actually spelling it out makes it obvious: it's not true. Only a minority of dev jobs are automating people out of work. There are entirely new industries like game dev that can't exist without it. Software development has gained such a political whipping-boy status, you'd be forgiven for forgetting it's been the route to the middle classes for a lot of people who would otherwise be too common, weird or foreign.
- exe34 1y agoThe kind of automation I write is stuff that wouldn't get done if person had to do it. But with automation, it becomes possible and profitable.
- sokoloff 1y agoI think a lot of genAI coding efficiency will have the same property: costs will go down to the point where things that couldn’t be done affordably in software in 2020 will be affordable in 2030. That could well result in a net increase in tech employment.
- exe34 1y agoI'm surprised people aren't using it to churn out javascript framework after framework - is that not the done thing anymore?
- perching_aix 1y ago> How is it poetic justice? Were we advocating for automation? Yes? I know I did, still do, and will continue to at least.
- Braxton1980 1y ago[flagged]
- tomhow 1y agoPlease don't comment like this on Hacker News. Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- Pet_Ant 1y agoEmail made the corporate mailroom obsolete and the letter carrier.
- devnullbrain 1y agoSo would it be poetic justice when an electrician gets laid off?
- Pet_Ant 1y agoMore like if the motor maker gets replaced by a motorised machine. And yeah, that’s poetic. The electrician is more like the person laying fibre optic cable.
- Braxton1980 1y agoDid the inventor of the SMTP protocol get laid off?
- A1kmm 1y agoSoftware development is the most automated career in the history of all time. Assemblers, Linkers, Compilers, Copying, Macros, Makefiles, Code gen, Templates, CI & CD, Editors, Auto-complete, IDEs are all terms that describe types of automation in software development. LLM-generated code is another form of automation, but it certainly isn't the first. Right now most of the problems are when it is inappropriately used. The same applies to other forms of automation too - but LLMs are really hyped up right now. Probably it will go through the normal hype cycle where there'll be a crash, and then a plateau where LLMs are used to drive productivity but expectations of their capability are more aligned to reality.
- lloeki 1y agoIn french the two fields that are Computer Science and Information Technology are under the same moniker: "informatique", a portmanteau of information and automatic. The whole field is about automating yourself out of a job, and it's right in the name.
- bgwalter 1y agoContraction of "information" and "electronics" according to this site: https://grodiko.fr/informatique?lang=en https://grodiko.fr/informatique?lang=en German site claims that "Informatik", which is practically the same, is a contraction of "Information" and "Mathematik": https://www.pctipp.ch/praxis/gewusst/kam-begriff-informatik-zustande-2621175.html https://www.pctipp.ch/praxis/gewusst/kam-begriff-informatik-...
- lloeki 1y agoLarousse dictionary disagrees: https://www.larousse.fr/dictionnaires/francais/informatique/42996 https://www.larousse.fr/dictionnaires/francais/informatique/... This cites the same person (Philippe Dreyfus) but with "automatic": https://www.caminteresse.fr/societe/quelle-est-lorigine-du-mot-informatique-11137313/ https://www.caminteresse.fr/societe/quelle-est-lorigine-du-m... > Il faut attendre 1962 pour réentendre parler d’informatique dans les médias. « Informatique » est en effet le terme utilisé pour la première fois par un scientifique français pour désigner le traitement automatique des données. Il s’agit de Philippe Dreyfus, fondateur de la société SIA, acronyme pour « Société d’Informatique Appliquée ». And then enters the dictionary in 1966. In 1957 in Germany, Karl Steinbuch describes Informatik as Automatische Informationsverarbeitung.
- jampekka 1y agoGloating about hardships was and is a great way to ensure things will get worse for workers as efficiency and automation increases. Another option would be to join forces to collectively demand more equitable distribution of the fruits of technological development. Sadly it doesn't seem to be very popular.
- wkat4242 1y ago> Sadly it doesn't seem to be very popular Strange enough the people that have the most to gain from keeping things the same, are really successful at convincing the masses who have the most to benefit from change in this regard to vote against it. https://pjhollis123.medium.com/careful-mate-that-foreigner-wants-your-cookie-aba1c536b0d8 https://pjhollis123.medium.com/careful-mate-that-foreigner-w...
