Nobody really cared when factory jobs were replaced, or food processing, or farming, or any number of waves of "menial", so called "low skill" labor jobs.
There was an arrogance that those people deserved it because they couldn't upgrade themselves.
Nobody will feel sorry for software devs, who have been privileged enough to have had high respect and pay for quite a long time.
İt may be sad but it's just the case that the only thing different this time is the fact that's its "knowledge work" that's being replaced, and the smart people now find themselves in the position where the common man has found themselves time and time again.
İ do feel sorry for devs as overall they are quite a good group of people,
As opposed to bankers and brokers and lawyers who I personally am praying they get replaces asap, unfortunately the only thing protecting them at the moment are the regulatory moats.
People will simple have to find some new work, it sucks but some of us have been dealing with not being wanted by corpo-world our whole lives despite our skills, and we are still here.
You will all be fine.
Much love to all who are going through this.
Software engineers are just the first professions on the frontline. So much "work" is repetitive and things like accounting and compliance are often for 60-80% "tick the box" jobs. Legal is another example that comes to mind, I've had Fable 5.1 review contracts before sending it to our in-house lawyer and the quality is easily 85-90% but with a turnaround time of minutes instead of weeks.
AI will have a massive impact, engineers might be the canary in the coalmine but no doubt other profession will follow soon.
To end in a bright note, software architecture and cyber security are going to be growing massively.
> So much "work" is repetitive and things like accounting and compliance are often for 60-80% "tick the box" jobs.
The repetitive nature of these jobs is a red herring, because people are not paid for ticking boxes. They are paid for being held accountable for the implications of the checks not being done.
For example, some roles are restricted to professional engineers and involve basically going to places, doing checks, and ticking boxes in a form. Other roles require a far greater specialization and complexity, but they don't require a professional engineer. Why? Because if your game server crashes no one dies, whereas if an office building falls down them the guys checking boxes will find themselves in a courtroom.
Software has always been a different kind of creative trade where if you stopped learning and embracing the trends you would get crushed sooner or later - if you just wanted decent paychecks until the end of time and protection by the sheer weight of your academic degree and years of "experience" then software development wasn't the best path forward.
But it often payed better than entry engineering or math jobs therefore many switched to software - although they would have been almost certainly happier staying a profession not so dependent on adapting yearly trends to this extreme.
This was the first major lesson i got taught almost 20 years ago here. It was also around that time where i realized most software professionals never belonged in this creative trade camp but still got a lifelong career out of being more or less disconnected with the trends.
They were doing year for year the almost same tasks and collecting paychecks. Which is totally fine as long as there was more demand for writing code than qualified professionals hirable. The trope of ageism in software and silicon valley is as old as hacker news. But there was still some touch of truth to it - you wanted the best developers who never stopped learning, knew that code isn't the goal and didn't think their years of experience are worth anything three years from now on in a profession that's about trends solving business needs and less about formal engineering.
> Nobody really cared when factory jobs were replaced, or food processing, or farming, or any number of waves of "menial", so called "low skill" labor jobs.
Not only did a lot of people care, it was the basis for all of the modern labor organizing starting in the late 19th century.
Like your entire post is 100% incorrect and clearly ignorant of the history of organized labor or class consciousness
Edit: It’s not anyone’s fault they are ignorant to this stuff because the amount of anti-labor propaganda is unbelievably pervasive. However it does prevent effective organizing if nobody thinks that there is actual process to organize around, so it just never happens.
The Haymarket affair was a very very long time ago in what was at the time a provincial mid power nation, and despite being one of the buzzword events taught in USA high school history, I would say nobody much remembers or cares anything about it today outside of historian or activist circles where it's seen as some sort of "win".
Labor rights have been polarized through many revolutions and political upheavals in the time since then and yet...all those jobs are still gone and worldwide labor conditions in most places outside of a few small countries still aren't great for working people.
