Comment by dofm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dofm | Hacker News Reader

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> Our client wants something: I mumble in my phone what they want, with some spec docs we had / made by mumbling in our phones: a working system comes out, we test it with our client, we fix. We sign a SLA, get paid 100k, a few weeks have passed.

OK so, it sounds empty and miserable to me, but we can stipulate that this is how it is working out for you.

Given that stipulation: how long do you think this can possibly last, when you are in a race to the bottom with everybody else who is doing this?

Have you made plans about how you will get out of your office lease, downsize, subcontract this button-pushing to even cheaper people overseas, etc.? Are you ready to lay off everyone who works for you, downsize your house to a smaller mortgage? Because you're on a burning platform. If you can do this, so can everyone else.

I mean, I think we all are, possibly, on the same burning platform; I don't think I can fully avoid AI so I am trying to make sense of it.

But I intend to fully avoid being in a race with other phone whisperers if I can.

You're not just in a race to the bottom with everybody else who is doing this. I don't think his anecdote is particularly surprising at all. You can do the same with basically any typical CRUD app, which is already going to be some very large percentage of all business software. But this kind of also leads to the conclusion that so can the people paying you.

I think the years of software development/employment for problem solving, in and of itself, are numbered at this point. When people start to understand how relatively easy this stuff is, they're going to be in-housing everything. Not only for price but also because of increased flexibility/confidentiality/control, and even lower concept-to-live timelines.

What third party stuff continues to exist will see its comp plummet. I imagine now you can already get some really nice quality software contracted out on places like fiverr for nothing simply because the skill involved to produce quality solutions has plummeted.

I think it's a mistake to assume that quality doesn't plummet when cost does, even if the AI is capable of quality work. The quality issue will always resurface.

But yeah — I mean, I am a freelancer who burned out for reasons that are rather more influenced by the SaaS wave. That was hard to compete with. People choose between the solution that meets their needs and changing their processes to meet the ten-times-cheaper solution that doesn't, and that decision is often not at all irrational; by and large you want as many of your problems to be shared problems as possible.

I am trying to return to work so I am looking at what AI can really do for me, but the conclusion I draw is that since I cannot simply burn token money to solve people's problems, and because bugs cost me money, I need a strategy where I remain in full control of actual code, but LLMs help me do things faster. If I can't solve that, I am out.

Perhaps AI will upend the SaaS market before it fucks the freelancer market and the balance may temporarily shift. But it probably won't.

And at that point, as a fiftysomething, even with a bit of financial security, I start thinking about living a rather shorter, happier life, instead of a longer one. Because as much as I might have ideas, I don't think there is much I can switch to where I have appropriately deep skills to survive AI there, and all those alternative jobs will be oversubscribed and less likely to hire me.

I wonder if people in this industry have understood what we are doing to ourselves, to our friends.

A bit of a tangent here, but I'd look into lower cost of living areas if you have the ability to move/remote, even moreso if you'll be drawing social security or have a pension. Money just goes so much further, and with an overall much better quality of life. And there's always stuff like teaching, moreso because it's enjoyable than for the paycheck.

But in these parts of the world, making a few bucks doing whatever in the software world goes so much further. Because of that I think LLMs are bringing in something like a temporary golden age. And these parts of the world will be the last to have the lights go out on software simply because the low cost of living means there's a whole lot more slack to give before things get bad.

I am moving to somewhere cheaper, yes. Though since my passport is no longer strong (British), my choice/range of cheaper is a lot more limited.

Quality of life will not improve, because I will be lonelier (plus I have a great quality of life here in other ways, that many places cannot match) but I am mostly reconciled to that loss. I will have a fair bit more flexibility in use of space, which means I can be a bit more of a portfolio-earner; I do have some fringe skills that could make some money still, and I can have a little workshop or studio.

> But in these parts of the world, making a few bucks doing whatever in the software world goes so much further.

I am (undiagnosed but very obviously) ADHD and I don't tend to find it easy to make a sustainable income off "a few bucks" here and there; the effort expenditure in managing it always ends up subsidising the work. It's part of why I am burned out. I need thicker strands of work and those are fewer and further between.

I have little certainty when things will get bad, but I do think it likely it happens in the next five or six years, and I do know that when things do get bad they favour the young. Which I am not. It is clear to me that I am never getting an ordinary dayjob in the tech industry again.

