Posted by abnercoimbre 2 hours ago
It's a misunderstanding that AI makes SW engineers less valuable, when the code making is cheaper. This assumes there is some fixed amount of code that the society needs to produce. I think the companies will face a different reality - the code they own ("intellectual property") will become less valuable, but the programmers (who are now effectively promoted to kind of product managers) will become more valuable, as they can now do more (and cause more damage, too).
The innovations of the past, such as compilers and open source, which made programmers more productive, didn't make them obsolete.
That being said, it will take companies (and their owners) some time to accept the new reality - programmers have more power now and it's harder to gatekeep what they work on. So the management of these companies will try to twist it, which will ultimately be counterproductive. The programmers should recognize it and look into some form of social organization - be it unions, professional organization or worker cooperatives. (Distinction of labor vs capital is not a natural law, just like the distinction between lords and peasants isn't god-given.)
It's not rocket science.
Digital computers were cheaper than the legions of human "calculators" that they replaced, but once those savings were realized, the next step was to attack the smaller number but still expensive per head staff of programmers you needed to get the most value out of a computer.
I've seen both ways, and don't share the "capital owners BAD" sentiment. The first thing to join a company is to see whether they assign Eng department to Costs or to Assets mentally.
The same is true for other knowledge workers, not just programmers. That doesn't mean that if corporate owners and managers had a magic wand that could replicate the worker on demand they wouldn't use it and toss the knowledge worker aside. They would do so happily, especially if it saved them money.
The reason that programmers (few are actually engineers, no reason to bullshit we're among friends and can be honest) have been treated so well is that they were hard to replace. If that barrier gets lifted, or is perceived to have been lifted, they'll get rid of the programmers in a heartbeat.
1) Cost
2) Flexibility. If you can hire random laborers to do most of your tasks, you can quickly scale up whereas if you depend on highly skilled and trained workers, starting a new operation elsewhere is hard. Similar, you can shift activity around, are less impeded by the opinions of workers, etc. Significantly, this may allow you to "franchise" your operations in various ways.
> It's not rocket science.
It's far above the heads of many supposedly "smart" software engineers, who looked at their high salaries and 401ks, forgot they were disposable laborers, and confused themselves for capitalist tycoons.
Drop the libertarianism and form a labor union before it's too late. You're not smart if you're parroting your boss's talking points like an idiot.
I agree with this, but it isn't just limited to software engineers. Most of the supposed "middle class" in the US fits this description.
We currently have the highest level of wealth inequality in history which is still growing at runaway rates and plenty of laborers who view themselves as "temporarily embarrassed billionaires" willing to prop up the system, seemingly unaware that those at the top will gladly wipe them off their boot when given the chance.
Big llm smells: 'Not "AI helps you autocomplete a function." Not "AI explains a stack trace." I mean the full-on narrative:'
'Sure, it's a weird language. It looks archaic. Sometimes it's hostile. Sometimes it's beautiful.
But still—if you know what you're doing—you can sit down with a keyboard and turn words into:
a product a workflow an automated business process a system that makes money while you sleep a tool that saves a team thousands of hours That's real power. It's leverage.'
'Not because we're lazy. Not because we're gatekeeping. Because building real systems is hard, and the number of people who can reliably do it is limited.'
Sometimes I think we get too caught up on what chatgpt will do to the economy, software, and businesses, and forget the most insidious aspect of this type of technology - we will no longer know how to write and all human text communication will confirm to a specific pattern.
There are literally people running bots creating such shortform videos as we speak.
And there are millions of kids (and adults) scrolling those same videos as you reading this.
Let that sink in.
That's other people. I'm not in that cesspol and neither will my children.
What are the good reasons to write a blog, minus those that involve you actually writing it?
It's basic market dynamics + some high school social calculus.
"My manager wants to get rid of me because I'm too good with computers and he is jealous."
No, he wants to get rid of you because you are an operating expense for the company. If they can achieve the same outcome without paying your salary then why wouldn’t they fire you?
It would take a huge leap forward, if not actual AGI, to fully replace Software Developers. If that's the case, they could replace any human job at any level, not just developers.
:-/
The same argument could be made about people writing articles and influencing actions in other humans. Something, it seems, people want to use AI for. Have AI write articles for them.
We’re software engineers. Like half of the work we do is try and automate jobs.
Are we really confused about why “they” might want to automate our jobs?
We manage complexity.
Flagged why?
I think it was a pretty good article.
I don't how this could offend anyone.
Since the development of computers, companies have wanted to save money and that's meant a push to find a magic bullet that can replace many, if not most or all, programmers. Natural language programming, RAD tools, much of the work on fifth-generation languages, was oriented around that objective (removing or reducing the dependence on programmers as a category of professionals, versus domain experts who happen to also program).