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Brutal that software engineering went from one of the least automatable jobs to a job that is universally agreed to be "most exposed to automation". Was good w
by muldvarp 1y ago
Brutal that software engineering went from one of the least automatable jobs to a job that is universally agreed to be "most exposed to automation".
Was good while it lasted though.
- ddddang 1y ago[dead]
- AndrewKemendo 1y agoToo bad engineers were “too important” to unionize because their/our labor is “too special .” I think you could find 10,000 quotes from HN alone why SDEs were immune to labor market struggles that would need a union Oh well, good luck everyone.
- JumpCrisscross 1y agoThis is, if true, a fundamental shift in the value of labor. There really isn’t a non-Luddite way to save these jobs without destroying American tech’s productivity. That said, I’m still sceptical it isn’t simply a reflection of an overproduction of engineers and a broader economic slowdown.
- jordanb 1y agoYeah I agree that outsourcing and oversupply are the real culprits and AI is a smoke screen. The outcome is the same though.
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago> outcome is the same though Not really. If it’s overproduction, the solution is tighter standards at universities (and students exercising more discretion around which programmes they enroll in). If it’s overproduction and/or outsourcing, the solutions include labour organisation and, under this administration, immigration curbs and possibly services tariffs. Either way, if it’s not AI the trend isn’t secular—it should eventually revert. This isn’t a story of junior coding roles being fucked, but one of an unlucky (and possibly poorly planning and misinformed) cohort.
- jordanb 1y agoIt can be oversupply/outsourcing and also secular: You can have basically chronic oversupply due to a declining/maturing industry. Chronic oversupply because the number of engineers needed goes down every year and the pipeline isn't calibrated for that (academia has been dealing with this for a very long time now, look up the postdocalypse). Outsourcing, because as projects mature and new stuff doesn't come along to replace, running maintenance offshore gets easier. Software isn't eating the world. Software ate the world. New use cases have basically not worked out (metaverse!) or are actively harmful.
- jordanb 1y agoThis was when programmers were making software to time Amazon worker's bathroom breaks so believing "this could never happen to me" was probably an important psychological crutch.
- alehlopeh 1y agoSaying “programmers” did this is about as useful as saying humans did it.
- orochimaaru 1y agoUnions won’t solve this for you. If a company just decides they have enough automation to reduce union workforce it can happen the next time contracts get negotiated. Either way, there are layoff provisions with union agreements.
- est31 1y agoIn Hollywood, union bargaining bought some time at least. Unions did mandate limits on the use of AI for a lot of the creation process. AI is still used in Hollywood but nobody is proud of it. No movie director goes around quoting percentages of how many scenes were augmented by AI or how many lines in the script were written by ChatGPT.
- jszymborski 1y agoTell that to dock workers, who have successfully delayed the automation of ports to the extent we see them automated in e.g. the PRC [0]. Hell, they're even (successfully) pushing back against automated gates! [1] [0] https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/02/business/dock-workers-strike-automation-nightcap/ https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/02/business/dock-workers-strike-... [1] https://www.npr.org/2024/10/03/nx-s1-5135597/striking-dockworkers-want-a-complete-ban-on-automation https://www.npr.org/2024/10/03/nx-s1-5135597/striking-dockwo...
- MangoCoffee 1y agoIsn't that just delaying the inevitable? Yangshan Deep-Water Port in Shanghai is one of the most automated ports. Considering there are more people in China than in the US, China still automated their port.
- jszymborski 1y agoI'm not making a value judgment on the specific case of dock workers, I'm rather saying that unions can and do prevent automation. If Software Devs had unionized earlier, a lot of positions would probably still be around.
- deleted 1y ago
- ivewonyoung 1y agoUnions would just delay the inevitable while causing other downsides like compressing salary bands, make it difficult to fire non-performers, union fees, increasing chance of corruption etc. For a recent example: > Volkswagen has an agreement with German unions, IG Metall, to implement over 35,000 job cuts in Germany by 2030 in a "socially responsible" way, following marathon talks in December 2024 that avoided immediate plant closures and compulsory layoffs, according to CNBC. The deal was a "Christmas miracle" after 70 hours of negotiations, aiming to save the company billions by reducing capacity and foregoing future wage increases, according to MSN and www.volkswagen-group.com.
