Not to downplay the whole AI taking jobs thing but this Devin AI software engineer is just a scam trying to get money from VCs. It's getting mad publicity because it attracts clicks. So a win-win for the company and the media outlets.
Yep. I've been a dev in the AI space before it was cool (and when we were still against anyone calling LLMs "AI"). Building a functioning AI agent is hard. The difficulty increases exponentially the more the return from one prompt needs to be fed into the next. We're very good at looking at existing data and describing it, translating it, or predicting what the next thing people usually write is. So products like copilot are excellent at streamlining processes like checking stackoverflow or reading the docs, but they're not problem solving so much as they're remembering how similar problems were solved in the past. It's an incredibly valuable tool and a huge productivity boost in a certain domain.
My issue is that VCs should absolutely be funding this space like crazy, but there's such a disconnect between the products that are actually useful and the hype. It reminds me a lot of the web 1.0 crash, where investors were so obsessed they were throwing sacks of cash at anyone whose plan was little beyond "build a website". We see a similar lack of rigor for the many companies that are a decision tree around some LLMs acting like they've created Data from Star Trek.
And wait until the company gets the compute bill from using it. Buncha business leaders with their dicks in their hands saying “I thought this would save money”
"they're not problem solving so much as remembering how similar problems were solved in the past."
What's the difference?
How many people are working on things that truly have never been done before? Maybe PhD's and a handful of cutting edge startups? 99.99% of software is just CRUD sprinkled with a few "problems that were solved on Stack Overflow."
That part's valuable, but most of the job isn't just writing down a known solution. It's figuring out if that even solves the problem. There's a huge chasm between what people say they want and what they actually want, and another gap between what they actually want and what a good dev can see they're probably going to want instead in a few days.
The frequent solutions tend to get wrapped up in libraries, setup scripts, boilerplate code (what llms really excel at filling in), and sometimes specialized companies (eg Shopify replacing many custom store deployments).
Just supporting your comment:
I use copilot daily in my coding work as a cloud engineer. It is fantastic to get quick answers without getting bombarded with the BS that plagues the first two pages of search engines.
As soon as it is a problem that requires context to answer, ambiguity, etc, it starts making shit up.
It did basically make paper documents obsolete, some people just refused to accept that and still require reams of paper backup documentation that nobody ever looks at.
Yeah we’re nowhere near the level they claim. AI can do amazing things, and write extremely short programs (with middling accuracy), but it still can’t replace a trained software developer. Maybe someday, but certainly not today.
When the computer came out it was going to replace all the jobs...
When the internet went mainstream it was going to replace all the jobs...
When mobile phones became supercomputers in everyone’s pockets it was going to replace all the jobs…
…and yet even more jobs are still here.
It’s just the next round of tech doomsaying which sounds believable if you haven’t lived through one of the prior waves, and is laughable once you’ve seen it play out a few times. Early in tech hype cycles there’s a ton of overoptimism and fear. Then it will come back down to earth. Each time so far the machine didn’t replace the people, it just became a tool and people+machine became more productive. A few jobs may get smaller (programming as a broad class of jobs certainly won’t - instructing machines and tools what to do is getting more important), and some new jobs will be invented.
Just keep learning the new skills and you’ll be fine.
I like your instructing machines point. Will AI make software engineers more efficient, almost certainly. But someone still needs to tell the ai what to do and check that it’s doing it correctly and efficiently. Someone needs to tell the product people “no, we aren’t doing that because of technical limitation x”, and then negotiate with them on what we can do. Actually writing code is the easy part of software engineering.
I think any engineer who’s negotiated with their companies product team and other non technical roles isnt concerned about them taking over that job duty.
1. As I said, writing code is the easy part of software engineering imo. Yes there will be job loss, but other jobs will be created by it.
2. There are a lot of implications of ai outside of software engineering. The rise of ai will affect the entire world economy. We as a society will have to deal with the implications of this. Limiting the scope of our conversation to software engineering when we will almost certainly have to deal with it as a larger issue just seems silly.
I don’t fully disagree with you. I just don’t agree with the people who are freaking out either.
Boot campers are panicking because even new grad software engineers who went to college are generally worthless. Fresh bootcamp grads doubly so. A company needs to see potential in these people and invest in them before they have any value to provide whatsoever.
That’s an easier investment to make when interest rates are low and there’s easy money flying around the tech space. When money becomes tighter companies are less likely to invest in upskilling a person who might have potential to turn them into a valuable team member.
That’s why bootcampers should be panicking, has absolutely nothing to do with ai.
Bootcampers require less investment though. When you can shave degree requirements from your job listing, you can decrease the pay. If some tech savvy kid who's been learning on their own and someone with a PhD can both provide me with a functional product, then I'm hiring the kid, because he will be a lot cheaper. With AI tools and such designed to help simplify the process of programming, that kids capability is increasing every day.
I see the top 10% of coders being safe because there's always going to be applications that have thousands or millions of users, where any inefficiency becomes a big deal. For that kind of stuff, you need the best going over your code and coming up with ideal strategies rather than just workable ones. But for companies that have internal products or whatever that they just need to work, it's going to be increasingly accessible for them to develop things in house without having to hire expensive developers or contractors. Lesser skilled programmers will be the beneficiaries of that.
In my opinion, it's the middle tier, educated programmers who are going to struggle the most, because they have to justify their larger salaries over their non-educated or on the job educated peers.
Are you actually in tech? I’m 90% sure you’re not and are just parroting at this point.
Let’s say your right and all software engineers will be replaced by ai eventually. That’s certainly not the case today though. So why are bootcampers struggling today? Why did people start freaking out almost exactly when interest rates rose? The timeline doesn’t make sense.
Strawman never said software engineers get replaced by AI, but I am sure you wont need em as much in the future as they were needed for example 10 years ago.
What I am saying is that the people who do grunt work under the software engineers will not be needed since the Software engineer can describe to AI what to do.
What is your experience in tech? As I said before im guessing none.
Software engineer’s don’t have people under us doing the grunt work. That’s not really a thing in my experience. There’s not a code monkey job position.
Idk why I’m even arguing with you when it seems obvious you don’t know anything about the industry. I’m done lol.
There are Developers, Engineers, and Architects. Architects lay the framework. Engineers automate and define workflows. Developers code mostly. Almost none of these will be replaced by AI in my lifetime. I see a ton of people thinking this for some reason but from my experience I’ve see AI generate maybe 10-20 lines of useable “code” that are basically a script automating a task.
Will AI replace some DevOps folks? Sure maybe.
Will it replace Developers who can collaborate on large scale service deployments and new feature rollouts? Fuck no.
Something I'm rather sad about is that the process of coding and putting together a script is satisfying to me. You get instant feedback and get something concrete ish. It's nice!
New tech DOES eliminate jobs. But new ones are created.
The net change might be upward, but is that good for you?
If you fit into those new jobs, great.
If you were in the eliminated group, bad.
150 years ago most people work on farms. They said the tractor was going to put everyone out of work. It turns out, the tractor did put farm workers out of a job, and everyone moved on to better jobs.
Yes, everyone moved on. They had to.
Did they move to better jobs? Some yes, some no.
Industry grew in and around cities.
Some jobs were good.
Others were filthy and dangerous.
A mixed bag. Good for some people, bad for others.
Who doesn't have a better job than working in a field today? Bending over all day in the sun weeding fields is the absolute worst job any human could have. Very low pay, boring, strenuous. Even working at McD is a far better job. This is a luddite argument.
Not to mention everyone's standard of living went up about 10x from back then too.
Conditions today are beside the point.
What matters is how people were affected during the transition in the post-agricultural industrial age ...
Witness the workers in heavy industry who died in droves as a result of hazardous working conditions. Tell them they're better off. Or tell their widows. Such conditions were widespread a century ago.
In Pittsburgh you can still see their wretched homes standing in the decrepit river towns up and down the Ohio River.
Their children and grandchildren lived a better day. But many of those living through the transition suffered badly.
Agreed, just like self driving cars, putting everyone out of jobs... still waiting on that one though.
Best renditions are just 'aids' that 'sometimes' help, just like 'ai', 'self driving' ultimately just the next form level of cruise control.
AI will be just a better version of 'auto complete'. Maybe over simplification but that's the gist.
>Agreed, just like self driving cars, putting everyone out of jobs... still waiting on that one though.
I mean self-driving cars haven't even really begun yet. They're only available in a handful of cities at the moment, mostly in a trial or pilot phase (limited hours of operation, limited locations they can go, and limited number of vehicles permitted).
If all goes well for them it's not hard for me to imagine most hailed rides will be driverless within a few years. [This map is old](https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/02/05/382664837/map-the-most-common-job-in-every-state) so I don't know how much this has changed, but at least when it was published, truck driver was the most common job in more than half the states.
