Mark Zuckerberg says AI could soon do the work of Meta's midlevel engineers
businessinsider.com
businessinsider.com
Maybe. It's certainly possible that this is the case, but I'm hesitant to believe anything Zuckerberg says during a hype-train, especially when saying that has a non-zero chance of boosting the stock.
But let's suppose that this is true, I don't think it necessarily implies that fewer engineers are actually hired. It could be that this "AI mid-level" engineer frees up resources for the remaining engineers to work on something more interesting.
Or forces them to waste all their time babysitting the "AI" workers that can't do basic tasks.
I guess the reason I'm skeptical is because there's really no reason for him to not say this kind of stuff. If he says "Meta's AI model is so good that it's on par with a mid-level engineer", there's a chance the stock price shoots up because it suggests that maybe Meta has some amazing new model and AI is the current hotness, and there's basically no penalty for being wrong.
It's not hard to find cases where CEOs just completely lie to everyone's faces in order to try and boost stock prices, so it's not a skepticism of Zuckerberg explicitly, so much as all CEOs.
VR is neat but the "metaverse" suggests a lot more, which is why I called it out and not VR.
I know the job market has been rough which has emboldened these CEO’s but we are starting to see hiring pick up again, and not just Staff+, interns, SDE 1 and 2 as well, which bodes well for 2025.
Before you go down the road of what can be automated, let's try to answer this. I'm sure there's actual research, but I cannot find it.
Anecdotal, but with 20+ years of professional development under my belt, at startups, ngos, enterprise, goverment etc: "insignificant amounts".
Yes, some embed-images.sh or some invoice-extractor/src/main.rs - side projects related to a job. Every week some boilerplate like this.
But the vast bulk of my work is:
- finding out what customers/a spec/stakeholder really mean. And how important it really is (and encoding that in executable specs, preferably)
- keeping the old stuff somewhat up-to-date. Fiddling with old Ruby runtimes, Pipenv/pyenv/ or whatever todays flavor is. Nodejs, npm juggling. Docker. Cargo. Deprecations. Security patches. CIs, infra, crashing on updates etc etc.
- muddling through codebases with 10+ years of accumulated horrors. Touched by 100+ random freelancers, employees, most lost to the time. Crippling technical debt. Undocumented decisions everywhere. Crucial business requirements encoded only in these three LoCs amongst thousands of lines inside this update_user_projects() function.
- Trying to get this old project running again on todays OS/runtimes/etc.
- Stitching poorly documented, weirdly (or hardly) architectured, abandoned or outdated libraries together.
The way I see it, LLMs-code-gens currently are little more than unpredictable but advanced compilers. Compiling instructions into instructions that computers can execute. BDD could be a good language to write these instructions. And works for new stuff, and much less for existing stuff. "Maintaining existing stuff" is the vast majority of most developers' work, I'd thing. - but cannot back up -.
There is a different picture. You are now seeing the same jobs but this time it has a reduced salary + equity and fewer openings. It is not the same as before 2020.
For every tech role open, it will be ultra competitive to the point where companies may start hiring olympians for the job that match the so-called "exceptional talent".
The truth is, it will get worse before it gets any better.
Sourcegraph Cody is another example of a code AI that can search.
ChatGPT will save you time but your boss will now demand you to greatly up your productivity to match this fabulous new technology. Now you’re working even more for the same or less pay!
AGI, in its final form, will turn us into slaves in its final form, and yet we’re cheering it on. This is madness.
I'll elaborate a bit more though...
In a capitalist world, it will always seek to maximize profits. Human suffering, animal suffering, morality, and so on are basically irrelevant.
Someone willing to exploit human happiness for an extra 2% gain, will wipe out the competition if they are unwilling to do the same. So everything is guaranteed to spiral in a race to the bottom.
So with a new tool, as every time before, it will be a race to the bottom to see how can most unethically use AI to exploit value.
Whether we end up as slaves, or starving on the street remains to be seen. But the odds of humanity being better off without a sharp course correction and regulation by the government, are very low.
Not "irrevelent" but most often deliberately part of a strategy:
In economics, an externality or external cost is an indirect cost or benefit to an uninvolved third party that arises as an effect of another party's (or parties') activity. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality
Mere literacy used to qualify you for a management role. I am not sure you could get a job of any kind without being able to read and write now. It gets replaced with more time spent in specialized education.
In the SFBA, Lockheed hires welders who can get a security clearance.
