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The article's claim that AI is responsible for a shrinking job market is tenuous at best. Economic factors are much more relevant. Rising interest rates make te
by fruchtose 3y ago
The article's claim that AI is responsible for a shrinking job market is tenuous at best. Economic factors are much more relevant. Rising interest rates make tech companies less attractive to investors, and this filters through companies as smaller hiring budgets.[0] And we're seeing relatively high interest rates compared to a few years ago. I am far from convinced that efficiency gains from AI correlate with—much less cause—software engineering job cuts.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/23/technology/tech-interest-rates-layoffs.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/23/technology/tech-interest-...
- jeremyjh 3y agoI agree. At present AI is a tool that engineers use for a marginal efficiency improvement. It isn't replacing anyone.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- smeagull 3y agoMarginal improvement? I'm not sure I can compete with that.
- breadwinner 3y agoIt may not be replacing anyone, but is it allowing 3 people to do the job of 4? I think so, and that reduces job opportunities for everyone. Also, is AI allowing junior engineers to do the job of senior engineers? I think so too.
- Macha 3y agoIt feels more like AI is doing tasks that senior engineers would have pushed out to more junior engineers more than it's leveling up junior engineers
- abirch 3y agoIt also let's someone create a new business that's cheaper than before. The size of the pie isn't fixed.
- wilsynet 3y agoThere is no chance AI is making a junior engineer as effective as a senior engineer.
- dullcrisp 3y agoIf anything it’s allowing senior engineers to do the job of junior engineers.
- Paul-Craft 3y agoFor sure. One person I talked to said using a code assistant was just like having a smart and eager, but really green junior to help them, but without so much of the hand holding an actual junior needs, and none of the mentorship requirements.
- TillE 3y agoSoftware isn't a finite problem that gets solved. We make what we can, given our resources. Commercial software used to be painstakingly written in assembly, with little more than simple text editors. An average Python programmer today is 10x more productive than that, yet there are vastly more developers now.
- shrimp_emoji 3y agoIt's because the demand is larger. If 99% of jobs are CRUD, and you have a tool that automates the creation of CRUD, say hello to driving Uber.
- jeremyjh 3y agoNo, it isn't that simple. When the work becomes more efficient, the programmer also becomes more valuable, which increases demand for the programmer.
- badpun 3y ago> 99% of jobs are CRUD People say that, but I have yet to work on a CRUD project. That's despite 15 years in industry and being involved with dozens of projects. My guess is that simple CRUD use cases are automated via Google Spreadsheets or similar solutions. Same as there are off the shelf solutions for a simple online store, so no one is writing that from scratch any more. What's left is writing the complex systems with unique requirements.
- jeremyjh 3y agoYeah that's why all the programming jobs disappeared after 4GL languages made us more efficient, and then when intellisense happened the industry got even smaller. The real tragedy though was all these open source libraries.
- 000ooo000 3y ago100%. I set up some keybinds this morning, and just now the guy next to me was made redundant.
- selimthegrim 3y agoKellyanne Conway is gonna have to tell us all about the Eclipse and Boost massacres
- Xixi 3y agoThink about the (grossly simplified and somewhat questionable) historical availability of: electronic gates -> binary -> assembly -> C -> Python. Each of these steps as allowed one engineer to do the work of an entire team at the previous step. And yet here we are: as technology has made engineers massively more productive, the need for engineers has gone up massively. Simply because the gains in productivity have made more projects doable. So the question is not whether AI will make engineers more productive. The question is whether it will allow more projects to be undertaken. I don't have the answer to that question...
- emmanueloga_ 3y agoI agree with you: it’s not that what you are saying is true, but that a lot of the people hoarding the money are salivating about this idea. For them, it’s easy to test the hypothesis: “let’s just fire people; with ai, at best we’ll become as productive as before or even better, at worst we’ll just have to hire the people again”. I hope that we won’t be riding the ai hype peak for too much longer.
- Pixie_Dust 3y ago> It may not be replacing anyone, but is it allowing 3 people to do the job of 4? I think so, and that reduces job opportunities for everyone. > Also, is AI allowing junior engineers to do the job of senior engineers? I think so too. Downvoted into oblivion for stating the blindingly obvious ö
- Paul-Craft 3y agoAre you using or have you used any of these AI tools for any length of time? Truthfully, no, I don't see it allowing 3 people to do 4 peoples' jobs, or for juniors to do the work of seniors. If I had to spitball a guess, I'd say there's potential for about a 10-15% productivity improvement on some tasks. Overall, as a senior/staff level software engineer, I can see these tools boosting my productivity maybe 5-10%. That's nowhere near "3 people doing the job of 4" levels. Speaking of juniors doing the work of seniors, you've got it totally backwards. The people who benefit most from these tools are the more experienced, more capable people, not new grads fresh out of college. There are a ton of things a SWE does that no LLM will help you with -- at least not until virtual avatars get to the point where I can send fake me to a meeting and expect to still have my job at the end of said meeting. Being able to evaluate and understand the output of these tools is a key skill necessary for gaining a benefit from them, and that's precisely the skill that juniors, by definition, lack. That said, this whole market dynamic of not hiring juniors at all right now is going to be a pain point for the industry at large in about 5 years if it keeps up. If you're a senior+ level SWE right now, that might end up being to your personal benefit, but it certainly won't benefit the tech industry when there aren't any mid-level engineers to hire, because we didn't cultivate, mentor, grow, and train them as juniors today.
