Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

defragzone.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

681–690 of 886 posts

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#681

Post by arscan »

Aperocky wrote: post #553
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.

Presumably it is going to be easier for increasingly smaller and smaller teams to make highly polished, scalable and stable products that will be appealing and addictive and resonate more with their users than whatever Meta can come up with. I suspect that there will be many, many more viable shots taken at Meta’s incumbent positions than have been taken historically because development costs associated with doing so will simply be so much lower. Meta used to need thousands of talented and expensive software engineers. They are saying they don’t anymore. Well, that means their competitors don’t either, which lowers the bar for competition.

I get that it wasn’t just the vast army of talented engineers they kept on staff that formed a moat. But it certainly helped, otherwise they wouldn’t have paid so much to have them on staff.

Point taken though, Meta has a lot more going for it than a simple technological advantage.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#682

Post by norseboar »

Is there actually an epidemic of firing programmers for AI? Based on the companies/people I know, I wouldn't have thought so.

I've heard of many companies encouraging their engineers to use LLM-backed tools like Cursor or just Copilot, a (small!) number that have made these kinds of tools mandatory (what "mandatory" means is unclear), and many companies laying people off because money is tight.

But I haven't heard of anybody who was laid off b/c the other engineers were so much more productive w/ AI that they decided to downsize the team, let alone replace a team entirely.

Is this just my bubble? Mostly Bay Area companies, mostly in the small-to-mid range w/ a couple FAANG.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#683

Post by fuzzzerd »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #497
pishpash wrote: post #457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That already happens. Maps directs you to odd nonsense detours somewhat frequently now, that you get better results by overriding the machine. It's going down the way of web search.

> It's going down the way of web search. This is an interesting idea. There's an obvious force directing search to get worse, which is the adversarial desire of certain people to be found. But no such force exists for directions. Why would they be getting worse?

Probably my cynicism but its the more stores you drive past the more likely you are to stop off and buy something.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#684

Post by groos »

A good analogy from not-so-distant past is the outsourcing wave that swept the tech industry. Shareholders everywhere were salivating at the money they would make by hiring programmers in India at 1/10 the cost while keeping their profits. Those of us who have been in the industry a while all saw how that went. I think this new wave wave will go roughly similarly. Eventually, companies will realize that to keep their edge, they need humans with creativity while "AI" will be one more tool in the bag. In the meantime, a lot of hurt will happen due to greed.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#685

Post by delichon »

I've been programming full time with an LLM in an IDE for the last two weeks, and it's a game changer for me at the end of my career. I'm in future shock. I suddenly can barely live without it.

But I'm not fearful for my job, yet. It's amazingly better, and much worse than a junior dev. There are certain instructions, however simple, that just do not penetrate. It gets certain things right 98% of the time, which make me stop looking for the other 2% of the time where it absolutely sabotages the code with breaking changes. It is utterly without hesitation in defeating the entire purpose of the application in order to simplify a line of code. And yet, it can do so much simple stuff so fast and well, and it can be so informative about ridiculously obscure critical details.

I have most of those faults too, just fewer enough to be worth my paycheck for a few more AI generations.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#686

Post by scotty79 »

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…

> We know what it is good at and what it's not.

We know what it's good at today. And pretty sure it won't be any worse at it in the future. And 5 years ago state of the art was basically output of Markov Chain. In 5 years we might be at another place entirely.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#687

Post by klik99 »

Honestly show junior programmers a little more respect. It's such an old person thing to say they're going to all become prompt engineers or similar. Why does the old always look at the young and claim they're all pulled by the tides of the zeitgeist and not thinking human beings who have their own opinions about stuff. Many smart people have a contrarian streak and won't just dive into AI tools wholesale. Honestly a lot of the comments here are at the level of critique as those facebook memes of crowd of people with iphones for faces.

Most people have ALWAYS taken the easy road and don't become the best programmers. AI is just the latest tool for lazier people or people who tend towards laziness. We will continue to have new good programmers, and the number of good programmers will continue to be not enough. None of that is not caused by AI. I'm far from an AI advocate, but it will, someday, make the most boring parts of programming less tedious and be able to put "glue" kind of code in non-professional hands.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#688

Post by QuantumGood »

delichon wrote: post #685

I've been programming full time with an LLM in an IDE for the last two weeks, and it's a game changer for me at the end of my career. I'm in future shock. I suddenly can barely live without it. But I'm not fearful for my job, yet. It's amazingly better, and much worse than a junior dev. There are certain instructions, however simple, that just do not penetrate. It gets certain things right 98% of the time, which make…

"utterly without hesitation in defeating the entire purpose". So many examples, ever-more detailed prompts attempted as a solution. The more I try, the more "AI" seems to be only workable as "experienced prompt engineer with an AI stack".

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#689

Post by cozzyd »

epcoa wrote: post #564
cozzyd wrote: post #537

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try asking your GPS for the Western blue line stop on the Chicago L. (There are two of them and it will randomly pick one)

What is “your GPS” meant here. With Google Maps and Apple Maps it consistently picks the closest one (this being within minutes to both but much closer to one), which seems reasonable. Maybe not ideal as when either of these apps will bring up a disambiguation for a super market chain or similar, but I’m not witnessing randomness.

Perhaps they have improved their heuristic for this one, though perhaps it was actually Uber/Lyft that randomly picks one when given as a destination...

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#690

Post by Kerrick »

askonomm wrote: post #630
hombre_fatal wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Difference here being that you actually learned the information about Ruby on Rails, whereas the modern programmer doesn't learn anything. They are but a clipboard-like vessel that passes information from an LLM onto a text editor, rarely ever actually reading and understanding the code. And if something doesn't work, they don't debug the code, they debug the LLM for not getting it right. The actual knowledge here ne…

Difference here being that you actually learned the information about computers, whereas the modern programmer doesn't learn anything. They are but a typist-like vessel that passes information from an architect onto a text editor, rarely ever actually reading and understanding the compiled instructions. And if something doesn't work, they don't debug the machine code, they complain about the compiler for not getting it right. The actual knowledge here never gets stored in the brain, making any future learning or evolving impossible.

I've had to work with developers that are over dependent on high-level languages. One didn't even know how to trace execution in machine code; they had to ask a debugger. Almost as if the person is a zombie or something. It's scary to witness. And as soon as you explain them to explain their memory segmentation strategy - dead silence. They can't, because they never actually _thought_.

Post reply on HN