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Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

defragzone.substack.com

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Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#471

Post by throwaway290 »

jayd16 wrote: post #442
nerder92 wrote: post #155

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…

These two predictions seem contradictory. If the AI massively improves why would they slow roll adoption?

People want their AI stocks to go up. So they say things like sky is the limit and jobs are not going away (aka please don't regulate) in one sentence. I think only one of this is true.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#473

Post by lizknope »

chasd00 wrote: post #434
lizknope wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can go to the next step. I studied computer engineering not computer science in college. We designed our own CPU and then implemented it in an FPGA. You can go further and design it out of discrete logic gates. Then write it in Verilog. Compare the differences and which made you think more about optimizations.

"in order to bake a pie you must first create the universe", at some point, reaching to lower and lower levels stops being useful.

Sure.

Older people are always going to complain about younger people not learning something that they did. When I graduated in 1997 and started working I remember some topics that were not taught but the older engineers were shocked I didn't know it from college.

We keep creating new knowledge. It is impossible to fit everything into a 4 year curriculum without deemphasizing some other topic.

I learned Motorola 68000 assembly language in college. I talked to a recent computer science graduate and he had never seen assembly before. I also showed him how I write static HTML in vi the same way I did in 1994 for my simple web site and he laughed. He showed me the back end to their web site and how it interacts with all their databases to generate all the HTML dynamically.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#474

Post by marcosdumay »

Havoc wrote: post #132

That’s what people said about outsourcing too. The corporate meat grinder keeps rolling forward anyway. Every single department and person believes the world will stop turning without them but that’s rarely how that plays out.

> That’s what people said about outsourcing too.

And they were right... and a lot of companies fully failed because of it.

And the corporate meat grinder kept rolling forward anyway. And the decision makers were all shielded from the consequences of their incompetence anyway.

When the market is completely corrupted, nothing means anything.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#475

Post by skydhash »

arrowsmith wrote: post #291
Workaccount2 wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually know a professional translator and while a year ago he was full of worry, he now is much more relaxed about it. It turns out that like art, many people just want a human doing the translation. There is a strong romantic element to it, and it seems humans just have a strong natural inclination to only want other humans facilitating communication.

How do they know that a human is doing the translation? What's to stop someone from just c&ping the text into an LLM, giving it a quick proofread, then sending it back to the client and saying "I translated this"? Sounds like easy money, maybe I should get into the translation business.

The fact that the client is actually going to use the text and they will not find it funny when they're being laughed at. Or worse, being sued because of some situation caused by a confusion. I read Asian novels and you can quickly (within a chapter) discern if the translators have done a good job (And there's so many translation notes if the author relies on cultural elements).

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#476

Post by hbn »

adamors wrote: post #21
ponector wrote: post #10

>>companies aren’t investing in junior developers It was a case before AI as well. Overall it reads the same as "Twitter will be destroyed by mass layoffs". But it is still online

Twitter is essentially losing money even with a bare bones staff https://www.theverge.com/2025/1/24/24351317/elon-musk-x-twit... It's being kept online because it's a good propaganda tool, not due to how it performs on the free market.

"Is a good propaganda tool" doesn't keep a website up, engineers do. It's losing money because a bunch of major advertisers pulled out, not because there's not enough engineers to keep it online.

I use it daily and can't remember the last outage.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#478

Post by burkaman »

cma wrote: post #263
swiftcoder wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the ~8 years since I worked there, Zuckerberg announced that we'd all be spending our 8 hour workdays in the Metaverse, and when that didn't work out, he pivoted to crypto currency. He's just trend-chasing, like all the other executives who are afraid of being left behind as their flagship product bleeds users...

Have they bled users?

Apparently not, according to their quarterly earnings reports: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1092227/facebook-product...

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#479

Post by blah2244 »

croes wrote: post #327
nerder92 wrote: post #155

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…

BTW your reasoning for 1 sound like previous reasoning for FSD. Assuming the same kind of growth in capabilities isn't backed by reality. The last release of OpenAI's model wasn't dramatically better. At the moment it's more about getting cheaper.

To be fair, his argument is valid for FSD! We have fully deployed FSD in multiple US cities now!

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#480

Post by kmoser »

whynotminot wrote: post #328
SJC_Hacker wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And that last 5% is what you're paying for

But not really. Looking around my shop, I’m probably the only one around who used to write a lot of C code. No one is coming to ask me about obscure memory bugs. I’m certainly not getting paid better than my peers. The knowledge I have is personally gratifying to me because I like having a deeper understanding of things. But I have to tell you I thought knowing more would give me a deeper advantage than it has in act…

Is that because the languages being used at your shop have largely abstracted away memory bug issues? If you were to get a job writing embedded systems, or compilers, or OSes, wouldn't your knowledge be more highly valued and sought after (assuming you were one of the more senior devs)?
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