İ don't see how this is an anti labor message, quite the opposite. İ wish people would respect themselves enough to stand up for better conditions, but this starts not with bombs and anarchistic rioting like the Haymarket affair, which was very controversial in other ways,
But by simply saying "no" to abuse.
Unfortunately when your hungry or scared enough you will say yes to just about everything, and the powerful know this very well.
Regimes that killed millions upon millions of people using the banner of "labor" is not polarizing? Political populist parties pandering to the desperate to gain power neither?
I actually have an advanced degree in and personal infatuation with history, so I would welcome proper debate on historical issues.
But hand wavy "your just wrong bro cause propaganda" just isn't discussion.
You're not helping your case by being arrogant. FWIW the person you're discussing with sounds a bit more balanced in their opinions. I am open to changing my mind, but refusing to elaborate because it's a "waste of your time" means conceding your case.
What precisely is arrogant about refusing to give somebody a history lesson about the labor movement when all of the information necessary is available and trivial easy to get?
I have no case to make here other than the one I’ve made: the representation of the labor movement that was made is completely incorrect
This is what I don't get. I've spent my whole live using technology to automate work in some form or the other. I've reached for any/every tool that made that processes easier, that made it easier to build and maintain software. Now comes along a tool that can automate a ton of the things I couldn't automate, or it has the "time" to automate the things I never could get around to, it can write code consistently better than I can and faster, it writes the tests I hated writing, it "remembers" to do more checks - more consistently, it runs 10 commands to diagnose an issue while I'll still poking around on the box. It lets me finally tackle tech debt that was _never going to get done_ (I cannot stress this enough).
I definitely had to leave my job after realizing what was happening to the company and to my brain on LLMs. Constantly using AI is not healthy and there’s no out except to leave.
At my employer, every incentive, every metric, every conversation, was aligned behind using AI. Every team performance meeting pulled up graphs on whether velocity was increasing beyond last quarter’s metrics, which should be going up because of AI. Choosing not to use it inevitably means getting let go since I’d be working at slower speeds. But as team lead this was already happening because all my time was spent reviewing slop and I had no time to produce my own code, because the entire team was being reckless with their submissions. I was going at 1/3 the speed of everyone else trying to keep things coherent. My manager preferred to fix forward rather than address my concerns that we were producing tech debt at 10x speeds, so none of my comments were addressed. As soon as our prototype was done, the other most senior engineer and I pleaded that we rewrite it from scratch before getting it to prod, but that of course would have been a two month setback. By now, all of upper management were ending every quarterly meeting with “If you don’t like AI, then leave now”.
I haven’t looked back, and I don’t think it will go well for them.
I think the capital vs labor structure here obscures the most interesting dynamics going on. I mean, sure there are a bunch of greedy execs that would love to reduce head count and are pretty out of touch so that they have a high degree of not really knowing or caring about the people on the front lines while also not really understanding what they do or if it even can be replaced. This is the same story since the dawn of the industrial revolution, and probably well before that.
But one of the things I find interesting at the ground level is that AI can be incredibly empowering to individuals on the front lines, because suddenly one person can run down code, data, logs, and other tedious scope to cut through layers of bureaucracy that served no real purpose except to manage human bandwidth constraints. Now obviously this is not a panacea, it doesn't work everywhere, can be disruptive, lead to new ambiguities, etc. It's too early to see how it will actually pan out once model capabilities and human ways of working stabilize, and I'm sympathetic to the anxiety this produces. But my point is, bad management notwithstanding, modern AI tends to be most empowering to software engineers and other detail-oriented people, and I don't see this changing any time soon.
> I keep coming across videos of people talking about burning out
I also keep coming across videos of people talking about quitting Warhammer 40k. This doesn't mean there's a crisis, as much as a self-reinforcing pattern of interest.
My employer retains thousands of devs. I have a handful of software developer friends outside of work. These people are all happy (not to the same degree or the same usage patterns ofc) with the improvements to quality and process that AI has actively sourced or helped produce.
I don't understand where all these AI burnouts are coming from, but it's a minority. It's likely less than ~30% efficiency haircut for the industry - so there's likely to be no additional impact if you're unhappy.
