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I remember John Carmack talking about this last year. Seems like it's still pretty good advice more than a year later: "From a DM, just in case anyone else needs to hear this." https://x.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1637087219591659520
It's more likely the number of jobs at all level of seniority will decrease, but none will disappear.
What I'm interested to see is how the general availability of LLM will impact the "willingness" of people to learn coding. Will people still "value" coding as an activity worth their time?
For me as an already "senior" engineer, using LLMs feel like a superpower, when I think of a solution to a problem, I can test and explore some of my ideas faster by interacting with it.
For a beginner, I feel that having all of this available can be super powerful too, but also truly demotivating. Why bother to learn coding when the LLM can already do better than you? It takes years to become "good" at coding, and motivation is key.
As a low-dan Go player, I remember feeling a bit that way when AlphaGo was released. I'm still playing Go but I've lost the willingness to play competitively, now it's just for fun.
As for every job done well the most important thing is to truly understand the essence of your job, why it exist in the first place and which problem truly solves when done it well. A good designers is not going to be replaced by Dall-e/Midjourney, becuase the essence of design is to understand the true meaning/purpose of something and be able to express it graphically, not align pixels with the correct HEX colour co…
> A good software engineer is not going to be replaced by Cursor/Co-pilot, because the essence of programming is to translate the business requirements of a real world problem that other humans are facing into an ergonomic tool that can be used to solve such problem at scale, not writing characters on an IDE. Managers and executives only see engineers and customer service as an additional cost and will find an opport…
The right thing to do economically (in capitalism) is to do more of the same, but faster. So if you as a software engineer or customer service rep can't do more of the same faster you will replaced by someone (or something) that alleggedly can.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
But the problem is that the majority of SWs are like that. You can blame them, or the industry, bust most engineers are writing code most of the time. For every Tech Lead who does "people stuff", there are 5-20 engineers who, mostly, write code and barely know that entire scope/context of the product they are working on.
> bust most engineers are writing code most of the time. the physical act of writing code is different than the process of developing software. 80%+ of the time working on a feature is designing, reading existing code, thinking about the best way to implement your feature in the existing codebase, etc. not to mention debugging, resolving oncall issues, and other software-related tasks which are not writing code GPT i…
You could argue about architecture/thinking about the correct/proper implementations, but I'd argue that for the past 7 decades of software engineering, we are not getting close to a perfect architecture singularity where code is maintainable and there is no more tech debt left. Therefor, arguments such as "but LLMs produce spaghetti code" can be easily thrown away by saying that humans do as well, except humans waste time by thinking about ways to avoid spaghetti code, but eventually end up writing it anyways.
>junior to mid level software engineering will disappear mostly, while senior engineers will transition It's more likely the number of jobs at all level of seniority will decrease, but none will disappear. What I'm interested to see is how the general availability of LLM will impact the "willingness" of people to learn coding. Will people still "value" coding as an activity worth their time? For me as an already "sen…
> My prediction is that junior to mid level software engineering will disappear mostly, while senior engineers will transition to be more of a guiding hand to LLMs output, until eventually LLMs will become so good, that senior people won't be needed any more. It is more like across the board beyond engineers, including both junior and senior roles. We have heard first hand from Sam Altman that in the future that Agen…
> So frankly, I'm afraid that the belief that software engineers of any level are safe in the intelligence age is 100% cope. In 2025, I predict that there will be more layoffs because of this. If this point could be clarified into a proposal that was easily testable with a yes/no answer, I would probably be willing to bet real money against it. Especially if the time frame is only until the end of 2025.
Frankly, I think it's ridiculous that anyone who has done any kind of real software work would predict this.
Layoffs? Probably. Layoffs of capable senior developers, due to AI replacing them? Inconceivable, with the currently visible/predictable technology.
I've been thinking about this a bunch and here's what I think will happen as cost of writing software approaches 0: 1. There will be way more software 2. Most people / companies will be able to opt out of predatory VC funded software and just spin up their own custom versions that do exactly what they want without having to worry about being spied on or rug pulled. I already do this with chrome extensions, with the h…
FWIW I was allowed to use AI at work since ChatGPT appeared and usually it wasn't a big help for coding. However for education and trying to "debug" funny team interactions, I've surely seen some value.
My guess is though that some sort of T-shaped skillset is going to be more important while maintaining a generalist perspective.
I remember John Carmack talking about this last year. Seems like it's still pretty good advice more than a year later: "From a DM, just in case anyone else needs to hear this." https://x.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1637087219591659520
Young people can learn and fight for their place in the workforce, but what is left for older people like myself? I'm in this industry already, I might have missed the train of "learn to talk with people" and been sold on the "coding is a means to an end" koolaid.
My employability is already damaged due to my age and experience. What is left for people like myself? How can I compete with a 20 something years old who has sharper memory, more free time (due to lack of obligations like family/relationships), who got the right advice from Carmack in the beginning of his career?
As for every job done well the most important thing is to truly understand the essence of your job, why it exist in the first place and which problem truly solves when done it well. A good designers is not going to be replaced by Dall-e/Midjourney, becuase the essence of design is to understand the true meaning/purpose of something and be able to express it graphically, not align pixels with the correct HEX colour co…
> A good software engineer is not going to be replaced by Cursor/Co-pilot, because the essence of programming is to translate the business requirements of a real world problem that other humans are facing into an ergonomic tool that can be used to solve such problem at scale, not writing characters on an IDE. Managers and executives only see engineers and customer service as an additional cost and will find an opport…
It's almost darwinian. The companies whose managers are less fit for running an organization that produces what matters will be less likely to survive.