Mr. Blow is right about some things and wrong about other things. Just like anybody else.
The fact that he has created a few successful games doesn’t make him an authority on the future of the job market for web developers.
Ask HN: The collapse of web programming jobs
11–20 of 22 posts
Re: Ask HN: The collapse of web programming jobs
#12Can someone more knowledgeable explain the economics of how all this will work? If the current outlook is that AI will replace programmers, then many other office jobs will be the first or not far off. At that point, who are these corps selling to if there middle and lower class is all but wiped out? Without a steady velocity of money, where is the revenue going to come from that justifies production of goods and ser…
I had this exact thought. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35575923
Re: Ask HN: The collapse of web programming jobs
#13As a 15 year full time JavaScript developer I think Blow is 100% correct.
Seriously consider what would happen to these jobs if tomorrow things like Vue, React, Angular, Express, Spring (Java), and so on all went away. Most of these people become instantly irrelevant even though demand for products/development in this space will remain constant. Those people are tool users, like screwdriver users who call themselves carpenters. WTF, why and how did we get here?
Programming is programming regardless of whether you are making AAA games, building a web application, or guiding rockets to kill people. Programming is a skill. Employment, however, is not so straight forward. Employment is a game in the same way "musical chairs" is a game and people will chase money irrespective of skills. Games are meant to be won.
The problem is a supply/demand problem. Historically the demand for "web work" (however you want to define that) has been high but the necessary preparation has been astonishingly bad. Most developers are trained by universities to write in something like C++, Java, or Python. Employers solve for this not with training (because that costs money and developers cost money) but with abstractions. The result is a platform that scares the shit out of the people hired to write for it. This is the inefficient that Blow is describing and its very real.
As an example consider the DOM. The DOM is the compile target of the browser. If you are working on the front end that is your foundation and everything layers off of it. Yet, the DOM is a tree model and tree models irrationally scare the shit out of people. The level of hysteria this generates defies the imagination. Most developers would rather be in zombie apocalypse combat than writing to the DOM directly. It's weird.
Another example are JavaScript classes. Why would you ever need classes if JavaScript has native lexical scope, functions as first class citizens, and a scalable object system? Maintainers of the language thought the same thing and were extremely resistant to add classes to the language, but classes were demanded in the ES6 specification almost more than all other features combined. The demand exists because people were/are educated to write code in one way and could not imagine writing code without that one way of doing it.
Re: Ask HN: The collapse of web programming jobs
#14Aren’t game programmers just using something like unity and writing scripts? I feel like that’s probably getting automated away. At the end of the day video games are a corporate beast that prints money. Indie games are like 1% and most people including me have never played them and don’t want to. Very few are actually making unity or “game engines” from the ground up, like Jon Blow.
> Aren’t game programmers just using something like unity and writing scripts? Hahaha wow. It’s like saying: “Aren’t web programmers just using something like chrome and writing scripts?”
Er... yes? :)
Re: Ask HN: The collapse of web programming jobs
#15In my opinion we are facing the crash of programming gold rush, especially in web development. The only exception is AI (especially LLMs). For a long time, software development was greatly overhyped as a way to make money, with no shortage of self-proclaimed tech leads selling training on how to pass the FAANG interview and common whinings about supposed developer shortage. What goes up must come down. Right now, the market is correcting itself, as the rivers of VC funding for the WeWorks of the the world are running dry under the changing macro-economic conditions.
Web will still exist for a long time and people will keep making money in software development, but things are changing. Easy money is going away, which makes us face the ever-present matter of actually creating the value for the world that was so easy to forget when money was pretty much growing on the branches of Merkle trees.
Re: Ask HN: The collapse of web programming jobs
#16Him being a game developer, saying that game development will survive, while web programming will die, definitely does project some bias. But I would like to make the argument that web-development as we know it will collapse in the future. Not too far from here, it won't be necessary to have specialized knowledge of languages and frameworks to create applications. You just need to know how to throw configs together. This predates even AI, where its already possible with no-code and low-code platforms to build stuff.
I'm sure that there will be a place for web-development as we know it today, but it probably will not as popular, neither as much of a lever when it comes to building applications and services on the internet. I feel like we were on this path already before AI (no-code, low-code, etc). But with AI it feels like we are on an even faster projection of abstracting most code away behind building blocks. Give it a few years.
Re: Ask HN: The collapse of web programming jobs
#17There’s still a bottomless ocean of B2B companies who need web products and services building, that’s not going to go away any time soon. For every planet scale cloud system there are thousands of on premises or basic cloud based applications being developed by people using traditional backend systems.
The job market for a Django + react fullstack dev is not really going to change overnight.
Re: Ask HN: The collapse of web programming jobs
#18Neh... web programming is not going anywhere. Sure, the current environment is exposing all of the companies that never really had a business model other than raising more and more money. But there's still plenty of space for software to grow within existing profitable companies and new companies that can be more capital efficient. He claims you can strip out some of the inefficiency which is related to interoperatin…
The comment about remote workers is nothing new; think of the effects this has had in the past 20 years alone.
Businesses are just now starting to understand that hiring people from overseas is not necessarily the best move. Better to hire in your time zone where it’s easy to communicate, than it is to rely on a constant stream of email messages.
And yet, this still tends to be a problem. One of my jobs has that issue of communication, and it’s basically made me shift from programming to managing the boss and the project.
So… no easy answers to any of this.
Re: Ask HN: The collapse of web programming jobs
#19Aren’t game programmers just using something like unity and writing scripts? I feel like that’s probably getting automated away. At the end of the day video games are a corporate beast that prints money. Indie games are like 1% and most people including me have never played them and don’t want to. Very few are actually making unity or “game engines” from the ground up, like Jon Blow.
> Aren’t game programmers just using something like unity and writing scripts? Hahaha wow. It’s like saying: “Aren’t web programmers just using something like chrome and writing scripts?”
I mean, kinda?
Re: Ask HN: The collapse of web programming jobs
#20If you consider web based SaaS companies then I don't think AI is a reason for collapse, for two major reasons:
1. AI popularity surge is happening at the same time as interest rates going up by a lot. Interest rates impacts borrowing and funding for companies, in many ways money is tighter and cash-flow is more important so borrowed funds with multi-year ROI is not a good idea. These (AI and interest rates) are completely unrelated so correlation (layoffs and software jobs contraction) doesn't mean causation (AI being a cause == not likely, interest rates == maybe, too much hiring during pandemic == more likely). A good question to ask is how many companies have replaced software devs with AI.
2. If you're a SaaS company your core product is software, are you going to let an AI service generate your core product or even submit pieces of your source code to it and feel 100% safe that your code won't be leaked out to other AI users? We can't get humans to document requirements for a feature in a way that can be reliably used to create software, I doubt using AI to generate software is going to work out well. With a SaaS you're betting your entire business on it.
3. Minor nitpick here - the comment is by a game developer. There's a yt video out there of a game developer having ChatGPT write a game. If anything I would think a collapse would happen more so in entertainment industries (as is already with Screen Writers Guild right?) because those are shorter project time-frames with tighter feedback loops to see if its profitable to use AI (and hollywood/game devs re-hash old ideas a lot anyhow but I digress.)