> My outlook is: this industry has always faced threats that looked like it was going to spell the end of our careers, but we always come out the other side better than ever.
I don't think there ever was as big treat to intellectual jobs. If LLMs ever get really good at programming (at the level of senior) there is 0 reason to keep majority of programmers employed. In addition it's not likely that it would be like other historical events of replacing workers with technology, because it most likely won't create new jobs (well, at least not for humans). So if LLMs won't run out of fuel before reaching that level I'm afraid we are fucked.
> I won't rule out the possibility of LLMs that are so good that they can replicate just about any app in existence in minutes. But there's still value in having workers manage infrastructure, data, etc.
Why would AI advanced enough to spin entire app from scratch have problems with managing infrastructure and data?
What do you define as a “senior developer”? Someone who “codez real gud” and can pass “leetCode hard” interviews or the tech industries definition of a senior developer who operates at a certain level of scope, impact and “dealing with ambiguity” and can deliver business value?
The former type of senior developer will be a commodity and see their pay stagnate or even go down as companies find cheaper labor, AI and more software development gets replaced with SaaS offerings especially with enterprise devs.
> a senior developer who operates at a certain level of scope, impact and “dealing with ambiguity” and can deliver business value?
Is there any chance for me (a student) to become like this? I'm fine with coding changing (I just love computing) but I'm scared of the entirety of the field being completely torched.
Please take my advice with a huge grain of salt. It’s been literally decades since I was an entry level developer. I try my best to keep my ear to the ground and look through the eyes of people at all levels of the industry. Part of my job is mentorship as a “staff software architect” at a consulting company.
What would I do these days? I would stay in computer science and if possible get an MBA. I dropped out of graduate school in 2001. But what I learned helped me a lot.
If you can’t go to graduate school, at least take a few business classes. I think the only way to survive will be focusing more on the business than the technology and work for a consulting company.
I don’t mean being a “consultant” who is really just a hands on keyboard coder doing staff augmentation. I mean working for one of the Big 5 consulting firms or one of the smaller equivalents.
The US is definitely moving toward privatization and the first thing they do is bring in more consultants.
I don’t work for any of them. I specialize in strategic cloud consulting. But that market seems congested at the low end.
As far as I've heard, MBAs have also become completely saturated as well. Out of the frying pan into the fire.
I get you're trying to be "consoling", but frankly the bajillion pivot ideas, hopium arguments, endless counterarguments, and other indirection is why I think there's nothing optimal that can be done. All I can do is go through the motions with my current internship and major and rely on Christ rather than this fickle world. I made the wrong choice. Nothing that can be done.
That's completely wrong. All of Europe heavily traded with Russia, and Germany even wanted to base their green transformation plan primarily on trade with Russia.
By which point, Russia was already in the hands of a dictator. Too late and too little, as they say. But yes, obviously, every country deserves a large share of blame for its own situation.
Either way - even if I concede this, my point stands that starving nations and denying them development isn't a great long term strategy for peace.
- Cues and Captivate - Vanessa Van Edwards (business-focused social skills)
- The Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense at Work - Suzette Haden Elgin (I actually didn't enjoy this one too much, didn't finish it, but I think that was a personal mismatch)
- How to Win Friends and Influence People - Dave Carnegie (a lot of the techniques are very, very dated and transparent when used today... but it's pretty foundational and worth a glance anyway)
Because we don’t believe it’s equal quality to our job, so we see cheap competition arriving with swathes of bad products, but no way for customers to distinguish what makes quality. Plus we all create bugs anyway.
It's not really that. The quality of these tools will probably increase, and I'm fine with more competition, and with less experienced developers being empowered to build their own products.
What is depressing to me is that the products showcased here are essentially cookie-cutter derivatives built on and around the AI hype cycle. They're barely UI wrappers around LLMs marketed as something groundbreaking. So the thought of the web being flooded with these kinds of sites, in addition to the increase in spam and other AI generated content, is just depressing.
I find that part depressing as well, like who would even listen to gen AI podcasts? Not even vetted by a person but just pumped out as filler like it’s some kind of soil fertilizer. There is already so much good human made content on the web for nearly free if you only look. No doubt this AI slop will get in out way even if we don’t want it, but think of the effect this slop is going to have on younger generation.
I dunno about any credible. This (both the problem and the solution proposed) is a direction to explore. The problem and its supposed consequences are a pretty widespread "conventional knowledge" (if not a "city legend") and this way cringe to mention with a serious face without a good reason. So there is likely to be at least some ground.
Through the temporal bone of most people you can catch some sparse doppler signals with average hospital gear.
The fontanelles enable good ultrasound imaging on an entirely different level. A highres greyscale image vs a few sparse blobs of doppler from major vessels.
I know how to find the context I need, being aided by the IDE and compiler. So yes, my context window contains all of the code in my project, even if it's not instantaneous.
It's not that hard to have an idea of what code is defined where in a project, since compilers have been doing that for over half a century. If I'm injecting protocols and mocks into a unit test, it shouldn't be really hard for a computer to figure out their definitions, unless they don't exist yet and I was not clear they should have been created, which would mean that I'm giving the AI the wrong prompt and the error is on my side.
But is it proportional to the investment of time and people participating in it. If you take the amount of money/people invested into the sciences at a point in time , lets take: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solvay_Conference
And then, put the number of contributors and the rate of progress against one another, my guess is that you would see a massive slowdown of progress, so massive actually, that explenations about the slowdown abound. There is the "all easy apples have been picked" theory, the "only life&death systemic competition forces contributors to produce good science" theory and a ton of others. All basically trying to explain the same phenomena- which could also be explained by: "hackers, hacking hackers, hacking processes, leave no financial substance behind to have people who actually do the scientific leg-work."
That's interesting take, personally I'd say that graduate-level math is orders of magnitude harder than significant majority of programming. And I mean that it's inherently harder, i.e. not due to lack of background.
I don't think there ever was as big treat to intellectual jobs. If LLMs ever get really good at programming (at the level of senior) there is 0 reason to keep majority of programmers employed. In addition it's not likely that it would be like other historical events of replacing workers with technology, because it most likely won't create new jobs (well, at least not for humans). So if LLMs won't run out of fuel before reaching that level I'm afraid we are fucked.
> I won't rule out the possibility of LLMs that are so good that they can replicate just about any app in existence in minutes. But there's still value in having workers manage infrastructure, data, etc.
Why would AI advanced enough to spin entire app from scratch have problems with managing infrastructure and data?