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Mark Zuckerberg says AI could soon do the work of Meta's midlevel engineers

businessinsider.com

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Re: Mark Zuckerberg says AI could soon do the work of Meta's midlevel engineers

#41

Post by IAmGraydon »

resource_waste wrote: post #11

Great, more midlevel engineers for me. I genuinely cannot see how AI is going to be bad for programmers. It doesnt do the entire job. It does snippits and you must integrate everything. (And if it does the entire job, amazing! Maybe we can spend extra time on a good UI or extra unit tests) AI could reduce our staff by half, but that isnt what happens. Instead we just get more work done. The productivity increase seem…

I think this is partly correct. It just allows you to do more work, and there is always more work to be done. That said, if every company does this, there isn't suddenly more money supply to just double everyone's profit. It's going to increase competition since the path from idea -> product is shorter, so you'll likely make the same amount of money while doing twice the work. In the end, your input effort and output profit will remain the same - the gearing in between will just be adjusted.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg says AI could soon do the work of Meta's midlevel engineers

#42

Post by bagels »

PittleyDunkin wrote: post #16

Sure, for some meaning of "work" we've been there already for decades. I don't think anyone is doubting that AI can increase productivity (and in this sense, displace midlevel engineers) but I don't see any reason to suspect that AI can replace a given engineer.

You can hire less people if they are more productive. Or you can do more things.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg says AI could soon do the work of Meta's midlevel engineers

#43

Post by rvz »

It has been admitted and not even Zuckerberg is hiding it.

First it was 'juniors', then 'mid-level' and it WILL especially be seniors next (as they are already expensive). There is a high certainty that there will be a significant job displacement with the introduction of these "AI Agents".

Once again as predicted in other threads before [0] with increased proposals to run to the AGI scam it is after complete job displacement with no alternative for those lost jobs.

2030 is their deadline. I'm giving you 5 years early to prepare as I already am doing this year. [1]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42651672

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42563239

Re: Mark Zuckerberg says AI could soon do the work of Meta's midlevel engineers

#44

Post by sincerecook »

sjtgraham wrote: post #13
throwaway48476 wrote: post #2

The future for programmers is not bright. Consequently the future for bug hunters and security professionals is very bright.

What makes you think adversarial AIs can't do the job of bug hunters and security professionals too?

This is like one grandparent with dementia correcting the other grandparent with dementia at Thanksgiving dinner.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg says AI could soon do the work of Meta's midlevel engineers

#45

Post by bdcravens »

seatac76 wrote: post #14

I don’t know how they think that’s going to work. The best AI has been able to do for me is smarter Auto Complete, I doubt it can just fit into larger code bases without the searching a human can do. I know the job market has been rough which has emboldened these CEO’s but we are starting to see hiring pick up again, and not just Staff+, interns, SDE 1 and 2 as well, which bodes well for 2025.

How many developers are doing little more than writing boilerplate? Those are the the kinds of jobs best automated. A few years ago behavior-driven development tried to take this as far as possible, taking stories and then turning them into runnable tests. LLMs can already do a pretty good job of being fed inputs and some context and create running code (for example, give ChatGPT a class file and tell it to write a unit test. It does a pretty good job of it)

Re: Mark Zuckerberg says AI could soon do the work of Meta's midlevel engineers

#46

Post by bagels »

myth_drannon wrote: post #7

That is the same person who renamed his company to Meta and went all in into the metaverse and how we all be working in the metaverse. The guy got lucky once, that's all, he is not the modern Oracle.

Buying and nurturing Instagram and Whatsapp are two other instances of "getting lucky"

Re: Mark Zuckerberg says AI could soon do the work of Meta's midlevel engineers

#47

Post by anonzzzies »

My company makes a boatload of money fixing urgent stuff companies cannot fix fast enough while losing money because it is broken. Without AI this type of thing is on the quick rise since we started end of the 90s and there is so much work we can just keep upping the hourlies and only pick the stuff we like. The last year or so, we have been finding naively generated AI code as a kind of incident multiplier. I think we will need to find more people as this is going to make us a lot more $.

Even if this is all bullshit and just hyping, it will cause more naive / lazy AI code to flood the market, that's for sure.

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