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Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

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Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#151

Post by philipov »

physicsguy wrote: post #117
isakkeyten wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

There's nothing discriminatory about it, it's the same if you outsource things within your own country except the price is higher. Contractors have a totally different way of working because they're not really interested in the long term of a project beyond being retained. If they code something in such a way that causes an issue that takes time to fix later then great - more hours we can charge the client for. Outso…

More important than cultural differences is timezone differences. Communication and collaboration is harder when you only have a couple hours of overlap between your working day and their working day. Much harder if you have no overlap at all. This isn't even a feature of outsourcing - it's a challenge for any globally distributed team.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#152

Post by williamcotton »

Nullabillity wrote: post #57
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #36

Well, what will happen, is that programmers will become experts at prompt engineering, which will become a real discipline (remember when “software engineering” was a weird niche?). They will blow away the companies that rely on “seat of the pants,” undisciplined prompting. I’m someone that started on Machine Language, and now programs in high-level languages. I remember when we couldn’t imagine programming without I…

This is like arguing that surely we can get rid of all our formers as soon as we have a widespread enough caste of priests. There is no such thing as "prompt engineering ", because there is no formal logic to be understood or engineered into submission. That's just not how it works.

There's plenty of tacit knowledge in engineering.

Being good at debugging a system is based more on experience and gut feelings than following some kind of formal logic. LLMs are quite useful debugging assistants. Using an LLM to assist with such tasks takes tacit knowledge itself.

The internal statistical models generated during training are capable of applying higher-ordered pattern matching that while informal are still quite useful. Learning how to use these tools is a skill.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#153

Post by kkapelon »

entropyneur wrote: post #26

Is that actually a thing? Anybody here being replaced with AI? I haven't observed any such trends around me and it's especially hard to imagine that happening in "tech" (the software industry). At this stage of AI development of course - if things continue at this pace anything is possible.

"Telecom Giant BT Will Cut 55,000 Jobs By 2030—And Replace Thousands Of Roles With AI"

https://www.forbes.com/sites/siladityaray/2023/05/18/telecom...

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#154

Post by greentxt »

NoGravitas wrote: post #109
yodsanklai wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why half-assed developer? It could be high-level developer that take advantage of AI to be more productive. This will reduce team sizes.

If that's the way this goes (that for a large program you only need a senior developer and an AI, not a senior developer and some juniors), then it kills the pipeline for producing the senior developers who will still be needed.

I hear highly experienced COBOL devs make bank. Supply and demand. Great for them!

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#155

Post by nerder92 »

This article is entirely built on 2 big and wrong assumptions:

1. AI code ability will be the same as is today

2. Companies will replace people for AI en masse at a given moment in time

Of course both these assumptions are wrong, the quality of code produced by AI will improve dramatically as model evolves. And is not even just the model itself. The tooling, the Agentic capabilities and workflow will entirely change to adapt to this. (Already doing)

The second assumption is also wrong, intelligent companies will not layoff en masse to use AI only, they will most likely slow hiring devs because their existing enhanced devs using AI will suffice enough to their coding related needs. At the end of the day product is just one area of company development, build the complete e2e ultimate solution with 0 distribution or marketing will not help.

This article, in my opinion, is just doomerism storytelling for nostalgic programmers, that see programming only as some kind of magical artistic craft and AI as the villain arrived to remove all the fun from it. You can still switch off Cursor and write donut.c if you enjoy doing it.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#157

Post by only-one1701 »

ActionHank wrote: post #143
jvanderbot wrote: post #122

What evidence do we have that AI is actually replacing programmers already? The article treats messaging on this as a forgone conclusion, but I strongly suspect it's all hype-cycle BS to cover layoffs, or a misreading of "Meta pivots to AI" headlines.

There is little evidence that AI is replacing engineers, but there is a whole lot of evidence that shareholders and execs really love the idea and are trying every angle to achieve it.

If the latter is the case, then it's only a matter of time. Enshitification, etc.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#158

Post by phito »

lordofgibbons wrote: post #149
qoez wrote: post #130

Some companies will try to fire as many programmers as possible and will end up struggling bc they have no moats against other companies with access to the same AI, or will hit some kind of AI saturation usefulness threshold. Other companies will figure out a smart hybrid to utilize existing talent and those are probably the ones that will thrive among the competition.

But why do you need programmers to utilize the AI? The whole point of AI is that it doesn't need an "operator". I'm not talking about GH Copilot or some autocomplete IDE feature, I'm talking about fully autonomous agents 2-3 years in the future. Just look at the insane rate of progress in the past 2 years. The next two years will be even faster if the past few months are anything to go by.

> Just look at the insane rate of progress in the past 2 years.

Are we living on the same planet? I haven't seen much real progress since the release of chatGPT. Sure brenchmarks and graphs are going up, but in practice, meh...

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#159

Post by kkapelon »

alkonaut wrote: post #41
outime wrote: post #4

Has there been any company so far that has fired 100% of their programmers to replace them with AI?

Has there been any company that has laid off even a nontrivial amount of programmers and replaced them with AI? Here I mean, where developers at said company actually say the process works and is established, and the staff cuts weren't happening anyway. I know there are CEOs that make bold claims about this (E.g. Klarna) but I don't really assign any value to that until I hear from people on the floor.

BT news suggest they made announcement to cut jobs back in 2023 and they are actually doing it now

https://www.socialistparty.org.uk/articles/133443/03-12-2024...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/siladityaray/2023/05/18/telecom...

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#160

Post by chubot »

ActionHank wrote: post #143
jvanderbot wrote: post #122

What evidence do we have that AI is actually replacing programmers already? The article treats messaging on this as a forgone conclusion, but I strongly suspect it's all hype-cycle BS to cover layoffs, or a misreading of "Meta pivots to AI" headlines.

There is little evidence that AI is replacing engineers, but there is a whole lot of evidence that shareholders and execs really love the idea and are trying every angle to achieve it.

The funny thing is that "replacing engineers" is framed as cutting costs

But that doesn't really lead to any market advantage, at least for tech companies.

AI will also enable your competitors to cut costs. Who thinks they are going to have a monopoly on AI, which would be required for a durable advantage?

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What you want to do is get more of the rare, best programmers -- that's what shareholders and execs should be wondering about

Instead, those programmers will be starting their own companies and competing with you

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