8 ms·

As long as there is no AGI, no software engineer needs to be worried about their job. And when there is, obviously everything in every field will change and thi

by clktmr 3y ago

As long as there is no AGI, no software engineer needs to be worried about their job. And when there is, obviously everything in every field will change and this discussion will soon be futile.

Toutouxc 3y ago
This has been my cope mantra so far. I don't mind if my job changes a lot (and ideally loses the part I dislike the most — writing the actual code), and if I find myself in a position where my entire skillset doesn't matter at all, then well a LOT of people are in trouble.
- Vinnl 3y ago
  The worst future is where there still are plenty of jobs, but all of them consist of talking to an AI and hoping you use the right words that gets them to do what you need it to.
  - weweweoo 3y ago
    Not really. As long as there is no universal basic income, any job with decent salary beats unemployment. The job may suck, but the money allows you to do fun stuff after work.
- tomashubelbauer 3y ago
  I have seen programmers express that they dislike writing code before and I wonder what the ratio of people who dislike it and people who like it, is. For me, writing code is one of the most enjoyable aspects of programming.
  - hnick 3y ago
    It's my favourite part, except maybe debugging. I really like getting into the guts of an issue and working out why it happens which I suppose will be around for a while yet with AI code. It's a lot less fun with transient network issues and such though.
- kossTKR 3y ago
  If you dislike writing code were you pushed into this field by family, education or because of money? Because not liking code and being a dev is absolutely bizarre to me. One of the most amazing things about being able to "develop" in my view is exactly in those rare moments where you just code away, time flies, you fix things, iterate, organise your project completely in the zone - just like when i design, paint or play music, do sports uninterrupted, it's that flow state. In principle i like the social aspects but often they are the shitty part because of business politics, hierarchy games or bureaucracy. What part of the job do you like then?
  - Toutouxc 3y ago
    I enjoy the part where I'm putting the solution together in my head, working out the algorithms and the architecture, communicating with the client or the rest of the team, gaining understanding. I do not enjoy the next part, where I have to type out words and weird symbols in non-human languages, deal with possibly broken tooling and having to remember if the method is called "include" or "includes" in this language, or whether the lambda syntax is () => {} or -> () {}. I can do this second part just fine, but it's definitely not what I enjoy about being a developer.
    - kossTKR 3y ago
      Interesting, i also like the "scheming" phase, but also very much the optimisation phase. I completely agree that tooling, dependencies and syntax / framework github issue labyrinths have become too much and GPT-4 already alleviates some of that but i wonder if the scheming phase will get eaten too very soon from just a few sentences of business proposal - who knows.
pydry 3y ago
Market consolidation (Microsoft/Google/Amazon) might cause a jobpocalypse, just as it did for the jobs of well paid auto workers in the 1950s (GM/Chrysler/Ford). GM/Chrysler/Ford didn't have to be better than the startup competition they just had to be mediocre + be able to use their market power (vertical integration) to squash it like a bug. The tech industry is headed in that direction as computing platforms all consolidate under the control of an ever smaller number of companies (android/iphone + aws/azure/gcloud). I feel certain that the mass media will scapegoat AGI if that happens, because AGI will still be around and doing stuff on those platforms, but the job cuts will be more realistically triggered by the owners of those platforms going "ok, our market position is rock solid now, we can REALLY go to town on 'entitled' tech workers".
- geodel 3y ago
  Seems about right to me. Hyper-standardization around few architecture patterns using Kubernetes/Kafka/Microservice/GraphQL/React/OTelemetry etc can roughly cover 95-99% of all typical software development when you add a cloud DB. Now I know there are ton of different flavors in each of these tech but they will be mostly distraction for employers. With heavy layer of abstraction of above pattern and SLAs by vendors as you say Microsoft/Google/Amazon etc employers will be least bothered vast variety of software products.
  - quonn 3y ago
    The technologies you mentioned are merely the framework in which the work is done. 25 years ago none of that was even needed to create software. Now they are needed to manage the complexity of the stack, but the actual content is the same as it used to be.
  - pydry 3y ago
    I've noticed over the years that those abstractions have moved up a step too. E.g. we used to code our own user auth with OSS, now we use cognito. At some point it'll become impossible to build stuff off platform because it'll have to integrate to stuff on platform to be viable. Your startup might theoretically be able to run on 3 servers but your customers' first question will be "does it connect to googazure WS?" and googazure WS is gonna be like "you wanna connect to your customers' systems? Pay us. A lot.". There goes your profit margins. Then, if your startup is really good googazure WS will clone it. There goes your company.
dgb23 3y ago
> this discussion will soon be futile Yes we could simply ask the AGI what to do anyways. I hope it's friendly.
- butlike 2y ago
  Equal ins, equal outs. Compassion is key on our end as well.
adrianN 3y ago
You don’t have to completely replace people with machines to destroy jobs. It suffices if you make people more effective so that fewer employees are needed.
- MrBuddyCasino 3y ago
  If software developers become more effective, demand will also rise, as they become profitable in areas where previously they weren't. The question then becomes which of those two effects outpaces the other, which is an open question.
- 63 3y ago
  The number of people/businesses that could use custom software if it were cheaper/easier to develop is nearly infinite. If software developers get more productive, demand will increase
  - bamboozled 2y ago
    There is just less people now too. Every single country seems to have a negative or break even birthrate. If we want to maintain the standard of living we have now, we need more efficient people.
    - defrost 2y ago
      > There is just less people now too. Global population is still increasing and will most likely continue to do so until 2100. > we need more efficient people. It take less people to mine, process, and produce a billion tonne of steel today than it did in the 1970s. Efficiency has steadily increased.
