31–40 of 145 posts
From 2011: "Don’t call yourself a programmer: “Programmer” sounds like “anomalously high-cost peon who types some mumbo-jumbo into some other mumbo-jumbo.” If you call yourself a programmer, someone is already working on a way to get you fired. You know Salesforce, widely perceived among engineers to be a Software as a Services company? Their motto and sales point is “No Software”, which conveys to their actual custo…
Because: 1) We're expensive (at least for Poland, I can aim for ~6-8k PLN monthly after few years of experience. Other, even civil/mech engineers will have around 4-6k monthly with similar experience) [edit: and minimal wage is 3.5k after taxes] 2) It appears to be replaceable (you can replace us with LLMs to an extent, you can't do that with other jobs)
> 1) We're expensive I reckon we're cheap. Even with the current wages software engineers have, the margins in software companies/industry is large.
Margins, are never large enough for a certain class of owners. That's the unfortunate reality. No one at an average board meeting is gonna say, "Hey guys, let's stay at this 40% margin level instead of going to 60%!"
The former own land, companies, and such assets that they profit from the difference in value between what is sold and the wages they pay labourers to produce that value.
Those people profit from wages going down.
One way to do that is to gain leverage over the job market by threatening to remove access to labourers. Unless those labourers are willing to accept a lower wage they can be replaced by AI and nobody will need them anymore.
Another way they can increase their profits is to force labourers to use GenAI tools to produce their work. There's constant pressure from the capital class to, "always improve productivity!" This is just another example of that.
I suspect there will come a point, perhaps, where some companies will decide to let developers go who refuse to use GenAI (or simply not hire them to begin with).
I don't know that we will see the technology become sophisticated enough to replace human developers entirely.
From 2011: "Don’t call yourself a programmer: “Programmer” sounds like “anomalously high-cost peon who types some mumbo-jumbo into some other mumbo-jumbo.” If you call yourself a programmer, someone is already working on a way to get you fired. You know Salesforce, widely perceived among engineers to be a Software as a Services company? Their motto and sales point is “No Software”, which conveys to their actual custo…
Have you met any software engineers?
its completely over for this field. anyone that doesnt think so has their head in the sand, we are 18 months out from the value proposition of a 50-85th percentile software engineer dropping to the floor
I guess if you spin up fresh CRUD apps or greenfield web apps for a living, you might be in danger, because they are really good at doing that. On an established codebase, especially with more than the low tens of thousands of lines of code, their usefulness is mostly relegated to writing boilerplate that can be explained in plain English. I'd be surprised if 85% of programmers were spending their days doing that, though.
Even if it was that serious, I don't see software engineers who can leverage LLMs and keep learning with the rest of their field being in much danger. The average software shop that I'm familiar with has a massive backlog of things to be done, and more direction than they have steam. We're pretty far from the point where almost any professional programmer will be saying "We finished all our work and there's nothing left to do".
I don't buy it. I also don't think it'll replace writers or artists. Just the low brow, chum bucket stuff which in programming terms is a todo app or web form.
They aren't trying to replace us in earnest, yet. They are using the threat to beat down wages, and to more generally tilt the power balance further in favor of ~capital~ employers. "Replacement" is smoke and mirrors at this point; anyone who seriously tries it will quickly fail, with today's technology.
We currently have an offshore dev team that is frankly just a money pit. Still, the C levels keep trying to make us use them and it's never been successful. Our offshore devs are simply incompetent because we hired for cheap and not quality.
From 2011: "Don’t call yourself a programmer: “Programmer” sounds like “anomalously high-cost peon who types some mumbo-jumbo into some other mumbo-jumbo.” If you call yourself a programmer, someone is already working on a way to get you fired. You know Salesforce, widely perceived among engineers to be a Software as a Services company? Their motto and sales point is “No Software”, which conveys to their actual custo…
> Your job was never to write code, it is to solve problems for your users. They are why we have a job. You need to talk with the users, empathize with them, understand their problems and feel their pains. This is much too important to be left exclusively in the hands of product managers and designers. You are the problem solver, so you need to fully understand the problem. Adding to this point, LLMs won't fully unde…
"Software development" will still exist, but if productivity tools become so capable that your PM can crank out a dozen variations and iterate on them solo, that will lead to developer replacement.