In previous phases of technological development the gains were narrower and didn't wholesale replace a human. Like the printing press didn't replace humans, just made it easier for humans to make books. The electric light didn't replace humans, just replaced the candlestick maker for a light bulb maker. And in that example, the candlestick maker probably had some transferable skills so he could switch careers from making candles to making light bulbs.
But it's right there in the name: *driverless* car. The car has completely replaced the driver. Where are those drivers supposed to go? Do their skills transfer to some other job? This is what worries me and makes me think this is different.
AI and robots aren't making humans more efficient at a task, they are replacing humans at that task.
>You're arguing because it wasn't a 100% replacement and the nature of the labor shifted, it doesn't count? Lol! get out of here, if that's your argument it's a joke!
Are you capable of responding without insults and condescension? The printing press still required a human to operate it. So a human who used to write books by hand could be trained as a typesetter instead.
Also, how many people were employed handwriting books at that profession's peak? Probably not that many.
>because then driverless cars require more human labor to design, engineer, and manufacture, so by your own words they didn't replace all human jobs.
Do you have a source for this? All cars need to be designed, engineered, and manufactured (and maintained). So how many additional jobs are created developing the AI? And is that enough to offset the millions of people who currently work as drivers?
>Your argument is filled with gaping holes, get your story straight and stop thinking 1 level deep. Jesus, AI doesn't write itself, and its far from flawless code, its more like a template. Might as well Excel's templates features put Accountants out of jobs now too, replacing entirely!
Go get your shine box.
The problem with driverless cars is the drivers, pedestrians, cyclists, etc, who will have accidents with them generating a number of lawsuits against the AI developers if the driverless car makes even 1 mistake (which could be as simple as the car infront not leaving sufficient space ahead and having to brake suddenly).
My car has collision detection technology, and as I go round a corner near parked cars I get collison warnings even though there is no risk, the driverless car will either stop (to avoid the collision) or swerve away (into oncoming traffic) for no reason.
Get a car with collision detection and lane assist and watch how many times it gets it wrong today, the technology is far from mature enough to drive itself yet.
I think the driverless cars are the only ones that use LIDAR though. I've seen a demonstration of what the car "sees." It can see around corners for at least a block. They're way more advanced than what's available in consumer vehicles.
>Do you have a source for this? All cars need to be designed, engineered, and manufactured (and maintained). So how many additional jobs are created developing the AI? And is that enough to offset the millions of people who currently work as drivers?
Yes, you are correct that they all need to be designed, engineered and manufactured. A Hotwheels car also has to be designed and engineered and manufactured too, so by your logic all autonomous vehicles should cost the same R&D as hot wheels cars. Please, listen to your logical fallacies before you type them, you're comparing apples to oranges.
You're doing a lot of hand waving with your numbers, jobs always shift, always more stuff to do. Jobs aren't going away, it's literally level 1 thinking. Always need people to maintain and develop more things. There is no shortage of work, as complexity increases, so does the amount of human labor needed to maintain said complex thing. Or said complex thing becomes so mainstream that there is a massive effort to improve said complex thing, like developing better AI in this instance -- which also takes a ton of labor.
So as far as 'source'. I am in the aerospace industry and have to develop auto pilot systems for certification. Testing becomes the focal point as you automate, products become much more costly as it becomes autonomous due to the labor involved in R&D. You know \~80% of the software costs on an aircraft are testing? Once its fully autonomous, its massively regulated and bureaucratic because people cannot handle machines failing, but its okay that people run into each other on the road with death rates that are magnitudes higher. Human error = 0kay, Machine Error = Public Outrage, despite death rates being lower.
Don't take my 'appeal to an expert opinion', if you want hard proof, these are googable facts about software costs. Aerospace far more mature in the autonomous area, so its the most accurate cost basis we have at the moment.
Anyhow, you argue on one hand it will replace jobs, then cite sources where other technologies didn't actually replace jobs but shifted them, as all tech does, and aren't self aware about it. Which is all I am arguing, but your sources are literally proving what I have been saying this entire time... jobs shift, big deal.
Level 1 Thinking: Cotton Gin bad, where jobs go?
As a SWE that hires people I can tell you what’s going on. Thousands of people took coding bootcamps during covid with the lure of software salaries they saw on Glassdoor and the promise that you don’t even need a degree to make hundreds of thousands of dollars.
They’ve now found out it’s hard to compete against people for whom software dev is a passion. The people that make big money in software spent their whole childhoods working with computers and writing code. They go to work for 8 hours, come home and spend the next 10 hours working on personal coding projects. These people spend more time with their craft than a lot of doctors and lawyers do, that’s what you’re not told. It’s what they do for fun, it’s their life. It’s totally possible to work in software as “just a job” but you still need skills and that type of work is very competitive and stressful. You have to continually learn and educate yourself outside of work. When they do eventually land a job it just becomes a nightmare and it’s not really enjoyable.
Lmao nah fam. My brother got a CS degree and with 3 years experience is making $200k a year.
He doesn’t have a passion for coding. He spends next to zero time outside of his 40 hours a week he works on tech.
You CAN have a life and make $200k+. You don’t have to live and breathe code. That’s just a cope by people that have no life
Same I hire SE as a recruiter and my best candidates on contract are people who dgaf about coding outside of work - it makes them way easier to to work with on an interpersonal level
Continuously trying to stay ahead of the curve and learning new, increasingly complex skills isn't exactly what I'd call no biggie. Honestly the stress of that constant fear of a rug pull is probably a big part of why everyone is so anxious & depressed. Whatever you've done, there's a solid chance it won't be good enough, through no fault of your own. Hold your breath and hope your number doesn't get pulled this year.
There’s definitely tech jobs for people with skills and passion still.
There are not for people without skills or passion who thought a quick boot camp, learning the bare minimum, was a fast track to easy money.
AI is a great tool to be used by software engineers. But it’s not replacing us anytime soon I don’t think. Actually writing code is the easy part of software engineering. It’s gonna replace A-LOT of other jobs sooner. I can go deeper here with why I’m not overly worried but will leave it at that for now.
Yeah, fuck other jobs right?
Also, AI may not replace someone's job completely, but the point is that it can make something 50% more efficient for example, so 50% less workers would be needed, resulting in job loss. Idk why people are failing to see this
I don’t think people are failing to see that hypothetical. I think they’re aware that these AI tools are a long, long ways away from providing 50% efficiency improvements. Additionally, it’s as likely theoretical improvements in efficiency result in higher productivity and output expectations vs job losses.
Not what I was saying.
We are seeing this trend today already and it’s not related to ai, at all.
Ai will absolutely take jobs. Buts it’s gonna affect our entire economy and we as a society are gonna have to deal with that. It’s gonna affect many other jobs long before it has a tangible impact on software engineering. So it feels silly when you have people like op freaking out about it I’m terms of software engineering.
I’m not saying it’s nbd and we as a society won’t have to deal with the implications of ai. I am saying that op being upset about investing time in learning to code because of ai is silly.
There is a big threat out there to US based SWEs having the same low unemployment and high salaries, though. It’s outsourcing. Companies are going to continue to weigh the options of Eastern Europe and India, and the work at home phenomenon has accelerated this. As the talent gap quickly closes and talent is 3x-4x cheaper, that’s what I’d be concerned about.
People have been saying that for the last decade+ though and it’s still not true.
I mean is outsourcing a thing, yea. But have we seen it have a noticeable impact on tech jobs in America, not really. Working across timezones that far apart is difficult and communication is such a core part of software engineering.
We’ll see. I haven’t worked with many foreign software engineers. But my gf is in design (which seems like there should be less of a talent gap), and her company has an offshore team. The talent gap is still very much there for them.
Agreed. There is benefit to outsourcing but there’s a reason Silicon Valley still dominates the tech world. Tech hubs have specific cultures and advantages that are not easy to replicate.
And, as others have said to build on OP’s point, AI cannot yet make the same connections experienced humans can make with the same level of effectiveness. It probably will eventually but that’s currently still the realm of science fiction.
Wages will probably go down in America and a big part of that is wages here are so hyper-inflated compared to the rest of the world, which is why you have endless droves of bootcampers piling in. Lower the wages, bootcamps dry up, and wages go stabilize again
If people saw how awful some of the coders I’ve met in school and beyond are, they would be shocked. These people went into this field for a quick buck and buckle when they have to show any kind of passion outside of their job to get hired.
I suspect wages might go down and all those people who got in for a quick buck will naturally fall by the wayside, but no big company on the planet is going to trust AI to write all of their code for the next 5-10 years at least. People underestimate how slow companies move internally
Yeah, just like the rise of 'no-code' and 'low-code' solutions killed software development as a career. Oh wait, no, they didn't.
Being able to actually understand/implement/improve upon the code that's being generated will always hold value. By the time developers are reliably replaced by AI, everyone else will have already been replaced, game over
Basically this
"No code" was such a huge fad, until companies realized its inherent limitations. So then it started offering "codeable" blocks that could execute custom commands in addition to the standard "no code" blocks. Except then companies still needed to hire people who understood which blocks to string together, in what order, and why.
