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Comment by frostiness | Hacker News Reader

I can't help but feel this is backpedaling after the AI hype led to people entering university avoiding computer science or those already in changing their major. Ultimately we might end up with a shortage of developers again, which would be amusing.

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I went to university 2005-2008 and I was advised by many people at the time to not go into computer science. The reasoning was that outsourced software developers in low-cost regions like India and SEA would destroy salaries, and software developers should not expect to make more than $50k/year due to the competition.

Even more recently we had this with radiologists, a profession that was supposed to be crushed by deep learning and neural networks. A quick Google search says an average radiologist in the US currently makes between $340,000 to $500,000 per year.

This might be the professional/career version of "buy when there's blood in the streets."

Yup hearing big talk about competition and doom is a strong signal that there is plenty of demand.

You can either bet on the new unproven thing claiming to change things overnight, or just do the existing thing that's working right now. Even if the new thing succeeds, an overnight success is even more unrealistic. The insight you gain in the meantime is valuable for you to take advantage of what that change brings. You win either way.

When there is no competition that is a sign there is no demand.

There can sometimes be too much competition, but often there is only the illusion of too much if you don't look at quality. You can find a lot of cheap engineers in India, but if you want a good quality product you will have to pay a lot more.

> Even more recently we had this with radiologists, a profession that was supposed to be crushed by deep learning and neural networks. A quick Google search says an average radiologist in the US currently makes between $340,000 to $500,000 per year.

At the end of the day, radiologists are still doctors.

Yep, the only reason their pay is high is artificial barriers to entry.

I went for CS in my late 20s, always tinkered with computers but didn't get into programming earlier. College advisor told me the same thing, and that he went for CS and it was worthless. This was 2012.

I had a job lined up before graduating. Now make high salary for the area, work remotely 98% of the time and have flexible schedule. I'm so glad I didn't listen to that guy.

The one thing I learned in college is that the advisors are worthless. There's how many students? And you are supposed to expect they know the best thing for you? My advisor told me that all incoming freshmen must take a specific math class, a pre-calculus course, totally ignoring all of my AP exams that showed I was well beyond that. Wasted my time and money.

The single most costly mistake I ever made, in hindsight, was talking myself out of a CS trajectory and into something more "practical" circa 2003.

My take is that these are not binary issues. With outsourcing, it is true that you can hire someone cheaper in Asian countries but it cannot kill all jobs locally. So what happens is that the absolute average/mediocre get replaced by outsourcing and now with AI while the top talent can still command a good salary because they are worth it.

So I think that a lot of juniors WILL get replaced by AI not because they are junior necessarily but because a lot of them won't be able to add great value compared to a default AI and companies care about getting the best value from their workers. A junior who understands this and does more than the bare minimum will stand out while the rest will get replaced.

If you have to be “top talent” to survive it’s not a good field to get into anymore.

To survive against Outsourcing/cheaper labor and AI, I would agree.

> So I think that a lot of juniors WILL get replaced by AI not because they are junior necessarily but because a lot of them won't be able to add great value compared to a default AI and companies care about getting the best value from their workers. A junior who understands this and does more than the bare minimum will stand out while the rest will get replaced.

Again this is what people said about outsourced developers. 2008 logic was, why would anyone hire a junior for $50k/year when you could hire a senior with 20 years experience for $10k/year from India?

Reality: for 5+ years you could change careers by taking a 3-6 month JavaScript bootcamp and coming out the other end with a $150k job lined up. That's just how in demand software development was.

You nailed it on the head, down to the exact examples.

I was still in high school in 2010, and was told the same thing about outsourcing to India/SEA/etc. making a CS degree/career (in the US) a terrible choice. It wasn't just random people saying this either, I was reading about it in the news, online, had some family acquaintances with alleged former software dev career, etc. I didn't listen, and I am glad I didn't.

