My mother is currently like, AI will eliminate all junior jobs and everyone will be on the managerial position. It's honestly exhausting. Damn, when will the hype end???
this post was submitted on 30 Dec 2024
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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.
AI as it exists now? Nah. AI 10 years from now? 🤷♀️
Lol. Even among those less stupid, most didn't hire junior developers for the last three years, to hedge their bets.
Well, it's three years later, AI didn't solve shit, and we are facing an entire missing cohort of senior developers.
We've seen this before - back when web frameworks "made all of us obsolete" back in 2003.-
Here's what comes next:
Everyone who needs a senior developer gets to start bidding up the prices of the missing senior developers. Since there simply aren't enough to go around, the "find out" phase will be punctuated.
Losing bidders get to pay 4x rates for 1/3 the output from consulting companies.
Cheers!
Source: I was made obsolete by web frameworks so hard that I entered a delusion where working with web frameworks just let us produce bigger buggier websites even faster - and where the demand for web developers skyrocketed and I made some seriously respectable money while helping train up junior developers to help address the severe shortage.
Wait, people really thought web frameworks would replace Devs? Which frameworks? 😂
People thought COBOL would let managers write code.
What.
It's by design very verbose and "English"-like, like instead of x=y*z it would go "MULTIPLY y BY z GIVING x", the idea was that it would read almost like natural language, so that non-tech staff could understand it.
Except that it's not the syntax that makes programming hard, it's the thought process, right?
Yes. COBOL can be excused because it was the first time anyone was going down that path. Everything that comes later, less so.
Yes. COBOL can be excused because it was the first time anyone was going down that path.
Yeah. And a lot of non-programmers became programmers thanks to Cobol.
I think we're seeing this effect with AI code copilots, as well. It can't replace a programmer, but it can elevate a potential programmer to proficient (in at least some tasks) faster than was possible before.
I know it theoretically means I earn less than I might have, but for my whole career there's been so much more to be done than there are of us to do it, anyway.
Everything that comes later, less so.
Yeah. They really need to get off my lawn with this nonsense. We've seen this enough times to know that it'll be great, but still won't solve all our problems.
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It's very common. Every few years there is some no-code platform claiming no developers are needed anymore in any sector, not just web dev. Invariably these only work if you stay on the narrow path and of course the customer asks something outside of the easy path after the first demo so a lot of work by devs are needed to make of happen.
AI is just one more like that, but with hype on steroids.
And very old. Part of the sales pitch for the COmmon Business-Protected Language was that anyone could learn to code in almost plain English.
Also, the stuff they wind up making is the kind of stuff that people with no coding experience make. Cooking up an ugly website with terrible performance and security isn't much harder than making an ugly presentation with lots of WordArt. But it never was, either.
Between COBOL and LLM-enhanced "low code" we had other stuff, like that infamous product from MS that produced terrible HTML. At this point I can't even recall what it was called. The SharePoint editor maybe?
Even SQL was originally called SEQUEL, Structured English QUEry Language. They got sued for the name and changed it to SQL. It was also pitched to retrieve data with plain language.
FrontPage?
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Which frameworks? 😂
Ruby on Rails was probably the peak of the hype wave. It had a tutorial that any manager could follow to build a simple data driven website in minutes.
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Well, forget for a moment everything you know about webpages and now you want a form where the user can create an account. The sales person tells you that the user has entered the data for us, so it just needs to be sent with a request to the backend, which always looks the same. And then it just needs to be put into a INSERT INTO, which also always looks the same.
All of that stuff can clearly be auto-generated by the framework. And 70% of the ~~boilerplate~~ code does exactly that, so that obviously means 70% of the workload of your devs disappears, which means you can get rid of 70% of your developers.
It just makes it really easy to scam people, when they don't know the technical side...
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I kinda wish it included the dates on these. Not having them makes me a bit dubious
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.
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Can you imagine the absolute misery of working for someone like this.
A person who thinks developers are all useless, and has total contempt for any skills that aren't "business" stuff.