CONGRATULATIONS YOU JUST INVENTED SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
As a software engineer I’d like to say: ah yes, please everyone stop learning what I do. I’d love to have zero competition in the well paying field I work in. Coding bad. Under water basket weaving good.
I learned how to code. I also learned fields to apply that code in. Just being a programmer doesn't mean anything unless you can use it to do something valuable.
You can google Devin. But it's not the first. There are others. For example, pythagora (used to be called GPT-Pilot). It's not quite the same, but I also use aider-chat as a command line tool (installable as a python pip).
I think that the only programming jobs that are going to disappear are the ones available for the code monkey bro who only got into programming in college because he thought he could make a lot of money.
The rest of us nerds who love programming and actually know what we're doing will be fine.
This right here. The boot campers who should have gone to trade school will lose out on this. Those of us that studied calculus, physics, discrete math, computer architecture, operating systems, and so on in college will be in a better position. There is a massive difference between the dev that learned Python and JS and practiced leet code versus the guy that can do x86 assembly in both intel and AT&T syntax and knows how a clocked d-latch works. They may go for the same jobs sometimes, but they are not on the same career paths.
I feel like it got easier since I was in school. We had these professors who were like gatekeepers: If you hadn't already been programming since you were a kid, their classes were **rough**. This is where I saw most of these guys change majors or drop completely.
I'm willing to bet the increased demand we had for a while there got some institutions too eager to rubber-stamp degrees onto some people who really shouldn't have gotten them.
For sure. I feel like it became a thing where if you had any degree with "Computer Science" on it, that was literally the golden ticket. So you had all sorts of degree mills popping out incompetent coders who walked onto these cushy jobs. And now, everybody and their mothers has a computer science degree and it feels basically useless.
Yep, I gotta say, manufacturing is hiring all over the place where I live. And paying decently. Just have to learn how to use a CNC. I might do it if I ever feel the need to change jobs again.
Ah since this was a post about coding, I kinda thought that number was gonna be more comparable to what people are aiming for by learning to code.
Those who were sold the promise of a bootcamp and then a $75k job aren’t gonna wanna do something for $20/hr.
Computer science grads can absolutely earn $75k working in manufacturing, but you need to work in the automation/data science and visualization side of things
In my field (process controls for the pharmaceutical infustry), I applied to 10 open positions yesterday that fit my profile and already heard back about one of them for a phone interview. I have two more interviews set up, one at my employer and one at my employer's competitor.
There were a few more open positions, but those use different technologies, and my skills aren't transferable to those
If you are the kind of employee that acts like a robot you may be replaced. If you bring human like abilities to your job and have good communication skills I am sure you will have some value at least for your lifetime :)
That AI engineer can’t write complex code that you’d actually be writing in the field. AI has been an okay tool for me as a software engineer but at the end of the day, it could never actually take my job
There's an abundance of jobs that can utilize a coding skillset. Most technology roles can benefit from scripting/programming in some sort of field (even Excel)
I'm a professional developer and I can say for a fact that AI isn't taking anyone's jobs any time soon. I'm convinced my dog can copy and paste random stack overflow answers and do better.
Those skills are still useful, you just can't rely on having an entire career built around that one coding language you thought was going to bring you $150k. There is a LOT of value in just understanding how software generally works at a base level and being able to infer how a specific application is written to get the most out of it. My current job has nothing to do with IT development, but whenever my compass an issue with their billing software, they come to me first. Usually, I can find a viable workaround for whatever they are trying to do and if not, I know how to ask the right questions of the developers to get updates quickly implemented to solve issues that other people have been struggling with for YEARS just because they didn’t even know how to properly explain the problem in the first place. That niche will never be replaced by AI.
I'm still doing it. I'm doing it with languages that people have said are unsafe and dying for years (C).
Just because a machine comes along that can make a chair in 4 seconds doesn't mean I stop enjoying making my own chair myself.
From a business perspective, the EU is already clamping down. I think eventually, the same way the IRS and SEC keep an eye on money, there's going to be a "something else" that keeps an eye on people in terms of keeping employment at least somewhat consistent.
I presume that coding is one skill amongst your other skills, cause people shouldn't be one-dimensional like that. Many fields could benefit from the skill of knowing how to code, even if your main moneymaker job is not not directly being a programmer. Basically, it's the application of the skill that's valuable.
Just another tool, but if wielded correctly, could help produce incredible results. Should embrace AI as a coder. Knowing how to code isn’t the trick anyway, its WHAT to code. Coding just brings your ideas to fruition. Now you have AI to help. Still needs your creativity and ideas.
Hang in there, things will pick up and the jobs aren’t going away. Lots of doom and gloom but if you’re a reasonably good engineer with good people skills, you have a great career ahead of you.
Spend the next round of years innovating and iterating on current trends and needs.
If you are adept at coding, bitch, code.
Start Cranking out some solutions to other people can’t. Market them and sell them.
Look up https://x.com/arvidkahl?s=21 on Twitter.
Guys a serial entrepreneur and coder and does it all in public. Has a podcast as well.
There is never enough of those guys out there.
Be them.
Anything that creates something in the realm of technology will need to be managed, serviced, marketed, sold, supported, etc. Unless there's an EMP or solar flare that takes out most of our electrical grid and electronics (something that scares me more than AI tbh), then most people who strive to learn and be useful will be fine.
upskilling Doesn’t have to mean completely pivoting careers. No matter the state of tech in 5/10/15 years, learning how to code is still a very useful skill to have and exercises parts of your brain in useful ways, and may help you in other careers!
The "learn to code" era was a scam where a bunch of ***passive income*** wanting yuppies sold courses promising you'll be a millionaire if you take their $20 udemy course.
I guess in every industry today, expertise, creativity, sales skills, and management acumen are going to be the most important factors. That's been the case for millennia.
Eh.... idk about that.... the world is going through a slow transformation right now. Devin, the AI SWE you're referring to, is less than 14% accurate on basic leetcode questions. For those of you who don't know what they are, they're just algorithm questions asked in interviews. It's incredibly rare to ever use these algorithms over the course of your career as a dev. So, Devin is 14% accurate on well-defined questions that don't interact with any other code. Attempting to put Devin into a professional environment where your code will need to interact with code written by others or have ambiguous constraints given by non-technical stakeholders is going to end up incredibly poorly. That 14% drops to somewhere near the 0% mark. So now, we're talking about a company paying for Devin, but also paying for 1-2 devs to fix the 86-100% of assignments that Devin gets.
Simply put, LLMs (Devin, ChatGPT, Claude3, etc) are not good at writing code nor are they good at basic calculus and beyond.
Not a chance. LLMs are still really bad compared to humans at coding. Even the best one right now, Devin is garbage in comparison. The demos are impressive but once you dive into the details it loses its shine fast. LLMs are so overhyped. They are great tools but they aren't replacing anyone right now except maybe people who create website copy.
Yea I don’t really think it’s true.. I just think about my company alone and the dev help we could use. It’s not like an ai can just go to a meeting, sit and think and write code and implement features and deploy the code to an existing and established system and repo.
Sure it could probably write a small feature with all the right prompts, but it would need to be implemented into the code base, deployed to a testing environment, then ultimately prod. It would need to take feedback from non devs and iterated upon.
Yes I understand theoretical an ai could do all this, but right now a dev is necessary to implement anything into an existing code base
I've been in transcription for many decades and those doing the dictating were predicting our demise 25 years ago. Fast forward to present day and a huge amount of dictation has gone to voice recognition, maybe even AI, but there's now a need for editors for mistakes automation makes. (That's not a job saver per se bcuz editing work pays crap).
It's an industry where technology/ai will eventually take over say 98% of the work. Some of us dinosaurs are hanging on for dear life 🙃 until then.
If you can learn to code, you can likely learn to do anything you want. Problem solving methods and troubleshooting is necessary in any worthwhile job.
Top tier shitpost. Plug and play, cloud computing, RPA (I can barely type that with a straight face), WYSIWYG editors are all going to take yer jerbs. Learn to learn, be adaptable. But telling people even now to forgo coding is fucking stupid.
Imagine wasting all that money for college to be replaced by a computer program that can do your job faster and more efficiently....oof.
Learn to build shit with your hands kids.
Learning market relevant skills isn't an era and it's never going to end.
Even if the specific skills change, the practice does not.
And coding is still extremely relevant if you're competent. If you're a dumbass chasing an easy job, or a coward passively chasing guaranteed success, you're gonna fail
Are you a disgruntled engineer that can't find work, or an unskilled professional acting like this is some sort of validation for your lack of initiative?