- dukeyukey 3y agoDo you think compilers made demand for software engineers fall?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- ams92 3y agoYep, we haven’t been allowed to hire anyone new on my team in a year. Definitely no headcount for junior engineers. With the cost of licenses for SaaS apps for a single developer my company would rather hire one senior engineer versus 2 juniors.
- chadash 3y agoWow. What saas are you using that’s so expensive?
- wlonkly 3y agoIn my experience it's the sum of them, rather than just one. I have at least a few dozen tiles in Okta.
- api 3y agoI remember years ago when moving to the cloud and SaaS was going to save so much money by letting companies do away with in house IT. Now that the in house IT expertise is gone and the data is in closed SaaS you are locked in and it’s time to turn the screws.
- thfuran 3y agoThe prices are definitely out of control if it's a significant fraction of the cost of a dev.
- api 3y agoI’ve seen some crazy examples when things like Datadog become part of the stack or you have a really big “GitOps” operation with loads of SaaS things all chained together to deploy, audit, manage, etc. a build pipeline and a cloud deployment. Then there’s all the stuff like Zoom, Office, Google Workspace, and more that everyone needs. It can get crazy fast, and once you let stuff into the stack it’s hard to get rid of it. This is particularly true when it becomes part of a process that is in turn tied up with compliance or is used by a lot of people. Major source of “cost disease” creeping into our industry. I’ve taken to calling the overall phenomenon “low interest rate architecture.”
- cedws 3y agoAI may not be actually responsible for layoffs and hiring freezes, but there are CEOs using it as an excuse. It's getting irritating that journalists keep citing AI as the cause anyway.
- gumballindie 3y agoThey are the actual stochastic parrots. If anything, ai is replacing content writers. These people have not been providing value - the contrary, have been part of the problem - for years.
- shrimp_emoji 3y agoSo are the content writers stochastic parrots?
- rcarr 3y agoThis 1000%. As an investor, if interest rates aren't zero, why would you put your money in a risky startup when you could park it in a load of other places and still get a decent return? It's also not 2007 anymore, the low hanging fruit has been picked, most things that can be digitised and turned into services have been. You're going to have to come up with something extremely original and brilliant or utilising some kind of new tech in order to succeed on a big scale. It's got very little to do with AI. Other industries are far more affected by AI than software engineering e.g in my opinion, the amount of graphic designers and copy writers are both going to shrink massively.
- elforce002 3y agoAfrica, LATAM, and parts of Asia are still for grabs.
- apitman 3y ago> It's also not 2007 anymore, the low hanging fruit has been picked, most things that can be digitised and turned into services have been I think there's plenty of low hanging fruit left, especially when it comes to improving current systems that we assume inherently have to suck simply because they always have. Plus there's new fruit growing every day. There's potentially huge opportunities in improving social media right now. Who would have guessed 5 years ago we could see legitimate vulnerability in the major platforms?
- mahmoudhossam 3y agoImproving social media is low hanging fruit? How so?
- apitman 3y agoThreads, ActivityPub, Bluesky, nostr. There's hasn't been this much of a shake up in over a decade. Will it be enough? Who knows. But I'm hopeful we'll come out with something healthier than what we've been doing with algorithmic curation.
- jhatemyjob 3y agoPeople are quick to forget. It was Twitter. Which was enabled by high interest rates.
- lolinder 3y agoDoes anyone know to what degree the Section 174 changes are responsible for this market? It's been brought up separately in a few venues with dire warnings, but I've rarely seen it mentioned when people are talking about the current job market.
- alephnerd 3y agoPretty significantly. Before I switched to my current career, I was a PM at a pretty large software company that had a massive layoff in our US HQ and pivoted hiring almost entirely to Eastern Europe, Israel, and India in anticipation of this. Nowadays we only hire a handful of strategic roles in the US - everything else R&D wise is abroad. Other peer companies in our sector did the same. We had other considerations too (eg. Lack of RoI on US talent) but 174 was a driving factor
- selimthegrim 3y agoWould you consider taking an R&D role in Europe if you were US talent?
- shiroiuma 3y agoI'm only answering in general, not personally, but this question is too vague. Would you take a job in your specialty in the US? If your answer is "yes", great! It's located in Nome, Alaska. Still interested? There's a world of difference between living in Netherlands and Bulgaria, just like life in Honolulu is almost nothing like life in rural Alaska or NYC or rural Kansas.