This is far from the implication that all Software Developers are not okay.
Reading the stories, I’m happy to be working at a place where management is AI-skeptical. They do allow developers to use LLMs, but the token budget is $5.
$5 as in 5 dollars? I'm genuinely curious, how did they get to that number? I could understand 20 since that's the price of the cheapest AI subscriptions but 5 seems arbitrary and unusable.
Completely arbitrary. The "AI Governance" team that onboarded our department told me that we could actually make the $5 whatever we wanted so long as our SVP approves it. He has not shown any eagerness to do so.
We're not tiny (6000 employees or thereabout) and we do software as our primary business, so it's not like we're unfamiliar with the technology. I think we just have conservative management.
After 40 years in development I have never known a time like this. Half of my colleagues seem to be in denial, the other half seem to be slowly cracking up. The future is going to be very different, very soon.
It's depressing. Those in denial are really difficult to work with now.. they have a hard time adapting to such fundamental changes but their denial leads to sabotaging the adaption efforts of the rest. The other half like you mentioned is only slowly cracking up like still trying to grasp that this ai thing isn't some new tool you will have mastered in a few days. There are right now only very few people who have mastered state of the art ai development and they would like to work with only those also in this camp because it's so depressing to watch the majority of developers wrestling to find their spot in this new world.
Now the impostors use AI and pretend they are geniuses. That will work, for a while. But I have seen two cases up close now where a relatively stable code base was wrecked inside of 6 months by juniors posing as seniors. In one of these the actual seniors left and now the company has a bit of a problem. I've declined to help fix it, I suggested they re-engage with the people that left, double their salaries and allow them to roll back to when things were still stable but they're not having it, so I don't think it is going to end well for them. You can use AI responsibly, and it will definitely help with some tasks and as long as you are able to contain what gets produced and pace it to the speed at which you can review. But there is a cadre of people that are 'all in' on this, they only see velocity, they don't see the approaching wall. Impact is a given.
It’s like trying to create a new type of imposter syndrome, but instead of referring to complex data structures and architectures, it’s the most effective esoteric inactions to chant at the Jira ticket resolving machine.
What is the current “state of the art” of AI development? Aside from running as many agents as possible, the models seem to have gotten to a place where iterative, straight-forward prompting works pretty well. SDD frameworks and such might have helped at one point but they seem like document bloat noise now.
care to elaborate a bit on this? how exactly does being a skeptic "sabotage" a team, are you saying that if teams are not becoming 10000000000X engineers it's entirely the fault of the one skeptic in the room?
What i observe here from the 3rd world country (technically European Union, but everything outside of the Valley is 3rd world when it comes to coding) is by far not as traumatic.
People who used to do coding jobs in order to extract the money from Americans, just switched to different kinds of online scams, which they believed coding to be simply one of, perhaps legitimately so.
So far, it seems like outside of just being a SWE, the value derived from AI coding has been either through influencing, scamming, or devaluing existing things.
For any given product, the instant it is made (using AI or no) and distributed, its value drops to practically zero. It can be remade and modified infinitely at practically zero cost.
Wouldn’t that just be a beautiful outcome, LLMs are small enough and the hardware is cheap enough that everyone has their own, large software orgs are rendered obsolete by their own creations… perfect.
Nobody really cared when factory jobs were replaced, or food processing, or farming, or any number of waves of "menial", so called "low skill" labor jobs. There was an arrogance that those people deserved it because they couldn't upgrade themselves. Nobody will feel sorry for software devs, who have been privileged enough to have had high respect and pay for quite a long time. İt may be sad but it's just the case that the only thing different this time is the fact that's its "knowledge work" that's being replaced, and the smart people now find themselves in the position where the common man has found themselves time and time again. İ do feel sorry for devs as overall they are quite a good group of people, As opposed to bankers and brokers and lawyers who I personally am praying they get replaces asap, unfortunately the only thing protecting them at the moment are the regulatory moats.
