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The Industrialization of IT

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Re: The Industrialization of IT

#31

Post by FirmwareBurner »

freetanga wrote: post #20
c0redump wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re right, but you’ve only got half the truth. Bay Area devs are overpaid and European devs are underpaid.

Also, a few years ago I had teams in multiple countries (South East Asia, India, Easter Europe, Western Europe, East and West Coast), all well paid (but not at FAANG levels). While their capacity was roughly similar, the West Coast ones were by far the more expensive ones, but also quite stressed out to make ends meet (buying a house, having a kid, putting them through school) compared to the other teams. Eastern Eur…

>but also quite stressed out to make ends meet (buying a house, having a kid, putting them through school) compared to the other teams.

Because a well paid SW dev wages goes soooo much further in developing countries, you're basically a king as every other profession earns very poor in comparison, so home ownership is no issue.

Re: The Industrialization of IT

#32

Post by lelanthran »

ConspiracyFact wrote: post #23
cyberax wrote: post #21

I tried vibe-coding some non-trivial code. It failed successfully. The resulting code had a memory leak (from good old Promise.race) that would have caused the app to continuously grow the RAM usage. I decided to let the AI code, and then asked it to fix the problems, describing the issue (steadily growing RAM usage). It was not able to find the issue. That's what I'm afraid of. We'll get megabytes of code that just…

> We'll get megabytes of code that just fails sometimes, for unfathomable reasons. But…that’s the current situation.

>> We'll get megabytes of code that just fails sometimes, for unfathomable reasons.

> But…that’s the current situation.

Where? Bugs are fixed by humans. I want to see a ticket closed due to "can't find bug".

Re: The Industrialization of IT

#33

Post by cs02rm0 »

fhd2 wrote: post #4

Tangential, but an entry level developer at 190k USD per year seems nuts, is that really a reasonable number? From a quick search, I find numbers below 100k USD for the bay area, which seems more reasonable. In a well off European country, you'd pay around 45k USD for a strong entry level developer. I can imagine 2x salaries, considering costs of living, fire at will and all that, but >4x? Not sure how to back that u…

I'm not sure many are hiring European devs at all at the moment, not sure what the US market is like.

Re: The Industrialization of IT

#34

Post by mihaic »

devnull3 wrote: post #30
InsideOutSanta wrote: post #25

I wish people would stop making predictions about LLMs so confidently. Some people confidently predict that LLMs will never be able to replace capable engineers, and other people equally confidently predict that we'll all be out of a job in five years. The reality is that we don't know. We don't know what the ceiling is for LLM programming ability. We don't know how much better they can get without scaling up the har…

To be fair, if we know something will happen with high certainty then its not much of a prediction. The fact that no one really knows how LLMS will pan-out means every projection in future is a prediction.

I echo the parent comment. It's not the fact that predictions are made, it's the fact that no certainty interval is ever given, and everything is pronounced with complete confidence.

Re: The Industrialization of IT

#35

Post by walterbell »

InsideOutSanta wrote: post #25

I wish people would stop making predictions about LLMs so confidently. Some people confidently predict that LLMs will never be able to replace capable engineers, and other people equally confidently predict that we'll all be out of a job in five years. The reality is that we don't know. We don't know what the ceiling is for LLM programming ability. We don't know how much better they can get without scaling up the har…

s/making predictions/talking their book/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18146703

Re: The Industrialization of IT

#36

Post by 0xEF »

InsideOutSanta wrote: post #25

I wish people would stop making predictions about LLMs so confidently. Some people confidently predict that LLMs will never be able to replace capable engineers, and other people equally confidently predict that we'll all be out of a job in five years. The reality is that we don't know. We don't know what the ceiling is for LLM programming ability. We don't know how much better they can get without scaling up the har…

Correct.

But...

We _do know_ that companies are typically driven by greed and profit, so if it is possible for them to replace their human workers with something that does a similar level of work but also does not require a paycheck, we would be absolute fools to assume that they won't do everything in their power to make that a reality, regardless of the understood reliability of LLMs.

Re: The Industrialization of IT

#38

Post by jsk2600 »

senko wrote: post #24
lordkrandel wrote: post #5

Also, calculators did millions of operations, but the were 99.999999% right all the time. That's what set the apart from human people: eternal reliability 24/7. AI is about right 1% of the time, a human is needed to recognise when the machine is wrong, and it keeps repeating the same mistakes when identified and corrected. People WISH it was like a calculator, but you know, magic thinking doesn't make things happen.

> AI is about right 1% of the time I have an app where people scan their retail/restaurant/cafe receipts and store them. I use Gemini 2.0 for OCR. It is right more than 99% of the time. I would be making many more errors transcribing the receipts manually. AIs are a different kind of tools, for a different kind of problems, with a different kind of failure cases.

OCRs are quite different from AI/ML, which the parent comment is referring to. In fact, OCR existed way before the current AI wave.

Re: The Industrialization of IT

#39

Post by jsk2600 »

joelthelion wrote: post #13

> In 2025, the engineer probably beats Gemini. Sure, great. But in 2030, who wins this hypothetical? I don't think we need to wait for 2030. Today, using aider/cursor and Gemini-pro-2.5, I'm pretty sure a team of two or three senior developers with great domain knowledge would be competitive with a team of 10 average devs. Being a small, close-knit team has a lot of advantages. And LLMs can help close the productivit…

>I'm pretty sure a team of two or three senior developers with great domain knowledge would be competitive with a team of 10 average devs.

You are comparing senior vs average devs here. What will happen if a team of 'two or three senior devs' with AI/ML tools compete with equally skilled 10 senior devs with AI/ML tools?

Re: The Industrialization of IT

#40

Post by leto_ii »

I find the outlined scenario well argued and plausible.

What's more interesting to me though is the complete lack of mention of labor unions as a potential defense mechanism for engineers (either in the OP or in the conversation here, at least so far).

For a while now I've felt it's quite arrogant and completely naive of us to not accept that we're just keyboard workers, and not rare special flowers that will forever be economically privileged.

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