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I think the field is basically over as a long term career unless you are truly exceptional. It will become very easy to build most software, and the upper end w
by mikert89 2mo ago
I think the field is basically over as a long term career unless you are truly exceptional. It will become very easy to build most software, and the upper end will be filled with the top people in the country/from abroad.
Wages are certainly going down for most software roles
- esafak 2mo agoOnly if you run out of things to write. Is your back log ever empty?
- skinfaxi 2mo agoNo one said there won't be work to be done, just that fewer people will be doing it.
- esafak 2mo agoIf the work to be done is infinite, why would there necessarily be fewer people doing it?
- pjmlp 2mo agoBecause most companies aren't software driven, they sell physical products and software is a cost center. There is a budget and when it is gone, no contractors until next budget round.
- andriy_koval 2mo agoit could mean they are not completely out of automation opportunities, and will lose to more innovative players if won't invest into software. The end state of these companies is grid of cheap robots controlled by software.
- pjmlp 2mo agoExactly, because the amount of people on bench due to robots doesn't scale with the amount of customer opportunities. There are only so much customers to chose from and all of them have finite budgets. The exponential growth curve only exists in MBA books.
- andriy_koval 2mo agoIn case of productivity surplus, exponential demand can be easily created by government: e.g. they print N trillions dollars, and say we spend it on some (hopefully useful) mega project(s): fusion, carbon capture, give nice home to everyone, fully verifiable, glitch free, hyper optimized software, etc. It will immediately create lots of demand, supply chains, customers, etc. You can see current AI hype as example, and its government didn't step in and printed N trillions yet.
- pjmlp 2mo agoSure, and I have a bridge to sell, to the same government.
- mikert89 2mo agoofcourse not, but they can pay someone 80k a year to work on the backlog, whereas maybe they used to pay 175k. its not about work going down, its the skill set needed to complete the work is lower than ever, and they need less people than ever
- reactordev 2mo agothey won't even need that as agents talk to their own lanes in some Linear project management workflow that your sales team agents are connected. The entire system is going to end up agentic and even the CEO will be out of work unless they are founders and owners of the company. We'll all have our own business this way. Or it all collapses. Time will tell.
- mrbombastic 2mo agocolor me skeptical that the CEO or anyone non-technical is ever going to prompt their way out of a major incident when all the AI chickens come home to roost.
- mikert89 2mo agoi think this is farther off, much sooner is just the subjugation of technical workers to be low skill drivers of LLMs
- Manfrednotfunny 2mo agoIn a few years, it just might. If maintenance and security is fully automated and for small changes or a small feature you will only dump some spec document into your agent platform, for sure.
- mjr00 2mo ago> In a few years, it just might. If you're in a product company and your development backlog is empty, run. That company is about to go out of business.
- edukite 2mo agoJust another 6 months bro, only another funding bro, I promise, all devs will be replaced bro I have stupid question here. Why they sell tokens instead of AI generated full application and AI fixes to your code without you needing a single dev?
- Applejinx 2mo agoWait.
- edukite 2mo agoI'm 40yo. Do you know how long I'm waiting? Only taking for an account this newest hype I heard like 4x next year and the current progress is slowing significantly over last year. Even foundings are starting to back off
- pjmlp 2mo agoBecause selling shovels is more profitable than digging holes themselves.
- edukite 2mo agoReally? Where do you live because in my country the opposite is true
- Tangurena2 2mo agoMaintenance will be forever. Tax laws change annually, so the payroll app will never stop being updated.
- falcor84 2mo agoI don't accept that argument. As I see it, laws should be structured as data rather than code, using a clean non-Turing-Complete DSL for any embedded logic and calculations. Maybe there would still be occasional situations when new software features are needed, but it should be a rare occurrence rather than on every new change.
- ok123456 2mo agoPeople just need to add/subtract an input box and update the tax rates. They don't need an ontology of taxes and goods.
- mejutoco 2mo ago> laws should be You are comparing what it is with what should be.
- Terr_ 2mo ago> laws should be structured as data rather than code There was a submission a while back that might be relevant here: "Why Law Is Law-Shaped" (lawvm.org) [0] [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47945861 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47945861
- mdemare 2mo agoI bet tax law is Turing-complete.
- falcor84 2mo agoI wouldn't be surprised if it is in some places, but nevertheless I wonder - is there a good reason for that? I don't think any lawmaker actually wants tax calculations to have the potential of not halting, right? ... right?
- nwatson 2mo agoI'm hopeful that software will be applied in new areas where it was too costly before, with AI help it will be possible. Software will be cheaper, even more prevalent, lower quality in since respects, but SW engineering will still be a viable career.
