Remember when tech workers dreamed of working for a big company for a few years, before striking out on their own to start their own company that would knock that tech giant over?
Then that dream shrank to: work for a giant for a few years, quit, do a fake startup, get acqui-hired by your old employer, as a complicated way of getting a bonus and a promotion.
Then the dream shrank further: work for a tech giant for your whole life, get free kombucha and massages on Wednesdays.
And now, the dream is over. All that’s left is: work for a tech giant until they fire your ass, like those 12,000 Googlers who got fired six months after a stock buyback that would have paid their salaries for the next 27 years.
We deserve better than this. We can get it.
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Maybe now we’ll finally unionize
As someone who started his tech career in the mid '90s, this kind of hurts to see put into words so well.
I started my tech career in 2003 and back then I thought I’d work for a startup, get some options, go public, and retire at 35.
That did not happen, and while I’m making more than most I don’t have fancy vacations or a brand new Tesla.
imagine getting first replaced by some kid out of a garage, then by indian code farms and now by ai developed by the grown up kids from said garage and trained by indian code farms.
So tired of this rhetoric. AI isn’t replacing any software engineering jobs, nor could it. It’s a joke, quite frankly.
They set up a ChatGPT based bot at my work just to help our support agents find information faster. It provides straight up factually false information 80% of the time. A solid 30% of the time, it says the opposite of the truth. It’s completely worthless at all times.
We are apparently going all in on AI, and the way those in charge talk about it, I can already see it will be a disaster. They think it’s a magic button to solve all our problems. I want no part of it.
I am seeing adoption being rather slow. Some very creative uses have been found though. It’s very good at summarizing content, for example. Especially in a context where it doesn’t matter too much how accurate it is, like summarizing a speech-to-text transcript of a phone call.
Not yet, but would you agree that businesses desire the ability to automate software engineering and reduce developer headcount by demanding an AI supplemented development work flow?
Sure, just like businesses have always wanted “no-code” solutions to their problems to cut out the need for software engineers. We all know how that turned out. There was no threat then, and there’s no threat now.
AI coding is just another tool developers have at their disposal now. It will just raise the bar for expected output. I expect within a few years it will be popular to describe a process, have an AI tool spit out some intern-grade hot mess that maybe compiles, then have a junior developer fix it, and a senior developer write the custom/complex parts. If the AI is good enough, it’ll be a significant time saver for it to get you more than half way to done.
It could even be tamed with a test-driven development approach. Write a bunch of good tests and have the AI generate code that passes the tests. What could possibly go wrong… lol
I find it highly overrated in terms of productivity in general, particularly when writing anything remotely non-trivial/company-specific.
There’s also the absolutely massive issue of licensing/IP/etc. Any company that’s not full of dumbasses should recognize the massive risk and liability involved and stay the fuck away.
It was impossible for a computer to be smart enough to beat grandmasters at chess, until it wasn’t. It was impossible to beat Go Masters at Go, until it wasn’t.
No software engineering jobs are getting replaced this year or next year. But considering the rapid pace of AI development, and considering how much code development is just straight up redundant… looking at 20 years from now, it’s not so bright.
It would be way better to start putting AI legislation in place this year. That or it’s time to start transitioning to UBI.
It was impossible for computers to beat chess and go masters when the computers were trying to play like humans -trying to model high level understanding of strategy and abstract values. The computers started winning when they got fast enough to brute force games - to calculate all of the possible outcomes from all of the possible moves, and to choose the best one.
This is basically the same difference between LLMs and ‘true’ general AI. The LLMs are brute forcing the next line of a screenplay, with no way to incorporate abstract concepts like truth or logic. If you confuse an LLM for an AI, then you’re going to be disappointed in its performance. If you accept that an LLM is a way to average past communications, and accept that a lot of its training set were fiction, then it’s an amazing tool for generating consensus text (given that the consensus includes fantasies and lies). It’s not going to write new code, but it will give you an approximation of all the existing examples of some algorithm. An approximation that may introduce errors, like copy-pasting sequential lines from every stackexchange answer.
Computer graphics, computer game opponents, they’re still doing the same things they were doing decades ago, and the improvements are just doing it all faster. General AI needs to do something different than LLMs and most other ML algorithms.
I am an actual (senior) software engineer, with a background in ML to boot.