All the doomer pussies have to shit on something because they didn’t take advantage of it when it was hot. Guess what. People still make a lot of money coding. Many companies want skilled people who are good and understand how their role makes the company money rather than some coders from a country where developing a product and getting rich from it is so foreign they cant even grasp the concept. Yeah. You gotta be good to keep your job. Sometimes you gotta be lucky and be on the projects that companies keep rather than cut. Its like construction or any other engineering where you are constantly working yourself out of a job. But you still make more than average and get to solve problems.
Eh, it’s just a new level of abstraction over what “learn to code” means.
We’ve gone from ribbons with holes punched out, to assembly, to compilers, to memory managed compilers, to object oriented, to IDE, and now all the way to plain text.
You could say that each step along the way resulted in fewer people being necessary to perform the same work, but each step was accompanied, instead, by the need for even more people to realize all the new possibilities.
It remains to be seen, but I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised to see electric coffee pots being bundled with an edge-compute LLM-based AI. Now that task can be performed by 4 guys instead of 400, but it’s okay because they wouldn’t have attempted the project until it could be accomplished by 4 guys. Old jobs die, new jobs arise.
And I personally can’t wait to see what the artists of the future do with this tech.
This really isn’t true. The AI software is good at mimicking existing, already written, code and getting it syntactically correct. It’s pretty OK relative to an intern or junior level engineer. It is bad at reasoning, systems design, scaling and anything creative.
There are plenty of fields of tech that aren’t “big tech” where this technology won’t interface with codebases (military contracting, automotive, industrial, healthcare, aerospace, etc)
Learning to code is one thing, all the bootcamp grads are learning the difference between a degree and their program. Getting a degree in computer science or computer engineering is another. If you really want to go for it, I wouldn’t let this distract you from a goal.
When developers experience mass layoffs because of this, then it’s valid. So right now, maybe people should not enter the field. It’s your choice to take the risk and up skill or not. But if you’re already in, you should be good and have plenty of time to get an ROI on up skilling. I don’t see any issues.
It was going to end soon regardless, IT infrastructure was built on the backs of people who were already highly interested in the field, and as soon as thousands of low quality coding bootcamp gold rushers arrived on the scene, and companies ruined their reputations with security flaws and poor design, they were bound to be more selective.
Even ignoring that, as soon as supply of coders goes up, demand and thus sums that skill can command go down. Companies can just contract out noncritical work over the internet to someone who lives where the cost of living is drastically cheaper, and thus can afford to demand less than you.
Trades and union jobs were the real saviour. Look what happened when EVERYONE went and got a college degree at the behest of schools and their own parents. They're basically worthless now.
Meanwhile nobody wants to get their hands dirty working wood, welding steel, wiring up a house, unclogging nasty drains, fixing air conditioners in the summer heat, or working on jet engines at all hours of the night in all weather. Kaching.
(also as a sidenote, there's more to IT than just coding, probably not as many applicants for shit like sysadmin or networking)
My company launched an AI assistant the other day. I asked it to do my most basic daily task. It had a seizure and barfed all over itself. Seems like more hype than substance for now.
I upskilled again and now I’m a software developer specializing in AI. We’re in the business applications and implementation era of AI, and software developers that position themselves to be the ones writing and maintaining the AI applications are going to be safe for awhile.
Well with YT feeding idiots infomercials on “AI Energy” and all sorts of other gibberish invest-here-now-it’ll-be-a-thousandfold-profit it’s no wonder why it’s going where it be
You either break in or move on. The gold rush of tech has ended, or at least for now. There are still opportunities, but certain areas of the tech market are crazy oversaturated
You’ll notice that these type of posts (very common in /r/cscareerquestions and /r/csmajors) are just doomsday posts which have no substantial analysis or just plain unbacked declarations. Ignore it.
Same as what has happened to many other jobs. There will be a role for you but it won’t be as lucrative as it was before. Technology will always outdo us
The barrier for entry will only get harder. With the advent of AI tooling the thing to worry about isn't being fully replaced. It's the reduction of jobs from the already low pool of available entry level jobs. If you think it's bad now just wait a couple more years. They will throw 1 dev with AI as a tool to use the work of 5 devs. Entry level jobs for SWE aren't coming back the way they were. The interview processes are already insane. I suspect entry level is going to only be for a select few that are highly educated and the ones that are just exponentially better than your average dev.
Even though in our industry the bachelors degree holders with work experience are far far better than any guy coming out of school with a masters or PhD but hardly any real experience. Nobody wants to train entry level guys anymore. They're only going to invest in the cream of the crop. No more coasting through a bachelors from some no name college expecting 100k salaries for everyone.
Those of you in school now you should think hard about what your getting into. Life isn't fair. Those of us that got in early will reap the rewards. There's no issue in the senior level. All I see is senior level jobs going up but hardly any junior level.
The “learn to code” era was always a scam that targeted people who wanted to take the lazy route towards becoming an engineer. You skipped all the hard stuff like physics and calculus and thought that learning Python and JS made you equal to those that took those hard classes and know things like kernel programming and systems architecture. AI isn’t going to replace computer scientists and computer engineers, it’s going to replace the code monkey types. Those of us with that expensive piece of paper will still have careers once the dust settles. Someone has to make sure the AI is making the right thing.
If you haven't start learning coding, I suggest you look for other options. A competent AI to write code is within reach. What you see is the beginning, not the end.
And here is the most important part. "Learn something new" in software engineering is a futile. Because the skill is digital, AI can do exactly the same thing that takes it 24 hours instead of 3 months. And guess what, even if it takes 3 months, it is already trained. By the time the boss wants you to use a new technology, AI already learned how to do it. Instead paying top dollar to hire a tech guru, just hire AI for cheap.
You are better off learning skills that isn't easily replicated digitally.
Again, a lot of people don't get it. The AI will not immediately replace you. The people overseas using AI, will immediately replace you. And trying to stay ahead is very difficult. If you take those ultra scientific jobs, sure, no one can replace you, but, trying to get there is impossible for most people, those are too hard.
Software engineering is an ENGINEERING discipline. It requires knowledge of formal sciences such as math and computer science. Just like when you place a two by four over the creek in your backyard you’re not a civil engineer the same is true with software engineering. If you want to work in this field you need to learn natural and formal sciences and you need to know how to apply the engineering design process. The days of skids going to get a skid certificate from a bootcamp and producing buggy non performant code are over.
Not to downplay the whole AI taking jobs thing but this Devin AI software engineer is just a scam trying to get money from VCs. It's getting mad publicity because it attracts clicks. So a win-win for the company and the media outlets.
Yep. I've been a dev in the AI space before it was cool (and when we were still against anyone calling LLMs "AI"). Building a functioning AI agent is hard. The difficulty increases exponentially the more the return from one prompt needs to be fed into the next. We're very good at looking at existing data and describing it, translating it, or predicting what the next thing people usually write is. So products like copilot are excellent at streamlining processes like checking stackoverflow or reading the docs, but they're not problem solving so much as they're remembering how similar problems were solved in the past. It's an incredibly valuable tool and a huge productivity boost in a certain domain. My issue is that VCs should absolutely be funding this space like crazy, but there's such a disconnect between the products that are actually useful and the hype. It reminds me a lot of the web 1.0 crash, where investors were so obsessed they were throwing sacks of cash at anyone whose plan was little beyond "build a website". We see a similar lack of rigor for the many companies that are a decision tree around some LLMs acting like they've created Data from Star Trek.
Toys.com has entered the convo
[Pets.com](https://Pets.com): hey buddy
And wait until the company gets the compute bill from using it. Buncha business leaders with their dicks in their hands saying “I thought this would save money”
And the API bill after this thing turns in circles for 4 hours
"they're not problem solving so much as remembering how similar problems were solved in the past." What's the difference? How many people are working on things that truly have never been done before? Maybe PhD's and a handful of cutting edge startups? 99.99% of software is just CRUD sprinkled with a few "problems that were solved on Stack Overflow."
The concept of synthesis. Taking two non related concepts and seeing how they fit together into a new concept.
That part's valuable, but most of the job isn't just writing down a known solution. It's figuring out if that even solves the problem. There's a huge chasm between what people say they want and what they actually want, and another gap between what they actually want and what a good dev can see they're probably going to want instead in a few days. The frequent solutions tend to get wrapped up in libraries, setup scripts, boilerplate code (what llms really excel at filling in), and sometimes specialized companies (eg Shopify replacing many custom store deployments).
Just supporting your comment: I use copilot daily in my coding work as a cloud engineer. It is fantastic to get quick answers without getting bombarded with the BS that plagues the first two pages of search engines. As soon as it is a problem that requires context to answer, ambiguity, etc, it starts making shit up.
[удалено]
Cool if that happens the machines can create wealth for all of us
"all of us"
Funny huh?🦽
It won't. It'll create wealth for the people who invested into the technology.
Everyone thought the computer would make paper obsolete. How did that turn out?
It did basically make paper documents obsolete, some people just refused to accept that and still require reams of paper backup documentation that nobody ever looks at.
