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Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

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Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#481

Post by cess11 »

iainctduncan wrote: post #343

I work in tech diligence. This means the companies I talk to cannot lie or refuse to answer a question (at risk of deals failing through and being sued to obvilion). Which means we get the hear the real effects of tech debt all time. I call it the silent killer. Tech debt paralyzes companies all the time, but nobody hears about it because there's zero advantage to the companies in sharing that info. I'm constantly go…

My work puts me in a similar position, but when they've gone bankrupt, and I see same thing. It's common to not invest in good enough developers early enough to manage to delete, refactor, upgrade and otherwise clean their software in time to be able to handle growth or stagnation on the business side.

Once I saw a software that was built mostly by one person, in part because he did the groundwork by pushing straight to main with . as the only commit message and didn't document anything. When they ended up in my lap he had failed for six months to adapt their system to changes in the data sources they depended on.

Sometimes the business people fucks up too, like using an excellent software system to do credit intensive trading without hedging for future interest raises.

I'm not so sure machines will solve much on either side even though some celebrities say they're sure they will.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#482

Post by abnercoimbre »

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…

If you have genuine systems programming knowledge, usually the answer is to innovate on a particular toolchain or ship your own product (I understand you may not like business stuff though.)

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#483

Post by amanda99 »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #303
csmpltn wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that LLMs are only going to make people with real tech/programming skills much more in demand, as younger programmers skip straight into prompt engineering and never develop themselves technically beyond the bare minimum needed to glue things together. The gap between people with deep, hands-on experience that understand how a computer works and prompt engineers will become so insanely deep. Somebody needs to…

I think we who are already in tech have this gleeful fantasy that new tools impair newcomers in a way that will somehow serve us, the incumbents, in some way. But in reality pretty much anyone who enters software starts off cutting corners just to build things instead of working their way up from nand gates. And then they backfill their knowledge over time. My first serious foray into software wasn't even Ruby. It wa…

I agree, and I also share your experience (guess I was a bit earlier with PHP).

I think what's left out though is that this is the experience of those who are really interested and for whom "it's not satisfying" to stay there.

As tech has turned into a money-maker, people aren't doing it for the satisfaction, they are doing it for the money. That appears to cause more corner cutting and less learning what's underneath instead of just doing the quickest fix that SO/LLM/whatever gives you.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#484

Post by jdmoreira »

nritchie wrote: post #472

It's been noted that LLM's output quality decays as they ingest more LLM generated content in their training. Will the same happen for LLM generated code as more and more of the code on Github is generated by LLMs? What then?

The approach has changed. Its all about test / inference time now and reinforcement learning on top of the base models. There is no end in sight anymore, training data won't be a limiting factor when reasoning and self-play are the approach

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#485

Post by sophacles »

zozbot234 wrote: post #347
thechao wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're right; I can see it in the accelerating growth curve of my good Junior devs; I see grandOP's vision in my bad Junior devs. Optimistically, I think this gives more jr devs more runway to advance deeper into more sophisticated tech stacks. I think we're gonna need more SW devs, not fewer, as these tools get better: things that were previously impossible will be possible.

> more sophisticated tech stacks Please don't do this, pick more boring tech stacks https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43012862 instead. "Sophisticated" tech stacks are a huge waste, so please save the sophisticated stuff for the 0.1% of the time where you actually need it.

That's great advice when you're building a simple CRUD app - use the paved roads for the 10^9th instance.

It's terrible advice when you're building something that will cause that boring tech to fall over. Or when you've reached the limits of that boring tech and are still growing. Or when the sophisticated tech lowers CPU usage by 1% and saves your company millions of dollars. Or when that sophisticate tech saves your engineers hours and your company 10s of millions. Or just: when the boring tech doesn't actually do the things you need it to do.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#486

Post by throwaway290 »

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 were massive layoffs in 2024 and continuing this year. No one will scream they are firing people for LLMs

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#487

Post by chasd00 »

eitally wrote: post #330
csmpltn wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that LLMs are only going to make people with real tech/programming skills much more in demand, as younger programmers skip straight into prompt engineering and never develop themselves technically beyond the bare minimum needed to glue things together. The gap between people with deep, hands-on experience that understand how a computer works and prompt engineers will become so insanely deep. Somebody needs to…

I agree. It's the current generation's version of what happened with the advent of Javascript frameworks about 15 years ago, when suddenly web devs stopped learning how computers actually work. There will always be high demand for software engineers who actually know what they're doing, can debug complex code bases, and can make appropriate decisions about how to apply technology to business problems. That said, AI a…

> I wouldn't want to be entering the job market in the next couple of years....

I bet there's a software dev employment boom about 5 years away once it becomes obvious competent people are needed to unwind and rework all the llm generated code.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#488

Post by larve »

larve wrote: post #469

This is missing the fact that budding programmers will also embrace these technologies, in order to get stuff done and working and fulfill their curiosity. They will in fact grow up to be much more "AI native" than current more senior programmers, except that they are turbocharging their exploration and learning by having, well, a full team of AI programmers at their disposal. I see it like when I came of age in the…

Another aspect this is missing is that, if AI works well enough to fire people (it already does, IMO), there is a whole world of software that was previously out of reach to be built. I wouldn't build a custom photography app for a single individual, nor would I write a full POS system for 3 people bakery. The costs would be prohibitive. But if a single developer/product designer can now be up to the challenge, be it through a "tweak wordpress plugins until it works" or through more serious engineering, there is going to be a whole new industry of software jobs out there.

I know that it works because the amount of softwrae I now write for friends, family or myself has exploded. I wouldn't spend 4 weekends on a data cleanup app for my librarian friend. But I can now, in 2-3 h, get something really usable and pretty, and it's extremely rewarding.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#489

Post by zozbot234 »

marcosdumay wrote: post #422
zozbot234 wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> more sophisticated tech stacks Please don't do this, pick more boring tech stacks https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43012862 instead. "Sophisticated" tech stacks are a huge waste, so please save the sophisticated stuff for the 0.1% of the time where you actually need it.

Sophistication doesn't imply any increase or decrease in "boringness".

The dictionary definition of 'sophisticated' is "changed in a deceptive or misleading way; not genuine or pure; unrefined, adulterated, impure." Pretty much the polar opposite of "boring" in a technology context.
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