- stefan_ 2mo agoThere are really a ton of fields where people have done an absolutely terrible job of properly using the advantages of software, even pre AI. Like, even today there are people manually drawing footprints in PCB design software, manually determining what pins carry differential signals, manually forgetting to swap RX and TX lines.. except for the functions they absolutely had to have a computer do, they forgot to move out all the drudgery and footguns and continue operating in "PDF space". It's embarrassing for a profession that is supposedly made of engineers. PDF space is still more advanced than the people typing into "word processors" however. Making software to emulate letters was such a massive mistake for the trajectory of computing, it let people effortlessly "adopt computers" by making a digital facsimile of their terrible analog processes. Only with AI we now have the ability to digest all this unstructured mess.
- pjmlp 2mo agoYes, when the project budget runs out and contractor team has to leave.
- ryandvm 2mo agoMy backlog is less empty than ever - it just happens to be overflowing with whispy Claude-written tickets for functionality that somebody else's Claude suggested after summarizing some other Claude-infused Slack chat.
- johnnyanmac 2mo agoMy backlog is overflowing. My wallet, however, is depleting.
- weatherlite 2mo agoAll fields are basically over as a long term career besides perhaps prostitutes and even there I'm not entirely sure. But the questions of how soon and by how much matter a lot. Being early is the same as being wrong a clever guy once said.
- mikert89 2mo agono programming is verifiable, and the major LLM companies are focused on it. its the first domino to fall by probably 5+ years
- nanapipirara 2mo agoI think this is true. A lot of AI believers (me too fwiw) seem to forget it’s a lot harder to ‘close the loop’ on non-code projects. I think this is because they are usually coders.
- owebmaster 2mo agoThat's what all AI believers get it wrong about programming. Code doesn't create products, humans do.
- weatherlite 2mo agoIs it really that simple ? A programming function that has set inputs and determinstic outputs is rather verifyable. A ten million lines code base is not easily verifyable. Knowing whether an agent is improving when it's working on a huge codebase is not that easy - it could easily start hurting code quality without it being clear in any output.
- IsTom 2mo agoIf you believe that I've got a halting problem oracle to sell to you.
- palmotea 2mo ago> no programming is verifiable, and the major LLM companies are focused on it. its the first domino to fall by probably 5+ years Which is kinda proof they're populated by sociopaths with extremely little empathy. The people who are building that stuff are programmers, and if they had a tiny bit of functioning empathy they'd stop or slow down or at least be unenthusiastic. And we're not talking about very high level empathy here, but the very basic kind of thinking about the effects on someone very much like yourself.
- ryandrake 2mo ago> It will become very easy to build most software We keep hearing this, but where is the Photoshop killer written by a gas station attendant? Where is the PayPal alternative written by a retired nurse? Over and over we're told that software is now trivial to write, and Claude is evidently writing some billions of lines of code a day, but where are the results? Where is the vibe coded app toppling the legacy hand-coded monster product from 20 years ago?
- confidantlake 2mo agoSoftware wins because of the sales team and the network effects. You could already create a better twitter or facebook that no one would use long before llms.
- mikert89 2mo agothe future is already here, its just not evenly distributed
- pydry 2mo agoIn the "iceberg" of boring company systems I see working day to day I actually think delivery of production software has been slowed down. The cost of "writing" code went down a bit, while validation costs positively exploded. There are definitely more apps developed these days but I haven't seen anything much vibe coded which actually seems to have staying power. Everything is prototype quality.
- deaton 2mo agoNow you can make a prototype without understanding what's going on internally or why the prototype wasn't good enough!
- threatofrain 2mo agoWhy ask such extreme stuff? Why not ask about the solo entrepreneur who creates a convincing iOS app without a programming background? Advantage the problem on the side of ML and look for winning scenarios today.
- dzonga 2mo agonah the world needs more software - it's just the delivery mechanism that's different. we are entering the world of smaller service firms (1 - 3 people) - where technical chops will even get paid more. the age of cookie-cutter apps is over.
- DataDaoDe 2mo agoI agree. And I would remove the basically. I give it five years before essentially just a few very senior people are managing the whole cycle. Downward pressure on wages is just gonna keep ratcheting up.
- cardy31 2mo agoPeople started saying this several years ago and yet it hasn’t really come to pass.
- mikert89 2mo agoit certainly has, SWE wages have dropped and continue to do so
- johnnyanmac 2mo agoIt's not over (far from it), but we certainly have spent the last few years shedding SWE's off by the millions. Try finding a new job as a SWE today. Whether that is due to AI or other economic conditions is an exercise left to the reader.