> Then the reality hit.
Are we talking about the reality where the size of the global software outsourcing market is $618 billion and growing? https://groovetechnology.com/blog/software-development/outso...
Are we talking about the reality where the size of the global software outsourcing market is $618 billion and growing? https://groovetechnology.com/blog/software-development/outso...
The thing is how you research, what you expect to get out of it, and what you're willing to pay. There was absolutely a gold rush on bottom-dollar development by cheap overseas developers by management who had no idea how software really worked, and thought they could build a business on cheap offshore development. These were software farms staffed by unappreciated undertrained people from diploma mills. I saw truly shocking things. I saw code written entirely with gotos instead of loops, because the developer had never learned how to write a while loop. The companies spent way more in the long run trying to iterate, ask for changes, and ultimately having to hire higher quality talent for much more money.
I agree with the GP. The LLMs will get better, maybe people will learn that you need an LLM with a skilled developer, or maybe the agents will get good enough to fully drive themselves properly, or maybe just good enough that a non-technical pilot can get good work out of them. Right now, "vibe coding" is largely non-technical people making messy, unmaintainable, insecure code. Some of these are programmers and non-programmers just playing around, but some people are trying to build money-making businesses off this, and it does feel like a very similar situation.
And who cares if it is true? So far programming is one of very few professions when person can set themselves for life in a relatively short period of time. When / if it is gone there will be something else. I have few friends who'd switched to be a handyman. They are doing great from what I see.
If you specifically optimize for it. Most people don't - they specialize and expect to be in their line of work for decades.
> When / if it is gone there will be something else.
There will be something else for young people who are just starting. If you're 20 years into a career and then your line of work disappears overnight, of course you can switch to something else - and enjoy your entry-level salary while competing for jobs with people who are 20+ years younger than you and have no meaningful costs or obligations yet.
Also, on what you're optimizing for. If, like many, you're looking for a job that makes sense, for instance (e.g. working to develop technologies or research that you think can change the world for the better), you're probably never going to strike that particular gold.
That reality in fact never materialized.
I think we will see something similar with LLMs. There will be areas where it will deliver cheaper and faster. There will be areas where it will deliver nothing but disaster. It'll change the industry but not eat it alive. The folks talking about fully autonomous coding on the near horizon are dreaming.
The first one is definitely happening with the LLM bubble where companies really want to pretend that the hard part of the job isn’t understanding what to build and how to do so maintainability.
The second one is going to be more interesting: I expect LLMs to put downward pressure on wages in a lot of places but also for smarter companies to realize that nothing short of true AGI is going to replace the need for people who can actually understand what the customer needs. If I’m right, this will swing the pendulum back towards specialists again – the seagull guys who come in, declare that their favorite framework will solve everything, and leave are more vulnerable to being replaced by an LLM than someone who knows how to code but is also bringing actual business-relevant experience and judgement which an LLM can’t have.
Oh no, now I love LLMs.
But that's just a continuous variant of the discrete-sounding claim that programming will get eaten by AI soon. After all, the "actual business-relevant experience and judgement which an LLM can’t have" is mostly not related to programming - and the better LLMs get at coding, the less value will the programming parts of the skillset have; take it to the limit, and it's just saying the managers and sales people will stay, while software developers will be gone.
Basically, I’m saying people should stop expecting to get six figures for being able to run create-react-app and deploy a container. The analytical and social parts of the job are where I predict LLMs to make fewer inroads because they require non-generic understanding.
That's a fair take. I do wonder though, how much will those "analytical and social parts of the job" be paying - I imagine you might no longer get six figures for that either, because high tech salaries are fueled by absurd growth of the industry, which manifests in a large part in software that's basically just {framework du jour + basic-level CRUD, that hasn't changed much in 30 years + branding}, and that kind of software I expect to get eaten by LLMs entirely.
Even with cookie-cutter app coders out of the way, the remaining software engineers might see the number of jobs implode, crashing salaries for some time, until (maybe) the growth restarts around new kinds of software, kinds that'll be in high demand and not something that can be made by a few "analytical/social" people herding LLMs. I'd normally say this won't happen, but rather that the software economy will slow down, stabilize, and get boring like everything else - but then, so much of software is driven purely by advertising, and advertising is a negative sum game, so surely they'll invent more bullshit jobs for us.
This is not to say outsourcing can't ever work, but the situations where it does work are much rarer than what every outsourcing vendor would like you to believe.
I bet a previous client's attempt at outsourcing (well into the 6 figures now) is included in that number... yet the expensive onshore devs outsourcing was supposed to replace are still there 2 years later except now they have to also babysit the offshore idiots and fix their messes.
But hey, the vendor got paid, the idiot executive who fell for their pitch wouldn't want to lose face, so it all gets handwaved away as a continuing success and more money gets thrown into the dumpster fire.
The need for companies to get more value out of less spend won't disappear, nor will the comparative advantage of companies in lower CoL areas of the globe. That's two fundamental incentives on both sides that are aligned, driving the market to find the lowest-energy path from here to there. It'll get there, even if it ends up looking strange (like, idk., maybe cutting out management intermediaries but involving a middleman acting as insurance).
That is, if LLMs won't leapfrog it all and end software dev outsourcing before it started to work well.