Hacker News Reader

Comment by JackOfCrows | Hacker News Reader

Very few people remember this now but when outsourcing was starting to become a thing circa 1998-2000, it was "common knowledge" that learning programming or getting a CompSci degree etc. Was going to be pointless because all those jobs were just going to be outsourced to India.

You can see that has proven to be 100% accurate.

View on HN

In some cases it lasted even longer than that. In 2004 at a Canadian University I was told during the student orientation that CS was not a great choice due to outsourcing.

There are many more available processing cores than potential humans workers.

That’s true. It’s just that the future hasn’t yet happened, so we cannot now for sure how it will play out. We can only make more or less educated guesses. And be prepared to sometimes become surprised, since there was developments going on that we just oversaw.

Outsourcing always has a lot challenges. AI is a completely different beast.

No matter how many frameworks, programming languages, the cloud, tools we have invented demand for programmers has stayed high.

LLM is another tool. Until it can talk to a stakeholders and build something it can be accountable for to a high standard that actually solves the problem and does well at the 1000 or so factors that make good software. I don’t worry about it right now.

AI is a threat to programmers precisely when it is a threat to civilisation. It may change the job substantially, but change is normal, so did the www, mobile, VC, cloud, Javascript explosion, functional programming and so on.

It also has a lot of challenges and needs quality control, automated quality control even.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com