4 ms·

It's not propaganda. It's a market trying to find the new low energy state. This stuff is putting an expiration date on your domain experience, and leadership

by echelon 4mo ago

It's not propaganda. It's a market trying to find the new low energy state. This stuff is putting an expiration date on your domain experience, and leadership is salivating at the chance to cut OpEx. At bare minimum, every PM is soon going to be able to do your work. That's a huge talent pool to draw from. This also opens the door to easy offshoring. They'll use layoffs to get rid of the existing high salary earners and backfill with new hires earning 70%, then 50%, then... I can't believe how many of you are absolutely certain you're going to be working in software in ten years. Let alone five.

hamdingers 4mo ago
> every PM is soon going to be able to do your work This is the kind of comedy I can only get on Hacker News
majormajor 4mo ago
> At bare minimum, every PM is soon going to be able to do your work. That's a huge talent pool to draw from. This also opens the door to easy offshoring. Hah, it would be easier to replace the PM with the engineer. Synthesize customer requests? "Competitor research" via google search? Some half-imaginary projection of how a given feature will affect usage rates? All of those are dead-simple to do with a model and are often un-falsifiable enough that if they're a bit wrong, it won't be noticed. Whereas a PM struggling to figure out how to debug something running in product or to keep the agent from making a destructive change while doing so would be MUCH more noticed. > I can't believe how many of you are absolutely certain you're going to be working in software in ten years. Let alone five. In that future, almost every other role goes away faster+harder. Even the vaunted entrepreneur: "just start your own thing and solve customer problems directly" isn't needed when the customer solves their own problems! "I'll be fine since I'm a good enough engineer" may be wrong, but "the engineers are gonna be fucked but me/the PM/the CEO/whoever else" is even less plausible.
- marcus_holmes 4mo ago
  Except the PM is better at the internal politics needed to survive the drama.
storus 4mo ago
Computer Science is the science of solving (hard) problems in general. If you automate CS, you trivially automate most of other professions. The only ones that won't budge are the regulated ones like lawyers, MDs and similar that have ways to prevent AI from wrecking their fields. Product/Project PMs are easy pickings. We'll also see wreckage coming to highly paid actors in the near future.
- LPisGood 4mo ago
  Exactly this, software engineering is “intelligence complete.” If you can solve it, you can solve all knowledge work.
  - miyoji 4mo ago
    No, it isn't, and the fact that software engineers think this despite being incredibly stupid about 99.5% of knowledge work is why everyone else hates software engineers.
    - LPisGood 4mo ago
      To me it is almost tautological that what I said is true. If software can’t solve a knowledge work problem, that means the software isn’t good enough and needs improved. I also question your claim that “everyone hates software engineers,” because I find they’re reasonably well liked in general. Perhaps you’re assuming what I meant was something like “if someone is good at software engineering then they’re smarter than all other knowledge workers,” which is blatantly not true (and indeed, not my point).
- tpm 4mo ago
  > We'll also see wreckage coming to highly paid actors in the near future. How is that going to work? People going to see a movie advertised as starring a well-known actor will be lured to see a movie starring unknown AI models?
  - BoingBoomTschak 4mo ago
winrid 4mo ago
At the end of the day it's a battle of competence of who runs your company. Sure you might be able to have PMs deal with the easy stuff for a short while. But will the company that can hire more competent people pull ahead? Probably. I can tell you one thing: I haven't worked with a PM for like 5 years.
grey-area 4mo ago
At bare minimum, every PM is soon going to be able to do your work. From the evidence so far, this isn’t true, see the reports above from people inside Meta and other companies heavily leaning on LLM use. Perhaps you’re suffering from AI psychosis and the imminent singularity is just a dream?
abstractcontrol 4mo ago
Dumb people aren't going to be doing the work of the smart people ever, no matter how tech evolves. The actual implication of AI being on the level of sentient beings instead of hyped-up token predictors is that the era of humanity is over. If AIs were literally capable of doing what CEOs want them to, we'd have far bigger problems to deal with than employment.
RugnirViking 4mo ago
> absolutely certain what else do you expect people to do? give up and preemptively go back to university for massive debt and become a doctor? get into long haul trucking? Programming is and was a great job for a middle class lifestyle, needing only smarts and nothing else. No connections, social skills, even location wouldn't hold you back that much. No, a lot of people will ride the train all the way down.

