Yeah, but the non-tech savvy business leaders see they can generate code with AI and think ‘why do I need a developer if I have this AI?’ and have no idea whether the code it produces is right or not. This stat should be shared broadly so leaders don’t overestimate the capability and fire people they will desperately need.
It won’t happen like that. Leadership will just under-hire and expect all their developers to be way more efficient. Working will be really stressful with increased deadlines and people questioning why you couldn’t meet them.
Yeah management are all for this, the first few years here are rough with them immediately hitting the “fire the engineers we have ai now”. They won’t realize their fuckup until they’ve been promoted away from it
LLMs program at the level of a junior engineer or an intern. You already need code review and more senior engineers to fix that shit for them.
What they do is migrate that. Now that junior engineer has an intern they are trying to work with. Or… companies realize they don’t benefit from training up those newbie (or stupid) engineers when they are likely to leave in a year or two anyway.
Programming jobs will be safe for a while. They’ve been trying to eliminate those positions since at least the 90s. Because coders are expensive and often lack social skills.
But I do think the clock is ticking. We will see more and more sophisticated AI tools that are relatively idiot-proof and can do things like modify Salesforce, or create complex new Tableau reports with a few mouse clicks, and stuff like that. Jobs will be chiseled away like our unfortunate friends in graphic design.
I wonder if this will also have a reverse tail end effect.
Company uses AI (with devs) to produce a large amount of code -> code is in prod for a few years with incremental changes -> dev roles rotate or get further reduced over time -> company now needs to modernize and change very large legacy codebase that nobody really understands well enough to even feed it Into the AI -> now hiring more devs than before to figure out how to manage a legacy codebase 5-10x the size of what the team could realistically handle.
Writing greenfield code is relatively easy, maintaining it over years and keeping it up to date and well understood while twisting it for all new requirements - now that’s hard.
Right on. AI feels like a looming paradigm shift in our field that we can either scoff at for its flaws or start learning how to exploit for our benefit. As long as it ends up boosting productivity it’s probably something we’re going to have to learn to work with for job security.
There are some areas I’m hoping get addressed by the coming skyrocket in programmer productivity:
Several phone apps aren’t utter garbage anymore. I’m not holding my breath on this one.
Online grocery websites aren’t shit-full-of-timing errors. If I get this, I’ll also wish for $1 million and buy a lottery ticket.
Municipalities and their allies (townships, city services, various local unions) will have barely passable specialized software support that actually fits their size, location and maybe even culture.
I think that last one stands to be strongly enabled by AI code assist tools. It might not be the sexiest or highest paying job, but it’ll be work that matters that largely isn’t even being done today.
Yeah, but the non-tech savvy business leaders see they can generate code with AI and think ‘why do I need a developer if I have this AI?’ and have no idea whether the code it produces is right or not. This stat should be shared broadly so leaders don’t overestimate the capability and fire people they will desperately need.
I say let it happen. If someone is dumb enough to fire all their workers… They deserve what will happen next
Well the firing’s happening so, i guess let’s hope you’re right about the other part.
It won’t happen like that. Leadership will just under-hire and expect all their developers to be way more efficient. Working will be really stressful with increased deadlines and people questioning why you couldn’t meet them.
Yeah management are all for this, the first few years here are rough with them immediately hitting the “fire the engineers we have ai now”. They won’t realize their fuckup until they’ve been promoted away from it
Mentioned it before but:
LLMs program at the level of a junior engineer or an intern. You already need code review and more senior engineers to fix that shit for them.
What they do is migrate that. Now that junior engineer has an intern they are trying to work with. Or… companies realize they don’t benefit from training up those newbie (or stupid) engineers when they are likely to leave in a year or two anyway.
Programming jobs will be safe for a while. They’ve been trying to eliminate those positions since at least the 90s. Because coders are expensive and often lack social skills.
But I do think the clock is ticking. We will see more and more sophisticated AI tools that are relatively idiot-proof and can do things like modify Salesforce, or create complex new Tableau reports with a few mouse clicks, and stuff like that. Jobs will be chiseled away like our unfortunate friends in graphic design.
Removed by mod
I wonder if this will also have a reverse tail end effect.
Company uses AI (with devs) to produce a large amount of code -> code is in prod for a few years with incremental changes -> dev roles rotate or get further reduced over time -> company now needs to modernize and change very large legacy codebase that nobody really understands well enough to even feed it Into the AI -> now hiring more devs than before to figure out how to manage a legacy codebase 5-10x the size of what the team could realistically handle.
Writing greenfield code is relatively easy, maintaining it over years and keeping it up to date and well understood while twisting it for all new requirements - now that’s hard.
Removed by mod
Right on. AI feels like a looming paradigm shift in our field that we can either scoff at for its flaws or start learning how to exploit for our benefit. As long as it ends up boosting productivity it’s probably something we’re going to have to learn to work with for job security.
Removed by mod
There are some areas I’m hoping get addressed by the coming skyrocket in programmer productivity:
I think that last one stands to be strongly enabled by AI code assist tools. It might not be the sexiest or highest paying job, but it’ll be work that matters that largely isn’t even being done today.
And they’ll find out very soon that they need devs when they actually try to test something and nothing works.