- nradov 1y agoI'm not necessarily opposed to unionization in general but it's never going to save many US software industry jobs. If a unionization drive succeeds at some big tech company then the workers might do well for a few years. But inevitably a non-union startup competitor with a lower cost structure and more flexible work rules will come along and eat their lunch. Then all the union workers will get laid off anyway. Unionization kind of worked for mines and factories because the company was tied to a physical plant that couldn't easily be moved. But software can move around the world in milliseconds.
- FirmwareBurner 1y agoIndeed, just look at the CGI VFX industry of Hollywood. US invented it and was the leader for a long time, but now it has been commodified, standardized and run into the ground, because union or not, you can't stop US studios form offshoring the digital asset work to another country where labor is 80% cheaper than California and quality is 80% there. So the US is left with making the SW tools that VFX artist use, as the cutting edge graphics & GPU knowhow is all clustered there. Similarly, a lot of non-cutting edge SW jobs will also leave the US as tooling becomes more standardized, and other nations upskill themselves to deliver similar value at less cost in exchange for USD.
- lokrian 1y agoUnions _can_ protect against this, but they have to do it via lobbying the government for protectionism, tariffs, restricting non-union competition etc.
- muldvarp 1y agoUnions can only prevent automation up to a point. Really the only thing that could have reasonably prevented this would have been for programmers to not produce as much freely accessible training data (formerly known as "open source software").
- coliveira 1y agoExactly. I am always so impressed by the fact that developers never see that open source is essentially them giving away free labor to giant corporations. Developers basically programmed their way out of a job, for free. It's the only profession that is proud to have its best work done on unpaid time and used for free by big corporations.
- renewiltord 1y agoI mean, I still don't want to unionize with the guys who find `git` too complicated to use (which is apparently the majority of HN). Also, you guys all hate immigrants which is not my vibe, sorry.
- AndrewKemendo 1y agoThen don’t complain when some other group treats you the same
- lispisok 1y agoUnions wouldnt stop any of this but professionalization would
- xienze 1y agoUnions work in physical domains that need labor “here and now”, think plumbers, electricians, and the like. You can’t send that labor overseas, and the union can control attempts at subversion via labor force importation. But even that has limitations, e.g. union factory workers simply having their factory shipped overseas. Software development at its core can be done anywhere, anytime. Unionization would crank the offshoring that already happens into overdrive.
- tick_tock_tick 1y agoSo what your argument is we're so special that we deserve to hold back human progress to have a privileged life? If it's not that what would you want a union to do in this situation?
- lotsoweiners 1y agoI’d prefer that my family are financially stable over “human progress”. One benefits me and the other benefits tech companies. Easy choice.
- aianus 1y agoIf our ancestors had thought like that we'd all be very busy and "stable" doing subsistence farming like we were doing 10,000 years ago. Better our children never have to work because the robots do everything and they inherited some ownership of the robots.
- redman25 1y agoDo you really believe that all technological progress has bettered humanity? Where’s the four day work week we were promised? I thought automation was supposed to free us from labor.
- aianus 1y agoI don't think all progress has benefitted humanity but I do think we've never worked less while earning more than the present.
- macintux 1y agoI like human progress. I don’t like the apparent end goal that the entire wealth of the planet belongs to a few thousand people while the rest of us live in the mud.
- msgodel 1y agoWe're not "too important." All a union would do is create extra problems for us. There are two possibilities: a) This is a large scale administrative coordination problem b) We don't need as many software engineers. Under (a) unionizing just adds more administrators and exacerbates the problem, under (b) unions are ineffective and just shaft new grads or if they manage to be effective, kills your employer (and then no one has a job.) You can't just administrate away reality. The reason SWEs don't have unions is because most of us (unlike blue collar labor) are intelligent enough to understand this. I think additionally there was something to be said about factory work where the workers really were fungible and it was capital intensive, software development is almost the polar opposite where there's no capital and the value is the theory the programmers have in their head making them a lot less fungible. Finally we do have legal tools like the GPL which do actually give us a lot of negotiating power. If you work on GPL software you can actually just tell your employer "behave or we'll take our ball and leave" if they do something stupid.
- AndrewKemendo 1y agoYou said: All a union would do is create extra problems for us. Then you said: a) This is a large scale administrative coordination problem Pray tell: what is it a union does other than the latter? Or is your position that “union” is some narrowly defined, undifferentiated structural artifact of a specific legal system?