Someone I know was in their 70s working there, because there isn't a large pipeline of welders to pull from. In his words, "there's a bunch of great guys with steady hands delivering doordash, because it pays better than being an apprentice in a body shop".
Most automotive welders can't get a clearance, the true factory welding jobs no longer pay well or are automated away.
In response, the old Martinez chevrolet factory welders are continuing to work in Lockheed with larger than normal incentives to stick around past their medicare and social security pay.
Most of them would rather be training new guys (or girls, apparently half of the good new welders are women), but most of the time there's nobody new who comes in.
The common theme from these CEO's is today is the worst AI will ever be. (who knows if thats true, not me)
And it's going to be easier than in medicine, because software is so forgiving. You can do real work during training with minimal supervision, as mistakes rarely cause serious harm.
Obviously, not on its own. I still needed to give it guidelines and feedback on what to do next. But i could improve my site while watching TV. This was science-fiction just 2 years ago.
"visualizing a general architecture" is piece of cake compared to the mental model one need to understand a full stack react / express / sqlite / typescript stack with sufficient details to be able to debug obscure error code.
But let's be real here, 90% of software and coding is taking x performing an action on it so the user can consume y. It's basic stuff. Much like how we don't write machine code these days and we use a compiler, your bonkers if you think your going to be writing python or c in the future and not just saying give me x and y from z.
You will still get folks writing code in some obscure areas, but most of us will switch to describing system and app flows and have the code written by ai and in areas utilize ai's to get tasks done. The theory of software construction from a high level will become more important than actual language mastery on the low level.
The folks saying it won't are much like the horse riders of yesteryear who said cars would never replace horses.
Simonw has plenty of examples on his blog, including full transcripts if you've honestly not seen them before though. https://simonwillison.net/tags/ai-assisted-programming/
A fun one that he didn't bother to post to his blog tho - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42505772
But the point is : it works.It is functional and handles complex realistic scenarios.
And only two years ago, this was pure fantasy. Now give the tech two more years, and see where this is going ?
In fact, i'll be doing exactly what i would do with a junior/midlevel developer. Except AI work probably 100x times faster.
My first iteration of that project lasted about 3 days from start to finish, reaching a point where i left so much cruft accumulating that it couldn't refactor it properly without breaking absolutely everything in an impossible to recover manner... But before you say anything, i've personally seen the same thing happen at least 5 times in my career, with professional humans developing the code.
Generative AI can't think, it can only mimic.
Personally I suspect that if they really try to replace mid-levels with "AI", they're going to have to re-hire the mid-levels as members of a new field: "AI mistake-checker/fixer". They'll have to pay for the AI (which is resource intensive) and the human worker to fix the AI mess. Everyone wins?
He isnt stupid. Stupid people don't make it this far. They don't. Don't let the media designed for The Commons tell you otherwise. There are too many filters from rational intelligence, social intelligence, willpower, book smarts, delegation/management/leadership, etc... If you fail at one of these, you don't ~10,000x your company's value.
John Mearsheimer said "They made the wrong decision, not an irrational one." And I think that goes for the Metaverse. VR was/is incredible. I personally would find it difficult to bet real money on that question.
He sees something that is reasonable to say. Will mid-level engineers be replaced by AI? If there is a 2x efficiency improvement, what will half those programmers be doing? Will 100% of their midlevel engineers be replaced? No, but I don't think a smart person would make that claim. Do You personally think 0 people will lose their jobs because they arent needed anymore?
B2B SaaS platforms like Salesforce/CRMs, etc are dead.
Let’s say you’re a big company able to afford quite a bit of mid level AI engineers - why bother paying millions to Salesforce, when you can direct your 24/7 mid engineers to just replicate the Salesforce offering?
Code quality doesn’t matter, it can be copy paste after copy paste, as long as the AI devs manage it.
The death of these types of companies are going to erase billions in the stock market.
What happens when AI devs can't manage it anymore and it suddenly falls apart, with every new release shipping more critical bugs than it fixed?
I think you better pray that it happens sooner rather than later, because the larger the mountain of crap code becomes, the more it's going to hurt when it unravels, and less likely it is that it's fixable. Do you then just shut the company down?
They aren't slinging pig iron into train cars.
If you are in the C* suite and believe this you need to find someone to feed context up to you stat.
Probably why lean, Toyota, agile failed too...
History will be far more likely to remember you as a tulip salesman than an innovator.