I don't mean to sound particularly gloomy but I think mine is the generation whose lifespans will dramatically shorten. I think a lot of single middle aged people (men mostly) in the tech industry will choose the time and manner of their departure. Because we are deliberately creating both misery and job insecurity.

I don't think you're being gloomy so much as realistic. It's clear a lot of people either don't realize what's already happened, or are in some sort of denial about it. What you're saying is entirely true and was almost certainly also true during past eras of revolutionary leaps in technology. Fortunately in current times we have far more options than we did in the past, but realizing those options takes a bit of adventurism.

Since you already have that in you, I think you'll be surprised what you'll find - entire communities of interesting English speaking tech-oriented folks, many with more than a few grey hairs, would be just the start. And don't forget the teaching aspect. If you have a degree, smarts, some basic charisma, and can roll with a bit of chaos - you'll find plentiful opportunities to teach any topic imaginable. It's not just English, like many think. It's really quite fun!

I have taught/lectured the odd thing in my past and I can do it; I come from a family of teachers and it is in the blood.

I do not have the psychological constitution to teach kids so I am not going to do that.

But teaching/training adults is an industry that AI will destroy because the baseline income — the stuff nobody else wanted to do but you could earn from — will be eliminated, increasingly by policy directives from above. I have some ideas in that regard but it is difficult to see how I won't end up competing with LLMs when even open weights models are pretty good at coming up with tech tutorials etc.

Broadly I think there is undue optimism about what will be left to move to when the programming jobs dry up.

(Thank you for the discussion, though! I may sound quite negative but actually I am doing better than I have been for years, and it is always useful to provoke one's own thoughts)

Well there's a world of difference between teaching a 7 year old and teaching a 17 year old. I would say in both regards a more engaging style may be necessary than what you're possibly alluding to, so there is that. Depending on your background, teaching in a university is also completely viable. There's also the private lessons possibility. There's many options and I definitely wouldn't just write it off.

I don't think AI will touch education. A good case study there is Khanmigo which was to be Khan Academy's revolutionary AI tutor. There's been a million articles written about the topic. It completely failed, in spite of receiving massive sponsorship and imposition in various educational settings. And I'm kind of surprised that Khan himself didn't understand or predict this. As you probably know, great intrinsically motivated students don't really need teachers. You could give them a book or a sort of LLM tutor, and they'd excel completely independently. But then there are the other 95% of students you have to consider.

And those other 95% tend to fall into camps of either being a bit less gifted in the cognitive domain, or lacking motivation. Depending on exactly where they stand on the balance of two, a good teacher can have a huge impact, whereas 'go learn with the LLM for a few hours' would have them tune out instantly. It's because teaching isn't just about literally teaching, but about forming a rapport and trying to gradually push those 95% into more of the habits and patterns of the 5%, but without them realizing they're being pushed in that direction. An LLM there is almost entirely nonsensical.

Try getting something good out of fiverr or upwork. Even now it’s terrible (we get to clean up some the experiments). I agree maybe with the in house after enough years but that will also have a big effect on employees of those companies; a future (5+ years for sure as enterprises don’t move so fast) AI would need few resources to create and optimize and improve. I am not resisting my company won’t exist soon-ish; I am resisting that people see a bright future for devs here on HN. I don’t know where that comes from outside handwaiving ‘loom’ and ‘train’.

I know fiverr will start delivering nice software in 5 years and that’s what I worry about. By that time fiverr is probably just a chatbox though without humans, as what is the point?

Software is easy until it isn’t - the moment you need serious infra you’re in deep trouble and looking for an experienced partner or a saas solution anyway.

The days of b2b saas subscriptions doing one simple thing well for 3 or so users are however numbered.

The point is that button pushers currently simply don’t seem to be able to do this work, so it’s a little more than pushing some buttons. But no, I don’t think it will last very long, but few years more I guess looking at the competition and lack thereof.

What you describe does not sound all that much more than button pushing, TBH.

And your competition is not non-skilled people using AI to take your jobs. It is _cheaper people_ using AI to take your jobs. All the things that outsourcing teams used to struggle to match are much less of a struggle to match when you are actively depersonalising your own effort by handing it to Claude.

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