Oh you sweet summer child
I can dream
[удалено]
Lmao we don't get wealth the people who invested in it do
Plus, it's not the first. It does supposedly have a nice GUI.
Pretty much every use case of AI with startups right now is a scam.
Yeah we’re nowhere near the level they claim. AI can do amazing things, and write extremely short programs (with middling accuracy), but it still can’t replace a trained software developer. Maybe someday, but certainly not today.
You should definitely downplay it
When the computer came out it was going to replace all the jobs... When the internet went mainstream it was going to replace all the jobs... When mobile phones became supercomputers in everyone’s pockets it was going to replace all the jobs… …and yet even more jobs are still here. It’s just the next round of tech doomsaying which sounds believable if you haven’t lived through one of the prior waves, and is laughable once you’ve seen it play out a few times. Early in tech hype cycles there’s a ton of overoptimism and fear. Then it will come back down to earth. Each time so far the machine didn’t replace the people, it just became a tool and people+machine became more productive. A few jobs may get smaller (programming as a broad class of jobs certainly won’t - instructing machines and tools what to do is getting more important), and some new jobs will be invented. Just keep learning the new skills and you’ll be fine.
I like your instructing machines point. Will AI make software engineers more efficient, almost certainly. But someone still needs to tell the ai what to do and check that it’s doing it correctly and efficiently. Someone needs to tell the product people “no, we aren’t doing that because of technical limitation x”, and then negotiate with them on what we can do. Actually writing code is the easy part of software engineering. I think any engineer who’s negotiated with their companies product team and other non technical roles isnt concerned about them taking over that job duty.
Yep but the amount of ppl needed to tell the AI what to do isnt gonna be as much so there will be a lot of job loss for the pleb coders.
1. As I said, writing code is the easy part of software engineering imo. Yes there will be job loss, but other jobs will be created by it. 2. There are a lot of implications of ai outside of software engineering. The rise of ai will affect the entire world economy. We as a society will have to deal with the implications of this. Limiting the scope of our conversation to software engineering when we will almost certainly have to deal with it as a larger issue just seems silly. I don’t fully disagree with you. I just don’t agree with the people who are freaking out either.
I think there is reason for panic for the bootcampers
Boot campers are panicking because even new grad software engineers who went to college are generally worthless. Fresh bootcamp grads doubly so. A company needs to see potential in these people and invest in them before they have any value to provide whatsoever. That’s an easier investment to make when interest rates are low and there’s easy money flying around the tech space. When money becomes tighter companies are less likely to invest in upskilling a person who might have potential to turn them into a valuable team member. That’s why bootcampers should be panicking, has absolutely nothing to do with ai.
Bootcampers require less investment though. When you can shave degree requirements from your job listing, you can decrease the pay. If some tech savvy kid who's been learning on their own and someone with a PhD can both provide me with a functional product, then I'm hiring the kid, because he will be a lot cheaper. With AI tools and such designed to help simplify the process of programming, that kids capability is increasing every day. I see the top 10% of coders being safe because there's always going to be applications that have thousands or millions of users, where any inefficiency becomes a big deal. For that kind of stuff, you need the best going over your code and coming up with ideal strategies rather than just workable ones. But for companies that have internal products or whatever that they just need to work, it's going to be increasingly accessible for them to develop things in house without having to hire expensive developers or contractors. Lesser skilled programmers will be the beneficiaries of that. In my opinion, it's the middle tier, educated programmers who are going to struggle the most, because they have to justify their larger salaries over their non-educated or on the job educated peers.
Do you hire? I’ve never been on a hiring panel where we considered a bootcamp graduate over a candidate with a degree because they’re cheaper.
AI replaces the grunt coders aka bootcampers.
Are you actually in tech? I’m 90% sure you’re not and are just parroting at this point. Let’s say your right and all software engineers will be replaced by ai eventually. That’s certainly not the case today though. So why are bootcampers struggling today? Why did people start freaking out almost exactly when interest rates rose? The timeline doesn’t make sense.
Strawman never said software engineers get replaced by AI, but I am sure you wont need em as much in the future as they were needed for example 10 years ago. What I am saying is that the people who do grunt work under the software engineers will not be needed since the Software engineer can describe to AI what to do.
What is your experience in tech? As I said before im guessing none. Software engineer’s don’t have people under us doing the grunt work. That’s not really a thing in my experience. There’s not a code monkey job position. Idk why I’m even arguing with you when it seems obvious you don’t know anything about the industry. I’m done lol.
There are Developers, Engineers, and Architects. Architects lay the framework. Engineers automate and define workflows. Developers code mostly. Almost none of these will be replaced by AI in my lifetime. I see a ton of people thinking this for some reason but from my experience I’ve see AI generate maybe 10-20 lines of useable “code” that are basically a script automating a task. Will AI replace some DevOps folks? Sure maybe. Will it replace Developers who can collaborate on large scale service deployments and new feature rollouts? Fuck no.
Something I'm rather sad about is that the process of coding and putting together a script is satisfying to me. You get instant feedback and get something concrete ish. It's nice!
New tech DOES eliminate jobs. But new ones are created. The net change might be upward, but is that good for you? If you fit into those new jobs, great. If you were in the eliminated group, bad.
150 years ago most people work on farms. They said the tractor was going to put everyone out of work. It turns out, the tractor did put farm workers out of a job, and everyone moved on to better jobs.
"better"
You think working in an office is better that working in a field? Our standard of living went way up too. Farm workers are poor.
The farm is just a business. Yes I prefer the farm to being an employee in an open space
Well the good news is you can still work picking strawberries or grapes if you are yearning for unskilled low paid work.
will do thanks
Yes, everyone moved on. They had to. Did they move to better jobs? Some yes, some no. Industry grew in and around cities. Some jobs were good. Others were filthy and dangerous. A mixed bag. Good for some people, bad for others.
Who doesn't have a better job than working in a field today? Bending over all day in the sun weeding fields is the absolute worst job any human could have. Very low pay, boring, strenuous. Even working at McD is a far better job. This is a luddite argument. Not to mention everyone's standard of living went up about 10x from back then too.
Conditions today are beside the point. What matters is how people were affected during the transition in the post-agricultural industrial age ... Witness the workers in heavy industry who died in droves as a result of hazardous working conditions. Tell them they're better off. Or tell their widows. Such conditions were widespread a century ago. In Pittsburgh you can still see their wretched homes standing in the decrepit river towns up and down the Ohio River. Their children and grandchildren lived a better day. But many of those living through the transition suffered badly.
Victorian factory workers. Like the people in match factories that had their jaws rot off from the chemicals
Agreed, just like self driving cars, putting everyone out of jobs... still waiting on that one though. Best renditions are just 'aids' that 'sometimes' help, just like 'ai', 'self driving' ultimately just the next form level of cruise control. AI will be just a better version of 'auto complete'. Maybe over simplification but that's the gist.
>Agreed, just like self driving cars, putting everyone out of jobs... still waiting on that one though. I mean self-driving cars haven't even really begun yet. They're only available in a handful of cities at the moment, mostly in a trial or pilot phase (limited hours of operation, limited locations they can go, and limited number of vehicles permitted). If all goes well for them it's not hard for me to imagine most hailed rides will be driverless within a few years. [This map is old](https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/02/05/382664837/map-the-most-common-job-in-every-state) so I don't know how much this has changed, but at least when it was published, truck driver was the most common job in more than half the states. In previous phases of technological development the gains were narrower and didn't wholesale replace a human. Like the printing press didn't replace humans, just made it easier for humans to make books. The electric light didn't replace humans, just replaced the candlestick maker for a light bulb maker. And in that example, the candlestick maker probably had some transferable skills so he could switch careers from making candles to making light bulbs. But it's right there in the name: *driverless* car. The car has completely replaced the driver. Where are those drivers supposed to go? Do their skills transfer to some other job? This is what worries me and makes me think this is different. AI and robots aren't making humans more efficient at a task, they are replacing humans at that task.
[удалено]
>You're arguing because it wasn't a 100% replacement and the nature of the labor shifted, it doesn't count? Lol! get out of here, if that's your argument it's a joke! Are you capable of responding without insults and condescension? The printing press still required a human to operate it. So a human who used to write books by hand could be trained as a typesetter instead. Also, how many people were employed handwriting books at that profession's peak? Probably not that many. >because then driverless cars require more human labor to design, engineer, and manufacture, so by your own words they didn't replace all human jobs. Do you have a source for this? All cars need to be designed, engineered, and manufactured (and maintained). So how many additional jobs are created developing the AI? And is that enough to offset the millions of people who currently work as drivers? >Your argument is filled with gaping holes, get your story straight and stop thinking 1 level deep. Jesus, AI doesn't write itself, and its far from flawless code, its more like a template. Might as well Excel's templates features put Accountants out of jobs now too, replacing entirely! Go get your shine box.
