Programmer Humor

Haha yeah… imagine… right.

Dev is a large financial drain and a ton of companies accounting departments(or whoever) don’t see the value. Ok the IT department is responsible for the website? The website is ‘done’ though so why are we still paying all these IT/Dev people? Cue massive IT layoffs…wall street/investors are super happy.

No new features/bug fixes/security updates. Customers are unhappy(who cares?, they’re still spending money!). Oh…massive data leak from some unpatched security vulnerability. All the sudden IT budget blows up…

The damage to reputation and future business deals are hindered. The amount of promising you’ve identified the problem and mitigated that from happening again etc. The requirements of other companies that you follow xyz audits to do business with them etc(which can be a good thing, it’s just very costly to a business).

Then a handful of years later they forget it all and repeat…

I work in IT/Dev…oof.

I never understood it, but business owners seem to have utter contempt for the people who actually make their money. I'm not talking about support staff, I mean the people that if they stay home, dollars aren't getting printed for everyone else. In private EMS, the billing staff would constantly get parties and catering and gift cards and shit, while the crews actually running the calls and writing the billable reports got third-hand furniture, moldy stations, ambulances held together with a fucking wish, and constant bellyaching about how paying the crews minimum wage was costing the company too much money. I'm starting to notice the same pattern pop up between the dev team and the product team as my software company scales.

The best part is when some dufus goes “I’ve got a great idea and the grit to see it through. I just need to hire a tech person to do it for me”.

Wait, people really thought web frameworks would replace Devs? Which frameworks? 😂

when actually everyone knows engineering is all about being able to negotiate precisely which snacks and soft drinks go in the office break room

t've always wondered, why lots of people think that if something you do is technical, then it's inherently not creative? You sure have a bit lesser degree of self-expression, but self-expression is mere an aspect of creativity

Mathematicians: "First time?"

The screenshotted tweet was from dec 20th. The linkedin post from dec 9th. You can see them in the link to his linkedin post in another comment.

Dude's clearly a dunce. There was never any chance he was gonna succeed.

AGI is currently just a buzzword anyway...

Microsoft defines AGI in contracts in dollars of earnings...

If you'd travel in time 5 years back and show the currently best GPT to someone, he/she would probably accept it as AGI.

I've seen multiple experts in German television explaining that LLMs will reach the AGI state within a few years...

(That does not mean that the CEO guy isn't a fool. Let's wait for the first larger problem that requires not writing new code, but rather dealing with a bug, something not documented, or similar...)

Plus there's the problem of a limited context window. Real software projects are spread across dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of files. Then they are deployed, sometimes compiled, run on a variety of devices and clients, and need to meet a couple dozen criteria to be acceptable, even more to be great. The AI can't track all of that and your request too, its context window is far too small. It can barely track a single file and your request, plus request changes. Tracking all of this from day-to-day, over months and years is just one part of an engineer's job, and it's going to be a long time before an AI can do that one small part of the job. Ask an AI why some part of the project was changed 12 months ago. Just try it. It'll evaluate the code, try to reason, and make something up. Ask a person and they'll remember the exact reason why, both in the context of the requested change and the coding project limitations.

My mother is currently like, AI will eliminate all junior jobs

There's a little truth to it.

The junior jobs did dry up, due to speculation by ignorant leaders, about three years ago.

But now everyone who didn't hire then has progressed through awkwardness then worry toward outright panic, as AI can't deliver everything they were promised. AI still might deliver what they need someday, but it now even the CEO can see that it clearly won't be in time to save the CEO's next bonus.

In my past experience, three years is about as long as most companies can get away with not hiring developer talent - before unfixed problems turn into crisis.

Sure enough, we're starting to see the leading edge of the panic hiring, now.

Things could still calm back down - due to more speculation, or another coordinated effort by CEOs to suppress developer salaries. I'm not a time traveler.

But the junior jobs will come roaring back with a vengeance one way or another.

My money is on this year.

That's actually literal, in my case.

I successfully made a case to spent some extra on developer bonuses this year to hopefully proactively avoid having to do any backfills during 2025 - when I, personally, expect developer hires to be particularly expensive (relative to inflation).

I've also spent the last three years building up some internal non-developer staff toward readiness to be an emergency backfill, in case I need a developer backfill in 2025, and cannot afford any at prevailing market rates.

Of course, I've lived through enough "developers are ludicrously expensive" years, that I just always prepare for them. If it's not 2025, it'll be 2026 or whenever, and my team will survive because I kept our options open. Probably will help that I also didn't piss off the talent by trying to replace them with bad automation, lol.

In the near future: Journalists use AI to turn 1 or 2 sentences into a full article. Meanwhile, readers use AI to summarize long articles into 1 or 2 sentences.