A person who thinks tech is easy and you can "just" do this and "just" do that and everything will be done, always telling you "this is so easy I could do it myself" while any contribution they make only makes things worse, and if there's any kind of hold-up it's because you're either "lazy" or "incompetent"
No thanks.
My first boss was a "just" guy. Thankfully he was also pro dev, being one himself, but sadly he was completely self-taught. This led to some interesting ideas, such as:
"We should not migrate anything to, or start any new projects in, .net framework 3. We should become the experts in .net framework 2, so people who need .net 2 solutions come to us."
"Agile means we do less documentation." (But we were already doing no documentation)
"Why are you guys still making that common functions class library? I just copy a .vb file into every project I work on, that way I can change it to suit the new project." (This one led to the most amusing compound error I've fixed for a fellow dev.)
Good guy, all in all. But frustrating to work for often.
Can you imagine the absolute misery of working for someone like this.
Oh yeah. I remember it well. Ugh. It's why I'm such a loud mouth here sometimes - if I can save one team from that guy, all my soap box shouting will have been worth it.
Haha yeah… imagine… right.
I wish the best for you, and hope you find yourself a better boss soon.
Thanks, but the reason I don’t have to imagine is because that job is a memory.
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well this happens because people have zero understanding of what programming is. they think that programmers have memorised some "dictionaries" that translate human specifications to machine code with complete disregard for problem solving and design part of things.
when actually everyone knows engineering is all about being able to negotiate precisely which snacks and soft drinks go in the office break room
As a manager of developers - that's not all I do...
But I mean...yeah. That might be the most important thing I do - at least before my team was fully remote...
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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
Its easy for a passerby to appreciate the work, skill, and creativity that goes into a painting or song. Its hard for the average person to infer those things looking at an electrical box or a plumbing network. An electrician knows when they're looking at good up to code wiring and a plumber can tell if the plumbing can be put together right. Those are things the average person has no concept of and doesn't want to think about all unless they have to. One provides instant artistic appeal while having no practical value, the other provides practical value but its systems are too complicated for the average person to appreciate in totality.
yeah, seems about right
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This man doesn't even know the difference between AGI and a text generation program, so it doesn't surprise me he couldn't tell the difference between that program and real, living human beings.
He also seems to have deleted his LinkedIn account.
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...)
LLMs can't become AGIs. They have no ability to actually reason. What they can do is use predigested reasoning to fake it. It's particularly obvious with certain classes of proble., when they fall down. I think the fact it fakes so well tells us more about human intelligence than AI.
That being said, LLMs will likely be a critical part of a future AGI. Right now, they are a lobotomised speech centre. Different groups are already starting to tie them to other forms of AI. If we can crack building a reasoning engine, then a full AGI is possible. An LLM might even form its internal communication method, akin to our internal monologue.
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I found the screenshot order confusing at first, and it's not OPs fault since the original article got the screenshots backwards too
From the article:
Synopsis Wes Winder, a Canadian software developer, is facing backlash after his controversial decision to replace his development team with Al backfired. Once a trending topic on Reddit and a source of widespread ridicule, Winder is now in an awkward position as he turns to Linkedln in search of web developers to hire.
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Plans like this work great for the first couple of weeks. Turns out software engineering isn't this simple fucking thing. Making anything beyond a toy takes actual work. There are lots of people learning this first hand right now. There is some kind of belief that ChatGPT version 0.1+ (whatever ships in 2 weeks) will be able to take over the job of software development entirely. Well, guess what? Doing anything relatively complex in software takes actual intelligence. Once there is an AI that can just code by itself, it will also be smart enough to be a doctor, civil engineer, consultant, etc.
A lot of fucking companies are going to learn this first hand. They are either firing their staff thinking the AI wave is already here, and in reality, it may never come.
The near future of AI is skilled software engineers using AI to augment their productivity. By the time you can take the human out of the loop, AI will be so powerful it will slay any white collar job, but this won't be for years and years and years and by then it won't just be software that is in trouble as a career; it will be many, many industries.
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"Does anyone want to come clean up my mess? As a gig fee of course though, I don't need employees. I keep all the money. It's mine! All mine!"
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