- amanaplanacanal 1y agoCertainly back when I worked in IT, the people I worked with were mostly very much anti-union. I didn't hear much anti immigrant talk back then but I've been retired for a while.
- jampekka 1y agoThere has been a lot of anti-H1B talk for a long time. And complaining about work being outsourced to India or where ever.
- wkat4242 1y agoI don't really believe in unions either. But I do believe in a good balance between capitalism and socialism (and welfare systems, employee rights etc). I don't believe in the market solving everything. The problem I have with unions is that they can be too unreasonable. They're too much on the other side, they're too hardline just like the ultracapitalists/neoliberals but on the other side. In a good system we wouldn't have to fight for our rights because we'd already have them anyway.
- smokel 1y agoI have been in this industry for some time, and over the years I have only seen more people being glued to electronic devices, not less. It might have been a selling point, but the status quo is that we are inventing new jobs faster than phasing out old ones. The new jobs aren't necessarily more enjoyable, though, and there are no more smoking breaks.
- aatd86 1y agonot necessarily. the economies of scale might be increasing as dev productivity increases. the goal of many businesses being to do more with less.
- neom 1y agoThe goal of all American business is exactly the same: maximize the return of profits to the shareholders at large. It is in fact, the law. Do more with less is a natural consequence of this.
- closewith 1y ago> is in fact, the law It is not in fact law in the US.
- neom 1y agohttps://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2021/12/01/dodge-v-ford-what-happened-and-why/ https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2021/12/01/dodge-v-ford-what... If directors consistently chose "do less with more" - they'd certainly lose under virtually any legal standard? Edit: I guess it's technically Michigan law, but as far as I'm aware is de facto? Even Aronson v. Lewis wouldn't allow that. (IANAL)
- devnullbrain 1y agoThe person the headline refers to is a webdev. What job is that getting rid of?
- garretraziel 1y agoCashiers, some officials, a lot of the “personal contact with a customer” gets transferred to web. I am not complaining, just answering the question.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- devnullbrain 1y agoSame goes for a truck driver, road builder, railway worker, etc. FWIW, I spent many years as a cashier. It's not something I find inherently more valuable to the world. If we could trust people not to steal, we wouldn't need them.
- sokoloff 1y agoWeb dev doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Web dev for e-commmerce displaced brick and mortar retail. Web dev for streaming displaced video rentals and audio sales.
- devnullbrain 1y agoWeb devs are a tiny proportion of the employees needed for e-commerce.
- sokoloff 1y agoWithout them (and mobile devs, though there’s increasing cross-over), e-commerce doesn’t get done. Ergo, web devs are directly contributing to the outcomes that e-commerce enables.
- 1y ago
- happytoexplain 1y agoSavoring suffering is uniquely hideous, and one of the grand hallmarks of almost every facet of the decline of the US. It's a clear, bright sign of the death of one's humanity, and the foundation of all evil. Is that dramatic? No. More specifically: Things can be inevitable and also horrible. It is not some kind of cognitive dissonance to care about people losing their livelihoods and also agree that it had to happen. We can structure society to help people, but instead we hate the imaginary stereotypes we've generalized every conceivable grouping of real people into, politics being the most obvious example, but we do it with everything, as you have. The electrician doesn't "deserve" punishment for "advocating" away the jobs replaced by electricity. The engineer doesn't "deserve" punishment for "advocating" away the jobs replaced by engineering. A person isn't an asshole who deserves his family to suffer because he committed his life to learning to write application servers, or whatever.
- closewith 1y agoIf in the process of automating away people's livelihoods, you do not simultaneously advocate for the destruction of the capitalist system that ties the well-being of people and their families intrinsically to those jobs, then you do in fact deserve what's coming to you. History shows that retribution against class traitors is not limited to financial hardship, either.
- layer8 1y agoThe problem I see is less that of losing jobs, but the fact that the jobs get less enjoyable, less deep work, more mindlessness and less reflection, and possibly also the quality of the produced software decreasing. Modern AI encroaches upon what software engineers consider to be interesting work, and also adds more of what they find less enjoyable — using natural language instead of formal language (aka code) for detailed specification — which creates a conflict that didn’t previously exist in software technology.