People will simple have to find some new work, it sucks but some of us have been dealing with not being wanted by corpo-world our whole lives despite our skills, and we are still here. You will all be fine. Much love to all who are going through this.
Thank you! I have dutifully updated my neural pathways to reflect the fact that nothing, absolutely nothing can be done here!
I shall continue my training watching Karpathy videos and reading Timothy Gowers' blog.
Software engineers are just the first professions on the frontline. So much "work" is repetitive and things like accounting and compliance are often for 60-80% "tick the box" jobs. Legal is another example that comes to mind, I've had Fable 5.1 review contracts before sending it to our in-house lawyer and the quality is easily 85-90% but with a turnaround time of minutes instead of weeks.
AI will have a massive impact, engineers might be the canary in the coalmine but no doubt other profession will follow soon.
To end in a bright note, software architecture and cyber security are going to be growing massively.
> So much "work" is repetitive and things like accounting and compliance are often for 60-80% "tick the box" jobs.
The repetitive nature of these jobs is a red herring, because people are not paid for ticking boxes. They are paid for being held accountable for the implications of the checks not being done.
For example, some roles are restricted to professional engineers and involve basically going to places, doing checks, and ticking boxes in a form. Other roles require a far greater specialization and complexity, but they don't require a professional engineer. Why? Because if your game server crashes no one dies, whereas if an office building falls down them the guys checking boxes will find themselves in a courtroom.
> Nobody will feel sorry for software devs
Software has always been a different kind of creative trade where if you stopped learning and embracing the trends you would get crushed sooner or later - if you just wanted decent paychecks until the end of time and protection by the sheer weight of your academic degree and years of "experience" then software development wasn't the best path forward.
But it often payed better than entry engineering or math jobs therefore many switched to software - although they would have been almost certainly happier staying a profession not so dependent on adapting yearly trends to this extreme. This was the first major lesson i got taught almost 20 years ago here. It was also around that time where i realized most software professionals never belonged in this creative trade camp but still got a lifelong career out of being more or less disconnected with the trends.
They were doing year for year the almost same tasks and collecting paychecks. Which is totally fine as long as there was more demand for writing code than qualified professionals hirable. The trope of ageism in software and silicon valley is as old as hacker news. But there was still some touch of truth to it - you wanted the best developers who never stopped learning, knew that code isn't the goal and didn't think their years of experience are worth anything three years from now on in a profession that's about trends solving business needs and less about formal engineering.
> Nobody really cared when factory jobs were replaced, or food processing, or farming, or any number of waves of "menial", so called "low skill" labor jobs.
Not only did a lot of people care, it was the basis for all of the modern labor organizing starting in the late 19th century.
Start here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haymarket_affair
Like your entire post is 100% incorrect and clearly ignorant of the history of organized labor or class consciousness
Edit: It’s not anyone’s fault they are ignorant to this stuff because the amount of anti-labor propaganda is unbelievably pervasive. However it does prevent effective organizing if nobody thinks that there is actual process to organize around, so it just never happens.
The Haymarket affair was a very very long time ago in what was at the time a provincial mid power nation, and despite being one of the buzzword events taught in USA high school history, I would say nobody much remembers or cares anything about it today outside of historian or activist circles where it's seen as some sort of "win".
Labor rights have been polarized through many revolutions and political upheavals in the time since then and yet...all those jobs are still gone and worldwide labor conditions in most places outside of a few small countries still aren't great for working people.
İ don't see how this is an anti labor message, quite the opposite. İ wish people would respect themselves enough to stand up for better conditions, but this starts not with bombs and anarchistic rioting like the Haymarket affair, which was very controversial in other ways, But by simply saying "no" to abuse. Unfortunately when your hungry or scared enough you will say yes to just about everything, and the powerful know this very well.
> Labor rights have been polarized through many revolutions and political upheavals in the time since
Again just totally incorrect and completely ignorant of the history of labor
But go ahead and go off on whatever you think is correct and continue to ignore the issue and then be confused about why the world is in the state
The reason propaganda is so pervasive is because it works and clearly so.
