Hacker News Reader

Comment by breadwinner | Hacker News Reader

It may not be replacing anyone, but is it allowing 3 people to do the job of 4? I think so, and that reduces job opportunities for everyone.

Also, is AI allowing junior engineers to do the job of senior engineers? I think so too.

View on HN

Yeah that's why all the programming jobs disappeared after 4GL languages made us more efficient, and then when intellisense happened the industry got even smaller. The real tragedy though was all these open source libraries.

100%. I set up some keybinds this morning, and just now the guy next to me was made redundant.

Kellyanne Conway is gonna have to tell us all about the Eclipse and Boost massacres

Think about the (grossly simplified and somewhat questionable) historical availability of: electronic gates -> binary -> assembly -> C -> Python. Each of these steps as allowed one engineer to do the work of an entire team at the previous step.

And yet here we are: as technology has made engineers massively more productive, the need for engineers has gone up massively. Simply because the gains in productivity have made more projects doable.

So the question is not whether AI will make engineers more productive. The question is whether it will allow more projects to be undertaken. I don't have the answer to that question...

Are you using or have you used any of these AI tools for any length of time? Truthfully, no, I don't see it allowing 3 people to do 4 peoples' jobs, or for juniors to do the work of seniors. If I had to spitball a guess, I'd say there's potential for about a 10-15% productivity improvement on some tasks. Overall, as a senior/staff level software engineer, I can see these tools boosting my productivity maybe 5-10%. That's nowhere near "3 people doing the job of 4" levels.

Speaking of juniors doing the work of seniors, you've got it totally backwards. The people who benefit most from these tools are the more experienced, more capable people, not new grads fresh out of college. There are a ton of things a SWE does that no LLM will help you with -- at least not until virtual avatars get to the point where I can send fake me to a meeting and expect to still have my job at the end of said meeting. Being able to evaluate and understand the output of these tools is a key skill necessary for gaining a benefit from them, and that's precisely the skill that juniors, by definition, lack.

That said, this whole market dynamic of not hiring juniors at all right now is going to be a pain point for the industry at large in about 5 years if it keeps up. If you're a senior+ level SWE right now, that might end up being to your personal benefit, but it certainly won't benefit the tech industry when there aren't any mid-level engineers to hire, because we didn't cultivate, mentor, grow, and train them as juniors today.

Software isn't a finite problem that gets solved. We make what we can, given our resources.

Commercial software used to be painstakingly written in assembly, with little more than simple text editors. An average Python programmer today is 10x more productive than that, yet there are vastly more developers now.

It's because the demand is larger.

If 99% of jobs are CRUD, and you have a tool that automates the creation of CRUD, say hello to driving Uber.

No, it isn't that simple. When the work becomes more efficient, the programmer also becomes more valuable, which increases demand for the programmer.

> 99% of jobs are CRUD

People say that, but I have yet to work on a CRUD project. That's despite 15 years in industry and being involved with dozens of projects.

My guess is that simple CRUD use cases are automated via Google Spreadsheets or similar solutions. Same as there are off the shelf solutions for a simple online store, so no one is writing that from scratch any more. What's left is writing the complex systems with unique requirements.

If anything it’s allowing senior engineers to do the job of junior engineers.

For sure. One person I talked to said using a code assistant was just like having a smart and eager, but really green junior to help them, but without so much of the hand holding an actual junior needs, and none of the mentorship requirements.

There is no chance AI is making a junior engineer as effective as a senior engineer.

It feels more like AI is doing tasks that senior engineers would have pushed out to more junior engineers more than it's leveling up junior engineers

I agree with you: it’s not that what you are saying is true, but that a lot of the people hoarding the money are salivating about this idea. For them, it’s easy to test the hypothesis: “let’s just fire people; with ai, at best we’ll become as productive as before or even better, at worst we’ll just have to hire the people again”. I hope that we won’t be riding the ai hype peak for too much longer.

It also let's someone create a new business that's cheaper than before.

The size of the pie isn't fixed.

> It may not be replacing anyone, but is it allowing 3 people to do the job of 4? I think so, and that reduces job opportunities for everyone.

> Also, is AI allowing junior engineers to do the job of senior engineers? I think so too.

Downvoted into oblivion for stating the blindingly obvious ö

Do you think compilers made demand for software engineers fall?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com