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Programmer salaries in the age of LLMs

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Re: Programmer salaries in the age of LLMs

#31

Post by kitsunesoba »

devmunchies wrote: post #6

I think it will be more like airline pilots with the addition of autopilot. Maybe you could write whole services, and networks of services with AI, but you need engineers to be the guiding hand. Engineers will always be better at using AI to build systems than non-developers. Also, it’s worth pointing out that AI is using existing data. If a new iOS API comes out, the AI will need code bases with it already implement…

Additionally, I would expect that AIs wouldn't fare as well in situations where footguns abound, specialization is high, and there's a much smaller body of code to learn from — think things like hardware drivers written in C or C++ or embedded firmware with restricted resources, which is much less forgiving than e.g. CRUD web app backend written in Python.

Re: Programmer salaries in the age of LLMs

#32

Post by rajin444 »

Engineers create value - making them more efficient at their work generally creates more opportunity for work.

Lawyers are an unfortunate necessity that extract value from society. Making them more efficient at their work (hopefully) creates less opportunity for work.

Re: Programmer salaries in the age of LLMs

#34

Post by testtesttesst »

rosywoozlechan wrote: post #15

I'm going to be the optimist here and instead of AI killing engineering jobs it's going to turn most engineers into much better engineers and what tech company doesn't want a whole bunch of better engineers? Building applications right now is time intensive, it takes years to build products, months to build features, and maybe we change it to be weeks and days instead, respectively. Maybe it's all just upside.

I think people are more impressed than they should be because of a misconception about what programmers really do.

For most big software projects the bottleneck is not writing code and test boilerplate that runs correctly locally. Which of course LLMs can do reasonably well. Most time is spent on design, on integrations with other internal services, scaling concerns, and reasoning about other things that these models can't really reason about yet.

I'm obvious impressed that these models can generate simple client/server websites and generate code to solve competitive programming problems. But I don't think they've "solved" software engineering; they've only solved "what you boss thinks software engineering is".

Re: Programmer salaries in the age of LLMs

#35

Post by aetherson »

Comment here seem to largely miss the point of the article, which isn't saying that nobody will employ software engineers. It is saying that instead of the current model of:

1 very highly compensated staff+ engineer

4 highly compensated senior engineers

4 pretty well-compensated mid-level engineers

2 decently compensated junior engineers

The future might look like:

1 yet-more-highly-compensated staff+ engineer who specializes in architecture

10 decently compensated junior engineers who specialize in error-checking LLMs and detail-intensive technical work

In the same way that paralegals aren't unskilled people, and aren't paid terribly -- but they aren't doing the same job as the partner-level lawyer who's crafting the legal strategy, and they don't have a simple clean progression to eventually getting his job.

Re: Programmer salaries in the age of LLMs

#36

Post by MrOwnPut »

holy_based wrote: post #23

[flagged]

> If you lot are so deathly afraid of a tool taking over your job

Not at all! You'll be sorely disappointed if you do actually get rid of the humans that you pay to solve your problems.

> so we are not beholden to a bunch of overpaid pampered prima donnas

They bring the logic into existence because you couldn't.

So yes, you are beholden to them, because you are latching on to them, feeding off them like a parasite.

> Whose job a program can do ... Good riddance.

A program made by who? Trained on who? ;)

And you are definitely speaking too soon... let's try "no code" one more time!

The reality of today is you still need us to solve your many problems...

Thanks for saying the quiet part out loud though.

Re: Programmer salaries in the age of LLMs

#37

Post by twelve40 »

aetherson wrote: post #35

Comment here seem to largely miss the point of the article, which isn't saying that nobody will employ software engineers. It is saying that instead of the current model of: 1 very highly compensated staff+ engineer 4 highly compensated senior engineers 4 pretty well-compensated mid-level engineers 2 decently compensated junior engineers The future might look like: 1 yet-more-highly-compensated staff+ engineer who sp…

you're probably right (and thanks for breaking it down), but it's more fun to engage in doom porn!

Re: Programmer salaries in the age of LLMs

#39

Post by neilv »

rajin444 wrote: post #32

Engineers create value - making them more efficient at their work generally creates more opportunity for work. Lawyers are an unfortunate necessity that extract value from society. Making them more efficient at their work (hopefully) creates less opportunity for work.

I disagree with these generalizations.

You could just as easily say that engineers work to exploit and otherwise harm people, and lawyers work to protect people from exploitation and other harm.

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