The one about the web developer job market

I don't think this is materially true, it's just a nice narrative. (And a way to entice investors, which, remember, is the CEO's job.)

> Most websites are buggy, inaccessible, and broken

It's been like this since at least 2010, so imo this isn't really anything new. We're just buggy in different ways. Switched from one footgun (jQuery) to another (React).

> That’s an entire industry removed from the web developer job market.

I'm not exactly sure what the "web media" sector is. Re-read that section like twice and I'm still confused. Programmatic advertising is dipping because things like FB/Google are losing out to TikTok and Instagram (& more tailor-made advertising). As someone that used to work in ad-tech, I don't really think those jobs are going away, just evolving in a post-Cambridge Analytica world. This has been in the works long before the LLM craze.

> Here we come to the reason why I did this research and wrote this analysis. I keep asking myself: what should I do?

The answer is always the same: start a company. I'm not sure why so many developers are terrified by the prospect.

> Sometimes all the news you have to tell is bad.

I dunno, I don't really see the doomerism here. I tend to be more optimistic than most, but even so, even if you can't get a job as a "web developer" (which really hasn't been a job title for about a decade now anyway), pivoting into data engineering, backend work, LLM work, infrastructure, etc. is not really that big of a leap.

Would generally agree and it’s been discussed a lot but apart from “because they can” I haven’t heard a really compelling reason why. I’m not convinced by the claims about AI taking jobs (yet). So what’s going on?

Out of those four quotes, we have one from nvidia, one from fixie.ai, and one from openai. That may be important too. Either because these people are in positions to see trends and potential that aren't yet generally visible; or because they have a vested interested in the success of this model.

(The fourth quote isn't attributed to a company)

That job title might simply become obsolete. When I entered the workforce around the turn of the millennium, there were people with titles like “webmaster” and “rich media designer”. Those don’t exist anymore. It’s not that the work has disappeared, but it’s been restructured and refined.

Developers and designers will always be needed, but the vaguely generic category of a web developer may be replaced.

> The overall developer job market will continue to fluctuate, but without dramatic change there isn’t much on the horizon that seems likely to turn the decline around.

My prediction: As soon as they cut interest rates, probably around June or July of this year, firms will start investing again and the hiring will follow. Probably will have a sellers market for labor like during the pandemic.

In the writing world, too. I’ve yet to hear of attempts at it being anything but a wasteful distraction. Probably works fine if you don’t care about accuracy or quality (and some use cases for writing don’t! Spam, astroturfing, paid trolling, mass-message scams) but otherwise LLMs aren’t close to replacing 80% of your content department. Maybe 5% at best.

But that doesn’t seem to have dampened enthusiasm for trying, yet.

There was a big difference between now and then too: then, so many companies were nothing burgers with no real product and no real revenue.

I graduated in 2005. I chose to go into public education as a teacher because it paid more than software development (35k for a dev, 40k for a teacher).

Yeah, shit's hard right now. I still think it was worse back then. Nobody would consider it a better choice to be a teacher today.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_engineering_demograph... https://news.crunchbase.com/startups/tech-layoffs

Does the boom in funding for AI companies make up for the overall drop in funding from late 10s-early 20s heights? That would not be my guess offhand, which makes playing up the contrast between “plenty of funding” (for one specific thing) and “job cuts” feel a little overstated.

It does complicate predictions, though.

The problem is communicating the vitality of engineers in this symbiotic relationship, but the power dynamics and ownership models obscure dependencies.

Who needs documentation with Claude and pbcopy?

1. ctrl-f "covid": 0

It's irresponsible to talk about the boom and bust cycles in hiring over the past ~4 years without mentioning covid and WFH [0]. Companies over-hired and over-retained for reasons like cheaper remote labor, prematurely extrapolating trends from large and sudden shifts in ecommerce/streaming/etc revenues, and ol-fashioned camaraderie (really). This positioned the industry to get doubly rekt, because even in good times, that retention debt would need to be paid down, and in bad times, it's even bloodier. There's some bullwhip effect[1] to this, where hiring too many people leads to needing to cut spend in a hurry, which invites more overcorrection, leads to needing to hire all the sudden, etc etc. It's my impression that these swings in developer hiring are continuing to go back and forth, with slightly lessening intensity each cycle, consistent with this effect. I think the pain will continue, but will also continue to lessen, over the next few years.

2. "has turned into a stock market driven movement..."

It's correct to tie a lot of this to market health and general macroeconomic environment. But what drives those things? The larger geopolitical landscape has a big influence here, albeit one that's hard to predict. For example the usa's post-war boom years happened when europe was in shambles and rebuilding, and the usa was mostly intact and well positioned for a manufacturing boom that serviced the rest of the west. there's some cause for optimism here, since again the US is recovering better that most other nations economically. Friends in JP and AUS are lamenting the weakness of their currency lately (or rejoicing, when they earn in USD and spend in local dollars). The next 10-20 yrs will see large, consequential geopolitical movement, particularly w/r/t china. Does the US successfully onshore/reshore semiconductor manufacturing? If so, does it exist alongside Taiwan, or do they weaken or face attack? What becomes of china and russia's demographic crises and budding codependency? Is the US drawn into a large conflict for those or other reasons? Does that cause the US to trend towards unity, or further politically atomize?

To me, these questions matter as much as, if not more than, AI advances. If the macro environment is strong, higher paying jobs will be more available, even if they're not needed as badly. If the macro environment is weak, AI successes will be a rocketship trapped under a low market ceiling. And if AI advancements are so staggeringly powerful that they mostly nullify the effects of macroeconomics and geopolitics.... this whole article goes out the window because the world it was written for has ceased to exist.

[0] Article mentions RTO, but only as a means of shadow layoff

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullwhip_effect

One thing that is overlooked here is that we're in the business of creating things to solve problems in the world. Code is simply the medium of creation.

Perhaps writing code does get scaled down over time and replaced with AI to a large extent. But the basic business and human needs that the code is solving doesn't necessarily disappear. Product management will still exist and there will be a need for humans that can talk to their human customers to understand their human needs. If the next step in that process of creation is prompt engineering and reviewing AI-written code, so what?

As creators and problem solvers, we need to always be reinventing ourselves anyways.

This will be a particularly painful and uncertain time for anyone whose job is going to look drastically different in the future, which is most of us. But I don't think that these arguments necessarily apply any more to software engineers than they do to a lot of other careers like writing, law, art, or movie production.

It's basically an attack of capital against labor. Maybe we should have listened all those years when people kept saying we needed a tech union.