The person the headline refers to is a webdev. What job is that getting rid of?
Cashiers, some officials, a lot of the “personal contact with a customer” gets transferred to web. I am not complaining, just answering the question.
Same goes for a truck driver, road builder, railway worker, etc.
FWIW, I spent many years as a cashier. It's not something I find inherently more valuable to the world. If we could trust people not to steal, we wouldn't need them.
The kind of automation I write is stuff that wouldn't get done if person had to do it. But with automation, it becomes possible and profitable.
I think a lot of genAI coding efficiency will have the same property: costs will go down to the point where things that couldn’t be done affordably in software in 2020 will be affordable in 2030. That could well result in a net increase in tech employment.
I feel my job in the future will be more secure than ever. Tons and tons of AI generated garbage code (trained on more and more existing garbage code) that the „developer“ will at a certain point no longer be able to maintain or fix. Not even speaking about trusting the output. Feels similar to all the outsourced development to cheap suppliers that inevitably collapse or create horrible maintenance overhead.
The person the headline refers to is a webdev. What job is that getting rid of?
Web dev doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Web dev for e-commmerce displaced brick and mortar retail. Web dev for streaming displaced video rentals and audio sales.
Web devs are a tiny proportion of the employees needed for e-commerce.
I think there is a fundamental misconception of the benefit / performance-improvement of LLM-aided programming: Without sacrificing code quality, it only makes coding more productive _if you already know_ what you're doing. This means that while it has a big potential for experienced programmers (making them push out more good code), you cannot replace them by an army of code monkeys with LLMs and expect good softwar…
I keep reading this but I feel it really ignores gaussian, where are your lines? What is good enough for what where? What is the base level of already know? I'm churning out a web app for fun right now with a couple of second year comp sci students from Sri Lanka + LLMs, they charge me around $1000 a month and my friend who is a SRE at appl looks at the code every week, said it's quality, modern and scalable. I do think they're a bit slow, but I'm not looking for fast.
I said it before and I'll say it again: it's high time we got the taste of our own medicine. Getting people out of jobs has been the main selling point of our industry since its first days, this is what we've collectively been doing for decades. Do I want my job to be automated right in front of my eyes? Not really. Do I see some poetic justice in the whole thing? Absolutely.
Hmm on the other hand, there isn't much resistance against genAI in software development (unlike other creative industries) because ours is founded in collaboration and continuing others' work. It's where open source came from, and the use of libraries. Using stackoverflow was never frowned on. AI is just the same but more efficient. Nobody invents the wheel from scratch. It will change the job yes but it also can me…
There isn't much open resistance because most of open source developers are bought and paid for. So they continue the path of destruction in the hopes that they will not be obsolete.
This is naive of course. Once you have identified yourself as corporate servants (like for example the CPython developers) the companies will disrespect you and fire you when convenient (as has happened at Google and Microsoft).
> Sadly it doesn't seem to be very popular Strange enough the people that have the most to gain from keeping things the same, are really successful at convincing the masses who have the most to benefit from change in this regard to vote against it. https://pjhollis123.medium.com/careful-mate-that-foreigner-w...
Certainly back when I worked in IT, the people I worked with were mostly very much anti-union. I didn't hear much anti immigrant talk back then but I've been retired for a while.
There has been a lot of anti-H1B talk for a long time. And complaining about work being outsourced to India or where ever.
Is it really that LLM-based tools make developers so much more productive or rather that organizations have found out they can do with less -- and less privileged -- developers? What I don't really see, especially not big tech-internally, are stories of teams that have become amazingly more productive. For now it feels we get some minor productivity improvements that probably do not off-set the invest and are barely…
For this narrative to make sense you would have to believe that Amazon management cares more about short-term profit than the long-term quality of their work.
Web dev doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Web dev for e-commmerce displaced brick and mortar retail. Web dev for streaming displaced video rentals and audio sales.
Web devs are a tiny proportion of the employees needed for e-commerce.
Without them (and mobile devs, though there’s increasing cross-over), e-commerce doesn’t get done.
Ergo, web devs are directly contributing to the outcomes that e-commerce enables.
Is it really that LLM-based tools make developers so much more productive or rather that organizations have found out they can do with less -- and less privileged -- developers? What I don't really see, especially not big tech-internally, are stories of teams that have become amazingly more productive. For now it feels we get some minor productivity improvements that probably do not off-set the invest and are barely…
For this narrative to make sense you would have to believe that Amazon management cares more about short-term profit than the long-term quality of their work.
The narrative reflects a broader cultural shift, from "we are all in this together" (pandemic) to "our organizations are bloated and people don't work hard enough" (already pre-LLM hype post-pandemic). The observation that less-skilled people can, with the help of LLMs, take the work of traditionally more-skilled people fits this narrative. In the end, it is about demoting some types of knowledge workers from the skilled class to the working class. Apparently, important people believe that this is a long-term sustainable narrative.