As I was graduating from college, and deep learning was becoming a new hot thing, I heard the same thing about radiologists, and how they are all getting automated away in the next 5 years. I had no plans to go to med school, and I didn't know anyone at the time who went through it, so I didn't know much about the topic. On the surface, it seemed like a legitimate take, and I just stored it in my head as "sounds about right."

Cue to now, I know more than a few people who went through med school, and am in general more attuned to the market. Turns out, all of that was just another genpop hype, those news articles about "omg radiologists are all getting replaced by computers" stopped from showing up on any of my news feeds, and not a single radiology-specialized med school graduate I know had any issues with getting a job (that paid significantly more than an entry level position at a FAANG).

I have zero idea what point I was trying to make with this comment, but your examples mirror my personal experience with the topic really well.

haha, I was working in the industry around that time, though quite young and inexperienced and had someone pull me aside to tell me I needed to get out of coding because soon the business PM type guys (like he was) wouldn't need "guys like you" soon.

His two points were one, 'no code' tools (they didn't call it that back then); this idea that full on business apps could get created by non programmers by just tweaking some XML.

Then he was convinced the rest would be done just by cheap indians and chinese programmers.

Can anyone really blame the students? If I were in their shoes, I probably wouldn't bother studying CS right now. From their perspective, it doesn't really matter whether AI is bullshit in any capacity; it matters whether businesses who are buying the AI hype are going to hire you or not.

Hell, I should probably be studying how to be a carpenter given the level at which companies are pushing vibe coding on their engineers.

Three-four years is a lot of time for these companies to face the harsh reality.

"after the AI hype led to people entering university avoiding computer science or those already in changing their major"

That's such a terrible trend.

Reminds me of my peers back in ~2001 who opted not to take a computer science degree even though they loved programming because they thought all the software engineering jobs would be outsourced to countries like India and there wouldn't be any career opportunities for them. A very expensive mistake!

Certainly, I even know of experienced devs switching out of tech entirely. I think the next couple of decades are going to be very good for software engineers. There will be an explosion of demand yet a contraction in supply. We are in 2010 again.

There will be programmers of the old ways, but AI is basically code 2.0, there are now a lot of things that are AI specific that those with traditional software development skills can’t do.

Like what exactly?

It's really good at writing Brainfuck code.

Train the models to perform high level tasks with complex datasets that are generated using highly technical rules to achieve extremely particular results. Its a completely different kind of programming that regular Comp Sci just doesn't cover since no Comp Sci profs have to do it.

It's backpedaling but I don't think it's planning ahead to prevent a developer shortage - rather it's pandering to the market's increasing skepticism around AI and that ultimately the promised moonshot of AI obsoleting all knowledge work didn't actually arrive (at least not in the near future).

It's similar to all those people who were hyping up blockchain/crypto/NFTs/web3 as the future, and now that it all came to pass they adapted to the next grift (currently it's AI). He is now toning down his messaging in preparation of a cooldown of the AI hype to appear rational and relevant to whatever comes next.

"We were against this all along"

The party line will be: “we always advised using it if it as long as it helps productivity.”

Pointing out that it wasn’t always that will make you seem “negative.”

You are right, perfect amount of false humility and balance. The wage suppression is an accidental biproduct and not the intent. Collateral damage if you will.

Perhaps, their own hiring pipeline is suffering, too. With most companies out there cutting internships and hiring of people with no experience "because AI will replace them" for the past 2-3 years we probably having a large dip in number of prospective candidates with 2-3 years of experience today.

Historically, these candidates have been the hiring sweet spot: less risky than brand new engineers, still small enough experience to efficiently mold them into your bespoke tools and processes and turn them into long-term employees, and still very cheap.

Reading this article is especially amusing since this bit just hit the news as well:

https://www.business-standard.com/amp/world-news/amazon-euro...

Or maybe they realize the AI needs humans in the loop for the foreseeable future for enterprise use cases and juniors (and people from LCL areas) are cheaper and make the economics make some sort of sense.

Agreed.

Considering the talk around junior devs lately on HN, there's way too many of them, it would indeed be amusing.

> changing their major

To what?

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