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Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

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Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#551

Post by fragmede »

osnium123 wrote: post #524

If you are a junior engineer who just graduated, what would you do to ensure that you learn the needed skills and not be overly reliant on AI?

I wouldn't, because AI isn't the problem. With machines being able to run deepseek locally, the problem to look out for isn't the possibility that the web service will go down and you have to live without it, it's that, as their capabilities currently stand, they can't fix or do everything.

I learned to program some time before AI became big, and back when I was an intern, I'd get stuck in a rut trying to debug some issue. When I got stuck in the rut, it would be tempting to give up and just change variables and "if" statements blindly, just hoping it would somehow magically fix things. Much like I see newer programmers get stuck when the LLM gets stuck.

But see, that's where you earn your high paying SWE salary. For doing something that other people can not. So my advice to Jr programmers isn't to avoid using LLMs, it's to use them liberally until you find something or somewhere they're bad at, and look at that as the true challenge. With LLMs, programming easy shit got easy. If you're not running into problems with the LLM, switch it up and try a different language with more esoteric libraries and trickier bugs.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#552

Post by insane_dreamer »

aksosnckckd wrote: post #247
insane_dreamer wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It'll happen gradually over time, with more pressure on programmers to "get more done". I think it's useful to look at what has already happened at another, much smaller profession -- translators -- as a precursor to what will happen with programmers. 1. translation software does a mediocre job, barely useful as a tool; all jobs are safe 2. translation software does a decent job, now expected to be used as time-savin…

The hard part of development isn’t converting an idea in human speak to idea in machine speak. It’s formulating that idea in the first place. This spans all the way from high level “tinder for dogs” concepts to low level technical concepts. Once AI is doing that, most jobs are at risk. It’ll create robots to do manual labor better than humans as well.

Right. But it only takes 1 person, or maybe a handful, to formulate an idea that might take 100 people to implement. You will still need that one person but not the 100.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#553

Post by Aperocky »

arscan wrote: post #521

What are these fired programmers going to do? Disappear? They’ll build stuff, using the same plus-up AI tooling that enabled their old boss to fire them. So guess what, their old boss just traded employees for competitors. Congrats, I guess? Zuck declaring that he plans on dropping programmer head-count substantially, to me indicates that they’ll have a much smaller technological moat in the future, and they won’t be…

What moat did Meta have today?

I'd say there is a moat, but it's not on the tech side.

Tiktok flew right through the moat, and only a small part of that is about tech.

A lot of development on AI is exciting and meta is a big part of that, but there isn't any real moat there either.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#554

Post by ahi »

thedanbob wrote: post #440
abeppu wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think also a critical weakness is that LLMs are trained on the code people write ... and our code doesn't annotate what was written by a human and what was suggested by a tool. In your analogy, this would be like if your sat nav system suggests that you turn right where other people have turned right ... because they were directed to turn by their sat nav.

In fact, I'm pretty sure this already happens and the results are exactly what you'd expect. Some of the "alternate routes" Google Maps has suggested for me in the past are almost certainly due to other people making unscheduled detours for gas or whatever, and the algorithm thinks "oh this random loop on a side street is popular, let's suggest it". And then anyone silly enough to follow the suggestion just adds more…

Google Maps has some strange feedback loops. I frequently drive across the Bay Bridge to Delaware beaches. There are 2 or 3 roughly equal routes with everyone going to the same destination. Google will find a "shorter" route every 5 minutes. Naturally, Maps is smart enough to detect traffic, but not smart enough to equally distribute users to prevent it. It creates a traffic jam on route A, then tells all the users to use route B which causes a jam there, and so on.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#555

Post by WaitWaitWha »

Mistletoe wrote: post #189
WaitWaitWha wrote: post #166

"What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun." - King Solomon Litter, palanquin, and sedan chair carriers were fired. Oarsmen were fired. Horses were fired. . . . [time] . . . COBOL programmers where fired. and, so on. What was the expectation; that programmers will be forever? Lest we forget, barely a century ago, programmers started to push out a large swat…

I was watching How It’s Made last night and watching how pencils were made, thinking how hard this would be and how expensive a pencil would be if a person had to make them and how an endless supply of them can be made this way. Then I thought about how software has allowed us to automate so many things and scale and I realized AI is the final step where we can automate and remove the programmers. Pencil makers were…

> Your best hope is being the person running the pencil machine.

Or, see what is coming and hop on that cart for the short lives we have.

Pencils. There is a hobby primitive survival, bushcraft, or primitive skills (youtuber John Plant in "Primitive Technology" is best example). I am certain we could come up with a path to create "pencils". We would just need to define what we agree to be a "pencil" first.

