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Why is everyone trying to replace Software Engineers?

toddle.dev

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Re: Why is everyone trying to replace Software Engineers?

#5
They aren't trying to replace us in earnest, yet. They are using the threat to beat down wages, and to more generally tilt the power balance further in favor of ~capital~ employers.

"Replacement" is smoke and mirrors at this point; anyone who seriously tries it will quickly fail, with today's technology.

Re: Why is everyone trying to replace Software Engineers?

#6
Because:

1) We're expensive (at least for Poland, I can aim for ~6-8k PLN monthly after few years of experience. Other, even civil/mech engineers will have around 4-6k monthly with similar experience) [edit: and minimal wage is 3.5k after taxes]

2) It appears to be replaceable (you can replace us with LLMs to an extent, you can't do that with other jobs)

Re: Why is everyone trying to replace Software Engineers?

#9

we are expensive to employ

I think it's mostly a lack of ideas.

If I sold you a device for $1 and it minted $5 using $2 of electricity then you'd buy absolutely as many as you could as fast as you can.

However, if the devices stopped working when you had 100 of them you'd buy exactly 100 and if somebody made ones that only needed 50 cents of electricity you'd be looking to switch to those ones.

A company that is looking to downsize it's employee count is saying we are out of growth ideas and we're just going to do the same thing but more efficiently. Nothing really wrong with this except then your stock price shouldn't be like 100 P/E since there's no growth.

Re: Why is everyone trying to replace Software Engineers?

#10
From 2011: "Don’t call yourself a programmer: “Programmer” sounds like “anomalously high-cost peon who types some mumbo-jumbo into some other mumbo-jumbo.” If you call yourself a programmer, someone is already working on a way to get you fired. You know Salesforce, widely perceived among engineers to be a Software as a Services company? Their motto and sales point is “No Software”, which conveys to their actual customers “You know those programmers you have working on your internal systems? If you used Salesforce, you could fire half of them and pocket part of the difference in your bonus.”" [0]

0 - https://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/10/28/dont-call-yourself-a-pr...

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