Regimes that killed millions upon millions of people using the banner of "labor" is not polarizing? Political populist parties pandering to the desperate to gain power neither?
I actually have an advanced degree in and personal infatuation with history, so I would welcome proper debate on historical issues. But hand wavy "your just wrong bro cause propaganda" just isn't discussion.
I’m not actually trying to debate you because it would be a waste of my time.
My goal is so that other readers don’t take your statements seriously at all
You're not helping your case by being arrogant. FWIW the person you're discussing with sounds a bit more balanced in their opinions. I am open to changing my mind, but refusing to elaborate because it's a "waste of your time" means conceding your case.
What precisely is arrogant about refusing to give somebody a history lesson about the labor movement when all of the information necessary is available and trivial easy to get?
I have no case to make here other than the one I’ve made: the representation of the labor movement that was made is completely incorrect
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I’m fine. I’ve made a career out of automating work previously done by people. I’ve no right to complain now I’m less of a bottleneck in the process.
This is what I don't get. I've spent my whole live using technology to automate work in some form or the other. I've reached for any/every tool that made that processes easier, that made it easier to build and maintain software. Now comes along a tool that can automate a ton of the things I couldn't automate, or it has the "time" to automate the things I never could get around to, it can write code consistently better than I can and faster, it writes the tests I hated writing, it "remembers" to do more checks - more consistently, it runs 10 commands to diagnose an issue while I'll still poking around on the box. It lets me finally tackle tech debt that was _never going to get done_ (I cannot stress this enough).
I definitely had to leave my job after realizing what was happening to the company and to my brain on LLMs. Constantly using AI is not healthy and there’s no out except to leave.
At my employer, every incentive, every metric, every conversation, was aligned behind using AI. Every team performance meeting pulled up graphs on whether velocity was increasing beyond last quarter’s metrics, which should be going up because of AI. Choosing not to use it inevitably means getting let go since I’d be working at slower speeds. But as team lead this was already happening because all my time was spent reviewing slop and I had no time to produce my own code, because the entire team was being reckless with their submissions. I was going at 1/3 the speed of everyone else trying to keep things coherent. My manager preferred to fix forward rather than address my concerns that we were producing tech debt at 10x speeds, so none of my comments were addressed. As soon as our prototype was done, the other most senior engineer and I pleaded that we rewrite it from scratch before getting it to prod, but that of course would have been a two month setback. By now, all of upper management were ending every quarterly meeting with “If you don’t like AI, then leave now”.
I haven’t looked back, and I don’t think it will go well for them.
I think the capital vs labor structure here obscures the most interesting dynamics going on. I mean, sure there are a bunch of greedy execs that would love to reduce head count and are pretty out of touch so that they have a high degree of not really knowing or caring about the people on the front lines while also not really understanding what they do or if it even can be replaced. This is the same story since the dawn of the industrial revolution, and probably well before that.
But one of the things I find interesting at the ground level is that AI can be incredibly empowering to individuals on the front lines, because suddenly one person can run down code, data, logs, and other tedious scope to cut through layers of bureaucracy that served no real purpose except to manage human bandwidth constraints. Now obviously this is not a panacea, it doesn't work everywhere, can be disruptive, lead to new ambiguities, etc. It's too early to see how it will actually pan out once model capabilities and human ways of working stabilize, and I'm sympathetic to the anxiety this produces. But my point is, bad management notwithstanding, modern AI tends to be most empowering to software engineers and other detail-oriented people, and I don't see this changing any time soon.
> I keep coming across videos of people talking about burning out
I also keep coming across videos of people talking about quitting Warhammer 40k. This doesn't mean there's a crisis, as much as a self-reinforcing pattern of interest.
My employer retains thousands of devs. I have a handful of software developer friends outside of work. These people are all happy (not to the same degree or the same usage patterns ofc) with the improvements to quality and process that AI has actively sourced or helped produce.
