741–750 of 808 posts
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There’s been over 1 million people laid off in tech in the past 4 years https://www.trueup.io/layoffs
I have been laid off 4 times. Tech has a lot of churn, there are a lot of high risk high reward companies.
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I don't have to do this regularly. You asked for a qualitative example. I just gave you one.
They actually asked for quantitative evidence.
Quantitative should be easy. OpenAI's ARR is $20b in 2025. Up nearly 6x over last year. If it isn't useful, people wouldn't pay for it.
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>> e.g. coming back to you and asking for help Funny you mention this because Opus 4.5 did this just yesterday. I accidentally gave it a task with conflicting goals, and after working through it for a few minutes it realized what was going on, summarized the conflict and asked me which goal should be prioritized, along with detailed pros and cons of each approach. It’s exactly how I would expect a mid level developer…
Yes, they continue to get better, but they are not at human level (and jr devs are humans too) yet, and I doubt the next level "AGI" that people like Demis Hassabis are projecting to still be 10 years away will be human level either.
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I had hired 3 junior/mid lvl devs and paid them to do nothing but study to improve their skills, it was my investment in their future, I had a big project on the horizon that I needed help with. After 6 months I let them go, the improvement was far too slow. Books that should have taken a week to get through were taking 6 weeks. Since then LLM have completely surpassed them. I think it’s reasonable to think that some…
But this is an issue of worker you're hiring. I've worked with senior engineers who a) did nothing (as - really not write any thing within the sprint, nor do any other work) b) worked on things they wanted to work on c) did ONLY things that they were assigned in the sprint (= if there were 10 tickets in the sprint and they were assigned 1 of these tickets then they would finish that ticket and not pick up anything el…
You're (unwittingly?) making an argument for using an LLM: you know what you're going to get. It does not take six months to evaluate one; six minutes suffice.
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> And now, we're having a huge explosion of tools for developers, to build software that has to be maintained by developers, made by developers for developers. What do you think they're building all those datacenters for? Why do you think so much money is pouring into AI companies? It's not to help make developers more efficient with code assistants. Traditional computation will be replaced with bots in every aspect…
I agree with all this, except there is no plan B. What could plan B possibly be when white collar work collapses? You can go into a trade, but who will be hiring the tradespeople?
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I consider myself progressive and my main issue with the technology is that it was created by stealing from people who have not been compensated in any way. I wouldn’t blame any artist that is fundamentally against this tech in every way. Good for them.
Every artist and creator of anything learned by engaging with other people's work. I see training AI as basically the same thing. Instead of training an organic mind, it's just training a neural network. If it reproduces works that are too similar to the original, that's obviously an issue, but that's the same as human artists.
Of course you do.
> I find it particularly disillusioning to realize how deep the LLM brainworm is able to eat itself even into progressive hacker circles. That's the thing, hacker circles didn't always have this 'progressive' luddite mentality. This is the culture that replaced hacker culture. I don't like AI, generally. I am skeptical of corporate influence, I doubt AI 2027 and so-called 'AGI'. I'm certain we'll be "five years away"…
> This is the culture that replaced hacker culture. Somewhere along the lines of "everybody can code," we threw out the values and aesthetics that attracted people in the first place. What began as a rejection of externally imposed values devolved into a mouthpiece of the current powers and principalities. This is evidenced by the new set of hacker values being almost purely performative when compared against the old…
Developers waste a lot of time writing a bunch of boilerplate code that they hate writing and that doesn’t make them happy and has nothing to do with craftmanship. We also just spent 60 years in a culture that dignified work done by developers to the extreme, and honestly that produced some of the most narcissistic minds the world has ever seen: Thiel, Andressen, et al - and why? Because we dignify work in a capitalistic culture by increasing wages.
You want to talk about a culture that values craftmanship? Let everyone have the time and the freedom and the security to build whatever they want to build, instead of what they have to build in order to have health insurance.
> We need to talk seriously and plainly about the spiritual and existential damage done by LLMs.
Uhhhhhh…..excuse me?
> despite hundreds of billions of dollars, it hasn't fully delivered on its promises, and investors are starting to be a bit skeptical.
More money was invested in the dot-com boom, and in the lead up to the railroad era, before anyone could ride. So this isn’t new.
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Nah it's pretty bad, but congrats on being an outlier.
Literally the worst job you can find as a programmer today (if you lower you standards and particularly, stay away from cryptocurrency jobs) is 10x better than the non-programmer jobs you can find. If you don't trust me, give a non-programming job a try for 1 year and then come back and tell me how much more comfy $JOB was :)
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right, but this is akin to arguing why the table saw also does not do x/y/z — I don't know why we only complain about AI and how it does NOT do everything well yet . Maybe it's expectations set by all the AI companies, idk, but this kind of mentality seems very particular to AI products and nothing else.
I'm not complaining about it, I said in my post that it's a huge time saver. It's here to stay, and that's pretty clear to see. It has mostly automated away the need for junior engineers, which just 5 years ago would have been a very unexpected outcome, but it's kind of the reality now. All that being said: There's a segment of the software eng population that has their heads in the sand about it and the argument bas…
Bad code is bad code. There’s been bad code since day one; the question is how fast are you willing to fail, learn, fail again, learn more, and keep going.
LLMs make failing fast nearly effortless, and THAT is power that I think young people really take to.
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But you wouldn't call them a craftsperson because they didn't do any craft other than "be a manager". Reviewing work is not on the same plane as actually creating something.
Does Steve Jobs deserve any respect for building the iPhone then? What is this "actually creating"? I'm sure he wasn't the one to do any of the "actually creating" and yet, there's no doubt in my mind that he deserves credit for the iPhone existing and changing the world.
No. Because he didn’t build it. He didn’t even have the idea for it. He gets respect for telling a lot of people “no” and for saying “not this” and “not that,” for being an excellent editor, but he does NOT get any credit for building m the iPhone.
That was thousands of other people.
By the way, what does being an editor look like?
It looks a lot like telling an LLM, “no, not that. Not that either. Try it this way. Mmm, not quite. Here, let me show you a sketch. Try something like that. Yes, that’s it!!”