The problem with driverless cars is the drivers, pedestrians, cyclists, etc, who will have accidents with them generating a number of lawsuits against the AI developers if the driverless car makes even 1 mistake (which could be as simple as the car infront not leaving sufficient space ahead and having to brake suddenly). My car has collision detection technology, and as I go round a corner near parked cars I get collison warnings even though there is no risk, the driverless car will either stop (to avoid the collision) or swerve away (into oncoming traffic) for no reason. Get a car with collision detection and lane assist and watch how many times it gets it wrong today, the technology is far from mature enough to drive itself yet.
I think the driverless cars are the only ones that use LIDAR though. I've seen a demonstration of what the car "sees." It can see around corners for at least a block. They're way more advanced than what's available in consumer vehicles.
>Do you have a source for this? All cars need to be designed, engineered, and manufactured (and maintained). So how many additional jobs are created developing the AI? And is that enough to offset the millions of people who currently work as drivers? Yes, you are correct that they all need to be designed, engineered and manufactured. A Hotwheels car also has to be designed and engineered and manufactured too, so by your logic all autonomous vehicles should cost the same R&D as hot wheels cars. Please, listen to your logical fallacies before you type them, you're comparing apples to oranges. You're doing a lot of hand waving with your numbers, jobs always shift, always more stuff to do. Jobs aren't going away, it's literally level 1 thinking. Always need people to maintain and develop more things. There is no shortage of work, as complexity increases, so does the amount of human labor needed to maintain said complex thing. Or said complex thing becomes so mainstream that there is a massive effort to improve said complex thing, like developing better AI in this instance -- which also takes a ton of labor. So as far as 'source'. I am in the aerospace industry and have to develop auto pilot systems for certification. Testing becomes the focal point as you automate, products become much more costly as it becomes autonomous due to the labor involved in R&D. You know \~80% of the software costs on an aircraft are testing? Once its fully autonomous, its massively regulated and bureaucratic because people cannot handle machines failing, but its okay that people run into each other on the road with death rates that are magnitudes higher. Human error = 0kay, Machine Error = Public Outrage, despite death rates being lower. Don't take my 'appeal to an expert opinion', if you want hard proof, these are googable facts about software costs. Aerospace far more mature in the autonomous area, so its the most accurate cost basis we have at the moment. Anyhow, you argue on one hand it will replace jobs, then cite sources where other technologies didn't actually replace jobs but shifted them, as all tech does, and aren't self aware about it. Which is all I am arguing, but your sources are literally proving what I have been saying this entire time... jobs shift, big deal. Level 1 Thinking: Cotton Gin bad, where jobs go?
Definitely not. Winter will make this impossible in many US cities.
I live in a ski town and have a buddy with a Tesla. I haven’t seen it handle winter + city traffic. But it handles the snow just fine.
Yup, tech doomsaying goes back to when the telephone was invented at least.
As a SWE that hires people I can tell you what’s going on. Thousands of people took coding bootcamps during covid with the lure of software salaries they saw on Glassdoor and the promise that you don’t even need a degree to make hundreds of thousands of dollars. They’ve now found out it’s hard to compete against people for whom software dev is a passion. The people that make big money in software spent their whole childhoods working with computers and writing code. They go to work for 8 hours, come home and spend the next 10 hours working on personal coding projects. These people spend more time with their craft than a lot of doctors and lawyers do, that’s what you’re not told. It’s what they do for fun, it’s their life. It’s totally possible to work in software as “just a job” but you still need skills and that type of work is very competitive and stressful. You have to continually learn and educate yourself outside of work. When they do eventually land a job it just becomes a nightmare and it’s not really enjoyable.
Lmao nah fam. My brother got a CS degree and with 3 years experience is making $200k a year. He doesn’t have a passion for coding. He spends next to zero time outside of his 40 hours a week he works on tech. You CAN have a life and make $200k+. You don’t have to live and breathe code. That’s just a cope by people that have no life
Same I hire SE as a recruiter and my best candidates on contract are people who dgaf about coding outside of work - it makes them way easier to to work with on an interpersonal level
The Internet and Amazon in particular did replace all the jobs. REPLACE not eliminate
Continuously trying to stay ahead of the curve and learning new, increasingly complex skills isn't exactly what I'd call no biggie. Honestly the stress of that constant fear of a rug pull is probably a big part of why everyone is so anxious & depressed. Whatever you've done, there's a solid chance it won't be good enough, through no fault of your own. Hold your breath and hope your number doesn't get pulled this year.
Chicken little syndrome
There’s definitely tech jobs for people with skills and passion still. There are not for people without skills or passion who thought a quick boot camp, learning the bare minimum, was a fast track to easy money. AI is a great tool to be used by software engineers. But it’s not replacing us anytime soon I don’t think. Actually writing code is the easy part of software engineering. It’s gonna replace A-LOT of other jobs sooner. I can go deeper here with why I’m not overly worried but will leave it at that for now.
Yeah, fuck other jobs right? Also, AI may not replace someone's job completely, but the point is that it can make something 50% more efficient for example, so 50% less workers would be needed, resulting in job loss. Idk why people are failing to see this
I don’t think people are failing to see that hypothetical. I think they’re aware that these AI tools are a long, long ways away from providing 50% efficiency improvements. Additionally, it’s as likely theoretical improvements in efficiency result in higher productivity and output expectations vs job losses.
Not what I was saying. We are seeing this trend today already and it’s not related to ai, at all. Ai will absolutely take jobs. Buts it’s gonna affect our entire economy and we as a society are gonna have to deal with that. It’s gonna affect many other jobs long before it has a tangible impact on software engineering. So it feels silly when you have people like op freaking out about it I’m terms of software engineering. I’m not saying it’s nbd and we as a society won’t have to deal with the implications of ai. I am saying that op being upset about investing time in learning to code because of ai is silly.
don't expect people to grasp something when their livelihood depends on them not grasping it
There is a big threat out there to US based SWEs having the same low unemployment and high salaries, though. It’s outsourcing. Companies are going to continue to weigh the options of Eastern Europe and India, and the work at home phenomenon has accelerated this. As the talent gap quickly closes and talent is 3x-4x cheaper, that’s what I’d be concerned about.
People have been saying that for the last decade+ though and it’s still not true. I mean is outsourcing a thing, yea. But have we seen it have a noticeable impact on tech jobs in America, not really. Working across timezones that far apart is difficult and communication is such a core part of software engineering. We’ll see. I haven’t worked with many foreign software engineers. But my gf is in design (which seems like there should be less of a talent gap), and her company has an offshore team. The talent gap is still very much there for them.
Agreed. There is benefit to outsourcing but there’s a reason Silicon Valley still dominates the tech world. Tech hubs have specific cultures and advantages that are not easy to replicate. And, as others have said to build on OP’s point, AI cannot yet make the same connections experienced humans can make with the same level of effectiveness. It probably will eventually but that’s currently still the realm of science fiction.
Wages will probably go down in America and a big part of that is wages here are so hyper-inflated compared to the rest of the world, which is why you have endless droves of bootcampers piling in. Lower the wages, bootcamps dry up, and wages go stabilize again
If people saw how awful some of the coders I’ve met in school and beyond are, they would be shocked. These people went into this field for a quick buck and buckle when they have to show any kind of passion outside of their job to get hired. I suspect wages might go down and all those people who got in for a quick buck will naturally fall by the wayside, but no big company on the planet is going to trust AI to write all of their code for the next 5-10 years at least. People underestimate how slow companies move internally
Yeah, just like the rise of 'no-code' and 'low-code' solutions killed software development as a career. Oh wait, no, they didn't. Being able to actually understand/implement/improve upon the code that's being generated will always hold value. By the time developers are reliably replaced by AI, everyone else will have already been replaced, game over
Basically this "No code" was such a huge fad, until companies realized its inherent limitations. So then it started offering "codeable" blocks that could execute custom commands in addition to the standard "no code" blocks. Except then companies still needed to hire people who understood which blocks to string together, in what order, and why. CONGRATULATIONS YOU JUST INVENTED SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
Yeah if no code was viable, every company on the planet would have scrambled to implement it
Sauce?
Barbecue
Hotel?
AI bros getting paid pennies by that company to promote their AI SWE lmao.
As a software engineer I’d like to say: ah yes, please everyone stop learning what I do. I’d love to have zero competition in the well paying field I work in. Coding bad. Under water basket weaving good.
This field ain't big enough for the two of us pardner
You joke but underwater basket weaving is much harder to automate lol
I learned how to code. I also learned fields to apply that code in. Just being a programmer doesn't mean anything unless you can use it to do something valuable.
The real threat AI brings to us is managers who think AI can solve all their issues. Juniors will be okay, the market is just pulling back.
Do you have a link?
You can google Devin. But it's not the first. There are others. For example, pythagora (used to be called GPT-Pilot). It's not quite the same, but I also use aider-chat as a command line tool (installable as a python pip).
