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Comment by littlecranky67 | Hacker News Reader

I am believing that, too. Just imagine this:

Take a Laptop with WinXP+Office 98 from the 2000 era and travel back in time to the 60s or 70s using a time machine. Show the power of Excel to any of those developers punching holes into a punch card, feeding room-sized "computers". Tell them that this "Excel" tool is used by business and sales people without any programming skills. Those developers would clearly tell their children to learn other professions, as no one will need developers in the future because this "Excel" and "Access" make it so easy. But the opposite become true, we needed more devs than ever at that time. Our field will change, the way we develop software did change and will continue to do so - maybe using AI all day.

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I disagree. Think about it like this: Excel can do more than punch cards can, but it's also harder to learn. So you can put in more effort and get more out, e.g. you might need 130% of the knowledge, but you get 150% of the result.

These new generative AI algorithms make things easier, but they produce worse results. E.g. you can put in 50% of the effort and get 80% of the result. By lowering the amount of knowledge required to build something, you open up the labor pool to more unskilled labor. So while technically the "number of developers" will increase, the ranks will be increased with unskilled labor and the profession will cease to be desirable knowledge work.

This is very similar to how craftsmen and tradespeople were replaced with automation. For example, "Luddites" are known as people who dislike technological progress, but they were really textile workers who opposed having their high-skill jobs replaced by low-skill laborers with the factory owners pocketing the difference between the high and low skill pay.

Excel is harder to learn than 1970s-era Fortran?

Excel is actually a good comparison. It's easy to learn, it works just fine for small stuff, it's easy to misuse, it's hard to catch mistakes, and more often than not at a certain point the grown-ups have to take over and rewrite the project using actually working technology.

> the ranks will be increased with unskilled labor and the profession will cease to be desirable knowledge work.

The real skill in software development has never been coding, but rather formally specifying problems and turning them into a complete set of instruction. If people could do that, we'd be all out of a job already. Java syntax isn't rocket science, folks...

I feel like you could say the same about Python.

There's nothing you can do in Python that you can't do in C. But while Python is easier to learn and use than C, it's less efficient, in some cases hundreds of times slower than C, let alone expertly-optimized assembly.

But the ease of application development in languages like Python has expanded the scope of what can be realistically done with software, causing developer employment and salaries to rise while lowering the required computer science knowledge.

As for the luddites, they lacked imagination. Low-skilled laborers might have been able to make textiles, but there were plenty of lucrative opportunities for talented people able to design, build and maintain machinery instead of merely operating it. It was not uncommon for talented engineers to become factory owners themselves, some of whom started as unskilled laborers (Samuel Slater, for example).

It does seem that every advance in productivity has led to more software jobs, but I see no reason this must continue forever. I can tell that I have no fear for my job from Copilot and ChatGPT, both of which I use constantly. But the next generation of tools, marrying low-code, integration platforms and AI generation of those applications could really be a game changer.

You have the right comparison. Developers need to remember that nobody had a job punching holes in cards after the revolution of personal computing. Going to be the same here. The jobs will revolve around operating the new "loom" which we have been given.

It's not clear to me that the new "loom" won't just operate itself completely.

That's the problem with comparing this to previous tech advances. Past advances made people much more efficient at some task, but it still required the people to work the new thing. But now we have a new thing that might be able to work itself.

The "loom" in this case is kind of a loom that helps people create other tools. Creating tools is generally not an automated task and with AI it will be easier.

I agree, with the caveat that the biggest danger that I see is that big corps are able to use the threat of AI to cow workers into accepting worse pay/treatment.

The middle class, which they (used to) represent, has lost lots and lots of buying power since then. So do they have jobs? Yes. Are they worse off? Also yes.

> Are they worse off? Also yes.

There's no time in human history that I'd rather live in than the present day.

"on my computer it works"

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