- grim_io 1y agoMaybe it's just the nature of being early adopters. Other fields will get their turn once a baseline of best practices is established that the consultants can sell training for. In the meantime, memes aside, I'm not too worried about being completely automated away. These models are extremely unreliable when unsupervised. It doesn't feel like that will change fundamentally with just incrementally better training.
- ACCount37 1y agoDoes it have to? Stack enough "it's 5% better" on top of each other and the exponent will crush you.
- cjs_ac 1y agoAre LLMs stackable? If they keep misunderstanding each other, it'll look more like successive applications of JPEG compression.
- ACCount37 1y agoBy all accounts, yes. "Model collapse" is a popular idea among the people who know nothing about AI, but it doesn't seem to be happening in real world. Dataset quality estimation shows no data quality drop over time, despite the estimates of "AI contamination" trickling up over time. Some data quality estimates show weak inverse effects (dataset quality is rising over time a little?), which is a mindfuck. The performance of frontier AI systems also keeps improving, which is entirely expected. So does price-performance. One of the most "automation-relevant" performance metrics is "ability to complete long tasks", and that shows vaguely exponential growth.
- grim_io 1y agoThe jpeg compression argument is still valid. It's lossy compression at the core.
- 1y ago
- shadowgovt 1y agoI really hope nobody had themselves convinced that software engineering couldn't be automated. Not with the code enterprise has been writing for decades now (lots and lots and lots of rules for gluing state to state, which are extremely structured but always just shy of being so structured that they were amenable to traditional finite-rule-based automation). The goal of the industry has always been self-replacement. If you can't automate at least part of what you're working on you can't grow. ... unfortunately, as with many things, this meshes badly with capitalism when the question of "how do you justify your existence to society" comes up. Hypothetically, automating software engineering could lead to the largest open-source explosion in the history of the practice by freeing up software engineers to do something else instead of toil in the database mines... But in practice, we'll probably have to get barista jobs to make ends meet instead.
- vitaflo 1y agoIf you want to know what will happen to software engineers in the US just follow the path of US factory workers in the 90s.
- manmal 1y agoThe experiences people are having when working with big, complex codebases don’t line up with your gloomy outlook. LLMs just fall apart beyond a certain project size, and then the tech debt must be paid.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- shadowgovt 1y agoIs it gloomy? I personally liken it to inventing the washing machine instead of doing laundry by hand, beating it against a washboard, for another hundred years.
- polski-g 1y agoIts the least regulated (not at all). So it will be the first to be changed. AI lawyers? Many years away. AI civil engineers? Same thing, there is a PE exam that protects them.
- muldvarp 1y agoSame thing for doctors. Turns out radiologists are fine, it's software engineers that should be scared.
- manmal 1y agoWe might end up needing 20% or so less doctors, because all that bureaucracy can be automated. A simple automated form pre-filler can save a lot of time. It’s likely that hospitals will try saving there.
- CHB0403085482 1y agoOh really? https://medium.com/backchannel/how-technology-led-a-hospital-to-give-a-patient-38-times-his-dosage-ded7b3688558 https://medium.com/backchannel/how-technology-led-a-hospital...
- siva7 1y agoYou know the difference between doctors and programmers? One have a regulated profession and lobby, the other have neither. Actually, all the other have is the richest amount of open training data for ai companies among all professions (and it's not medicine)
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- DrewADesign 1y agoYou don’t need to perfect AI to the point of becoming credentialed professionals to gut job markets— it’s not just developers, or creative markets. Nobody’s worried that the world won’t have, say, lawyers anymore — they’re worried that AI will let 20% of the legal workforce do 100% of the requisite work, making the skill essentially worthless for the next few decades because we’d have way too many lawyers. Since the work AI does is largely entry-level work, that means almost nobody will be able to get a foothold in the business. Wash, rinse, repeat to varying levels across many white collar professions and you’ve got some real bad times brewing for people trying to enter the white collar workforce from now on— all without there being a single AI lawyer in the world.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- elif 1y agoI'm not sure it's that our job is the most automatable, but that the interface is the easiest to adapt to our workflow. I have a feeling language models will be good at virtually every "sit at a desk" job in a virtually identical capacity, it's just the act of plugging an AI into these roles is non-obvious. Like every business was impacted by the Internet equally, the early applications were just an artifact of what was an easy business decision.. e.g. it was easier to start a dotcom than to migrate a traditional corporate process. What we will see here with AI is not the immediate replacement of jobs, but the disruption of markets with offerings that human labor simply can't out-compete.
