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Comment by lolinder | Hacker News Reader

> I believe some devs were probably replaced by AI, but not a large amount.

I'm not even sold on the idea that there were any. The media likes to blame AI for the developer layoffs because it makes a much more exciting story than interest rates and arcane tax code changes.

But the fact is that we don't need more than the Section 174 changes and the end of ZIRP to explain what's happened in tech. Federal economic policy was set up to direct massive amounts of investment into software development. Now it's not. That's a real, quantifiable impact that can readily explain what we've seen in a way that the current productivity gains from these tools simply can't.

Now, I'll definitely accept that many companies are attributing their layoffs to AI, but that's for much the same reason that the media laps the story up: it's a far better line to feed investors than that the financial environment has changed for the worse.

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But I see so many devs typing here saying how vital AI is to their writing code efficiently and quickly now. If that is true then you need way less devs. Are people just sitting idle at their desks? I do see quite a bit of tech layoffs for sure. Are you saying devs aren't part of the workers being laid off?

>In 2024: At least 95,667 workers at U.S.-based tech companies have lost their jobs so far in the year, according to a Crunchbase News tally.

Induced demand means we’ll need more devs than we have right now since every dev can produce more value (anyone using cursor for a longer while should be able to confirm that easily).

The problem is different in the meantime: nobody wants to be paying for training of those new devs. Juniors don’t have the experience to call LLM’s bullshit and seniors don’t get paid to teach them since LLMs replaced interns churning out boilerplate.

> Are you saying devs aren't part of the workers being laid off?

No, they are saying that the reason for the layoffs is not AI, it is financial changes making devs too expensive.

> If that is true then you need way less devs.

This does not follow. First of all, companies take a long time to measure dev output, it's not like you can look at a burn down chart over two sprints and decide to fire half the team because it seems they're working twice as fast. So any productivity gains will show up as layoffs only after a long time.

Secondly, dev productivity is very rarely significantly bounded by how long boilerplate takes to write. Having a more efficient way to write boilerplate, even massively more efficient, say 8h down to 1h, will only marginally improve your overall throughput, at least at the senior level: all that does is free you to think more about the complex issues you needed to solve. So if the task would have previously taken you 10 days, of which one day was spent on boilerplate, it may now take you, say, 8-9 days, because you've saved one day on boilerplate, plus some more minor gains here and there. So far from firing 7 out of every 8 devs, the 8h-to-1h boilerplate solution might allow you to fire 1 dev in a team of 10.

> But I see so many devs typing here saying how vital AI is to their writing code efficiently and quickly now. If that is true then you need way less devs.

Sure, in the same sense that editors and compilers mean you need way less devs.

A lot of devs are hacks. If an AI can do your job you had no value as a software developer.

https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/...

BLS reports ~1.9 million software developer jobs and predicts 17% growth through 2033. Crunchbase is talking about "tech workers" not developers. And they don't even say that tech employment is down. I predict that when BLS publishes their preliminary job numbers for 2024 it will be at least 1.85 million, not 1.9 million as suggested by your Crunchbase News. I would lay 2:1 odds that it will be higher than 2023's number.

It just isn’t true that AI has made developers more efficient. Some might claim such on this site, but the vast majority of developers aren’t using it, or they find it to be a drag on their productivity (because for most tasks the median software engineer has to do, it actually can’t help), and the ones that do use it are (unknowingly maybe) exaggerating its impact.

Devs are getting laid off, yes. AI is not the reason. Executive/shareholder priorities are the reason.

Why would Jevon's paradox not apply to human labor?

I am not sure what I expect for software developers besides that the nature if the work will change but it is still too early to say exactly how. We certainly cannot extrapolate linearly or exponentially from the past few years.

> Are you saying devs aren't part of the workers being laid off?

Of course not. The Section 174 changes are really only relevant to software devs—the conversation in the months leading up to them kicking in was all about how it would kill software jobs. But then when it happened the media latched onto this idea that it was the result of automation, with zero evidence besides the timing.

Since the timing also coincided with a gigantically important change to the tax code and a rapid increase in interest rates, both of which were predicted to kill software jobs, I'm suggesting that blaming AI is silly—we have a proximate cause already that is much more probable.

> But I see so many devs typing here saying how vital AI is to their writing code efficiently and quickly now. If that is true then you need way less devs

Same can be said for github, and open-source deoendency management tools like npm, and I'd argue that it had an even a much bigger impact then, and did you see what happen afterwards? Where were the mass layoffs back then? The number of software developers is actually much higher than before that era.

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