It's natural to reduce the cost of doing business.
Why do they want to get rid of software engineers?
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Re: Why do they want to get rid of software engineers?
#22Software engineers are laborers. If you're a capital owner, a laborer is something that weights down your returns. It's not rocket science.
I agree but I'd also note that a capital owner actually has a couple motivations to get rid of high paid labors.
1) Cost
2) Flexibility. If you can hire random laborers to do most of your tasks, you can quickly scale up whereas if you depend on highly skilled and trained workers, starting a new operation elsewhere is hard. Similar, you can shift activity around, are less impeded by the opinions of workers, etc. Significantly, this may allow you to "franchise" your operations in various ways.
Re: Why do they want to get rid of software engineers?
#23Part of this is jealousy (yes, I said it)
It's not jealousy though. It's seeing an operational bottleneck as inefficiency. If you know what you want and you have to go through someone else to get it, that's frustrating, so you look for ways around it. AI is a way around software engineers.
The key to remaining usefully employed is not to be the bottleneck. If it's faster for someone to get to a solution with a software engineer than without a software engineer then you will remain employed. This is largely irrespective of cost - generally speaking spending money on a salaries to go faster is always better so long as you're actually going faster.
Re: Why do they want to get rid of software engineers?
#24Software engineers are laborers. If you're a capital owner, a laborer is something that weights down your returns. It's not rocket science.
Counterpoint -- capital owners see SWEs as their asset, and owners do not like to see their assets go away (with intellectual property in their heads). So they nurture and give a lot of freedom to their SWEs.
I've seen both ways, and don't share the "capital owners BAD" sentiment. The first thing to join a company is to see whether they assign Eng department to Costs or to Assets mentally.
Re: Why do they want to get rid of software engineers?
#25Software engineers are laborers. If you're a capital owner, a laborer is something that weights down your returns. It's not rocket science.
> Software engineers are laborers. If you're a capital owner, a laborer is something that weights down your returns. > It's not rocket science. It's far above the heads of many supposedly "smart" software engineers, who looked at their high salaries and 401ks, forgot they were disposable laborers, and confused themselves for capitalist tycoons. Drop the libertarianism and form a labor union before it's too late. You'…
> forgot they were disposable laborers, and confused themselves for capitalists.
I agree with this, but it isn't just limited to software engineers. Most of the supposed "middle class" in the US fits this description.
We currently have the highest level of wealth inequality in history which is still growing at runaway rates and plenty of laborers who view themselves as "temporarily embarrassed billionaires" willing to prop up the system, seemingly unaware that those at the top will gladly wipe them off their boot when given the chance.
Re: Why do they want to get rid of software engineers?
#26> Part of this is jealousy (yes, I said it) This feels like cope here. They want to get rid of SWE because they are highly paid (in the US especially) and they want them for cheap (e.g. Bangalore, London) AI just makes it a no brainer. Also I don't think there is anything wrong with everyone being a software engineer, more accessibility to the SWE field for all is great. Current SWE's will just need to now adapt quic…
That's like saying that the chefs who didn't want to adapt when their restaurant became a McDonald's were probably not the good chefs anyway.
Re: Why do they want to get rid of software engineers?
#27I've been noticing lately that the discussion around LLMs and using them for programming has begun to expose people for how little they understand programming or what software developers do in general. I think I generally agree with the author as a result. A year ago I might think this was more naive, but today... I think software development has more of a moat than I thought, for more reasons than I originally perceived.
There are a lot of senior developers who discuss how they use LLMs and why, for example, and it exposes that even with a decade or so of experience, people can have extremely thin and weak understandings of what they're doing, and why. That isn't to cast shade at all, and I've been (and will be) the experienced yet clueless person at times. I could be right now.
A reductive description is that it's turning a lot of people in expert beginners, and the coworker they collaborate most now has no way of compensating for it. LLMs are useful and powerful tools, but they can't make up for these kinds of deficiencies yet. It doesn't seem like they will very soon, either. As they get better at generating code, they seem to simultaneously widen gaps in their ability to identify or anticipate bugs or poorly fit solutions.
I can't imagine the messes people are creating with LLMs when they have no experience at all, though. They might feel empowered (and to a degree they certainly are) but when it comes to complex, large, mission-critical, and/or distributed systems... These tools are nowhere near where they need to be.
Otherwise, I've also found that important software can now become more ambitious. We seem to model the career risk developers face based on the software of today, but what I'm seeing is that I'm able to build and maintain more ambitious projects than ever. I'll be pushing the limits of what's possible for myself for a while yet, and I suspect it will continue to produce value for the people I work with. I could have these tools do the work I used to do (or help me do it faster) and leave it at that, but the reality is that I don't just stop there. I keep going, I continue refining, I discover more ways to make it more valuable, I iterate faster and maintain a tighter feedback loop with the people who use the things I create.
So, why would I be eliminated from that process? Do people really believe that my position in that loop will be eliminated by AI? This seems to disregard a myriad of qualities that allow software developers to be effective and valuable team members.
If that happens, frankly, I believe far more roles than software development would be eliminated at that point. The implications would go far beyond software.
Re: Why do they want to get rid of software engineers?
#28Why does this entire article read like chatgpt? Kind of ironic considering the content. Big llm smells: 'Not "AI helps you autocomplete a function." Not "AI explains a stack trace." I mean the full-on narrative:' 'Sure, it's a weird language. It looks archaic. Sometimes it's hostile. Sometimes it's beautiful. But still—if you know what you're doing—you can sit down with a keyboard and turn words into: a product a wor…
Why do "they" (bloggers) want to get rid of their own writing? What are the good reasons to write a blog, minus those that involve you actually writing it?
I guess just status farming, or some sort of delusion about writing being a hindrance to conveying your ideas, much like with writing code.
Re: Why do they want to get rid of software engineers?
#29This reads like a fanfic.
"My manager wants to get rid of me because I'm too good with computers and he is jealous."
No, he wants to get rid of you because you are an operating expense for the company. If they can achieve the same outcome without paying your salary then why wouldn’t they fire you?
Re: Why do they want to get rid of software engineers?
#30A job is a machine that takes money from someone who is very wealthy and gives that money to someone who does not already have enough wealth to live a safe and secure life of idle leisure. The people who have wealth want there to be as few jobs as possible. If they can eliminate a highly compensated job, all the better.