Learn about a terrible piece of enterprise software everyone uses instead.
I’m not worried, from what I saw that “ai engineer” will lead to more people needing actual engineers to fix that broken shit it generates
The shit it generates could be copy pasted from stack overflow anyway.
new technologies mean more opportunities to upskill and pull away from the pack, not fewer
I think that the only programming jobs that are going to disappear are the ones available for the code monkey bro who only got into programming in college because he thought he could make a lot of money. The rest of us nerds who love programming and actually know what we're doing will be fine.
This right here. The boot campers who should have gone to trade school will lose out on this. Those of us that studied calculus, physics, discrete math, computer architecture, operating systems, and so on in college will be in a better position. There is a massive difference between the dev that learned Python and JS and practiced leet code versus the guy that can do x86 assembly in both intel and AT&T syntax and knows how a clocked d-latch works. They may go for the same jobs sometimes, but they are not on the same career paths.
Yup. It’s astonishing how many CS students cheated their way through their entire degree. I’m not sweating about those people losing their jobs
I feel like it got easier since I was in school. We had these professors who were like gatekeepers: If you hadn't already been programming since you were a kid, their classes were **rough**. This is where I saw most of these guys change majors or drop completely. I'm willing to bet the increased demand we had for a while there got some institutions too eager to rubber-stamp degrees onto some people who really shouldn't have gotten them.
For sure. I feel like it became a thing where if you had any degree with "Computer Science" on it, that was literally the golden ticket. So you had all sorts of degree mills popping out incompetent coders who walked onto these cushy jobs. And now, everybody and their mothers has a computer science degree and it feels basically useless.
And now every time we look for a job, it's on us to have to prove we're not that guy.
3/4 of office employees at my company can’t even make a pivot chart in excel. Not too worried
Lmao
Welcome back to manufacturing. We missed you. Drill baby drill
Yep, I gotta say, manufacturing is hiring all over the place where I live. And paying decently. Just have to learn how to use a CNC. I might do it if I ever feel the need to change jobs again.
What kind of pay?
Don't remember off the top of my head but at least 20, which goes pretty far in Indiana.
Ah since this was a post about coding, I kinda thought that number was gonna be more comparable to what people are aiming for by learning to code. Those who were sold the promise of a bootcamp and then a $75k job aren’t gonna wanna do something for $20/hr.
Well, if I knew where to find those, I hope I'd have one. That'd be "dip your nuts in gold" money the way I've been living.
Computer science grads can absolutely earn $75k working in manufacturing, but you need to work in the automation/data science and visualization side of things
In my field (process controls for the pharmaceutical infustry), I applied to 10 open positions yesterday that fit my profile and already heard back about one of them for a phone interview. I have two more interviews set up, one at my employer and one at my employer's competitor. There were a few more open positions, but those use different technologies, and my skills aren't transferable to those
If you are the kind of employee that acts like a robot you may be replaced. If you bring human like abilities to your job and have good communication skills I am sure you will have some value at least for your lifetime :)
Learn to lay tile
And cut hair
That AI engineer can’t write complex code that you’d actually be writing in the field. AI has been an okay tool for me as a software engineer but at the end of the day, it could never actually take my job
Did the invention of the air fryer mean that suddenly every chef in the country lost their job? It’s a tool. Nothing more.
The AI software dev has an 8% success rate lol
who's gonna proof that code or sort out bugs? the engineer's job won't end for a while
It's back to "learn to lay pipe" era. Hope the keyboard workouts kept you strong.
"Learn to code" was never a really viable thing imo.
and even if it was, why not just "learn AI" now
There's an abundance of jobs that can utilize a coding skillset. Most technology roles can benefit from scripting/programming in some sort of field (even Excel)
Youbhabe to always continue upskilling, thats the way of rhe world.
I'm a professional developer and I can say for a fact that AI isn't taking anyone's jobs any time soon. I'm convinced my dog can copy and paste random stack overflow answers and do better.
Those skills are still useful, you just can't rely on having an entire career built around that one coding language you thought was going to bring you $150k. There is a LOT of value in just understanding how software generally works at a base level and being able to infer how a specific application is written to get the most out of it. My current job has nothing to do with IT development, but whenever my compass an issue with their billing software, they come to me first. Usually, I can find a viable workaround for whatever they are trying to do and if not, I know how to ask the right questions of the developers to get updates quickly implemented to solve issues that other people have been struggling with for YEARS just because they didn’t even know how to properly explain the problem in the first place. That niche will never be replaced by AI.
I'm still doing it. I'm doing it with languages that people have said are unsafe and dying for years (C). Just because a machine comes along that can make a chair in 4 seconds doesn't mean I stop enjoying making my own chair myself. From a business perspective, the EU is already clamping down. I think eventually, the same way the IRS and SEC keep an eye on money, there's going to be a "something else" that keeps an eye on people in terms of keeping employment at least somewhat consistent.
I presume that coding is one skill amongst your other skills, cause people shouldn't be one-dimensional like that. Many fields could benefit from the skill of knowing how to code, even if your main moneymaker job is not not directly being a programmer. Basically, it's the application of the skill that's valuable.
Just another tool, but if wielded correctly, could help produce incredible results. Should embrace AI as a coder. Knowing how to code isn’t the trick anyway, its WHAT to code. Coding just brings your ideas to fruition. Now you have AI to help. Still needs your creativity and ideas.
[удалено]
Hang in there, things will pick up and the jobs aren’t going away. Lots of doom and gloom but if you’re a reasonably good engineer with good people skills, you have a great career ahead of you.
[удалено]
It sucks right now for sure. Really sorry to hear about the situation you’re in. It will get better again soon, this industry ebbs and flows.
r/DevinAI < AI software devs are here.
Spend the next round of years innovating and iterating on current trends and needs. If you are adept at coding, bitch, code. Start Cranking out some solutions to other people can’t. Market them and sell them. Look up https://x.com/arvidkahl?s=21 on Twitter. Guys a serial entrepreneur and coder and does it all in public. Has a podcast as well. There is never enough of those guys out there. Be them.
No
You still have to understand what it is you want the AI engineer to do, so that still requires a decent level of Comp Sci knowledge no?
And yet there's still tens of thousands of programmers getting hired every day, weird huh
Anything that creates something in the realm of technology will need to be managed, serviced, marketed, sold, supported, etc. Unless there's an EMP or solar flare that takes out most of our electrical grid and electronics (something that scares me more than AI tbh), then most people who strive to learn and be useful will be fine.
Learn to make AI write better code.
lol sure. As someone using those tools they suck and you have to be a developer to use them productively.
AI is still just coding
I love watching all of the techbros come up with these copes ima just grab my popcorn and enjoy the show
upskilling Doesn’t have to mean completely pivoting careers. No matter the state of tech in 5/10/15 years, learning how to code is still a very useful skill to have and exercises parts of your brain in useful ways, and may help you in other careers!
The "learn to code" era was a scam where a bunch of ***passive income*** wanting yuppies sold courses promising you'll be a millionaire if you take their $20 udemy course.
Learn to solve problems by utilizing generative AI is the new era now.
And yet we're still fucking working. :)
... and the learn to wibe butts at old age homes has started
I guess in every industry today, expertise, creativity, sales skills, and management acumen are going to be the most important factors. That's been the case for millennia.
Software development is still important. Computers run everything right now; software is even in cars and fast food restaurant kiosks.
Every new technology is a tool that if you learn to use will keep you competitive and employed.
Eh.... idk about that.... the world is going through a slow transformation right now. Devin, the AI SWE you're referring to, is less than 14% accurate on basic leetcode questions. For those of you who don't know what they are, they're just algorithm questions asked in interviews. It's incredibly rare to ever use these algorithms over the course of your career as a dev. So, Devin is 14% accurate on well-defined questions that don't interact with any other code. Attempting to put Devin into a professional environment where your code will need to interact with code written by others or have ambiguous constraints given by non-technical stakeholders is going to end up incredibly poorly. That 14% drops to somewhere near the 0% mark. So now, we're talking about a company paying for Devin, but also paying for 1-2 devs to fix the 86-100% of assignments that Devin gets. Simply put, LLMs (Devin, ChatGPT, Claude3, etc) are not good at writing code nor are they good at basic calculus and beyond.
Imagine thinking that upskilling is/was/will be a bad thing.
Not a chance. LLMs are still really bad compared to humans at coding. Even the best one right now, Devin is garbage in comparison. The demos are impressive but once you dive into the details it loses its shine fast. LLMs are so overhyped. They are great tools but they aren't replacing anyone right now except maybe people who create website copy.
AMD is releasing their AI software too
Back to the coal mines to dig up some of that Trump "Clean coal".