- SpaceNoodled 1y agoLLMs can't do creative or unique work. They're really only useful for boilerplate, which is the tedious part.
- spacemadness 1y agoTo be fair, all of corporate has grated against deep work and well written software way before the dawn of LLMs. Tech debt is one of the things that modern software engineering produces in spades.
- casenmgreen 1y agoI may be wrong, but I think every job creates wealth overall (or it would not exist), and that software engineering has been making some jobs more efficient and others not necessary, and then the wealth which formerly had to be employed where those jobs were inefficient, or had to exist at all, is then employed elsewhere. If you are the person who lost their job, you get all the downside. Overall, over the whole of the economy, the entire population, and a reasonable period of time, this increasing efficiency is a core driver of the annual overall increase in wealth we know as economic growth. When an economy is growing, there is in general demand for workers, and so pay and conditions are encouraged; when an economy is shrinking, there is less demand than supply, and pay and conditions are discouraged.
- closewith 1y ago> Overall, over the whole of the economy, the entire population, and a reasonable period of time, this increasing efficiency is a core driver of the annual overall increase in wealth we know as economic growth. This is only true while wealth inequality is decreasing, which it is not.
- casenmgreen 1y ago> This is only true while wealth inequality is decreasing, which it is not. If everyone is becoming better off, but at different rates such that there is increase in inequality, then everyone experiences economic growth. Thought experiment. We have two people, one with 1000 wealth one with 100. We have 10% growth per year. So we see; 1000 -> 1100 -> 1210 -> 1331 100 -> 110 -> 121 -> 133.1 Difference in wealth; 900 -> 990 -> 1089 -> 1198 The ratio of wealth remains 10:1, but the absolute difference becomes larger and larger. I do not know, and I would like to know, how numbers for wealth inequality are being computed.
- closewith 1y agoDo you see in your example that the working class becomes exponentially more disadvantaged over time? Both in relative and absolute terms.
- wkat4242 1y agoHmm on the other hand, there isn't much resistance against genAI in software development (unlike other creative industries) because ours is founded in collaboration and continuing others' work. It's where open source came from, and the use of libraries. Using stackoverflow was never frowned on. AI is just the same but more efficient. Nobody invents the wheel from scratch. It will change the job yes but it also can mean the job can go in new directions because we can do more with less.
- bgwalter 1y agoThere isn't much open resistance because most of open source developers are bought and paid for. So they continue the path of destruction in the hopes that they will not be obsolete. This is naive of course. Once you have identified yourself as corporate servants (like for example the CPython developers) the companies will disrespect you and fire you when convenient (as has happened at Google and Microsoft).
- wkat4242 1y agoThese things are waves. First they will fire a bunch of people, but no company can grow through constant downsizing. Then they'll start to imagine to do new things they can do with the new skills and invest in that. It will cause a displacement of job types for sure. But I think it means change more than decline. When industrialisation happened, lots of factory workers were afraid of their jobs and also lost them. But these days nobody even wants to do a menial factory job, slaving away on the production line for minimum wage. In fact most people have a far better life now than the masses did before industrialisation. We also had the computer automation that made entire classes of jobs obsolete. Yet it's almost impossible to find skilled workers in Holland now. And companies need customers with purchasing power. They can't replace everyone with AI because there will be nobody left with money to sell things to. In the end there will be another balance. The interim time, that's the difficult part. Though it is temporary, it can really hurt specific people. But I don't see AI as a downward spiral that will never recover. In the end it will enable us to look more towards the future (and I am by no means an "AI bro", I think current capabilities of AI have been ridicuously overhyped) I think we need to redraw society too to compensate. Things like universal basic income, better welfare etc. Here in Europe we already have that but under the neoliberal regimes of the last 20 years (and the fallout from the American banking crisis), things have been austerised too much. In America this won't happen as it seems to go only the other way (very hardline capitalism, with a fundamentalist almost taliban-like religious streak) but well, it's what they voted for.
- oulipo 1y agoAgreed, although it's slightly beside the point. The goal of building tools and robots has always been to alleviate work. And this is fine. There's still plenty of stuff to do if machines work for us to give us basic housing and food. Now what needs to be done is to give back the profits to everyone, inclusively, as a kind of "universal basic income", so that we all enjoy it together, and not just the billionaires