by echelon 4mo ago

hamdingers 4mo ago

> every PM is soon going to be able to do your work This is the kind of comedy I can only get on Hacker News

majormajor 4mo ago

> At bare minimum, every PM is soon going to be able to do your work. That's a huge talent pool to draw from. This also opens the door to easy offshoring. Hah, it would be easier to replace the PM with the engineer. Synthesize customer requests? "Competitor research" via google search? Some half-imaginary projection of how a given feature will affect usage rates? All of those are dead-simple to do with a model and are often un-falsifiable enough that if they're a bit wrong, it won't be noticed. Whereas a PM struggling to figure out how to debug something running in product or to keep the agent from making a destructive change while doing so would be MUCH more noticed. > I can't believe how many of you are absolutely certain you're going to be working in software in ten years. Let alone five. In that future, almost every other role goes away faster+harder. Even the vaunted entrepreneur: "just start your own thing and solve customer problems directly" isn't needed when the customer solves their own problems! "I'll be fine since I'm a good enough engineer" may be wrong, but "the engineers are gonna be fucked but me/the PM/the CEO/whoever else" is even less plausible.

marcus_holmes 4mo ago
Except the PM is better at the internal politics needed to survive the drama.

storus 4mo ago

Computer Science is the science of solving (hard) problems in general. If you automate CS, you trivially automate most of other professions. The only ones that won't budge are the regulated ones like lawyers, MDs and similar that have ways to prevent AI from wrecking their fields. Product/Project PMs are easy pickings. We'll also see wreckage coming to highly paid actors in the near future.

LPisGood 4mo ago
Exactly this, software engineering is “intelligence complete.” If you can solve it, you can solve all knowledge work.
- miyoji 4mo ago
  No, it isn't, and the fact that software engineers think this despite being incredibly stupid about 99.5% of knowledge work is why everyone else hates software engineers.
  - LPisGood 4mo ago
    To me it is almost tautological that what I said is true. If software can’t solve a knowledge work problem, that means the software isn’t good enough and needs improved. I also question your claim that “everyone hates software engineers,” because I find they’re reasonably well liked in general. Perhaps you’re assuming what I meant was something like “if someone is good at software engineering then they’re smarter than all other knowledge workers,” which is blatantly not true (and indeed, not my point).
tpm 4mo ago
> We'll also see wreckage coming to highly paid actors in the near future. How is that going to work? People going to see a movie advertised as starring a well-known actor will be lured to see a movie starring unknown AI models?
- BoingBoomTschak 4mo ago

winrid 4mo ago

At the end of the day it's a battle of competence of who runs your company. Sure you might be able to have PMs deal with the easy stuff for a short while. But will the company that can hire more competent people pull ahead? Probably. I can tell you one thing: I haven't worked with a PM for like 5 years.

grey-area 4mo ago

At bare minimum, every PM is soon going to be able to do your work. From the evidence so far, this isn’t true, see the reports above from people inside Meta and other companies heavily leaning on LLM use. Perhaps you’re suffering from AI psychosis and the imminent singularity is just a dream?

abstractcontrol 4mo ago

Dumb people aren't going to be doing the work of the smart people ever, no matter how tech evolves. The actual implication of AI being on the level of sentient beings instead of hyped-up token predictors is that the era of humanity is over. If AIs were literally capable of doing what CEOs want them to, we'd have far bigger problems to deal with than employment.

RugnirViking 4mo ago

> absolutely certain what else do you expect people to do? give up and preemptively go back to university for massive debt and become a doctor? get into long haul trucking? Programming is and was a great job for a middle class lifestyle, needing only smarts and nothing else. No connections, social skills, even location wouldn't hold you back that much. No, a lot of people will ride the train all the way down.