Is a stick of graphite or even wood charcoal wrapped in sheepskin a "pencil". Would a hollowed juniper branch stuffed with the writing material a "pencil"?

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#556

Post by ljm »

csmpltn wrote: post #214
dham wrote: post #144

There's such a huge disconnect between people reading headlines and developers who are actually trying to use AI day to day in good faith. We know what it is good at and what it's not. It's incredibly far away from doing any significant change in a mature codebase. In fact I've become so bearish on the technology trying to use it for this, I'm thinking there's going to have to be some other breakthrough or something…

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…

The enshittification will come for the software engineers themselves eventually, because so many businesses out there only have their shareholders in mind and not their customers, and if a broken product or a promise of a product is enough to boost the stock then why bother investing in the talent to build it properly?

Look at Google and Facebook - absolute shithouse services now that completely fail to meet the basic functionality they had ~20 years ago. Google still rakes in billions rendering ads in the style of a search engine and Facebook the same for rendering ads in the format of a social news feed. Why even bother with engineering anything except total slop?

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#557

Post by hintymad »

csmpltn wrote: post #214
dham wrote: post #144

There's such a huge disconnect between people reading headlines and developers who are actually trying to use AI day to day in good faith. We know what it is good at and what it's not. It's incredibly far away from doing any significant change in a mature codebase. In fact I've become so bearish on the technology trying to use it for this, I'm thinking there's going to have to be some other breakthrough or something…

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…

Would technical depth change the fundamental supply and demand, though? If we view AI as a powerful automation tool, it's possible that the overall demand will be lowered so much that the demand of the deep technical expertise will go down as well. Take EE industry, for instance, the technical expertise required to get things done is vast and deep, yet the demand has not been so good, compared to the software industry.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#558

Post by AnthonyMouse »

whynotminot wrote: post #230
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…

Isn’t this kind of thing the story of tech though? Languages like Python and Java come around, and old-school C engineers grouse that the kids these days don’t really understand how things work, because they’re not managing memory. Modern web-dev comes around and now the old Java hands are annoyed that these new kids are just slamming NPM packages together and polyfills everywhere and no one understands Real Software…

> Modern web-dev comes around and now the old Java hands are annoyed that these new kids are just slamming NPM packages together and polyfills everywhere and no one understands Real Software Design.

The real issue here is that a lot of the modern tech stacks are crap, but won for other reasons, e.g. JavaScript is a terrible language but became popular because it was the only one available in browsers. Then you got a lot of people who knew JavaScript so they started putting it in places outside the browser because they didn't want to learn another language.

You get a similar story with Python. It's essentially a scripting language and poorly suited to large projects, but sometimes large projects start out as small ones, or people (especially e.g. mathematicians in machine learning) choose a language for their initial small projects and then lean on it again because it's what they know even when the project size exceeds what the language is suitable for.

To slay these beasts we need to get languages that are actually good in general but also good at the things that cause languages to become popular, e.g. to get something better than JavaScript to be able to run in browsers, and to make languages with good support for large projects to be easier to use for novices and small ones, so people don't keep starting out in a place they don't want to end up.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#559

Post by insane_dreamer »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #239
insane_dreamer wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It'll happen gradually over time, with more pressure on programmers to "get more done". I think it's useful to look at what has already happened at another, much smaller profession -- translators -- as a precursor to what will happen with programmers. 1. translation software does a mediocre job, barely useful as a tool; all jobs are safe 2. translation software does a decent job, now expected to be used as time-savin…

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.

I’ve done freelance translating (not my day job) for 20 years. What you describe is true for certain types of specialized translations, particularly anything that is literary in nature. But that is a very small segment. The vast majority of translation work is commercial in nature and for that companies don’t care whether a human or machine did it.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#560

Post by NicuCalcea »

selfmodruntime wrote: post #519
NicuCalcea wrote: post #511

Workers in various industries have pled for their jobs and programmers said "no, my code can replace you". Now that automation is coming for them, it's suddenly "the dumbest mistake". Tech has "disrupted" many industries, leaving some better, but many worse. Now that "disruption" is pointed inwards. Programmers will have to adapt to the new market conditions like everyone else. There will either be fewer jobs to go a…

The real funny thing is that now we‘re replacers and the replaced at the same time. We plead to ourselves. The wings have begun melting and nothing will stop it. Finally, Icarus has flown too close to the sun.

Ultimately, it's executives and shareholders who make the decisions, and they will always be able to pay some programmers enough to replace the other ones. I don't think of developers as having a lot of professional or class solidarity.
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