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Comment by pjmlp | Hacker News Reader

Our industry is equally cannibalised, anyone that thinks otherwise is either having too many tokens or in a privileged position.

If business can deliver the same product with a smaller team, great!

And yes this has been happening for a while, even if not everywhere.

In enterprise consulting, projects that would require a team of 20 devs on average, now have about 5.

Moving away from on-prem, managing own cloud infra to managed containers, to serverless, SaaS and iPaaS ready made products, and offshoring naturally.

All contributed to ever decreasing team sizes.

Now AI based tooling is added to that cocktail, reducing even further the team sizes.

The only folks doing well in the end, are the employees of AI companies, without moral issues contributing to the industry downfall, because the CEO themselves aren't the ones coding and pirating human culture.

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For now, a skilled person using AI is still miles better than an autonomous AI building something. I’ve been trying to do the latter for months to build open source alternatives and the end products still lack polish and that last 20%. Maybe this changes, but I still think there will be people who can use that AI to be better than AI alone.

Definitely, the problem is that companies need less of them, just like a construction company opening roads with machinery, or an automated factory.

For now that is balanced by the fact that we build more software, things that wouldn't be worth it before.

It's not balanced, the market keeps shrinking visibly.

There's CVs out there that would've made recruiters go mad 36 months ago sending their hundreth application.

Number of employed SWEs has maintained the same, slightly increased in fact.

Which companies?

If they weren't worth before, they aren't suddenly worth paying for now.

If the cost comes down, that could make something worth paying for when it previously was not.

Not enough to keep that exponential growth curve going.

Wait, I thought we were discussing loss of employment of engineers? Whether the AI companies continue their exponential growth curve is another question entirely. Making up for the (thus far hypothetical) loss of engineering roles doesn’t require the AI companies to even stay in business, let alone grow exponentially.

It could be that there are more companies though, companies that couldn't afford a large team before. Now they can start delivering value with just, say, 3 people, making the business worthwhile. At least that's one optimistic scenario.

Doesn't matter, if the number of position keeps shrinking so will our job prospects.

I'm a freelancing consultant since 5 years, I've had 2 major customers now for 3+ years. I have a very good pulse of the market: being good, or being even very good and being among those that brings AI and automation to organizations will not save our jobs.

In fact, AI has sped up so much the work that 2 out of 5 people in my current team are being let go: I find it absurd, our productivity has more than doubled over the last years and we've made ourselves redundant. Money is money, I'm on one side making non-tech workers redundant (people whose job was menial boring office stuff), and building the systems that will make myself redundant.

An industry being able to deliver the same value to society with less human capital isn't a "downfall." It sucks for the people who used to be able to extract lots of value for themselves, but for society and the industry, it's a plus.

It is a plus for the shareholders, that is for sure.

For the society definitely not.

Do you believe that farming technology, freeing up 95% of humans to not have to toil in fields all day, was only beneficial to shareholders?

Thing is that people don't want to be "freed up" from their comfortable, high-paying jobs. Because then they likely need to return to metaphorical toiling in the field.

Read the second to last slide. What we need now is *imagination*. You assume the need for new software is fixed and that AI is going to satisfy that need with fewer humans (lower cost), but by lowering the cost we can increase the supply of software!

That means software engineers better start getting creative. If you think your job is to wait for a PM to assign you a well-written researched ticket, you're done. Your job is now to figure out how to make these machines (computers) do whatever we need them to do safely, quickly, at scale, and correctly by applying all your knowledge of computer science and the engineering field of software engineering to an AI prompt.

This doesn't scale, because like in a factory that gets replaced by robots, or in a supermarket with self checkouts, not everyone gets to save their job, regardless.

Also, the increase in output is meaningless when the amount of customers doesn't scale in similar size.

Then there are the constraints of physics, there are so many humans in the planet that actually want to pay for a specific product, or consulting services.

I read the "imagination" as prelude to "Jevon's paradox" for AI. It might be that we simply don't know yet what using AI fully means, and where else it can be used and how. Electricity was initially just for lighting, but now it's everywhere...

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