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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

#741

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> After 20 years in tech, I can't think of a single company I've worked for/with that would fit the profile of an "intelligent" company. All of them make poor and irrational decisions regularly. I think you over-estimate the intelligence of leadership whilst simultaneously under-estimating their greed and eventual ability to self-destruct. Says nothing about companies and everything about you > you also over-estimate…

I'm happy you've only worked for altruistic, not-for-profit minded companies that care about employee growth and takes pride in their tach stack above all else. I have not had as fortunate an experience. >I expect that once many begin to do this, there will be some who do use it for productivity and they will set the bar. Yeah, probably. I've had companies so pinpointed on "velocoity" instead of quality. I imagine th…

> I'm happy you've only worked for altruistic, not-for-profit minded companies that care about employee growth and takes pride in their tach stack above all else. I have not had as fortunate an experience.

No one is making this claim.

My comment was a bit terse and provocative, rude, deserves the downvotes tbh. I'll take them.

To elaborate ~ I've got a lot of empathy for the poster I was originally replying to. I've fallen into that way of thinking before, and it sure is comfortable. Of course, companies and their leadership make poor and irrational decisions. Often, however, it's easy to perceive their decisions as poor and irrational when you simply don't have the context they do. "Why would they x ?? if only y!!" but, you know, there may well be a good reason why that you aren't aware of, they may have different goals to you (which may well be selfish! and that doesn't make them irrational or anything). Feels similar to programmers hating when people say "can't you 'just' x" - well yes, but actually there's a mountain of additional considerations behind the scene that the person spouting "just" hasn't considered.

Is leadership unintelligent, or displaying poor/irrational decision making, if the company self destructs? Perhaps. But quite possibly not. They probably got a whole lot out of it. Different priorities.

Consider that leadership may label a developer unintelligent if that dev doesn't always consider how to drive shareholder value "gee they're so focused on increasing their salary not on business value". Well actually the dev is quite smart, from their own perspective. Same thing.

And if every company you've ever worked for truly has poor leadership then, yeah, it's probably worth reassessing how you interview. Do you need to dig deeper into the business? Do you just not have the market value to negotiate landing a job at a company with intelligent leadership?

So, two broad perspectives: either the poster has a challenge with perception, or they are poor at picking companies. Or perhaps the companies truly do have poor leadership but I think that unlikely. Hence it comes back to the individual.

@y-c-o-m-b sorry for being a bit rude.

Cheers for reading

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#742
post #736

I think anyone who is afraid of AI destroying our field just has to look at the history of DevOps. That was a massive shift in systems engineering and how production is maintained. It changed how people did their jobs, required people to learn new skills, and leaders to change how they thought about the business. AI is going to change a lot about software, but AI code tools are coming for SWEs the way Kubernetes came…

If the job of SWEs after AI is to edit yaml, json, yaml templates, and yaml-templates-in-yaml-templates all day long, while waiting for ArgoCD, I quit.

SWEs do something other than this??! :)

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#743
post #95

For each programmer who actually spends their time on complex design work or fixing difficult bugs, there are many more doing what amounts to clerical work. Adding a new form here, fiddling with a layout there. It is the latter class who are in real danger.

But the question is, are we there yet? I have yet to hear of an AI bot who can eat up a requirement and add said new form in the right place, or fiddle with a layout. Do you know any? So all those big promises you read right now are outright lies. When will we reach that point? I don't do gambling. But we are not there, regardless what the salespeople or fancy journalists might be claiming all day long.

We're at a point where companies have figured out that they can hire someone on a clerical wage to prompt an AI to do this grunt work, rather than a CS grad on $100k a year.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#744
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…

A breakthrough is exactly what everyone is banking on. OpenAI was surprised by GPT3, they were just dumping data into an LLM and ended up with something that was way better than they expected.

Everyone is hoping (probably delusional) that bigger and more impressive breakthroughs will keep leaping up if we just keep tweaking the models and increasing the size of the data sets.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#745

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.

In fairness, creating a universe is pretty useful.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#746

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…

There are definitely a fair few companies laying off programmers at the moment, though few of the ones I've seen blamed it on AI (usually more either overhiring, the pandemic ending and usage going down, or someone thinking they can outsource everything to save money). Wouldn't be surprised if a few tried to say it was because of AI when it was really for some other reason though.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#747
post #643

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People somehow have expectations that are both too high and too low at the same time. They expect (demand) current language models completely replace a human engineer in any field without making mistakes (this is obviously way too optimistic) while at the same time they are ignoring how rapid the progress has been and how much these models can now do that seemed impossible just 2 years ago, delivering huge value when…

ChatGPT 4 was released 2 years ago. Personally I don't think things have moved on significantly since then.

Really now. I think that deserves a bit more explaination, given the cost per token has dropped by several orders of magnitude, we have seen large changes on all benchmarks (including entirely new capabilities), multimodality is now a fact since 4o, test time compute with reasoning models is making big strides since o1.... It seems on the surface a lot is happening. In fact, I wanted to share one of the benchmark overviews, but none include ChatGPT 4 anymore since it is totally not competitive anymore..

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#748

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tend to agree with you. The general pattern behind "x tool came along that made work easier" isn't to fire a bunch of folks, its to make the people that are there work whatever increment of ease of work more. ie, if the tool cuts work in half, you'd be expected to do 2x more work. Automation and tools almost never "makes our lives easier", it just removes some of the lower value added work. It would be nice to live…

> but our overlords won't let that happen If you have a job, working for a boss, you're trading your time for money. If you're a contractor and negotiate being paid by the project, you're being paid for results. Trading your time for money is the underlying contract. That's the fundamental nature of a job working for somebody else. You can escape that rat race if you want to. Someone I know builds websites for client…

Interesting. So it sounds like I need to get into the market and charge half as much and steal all of his customers.

These things eventually always end up as a Red Queen’s race, where you have to run as fast as you can to stay in the same place.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#749

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ChatGPT 4 was released 2 years ago. Personally I don't think things have moved on significantly since then.

Exactly. I have been waiting for gpt5 to see the delta, but after gpt4 things seemed to have stalled.

This seems like a bizarre claim on the surface, see also my other message above.

https://epoch.ai/data/ai-benchmarking-dashboard

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#750
post #327

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.

Really? Because I’m using ChatGPT Deep Research and it feels revolutionary in the quality of the data it’s able to output.
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