I don't understand where all these AI burnouts are coming from, but it's a minority. It's likely less than ~30% efficiency haircut for the industry - so there's likely to be no additional impact if you're unhappy.
This is far from the implication that all Software Developers are not okay.
Reading the stories, I’m happy to be working at a place where management is AI-skeptical. They do allow developers to use LLMs, but the token budget is $5.
I’ve decided not to complain.
$5 as in 5 dollars? I'm genuinely curious, how did they get to that number? I could understand 20 since that's the price of the cheapest AI subscriptions but 5 seems arbitrary and unusable.
Completely arbitrary. The "AI Governance" team that onboarded our department told me that we could actually make the $5 whatever we wanted so long as our SVP approves it. He has not shown any eagerness to do so.
We're not tiny (6000 employees or thereabout) and we do software as our primary business, so it's not like we're unfamiliar with the technology. I think we just have conservative management.
After 40 years in development I have never known a time like this. Half of my colleagues seem to be in denial, the other half seem to be slowly cracking up. The future is going to be very different, very soon.
It's depressing. Those in denial are really difficult to work with now.. they have a hard time adapting to such fundamental changes but their denial leads to sabotaging the adaption efforts of the rest. The other half like you mentioned is only slowly cracking up like still trying to grasp that this ai thing isn't some new tool you will have mastered in a few days. There are right now only very few people who have mastered state of the art ai development and they would like to work with only those also in this camp because it's so depressing to watch the majority of developers wrestling to find their spot in this new world.
You know, the thing I miss most about the old world is how people would have imposter syndrome. Now they have whatever this is.
Now the impostors use AI and pretend they are geniuses. That will work, for a while. But I have seen two cases up close now where a relatively stable code base was wrecked inside of 6 months by juniors posing as seniors. In one of these the actual seniors left and now the company has a bit of a problem. I've declined to help fix it, I suggested they re-engage with the people that left, double their salaries and allow them to roll back to when things were still stable but they're not having it, so I don't think it is going to end well for them. You can use AI responsibly, and it will definitely help with some tasks and as long as you are able to contain what gets produced and pace it to the speed at which you can review. But there is a cadre of people that are 'all in' on this, they only see velocity, they don't see the approaching wall. Impact is a given.
It’s like trying to create a new type of imposter syndrome, but instead of referring to complex data structures and architectures, it’s the most effective esoteric inactions to chant at the Jira ticket resolving machine.
I think it is some interesting mix of Dunning Kruger and Gambler's Fallacy.
What is the current “state of the art” of AI development? Aside from running as many agents as possible, the models seem to have gotten to a place where iterative, straight-forward prompting works pretty well. SDD frameworks and such might have helped at one point but they seem like document bloat noise now.
You do projects using low code, no code platforms like Workato, Boomi,....
Where execution diagrams and integrations are now replaced by agents and prompts.
Tools integrations exist, but even those can be done with prompting.
At least on the world of enterprise consulting with SaaS products, the reality is already quite grimm.
care to elaborate a bit on this? how exactly does being a skeptic "sabotage" a team, are you saying that if teams are not becoming 10000000000X engineers it's entirely the fault of the one skeptic in the room?
Duplicate of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50025798
What i observe here from the 3rd world country (technically European Union, but everything outside of the Valley is 3rd world when it comes to coding) is by far not as traumatic.
People who used to do coding jobs in order to extract the money from Americans, just switched to different kinds of online scams, which they believed coding to be simply one of, perhaps legitimately so.
So far, it seems like outside of just being a SWE, the value derived from AI coding has been either through influencing, scamming, or devaluing existing things.
For any given product, the instant it is made (using AI or no) and distributed, its value drops to practically zero. It can be remade and modified infinitely at practically zero cost.
As a proud long time pirate this new world is great. I'm just waiting on Anthropic and OpenAI to go bankrupt so RAM gets cheaper.
Wouldn’t that just be a beautiful outcome, LLMs are small enough and the hardware is cheap enough that everyone has their own, large software orgs are rendered obsolete by their own creations… perfect.
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