- throwaway31131 1y ago> I'm not sure it's that our job is the most automatable I don't know. It seems pretty friendly to automation to me. When was the last time you wrote assembly? When was the last time you had map memory? Think about blitting memory to a screen buffer to draw a square on a screen? Schedule processes and threads? These are things that I routinely did as a junior engineer writing software a long time ago. Most people at that time did. For the most part, the computer does them all now. People still do them, but only when it really counts and applications are niche. Think about how large code bases are now and how complicated software systems are. How many layers they have. Complexity on this scale was unthinkable not so long ago. It's all possible because the computer manages much of the complexity through various forms of automation. Expect more automation. Maybe LLMs are the vehicle that delivers it, maybe not. But more automation in software is the rule, not the exception.
- hex4def6 1y agoThis has been my argument as well. We've been climbing the abstraction ladder for years. Assembly -> C -> OOP ->... this just seems like another layer of abstraction. "Programmers" are going to become "architects". The labor cost of implementing a given feature is going to dramatically drop. Jevons Paradox paradox will hopefully still mean that the labor pool will just be used to create '10x' the output (or whatever the number actually is). If the cost of a line of code / feature / app becomes basically '0', will we still hit a limit in terms of how much software can be consumed? Or do consumers have an infinite hunger for new software? It feels like the answer has to be 'it's finite'. We have a limited attention span of (say) 8hrs/person * 8 billion.
- anthem2025 1y ago[flagged]
- robotnikman 1y agoIf it gets to the point where I can no longer find a tech job I am just going to buy a trailer, live somewhere cheap, and just make money doing odd jobs while spending most of my time programming what I want. I don't want to participate in a society where all I have for job options is a McJob or some Amazon warehouse.
- sandspar 1y ago>Buy a trailer, live somewhere cheap, do odd jobs Unrelated to the discussion, but I love these kinds of backup plans. I've found that most guys I talk to have one. Just a few days ago a guy was telling me that, if his beloved wife ever divorces him, then he'd move to a tropical island and become a coconut seller. (My personal plan: find a small town in the Sonoran Desert that has a good library, dig a hole under a nice big Saguaro cactus, then live out my days reading library books in my cool and shady cave.)
- bilsbie 1y agoIs it hard to date living under a cactus?
- robotnikman 1y agoThe future seems very uncertain right now and we are living in weird times. Its always a good idea to have a backup plan in case your career path doesn't work out!
- bdcravens 1y agoI'm sure those who lost a job to software at some point are feeling a great deal of sympathy for developers who are now losing out to automation.
- lawlessone 1y agoNice watching it tear down recruiters though.
- devnullbrain 1y agoDespite being the target of a lot of schadenfreude, most software developers aren't working on automation.
- omnicognate 1y agoUniversally? Nah.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- random3 1y agoI'd argue that, out of white collar jobs, it is actually one of the least automatable still. I.e. the rest of the jobs are likely going to get disrupted much faster because they are easier to automate (and have been the target of automation by the software industry in the past century). Whatever numbers were seeing now may be too early to reflect this accurately. Also there are different metrics that are relevant like dollar count vs pure headcount. Cost cutting targets dollars. E.g. entry level developers are still expensive compared to other jobs.
- beeflet 1y agoMost "Software Engineering" is just applying the same code in slightly different contexts. If we were all smarter it would have been automated earlier through the use of some higher-level language.
- kaibee 1y ago> If we were all smarter Its not really an intelligence thing. You could have the most intelligent agent, but if the structural incentives for that agent are for example, "build and promote your own library for X for optimal career growth.", you would still have massive fragmentation. And under the current rent-seeking capitalist framework, this is a structural issue at every level. Firefox and Chrome? Multiple competing OSes? How many JS libraries? Now sure, maybe if everyone was perfectly intelligent _and_ perfectly trusting, then you could escape this.
- pensatoio 1y agoIt’s just engineers getting high on their own supply. All the hype men for the software are software engineers (or adjacent.) Frankly, any time I see research indicating software engineering is at a high risk of being automated, I outright dismiss it as pseudo science. It ain’t happening with current tech.