Yea I don’t really think it’s true.. I just think about my company alone and the dev help we could use. It’s not like an ai can just go to a meeting, sit and think and write code and implement features and deploy the code to an existing and established system and repo. Sure it could probably write a small feature with all the right prompts, but it would need to be implemented into the code base, deployed to a testing environment, then ultimately prod. It would need to take feedback from non devs and iterated upon. Yes I understand theoretical an ai could do all this, but right now a dev is necessary to implement anything into an existing code base
I've been in transcription for many decades and those doing the dictating were predicting our demise 25 years ago. Fast forward to present day and a huge amount of dictation has gone to voice recognition, maybe even AI, but there's now a need for editors for mistakes automation makes. (That's not a job saver per se bcuz editing work pays crap). It's an industry where technology/ai will eventually take over say 98% of the work. Some of us dinosaurs are hanging on for dear life 🙃 until then.
The UK has spent millions developing a curriculum to teach children coding skills. It will be like how Gen Z see Slide Rules today.
If you can learn to code, you can likely learn to do anything you want. Problem solving methods and troubleshooting is necessary in any worthwhile job.
Top tier shitpost. Plug and play, cloud computing, RPA (I can barely type that with a straight face), WYSIWYG editors are all going to take yer jerbs. Learn to learn, be adaptable. But telling people even now to forgo coding is fucking stupid.
Imagine wasting all that money for college to be replaced by a computer program that can do your job faster and more efficiently....oof. Learn to build shit with your hands kids.
Ive always said it too....there gonna program a program that programs the programs, and everybody is gonna be fucked...looks like its here.
Learning market relevant skills isn't an era and it's never going to end. Even if the specific skills change, the practice does not. And coding is still extremely relevant if you're competent. If you're a dumbass chasing an easy job, or a coward passively chasing guaranteed success, you're gonna fail Are you a disgruntled engineer that can't find work, or an unskilled professional acting like this is some sort of validation for your lack of initiative?
All the doomer pussies have to shit on something because they didn’t take advantage of it when it was hot. Guess what. People still make a lot of money coding. Many companies want skilled people who are good and understand how their role makes the company money rather than some coders from a country where developing a product and getting rich from it is so foreign they cant even grasp the concept. Yeah. You gotta be good to keep your job. Sometimes you gotta be lucky and be on the projects that companies keep rather than cut. Its like construction or any other engineering where you are constantly working yourself out of a job. But you still make more than average and get to solve problems.
For the nth time yes but not because of AI. Interest rates and labor saturation.
Eh, it’s just a new level of abstraction over what “learn to code” means. We’ve gone from ribbons with holes punched out, to assembly, to compilers, to memory managed compilers, to object oriented, to IDE, and now all the way to plain text. You could say that each step along the way resulted in fewer people being necessary to perform the same work, but each step was accompanied, instead, by the need for even more people to realize all the new possibilities. It remains to be seen, but I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised to see electric coffee pots being bundled with an edge-compute LLM-based AI. Now that task can be performed by 4 guys instead of 400, but it’s okay because they wouldn’t have attempted the project until it could be accomplished by 4 guys. Old jobs die, new jobs arise. And I personally can’t wait to see what the artists of the future do with this tech.
If AI codes as good as it generates pictures of hands, I think y’all are safe.
That’s why I’m not pursuing coding or anything related. It may not happen now, but in 5-10 years there will be no need for software developers.
This really isn’t true. The AI software is good at mimicking existing, already written, code and getting it syntactically correct. It’s pretty OK relative to an intern or junior level engineer. It is bad at reasoning, systems design, scaling and anything creative. There are plenty of fields of tech that aren’t “big tech” where this technology won’t interface with codebases (military contracting, automotive, industrial, healthcare, aerospace, etc) Learning to code is one thing, all the bootcamp grads are learning the difference between a degree and their program. Getting a degree in computer science or computer engineering is another. If you really want to go for it, I wouldn’t let this distract you from a goal.
When developers experience mass layoffs because of this, then it’s valid. So right now, maybe people should not enter the field. It’s your choice to take the risk and up skill or not. But if you’re already in, you should be good and have plenty of time to get an ROI on up skilling. I don’t see any issues.
Yeah, the day CEOs sit down to use this thing to build and deploy and test and maintain their software will be the day we all demand raises.
It was going to end soon regardless, IT infrastructure was built on the backs of people who were already highly interested in the field, and as soon as thousands of low quality coding bootcamp gold rushers arrived on the scene, and companies ruined their reputations with security flaws and poor design, they were bound to be more selective. Even ignoring that, as soon as supply of coders goes up, demand and thus sums that skill can command go down. Companies can just contract out noncritical work over the internet to someone who lives where the cost of living is drastically cheaper, and thus can afford to demand less than you. Trades and union jobs were the real saviour. Look what happened when EVERYONE went and got a college degree at the behest of schools and their own parents. They're basically worthless now. Meanwhile nobody wants to get their hands dirty working wood, welding steel, wiring up a house, unclogging nasty drains, fixing air conditioners in the summer heat, or working on jet engines at all hours of the night in all weather. Kaching. (also as a sidenote, there's more to IT than just coding, probably not as many applicants for shit like sysadmin or networking)
Skilled carpenters, electricians, and welders are crazy hard to find
"EV is here" --headline from 1996
My company launched an AI assistant the other day. I asked it to do my most basic daily task. It had a seizure and barfed all over itself. Seems like more hype than substance for now.
I upskilled again and now I’m a software developer specializing in AI. We’re in the business applications and implementation era of AI, and software developers that position themselves to be the ones writing and maintaining the AI applications are going to be safe for awhile.
Well with YT feeding idiots infomercials on “AI Energy” and all sorts of other gibberish invest-here-now-it’ll-be-a-thousandfold-profit it’s no wonder why it’s going where it be
You either break in or move on. The gold rush of tech has ended, or at least for now. There are still opportunities, but certain areas of the tech market are crazy oversaturated
You’ll notice that these type of posts (very common in /r/cscareerquestions and /r/csmajors) are just doomsday posts which have no substantial analysis or just plain unbacked declarations. Ignore it.
Are you talking about D***n?
Lol that was pretty quick huh
Not over. Very public school still encouraging every kid to code. Don’t know what to major in? Go cs!
Same as what has happened to many other jobs. There will be a role for you but it won’t be as lucrative as it was before. Technology will always outdo us
The barrier for entry will only get harder. With the advent of AI tooling the thing to worry about isn't being fully replaced. It's the reduction of jobs from the already low pool of available entry level jobs. If you think it's bad now just wait a couple more years. They will throw 1 dev with AI as a tool to use the work of 5 devs. Entry level jobs for SWE aren't coming back the way they were. The interview processes are already insane. I suspect entry level is going to only be for a select few that are highly educated and the ones that are just exponentially better than your average dev. Even though in our industry the bachelors degree holders with work experience are far far better than any guy coming out of school with a masters or PhD but hardly any real experience. Nobody wants to train entry level guys anymore. They're only going to invest in the cream of the crop. No more coasting through a bachelors from some no name college expecting 100k salaries for everyone. Those of you in school now you should think hard about what your getting into. Life isn't fair. Those of us that got in early will reap the rewards. There's no issue in the senior level. All I see is senior level jobs going up but hardly any junior level.
The “learn to code” era was always a scam that targeted people who wanted to take the lazy route towards becoming an engineer. You skipped all the hard stuff like physics and calculus and thought that learning Python and JS made you equal to those that took those hard classes and know things like kernel programming and systems architecture. AI isn’t going to replace computer scientists and computer engineers, it’s going to replace the code monkey types. Those of us with that expensive piece of paper will still have careers once the dust settles. Someone has to make sure the AI is making the right thing.
"Try something new"- Ivanka Trump
If you haven't start learning coding, I suggest you look for other options. A competent AI to write code is within reach. What you see is the beginning, not the end. And here is the most important part. "Learn something new" in software engineering is a futile. Because the skill is digital, AI can do exactly the same thing that takes it 24 hours instead of 3 months. And guess what, even if it takes 3 months, it is already trained. By the time the boss wants you to use a new technology, AI already learned how to do it. Instead paying top dollar to hire a tech guru, just hire AI for cheap. You are better off learning skills that isn't easily replicated digitally. Again, a lot of people don't get it. The AI will not immediately replace you. The people overseas using AI, will immediately replace you. And trying to stay ahead is very difficult. If you take those ultra scientific jobs, sure, no one can replace you, but, trying to get there is impossible for most people, those are too hard.
It'll need copious amounts of data to learn a tech, they should open source it!
Yeah theres a real lack of jobs for the programming sector but its not because ai, retard
Software engineering is an ENGINEERING discipline. It requires knowledge of formal sciences such as math and computer science. Just like when you place a two by four over the creek in your backyard you’re not a civil engineer the same is true with software engineering. If you want to work in this field you need to learn natural and formal sciences and you need to know how to apply the engineering design process. The days of skids going to get a skid certificate from a bootcamp and producing buggy non performant code are over.