Comment by BiteCode_dev | Hacker News Reader

Comment by BiteCode_dev | Hacker News Reader

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I have been coding for 20 years now, pretty much on every continent, in many different projects.

At least half of them have failed.

I've seen NGO moving to docker based micro services for their data collection tools and burn the donators money for 2 years before dying under the weight of the complexity they just created.

I've seen start up working on ideas for months that made no sense, only to run out of cash but the belly full of useless lines of code.

I've seen corporations hiring 7 people to do the work one single senior dev could do, then from meetings to audits, proceed to ensure the budget would explode and the product never released.

I've seen fancy operations, with free food and fashionable people full of colors and style. And they spent 2 third of their day virtue signaling, fighting over how to do thing, what should have been done instead, and what we should do in the future. But certainly doing nothing right now.

I don't believe the free market is pricing the value of most things fairly. Just like I don't believe diamonds have much value, and never did, even before when people were still buying them for their wedding ring.

Yes, most of us are overpaid, given the problems we actually solve.

But we are in the IT golden age, if you throw computers at things, you get a 100x return. And money was cheap for so long.

So it was ok, to hire 100 people, and have 12 of them being actually useful, because you didn't have time figure out which ones.

However today the economy is contracting. The low hanging fruits have been harvested. And it's no longer economically viable for the companies (that were never our friends in the first place) that they care about how special devs are.

And so we get fired.

man - if you've been at it 20 years, this isn't your first rodeo...

I've been working 40 years in Tech..

Saw the Wall St. ups/downs in the 90s - NYC was feast/famine back then

Saw the Y2K 'end of the world' ... We're still here

Saw the 'dot com' bust ... Tech/Internet didn't die

Saw the 2008 crash ... We're still here

and thats just what I can remember at 2 am :-) I fully expect us to be here after this current stuff blows over. And I expect there to be a bigger shortage of programmers due to retirement, changing careers, etc.

edit: fix formating

100% agree.

In fact, I expect to be shortage of programmers even if none of those would happen (and they will), solely because the need will increase as we automatize even more things with AI. The people qualified to do those jobs we partially replace will not suddenly turn into devs.

So we will play divas for a long time. And good for us. Not going to complain that we have such a good situation.

But the fact so many people are surprised by being fired is hilarious. They lived in the illusion they were so special. Like this is perfectly normal to have so many privileges as we have.

We are just very, very lucky. I know doctors that work twice my week to save human life, doing so in terrible conditions and sleep deprived, for half of my salary.

Time to appreciate that.

> In fact, I expect to be shortage of programmers even if none of those would happen (and they will)

Did you see GPT-4 demo yesterday?

Seems to me that after a LLM has been trained to the level of GPT-3.5, we programmers not only are not needed, but most of what we can do can be automated.

So how exactly are programmers are needed to automate things with AI? What am I missing?

Doctor Dobbs was hyping AI in the 80s...

Fifth Gen project, prolog etc. - Didn't change much

Expert systems were the rage for medicine back in the 90s? Don't see doctors out of work..

IBM Watson passed the bar in UK and was hired as a 'lawyer' - Don't see lawyers going away...

The hype circles keep circling ... Yeah, chatGPT is neat - but its still got a long way to go...

Edit: oh - and lets not forget, we were all supposed to be programming in ADA now. It was going to 'take over' the world, first in DoD... then spreading to general usage. Can't remember the last time I saw an ADA job ?

Developers aren't getting replaced until we have strong AGI. GPT still hallucinates it's output much of the time. You need someone who can review that output before you can trust it.

Maybe LLM's get to the point where they really help dev productivity, and we wind up needing less devs overall, but that hasn't happened in the past when easy to use frameworks like rails made it super easy to spin up a twitter clone. In fact, employment exploded.

TLDR: Devs won't be out of a job until we run out of things to automate. Sometime around the heat death of the universe or we're being crushed by skynet.

It’s all depending on cultural values.

Past the very tiny portion of people who work on base necessities to the point they will be given permission to roam when everyone else is supposed to be locked down, jobs are only about fanciful human whims.

"How many people will shortly die of starvation or medical troubles if the job is not performed?" might be a relevant metric here.

So, past these considerations, everyone is going to make needless work. Obviously, from some perspective, they all are overpaid to do so at various degree. IT people, HR, chief suite and many other are on the same boat here, they just don’t navigate with the same level of luxury.

> But we are in the IT golden age, if you throw computers at things, you get a 100x return. And money was cheap for so long.

Check back in five to ten years, this is a slight reversal on a continued bull run. Why? Because people with money want to make more money and saving money, while important is not making money. Worst case scenario we all get transitioned into defense contractors to fight a future where our current overlords are supplanted by an rapidly rising, better educated and executing CCP.

You really need to look at China's demographic problems if you think the CCP is still a major threat a decade from now...

I agree with all said, beside the last two paragraphs. But I'd rather not debate the economical situation.

How do you see IT from the other perspectives? For example, from the accounting perspective: the profitability of the companies, the cost/benefit ratio, profit per employee, etc.

How the other industries are holding up? Sports? Music? Shows & Movies? Marketing? Law?

We are fortunate that we made the stack very complicated. And the stakeholders believe us that it's organic. Once the stakeholders become IT-proficient, we are doomed (fortunately, as the things stand, that's about never)

The stakeholders won't become any more IT proficient than they have become Accounting proficient. CTOs are IT proficient, and they are enough of the stakeholder.

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