I would start to worry if we were anywhere close to even dreaming of how AGI might actually work, but we’re not. It’s purely in the realm of science fiction. Until you meet the bar of AGI, there’s absolutely no risk of software engineering jobs being replaced.
Go or Chess are games with a fixed and simple ruleset and are very suited to what computers are really good at. Software engineering is the art of making the ambiguous and ill-defined into something entirely unambiguous and precisely defined, and that is something we are so far from achieving in computers it’s not even funny. ML is ultimately just applied statistics. It’s not magic, and it’s far from anything we would consider “intelligence”.
I do think we need legislation targeting ML, but not because of “omg our jobs”. Rather we need legislation to combat huge tech companies vacuuming any and all data on the general public and using that data to manipulate and control the public.
Also, LOL at “how much code development is straight up redundant”. If you think development amounts to just writing a bunch of boilerplate as though we were some kind of assembly line putting together the same thing over and over again, you’re sorely mistaken.
It’s purely in the realm of science fiction.
This isn’t proof of anything, I would just like to point out that a lot of science fiction has become reality in the last few decades.
Go or Chess are games with a fixed and simple ruleset
At the end of the day, what is a computer except a machine with a fixed and simple ruleset: logic gates.
ambiguous and ill-defined into something entirely unambiguous and precisely defined, and that is something we are so far from achieving in computers it’s not even funny
You don’t need AI to write you perfect C or JavaScript or HTML. You just need it to create an interface for an end user to make the computer do what they want. I predict the AI itself won’t write the languages, it will tend to replace the languages. Many orders of magnitude more computationally expensive, but the hardware is quickly becoming cheaper to buy than paying software engineers.
If you think development amounts to just writing a bunch of boilerplate as though we were some kind of assembly line putting together the same thing over and over again, you’re sorely mistaken.
Obviously not, that’s why libraries and OOP and frameworks exist, I’m aware, not pretending like I have anything to teach you about it either.
And I’ll take the L if you have the insider knowledge that there’s a requirement for massive creativity behind the scenes in widespread fundamental overhauls of the way software works. But afaik, the fundamentals of code haven’t changed in decades. The way users interact has not changed much since smartphones became standard. I don’t see a capitalistic incentive to pay for lots of new creativity, instead of just making usable products.
Now that I use github copilot, I can work more quickly and learn new frameworks more with less effort. Even its current form, LLMs allow programmers to work more efficiently, and thus can replace jobs. Sure, you still need developers, but fewer of them.
Learning frameworks has never been hard, and frankly does not make up the majority of a developer’s job. Maybe you do it while onboarding. Big whoop. Any good developer can do that fairly easily, and LLMs are entirely superfluous. Worse yet, since they are so commonly confidently incorrect, you have to constantly check if it’s even correct. I’d prefer to just read the documentation, thanks.
A mature engineering organization is not pumping out greenfield projects in new languages/frameworks all the time. Greenfield is usually pretty rare, and when you do get a greenfield project, it’s supposed to be done using established tools that everyone already knows.A tiny fraction of a developer’s job is actually writing code. Most of it is the soft skills necessary to navigate ambiguous requirements and drive a project to completion. And when we do actually program, it’s much more reading code than it is writing code, generally to gain enough understanding of the system in order to make a minor change.
LLMs are highly overrated. And even if it does manage to produce something useful, there’s much more to a codebase itself. There’s the socialization of knowledge around it and the thought process that went into it, none of which you gain when using an LLM. It’s adequate for producing boilerplate no one reads anyway, but that’s such a small fraction of what we even do (and hopefully, you can abstract away that boilerplate so you’re not writing it over and over again anyway).
I think the number of places for an IT engineer to work is going to reduce to just SaaS companies and cloud providers. The guys working at the fortune 500s will be clicking radio buttons in an app and not know how any of it really works.
eh, I think on prem will have a resurgence when cloud goes the way of streaming, and becomes so fragmented and expensive it becomes cheaper and safer to build your own.
Cloud is just like social media. It’s providing a “too good to be true” model to attract everyone it can to make them dependent on it before the big bait and switch of price hikes.
For more details read the book Chokepoint Capitalism
I hope youre right. I see companies going from having mature change control processes to outsourcing to a saas or cloud provider who operates like the wild west behind the curtains.