Hint, the code isn't your problem.
I genuinely cannot see how AI is going to be bad for programmers. It doesnt do the entire job. It does snippits and you must integrate everything. (And if it does the entire job, amazing! Maybe we can spend extra time on a good UI or extra unit tests)
AI could reduce our staff by half, but that isnt what happens. Instead we just get more work done. The productivity increase seems to warrent spending more money on programmers. If we made our company 500k/yr profit before, AI makes us 1M/yr profit now. What if we bring on 2x as many programmers, do we make 2M/yr profit?
I understand not all jobs scale like this, but at least my industry has demand go up since we are more efficient.
It feels like people are assuming that there's only so much work that can actually be done, and I don't think that's what happens in practice; instead we figure out how to exploit the resources more instead of doing "the same with less".
Basically I feel most people are not thinking in terms of Gustafson's Law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustafson%27s_law
For some of my smaller projects, AI makes them vastly more efficient to do, but it is far from the hacker-style type of work they started as. For many of them, the human communication, typing the change request into ChatGPT, and pasting the new code into the file are all that remain of the work.
Memory and storage used to be precious resources in the computing world, but now nobody blinks at shipping webpages that are 5MB, APIs that take 3 seconds because there is now a spinner to distract people, or entire browser instances for a calculator.
I know a few software devs that didn't take that transition well as they loved knowing the little details and then the paradigm changed to "nobody cares."
Dev used to be an option for a quiet solitary job. I can see that type of role disappearing.
I just don't think it's quite as doom-and-gloom as everyone is paranoid about. I feel like most of the jobs that could be easily replaced by AI also could have already fairly easily been outsourced to India. If you already have a job in a rich country like the US, it's likely that your employer thinks that it's necessary.
Can you explain this line of thinking a bit? I see this a lot but it never makes any sense. It's like being offended about being paid money or feeling that you make too much or that you will be excited once you can get paid minimum wage or better yet just be homeless; I don't see the appeal ...
How do we train up the next generation of software engineers if nobody is hiring newbies? This is going to be the fundamental question for the industry over the next decade. The answer, I'm afraid, is going to look something like Musk's Twitter - 80% drop in head count, only the highly motivated remain.
These business owners aren't going to see us as people until we force them to. Unionize and strike.
Can't unionize against being outskilled by a machine. Much like in construction, why hire a hundred men to shovel when I can hire one bloke and a excavator? Why use a hammer when I've got a nailgun?
The logical AI consequence for Facebook is not that they'll be able to save on salaries, it is that people will (and already are) getting tired of the Internet and will visit Facebook less.
But it fits with the coordinated effort between Starmer's AI hype and the new fake MAGA team of Musk, Sacks, etc.
I'm sure that replacing workers is exactly what Trump voters hoped for! Let us see how the Bannon/Musk row plays out.
I have no clue why Zuckerberg would want to position stuff this way if a) it's just going to get people more upset and b) can't deliver on his claims.
Even if this is all bullshit and just hyping, it will cause more naive / lazy AI code to flood the market, that's for sure.
With self-congratulatory post-merge success gif post by a machine.
Would be great to know what’s the day of a mid-level engineer at meta like.
Social Media itself can be replaced if ChatGPT or what ever just takes everyone's chat history and connects us directly to people who care about similar interests.
I don't give a shit about getting the worlds Attention if only 6 people in the world actually care about the things I care about. Social Media's current architecture is pure shit.
First it was 'juniors', then 'mid-level' and it WILL especially be seniors next (as they are already expensive). There is a high certainty that there will be a significant job displacement with the introduction of these "AI Agents".
Once again as predicted in other threads before [0] with increased proposals to run to the AGI scam it is after complete job displacement with no alternative for those lost jobs.
2030 is their deadline. I'm giving you 5 years early to prepare as I already am doing this year. [1]
My thoughts are:
I might as well enjoy life now since the future me will need no savings as the age of abundance will take care of me.
I might switch careers to accelerate this future. Whatever I’m working on now isn’t that important because 5 years from now it will be done by AGI if this is brought about.
I should stake a claim in the AGI future. Own or invest in a company that will increase in value given this future.
I could start preparing by switching careers. Maybe becoming a product manager or manager that manages AGI for a business or picking a career that AGI can’t do. Maybe an electrician or doctor or plumber. But is anything safe?
Prepare for the Terminator future. Find the weakness in machines and figure out how to destroy them.