I found this thought funny. A few years ago everyone was all learn to code so you don’t lose your job! Now there wont be any programming jobs in 10 years. But we will need a lot of manual labor still.
I found this thought funny. A few years ago everyone was all learn to code so you don’t lose your job! Now there wont be any programming jobs in 10 years. But we will need a lot of manual labor still.
Bullshit.
While “any” is a bit much, I do anticipate a rather dramatic decline.
One is that there are a large chunk of programming jobs that I do think LLM can displace. Think of those dumb unimaginative mobile games that bleed out a few dollars a week from folks. I think LLM has a good chance at cranking those out. If you’ve seen companies that have utterly trivial yet somehow subtly unique internal applications, LLMs can probably crank out a lot of those to. There’s a lot of stupid trivial stuff that has been done a million times before that still gets done by people.
Another is that a lot of software teams have overhired anyway. Business folk think more developers mean better results, so they want to hire up to success, as long as their funding permits. This isn’t how programming really works, but explanations that fewer people can do more than more people in some cases can’t crack through how counter-intuitive that is. AI offers a rationalization for a lot of those folks to finally arrive at the efficient conclusion.
Finally, the software industry has significantly converted transactional purchases to subscription. With perpetual license, you needed to provide some value to drive that customer who bought from you 5 years ago a reason to upgrade. Now with subscription models, you just have to coast and keep the lights on for those customers. Often with effective lock-in of the customers data to make it extra hard or impossible for them to jump to a competitor, even if competitors could reverse-engineer your proprietary formats, the customer might not even be able to download their actual data files. So a company that acheived “good enough” with subscription might severely curtail investment because it makes no difference to their bottom line if they are delivering awesome new capability or just same old same old. Anticipate a log of stagnation as they shuffle around things like design language to give a feeling of progress while things just kinda plateau out.
True, but it’s that market preference is a pendulum. It swings back and forth. It’s funny how hard companies are pushing today to (fail to) keep it from swimming swinging back towards owning things.
Companies that try to charge monthly for service that isn’t improving eventually lose their customers, except in the rare cases where stability is the only customer motivation.
Being able to just cut off access to the application means a customer has little choice.
For a competitor to pass them, they first have to catch up. To catch up, the customer needs to be able to extract the data from the application to give competition a chance. If they get closer to catching up, they tend to be bought out. Lot of speedbumps to discourage competition. Also, to get funding those competitors have to pretty much promise investors they will also do “as a service”.
For assets versus expense, I see a pendulum, largely based on how appreciation/depreciation pans out versus acquisition cost and loan interest rates, as well as uncertain start up versus steady business. I’m not sure software is giving enough choice in the matter the let that swing.
Hes not wrong. Amazon for example is getting rid of SDE roles for AI as per leaked conversation from the head of AWS.
Its coming anyone who thinks other wise will have a surprise pikachu face.
The real answer is somewhere in between.
There’s going to be less programming jobs, but there’s still always going to be some demand for them, there’s always going to be some technical knowledge required, even if just “prompt engineers” or similar concepts. Things still need to be built and fixed, and if you’ve worked for enough project managers/product managers, you know their lack of technical knowledge would not be enough to even prompt an LLM much less do anything else.
Yea pretty much you will still need a handful of SDEs either way to validate and work on the AI models but those big teams where they hire shit ton of devs those will soon be a thing of the past. Even IT outside of break fix hardware support will be replaced by AI at a help desk/IT Support level. (Already seeing that at my job as an IT analyst)
For the most part I’ve only ever been on smaller teams anyway, my largest team has been my current job with like 15 developers but there’s so much work to go around, so many projects constantly being worked on it’s kind of expected to have this many (and still be hiring more every year) lol