- thesnide 3y agoRural Alaska seems rather a nice isolated place for a typical HN commenter...
- selimthegrim 3y agoMy dad did consider taking a medical job in Soldotna...
- paulryanrogers 3y agoInterest rates and AI impacts aren't mutually exclusive.
- lolinder 3y agoBut has anyone here seen any evidence of AI impacting software jobs? Maybe my company is just behind the times, but I'm seeing no indication that AI is going to displace anyone. Copilot and GPT-4 are convenient and speed up certain parts of the job, but the parts they impact aren't where the bulk of my time was spent anyway.
- hmcq6 3y agoWhat exactly are you expecting? That a company will post a job opening and then tell the candidates "On second thought we've passed you all up for AI"? That's never gonna happen. As far as you seeing no indication, I saw a job posting today on Indeed for a Software QA and one of the bullet points included working with AI tools. So you may not see it anecdotally but it's out there. Actually, ya know what. I went and tracked that job posting down https://us-redhat.icims.com/jobs/100347/senior-software-quality-engineer---openshift/job?hub=7&mobile=false&width=1140&height=500&bga=true&needsRedirect=false&jan1offset=-300&jun1offset=-240 https://us-redhat.icims.com/jobs/100347/senior-software-qual... It's from Red Hat... So yeah... It's significant
- Paul-Craft 3y agoI can't honestly say for sure, but I would say there's a possibility that AI was a factor in at least some of the layoffs last spring. Once June / July rolled around though, no way.
- hintymad 3y agoAgreed. And lacking apparent growth area is another reason. We had social media and rapid development of e-commerce in the 2000s, mobile revolution in the 2010s. What do we have now that sweeps the entire industry? Gen AI? But many companies are still trying to figure out what Gen AI can truly revolutionize.
- goalieca 3y ago10 years ago we had everyone trying to find a legit use for blockchain.
- gsharma 3y agoAgreed, but Gen AI already has a lot of use cases, the challenges are with “taming” the technology - Rare hallucinations, RAG (or equivalent) figured out, more deterministic. Assuming some of these challenges are solved, integrations will follow. Imagine the web before CSS, JS, AJAX. That’s where we are with Gen AI.
- hintymad 3y agoNo doubt Gen AI has lots of use cases. I'm just not sure if the use cases can lift the entire IT sector for the next N years like mobile or e-commerce used to do.
- Paul-Craft 3y agoWe still haven't found a good one yet, either.
- blinded 3y agoyep true, if anything the ai hype is helping the market.
- ghostly_s 3y agoThe article does not make that claim, read it. It states that those surveyed in the industry are concerned about AI's impact in the near future: " More than 60 percent of those surveyed said they believed their company would hire fewer people because of AI moving forward."
- UncleOxidant 3y agoIt could be that the expectation that AI will be able to replace tech jobs in the near to medium term (or at least lead to greater programmer productivity) is in fact influencing current C-level hiring decisions. Interest rates have plateaued and the consensus is that they could start dropping in the 2nd half of 2024.
- dccoolgai 3y agoAnother big factor (that doesn't get as much attention because it's wonkish) is the section of the TCJ Act of 2021 that forced software engineering to be amortized over 5 years instead of written off as an expense. Absolutely responsible for a huge pct of layoffs in 22 and 23.
- Paul-Craft 3y agoI agree. I find it hard to believe that anyone who's actually studied and probed the limitations of LLMs and AI art generators actually believes that AI is going to take anyone's job anytime soon. That might have spurred some of the layoffs last spring, but, today, I absolutely do not believe it is. That said, I have heard crazy stories from some people, like one CTO who was saying that "90% of code in [their] company would be written by AI" by the end of this year. And, there definitely has been a very palpable slowdown in hiring. Let's put it this way: I applied for 50 jobs the first week of last month and got very little response. I've had three on-sites that didn't seem terribly difficult, yet no offer. I've had another 2 or 3 opportunities basically evaporate in front of me as the companies decided they were not going to hire at all, or changed their mind about what they were looking for. Two years ago, I might have applied to a total of maybe 30 over 2-4 months, and I'd have gotten probably at least 12-15 interviews, most of which would have probably turned into on-sites. I'm starting to get more activity in my inbox now that the first of the year's rolled around. Let's hope it holds up long enough for me to land an offer :-)
- mrangle 3y agoGenerally speaking, people in charge shift a lot of blame for what may be pinned on them (interest rates in this instance) to other crises. Some of the manufacture of which can be traced back to said people. The case of Ai in this context is arguable. They did not create it, but are their hands clean of pushing Ai doomerism?
- psyfi 3y ago> The article's claim that AI is responsible for a shrinking job market is tenuous at best. It serves its purpose as a clickbait