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Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

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Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#801

Post by raducu »

unyttigfjelltol wrote: post #419
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…

> 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. The article is right in a zoomed-in view (fundamental skills will be rare and essential), but in the big picture the critique in the comment is better (folks rarely start on nand gates). Programmers of the future will have less need to know code syntax the same way c…

> The article is right in a zoomed-in view.

First of all, I think the problems of the industry were long overdue. It started with Twitter and it proved it can be done. AI just made it easier psychologically because it's much easier to explore and modify existing code and not freak out "omg, omg, omg, we've lost this guy and ony he understands the code and we're so lost without him". AI just removes the incentives to hoard talent.

I also think of excel/spreadsheets and how it did in fact change accounting industry forever. Every claim the author makes about software developers could have been made about accounting after the advent of electronic spreadsheets.

I don't want to even get started on the huge waste and politics in the industry. I'm on the 3rd re-write of a simple task that removes metrics in Grafana which saves the team maybe 50$ monthly. If the team was cut in half, I'm sure we'd simply not do half the bullshit "improvements" we do.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#802

Post by gloosx »

pyrale wrote: post #11

We have fired all our programmers. However, the AI is hard to work with, it expects specific wording in order to program our code as expected. We have hired people with expertise in the specific language needed to transmit our specifications to the AI with more precision.

First Turing-complete prompt language when?

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#803

Post by Jean-Papoulos »

y-c-o-m-b wrote: post #617
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…

> The second assumption is also wrong, intelligent companies will not layoff en masse to use AI only, they will most likely slow hiring devs because their existing enhanced devs using AI will suffice enough to their coding related needs 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 r…

Companies that do not adopt AI whereas their competitors do will eventually (slowly) fall behind.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#804

Post by Draiken »

marcosdumay wrote: post #566
Draiken wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes banks employ less people. In my country there are now account managers handling hundreds of clients virtually. Most of the local managers got fired. I find it easy to say from our privileged position that "tech might replace workers but it'll be fine". Even if all the replaced people aren't unemployed, salaries go down and standards of living for them fall off a cliff. Tech innovation destroys lives in our curren…

> Even if all the replaced people aren't unemployed, salaries go down and standards of living for them fall off a cliff. Salaries of the remaining people tend to go up when that happens. And costs tend to go down for the general public. Owners are actually supposed to only see a temporary benefit during the change, and then go back to what they had before. If that's not how things are happening around you¹, consult w…

I'm sorry but I have to call BS.

>Salaries of the remaining people tend to go up when that happens.

You're telling me with a straight face that after a company replaces part of its workforce with tech/automation, salaries go up? Really? Please show me some data on that because every single graph I've ever seen of salaries must be wrong then. We've had an enormous amount of innovation and breakthroughs in the last decades, but weirdly enough all salaries remain stagnated. If this is true, they should be going up constantly every time we offshore some work or get more efficient technology.

The company can have 50000% growth and salaries will NOT go up. They basically never go up unless the companies want to retain an employee that's at risk of leaving and the replacement cost is high.

The objective of a company is to give money to its owners, nothing else. Salaries are viewed as a cost, so they will never willingly increase their costs unless it's absolutely necessary.

> And costs tend to go down for the general public.

Assuming there aren't monopolies involved and it's a commodity, yes, that sometimes happens. If there's any monopoly involved, unfortunately companies will simply pocket the difference.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#805

Post by dimmuborgir »

dyauspitr wrote: post #785
groos wrote: post #684

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…

What do you mean by see how that went? The corps are at the point now where they stopped using consultancies and instead have their own company divisions in India where they still pay them 1/10th. If anything it’s a more dire situation.

Yup, they are called GCCs (Global Capability Centers).

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#806

Post by bradley13 »

There is a lot of demand for crap code (quick'n'dirty apps, websites, web services, etc.). Look at the apps for a lot of IoT devices: it's mostly boilerplate, kinda-sorta works, and obviously has been produced by programmers of...limited skill.

AI may well be able to take over a lot of that coding, or at least increase the productivity of the semi-competent (thus reducing the number of such jobs available).

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#807

Post by croes »

blah2244 wrote: post #479
croes wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

Just because it’s deployed doesn’t mean it’s working.

https://www.autoevolution.com/news/viral-tesla-cybertruck-cr...

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#808

Post by croes »

wincy wrote: post #750
croes wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Deep Research is only available for Pro subscribers, I know only the benefits of the Plus subscription models and it’s pretty underwhelming.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#809

Post by robertlagrant »

seletskiy wrote: post #72

I would say that AI is not to blame here. It just accelerated existing process, but didn't initiate it. We (as a society) started to value quantity over quality some time ago, and, apparently, no-one care enough to change it. Why tighten the bolts on the airplane's door yourself if you can just outsource it somewhere cheaper (see Boeing crisis)? Why design and test hundreds of physical and easy-to-use knobs in the ca…

> Why tighten the bolts on the airplane's door yourself if you can just outsource it somewhere cheaper (see Boeing crisis)?

This is just an overreach of a process that means that airplane flights aren't $1m+. Aircraft issues have plummeted, if you'll excuse the expression, while flight numbers have soared. You've got to have noticed that.

Re: Firing programmers for AI is a mistake

#810

Post by gorjusborg »

kmoser wrote: post #459
gorjusborg wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think we're gonna need more SW devs, not fewer Code is a liability. What we really care about is the outcome, not the code. These AI tools are great at generating code, but are they good at maintaining the generated code? Not from what I've seen. So there's a good chance we'll see people using tools to generate a ton of instant legacy code (because nobody in house has ever understood it) which, if it hits product…

We will see both: lots of poor code, lots of neutral code (LLMs cranking out reasonably well written boilerplate), and even some improved code (by devs who use LLMs to ferret out inefficiencies and bugs in their existing, human-written codebase). This is no different from what we see with any tool or language: the results are highly dependent on the experience and skills of the operator.

You've missed my core point if you think those isn't different. Before AI there was always someone who understood the code/system.

In the a world where people are having machines build the entire system, there is potentially no human that has ever understood it. Now, we are talking about a yet unseen future; I have yet to see a real world system that did not have a human driving the design. But, maintaining a system that nobody has ever understood could be ultra-hardmode.

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