      - bamboozled 2y ago
        It take less people to mine, process, and produce a billion tonne of steel today than it did in the 1970s. Why do you think that is? Efficiently gains, which is what I said... Global population can't just "go up", you need people who are educated in doing things and using tools efficiently. We also have an incredible amount of elderly people to take care of, that puts a huge burden on younger people. Also don't forget how fast 100 years actually goes. It not a long time. There is a limit to all of this though, there's absolutely no way 10 billion people colliding with the climate crisis will end well. We'd be better off with 6 billion efficient people than 10 billion starving and thirsty "workers".
fullstackchris 3y ago
and does even AGI change the bigger picture? we have 26.3 million AGIs currently working in this space [1]. I've never seen a single one take all the work of the others away... [1] https://www.griddynamics.com/blog/number-software-developers-world#:~:text=and%20developer%20demographics.-,How%20many%20software%20developers%20are%20there%20in%20the%20world%3F,hit%2029.3%20million%20by%202027 https://www.griddynamics.com/blog/number-software-developers....
- zeroonetwothree 3y ago
  What do you think the “A” stands for?
- threecheese 2y ago
  Presumably, the same ability we have to scale software which drives the marginal cost of creating it down will apply to creating this kind of software. The difference here though is the high compute cost might upset this ability to scale cheaply enough to make it worthwhile economically. We won’t know for a while IMO; new techniques could make the algorithms more efficient, or new tech will make the compute hardware really cheap. Or maybe we run out of shit to train on and the AI growth curve flattens out. Or an Evil Karpathy’s Decepticons architecture comes out and we’re all doomed.
pizzafeelsright 3y ago
I would argue future engineers should be worried a bit. We no longer need to hire new developers. I was not trained professionally yet I'm writing production code that's passing code reviews in languages I never used. I will create a prompt, validate it compiles, passes tests, have it explain so I understand it was written as expected and write documentation about the code, write the PR, and I am seen as a competent contributor. I can't pass leet code level 1 yet here I am being invited to speak to developers. Velocity goes up and cost of features will drop. This is good. I'm seeing at least 10 to 1 output from a year ago based upon integrating these new tools.
- supriyo-biswas 3y ago
  To be fair, Leetcode was never a good indicator of developer skills, though primarily because of the time pressure and the restrictive format that dings you for asking questions about the problem.
  - politician 3y ago
    Speaking of Leetcode... is anyone selling a service to boost Leetcode scores using AI yet? It seems like that's fairly low hanging fruit at this point.
    - ioblomov 3y ago
      Based on their demos, HackerRank is doing this as part of their existing products. Which makes sense since prompt engineering will soon become a minimum requirement for devs of any experience level.
- visarga 3y ago
  Yeah, it sounds to me your teammates are going to pick up the tab at the end, when subtle errors will be 10x harder to repair, or you are working on toy projects where correctness doesn't really matter.
  - nyrikki 3y ago
zeroonetwothree 3y ago
I still think it’s much more an “if” than a “when”. (Of course I am perhaps more strict with my definition)
brailsafe 3y ago
software engineers already need to be worried about either losing their current job or getting another one. The market is pretty much dead already unless you're working on something AI
- mixmastamyk 3y ago
  Do you know how many hype trains I’ve seen leave the station? :-D
  - brailsafe 2y ago
    True, but I didn't say dead permanently, just evidently and relatively dead since about late 2022
schaefer 3y ago
If AGI and artificial sentience comes hand in hand, I fail to see how our plans to spin up AGI's as a black box to "do the work" is not essentially a new form of slavery. Speaking from an ethics point of view: at what point do we say that AGI has crossed a line and deserves self autonomy? And how would we ever know when the line is crossed?
- hathawsh 3y ago
  Humans can't be copied. It seems like the inability to copy people is one of the pillars of our morality. If I could somehow make a perfect copy of myself, would I think about morality and ethics the same way? Probably not. AGI will theoretically be able to create perfect copies of itself. Will it be immoral for an AGI to clone itself to get some work done, then cause the clone to cease its existence? That's what computer software does all the time. Keep in mind that both the original and the clone might be pure bits and bytes, with no access to any kind of physical body. Just a thought.
  - int_19h 3y ago
    If humans fundamentally work in the same way as any such hypothetical AGI, then they can be copied in the same way.
    - hathawsh 3y ago
      If we ever do find a way to copy humans (including their full mental state), I suspect all law and culture will be upended. We'll have to start over from scratch.
  - voxl 3y ago
    > Humans can't be copied. There is no reason to believe this, and every reason to believe that humans can, in fact, be cloned/copied/whatever. It may not be an instant process like copying a file, but there is nothing innately special about the bio-computers we call brains.
    - 2y ago
acchow 3y ago
Depends how expensive the AGI is. If it requires $1M of electricity per year to run, it will for sure not replace human jobs paying only $100k. The highest paying jobs will probably get replaced first.

by clktmr 3y ago

As long as there is no AGI, no software engineer needs to be worried about their job. And when there is, obviously everything in every field will change and this discussion will soon be futile.

Toutouxc 3y ago

This has been my cope mantra so far. I don't mind if my job changes a lot (and ideally loses the part I dislike the most — writing the actual code), and if I find myself in a position where my entire skillset doesn't matter at all, then well a LOT of people are in trouble.

Vinnl 3y ago
The worst future is where there still are plenty of jobs, but all of them consist of talking to an AI and hoping you use the right words that gets them to do what you need it to.
- weweweoo 3y ago
  Not really. As long as there is no universal basic income, any job with decent salary beats unemployment. The job may suck, but the money allows you to do fun stuff after work.
tomashubelbauer 3y ago
I have seen programmers express that they dislike writing code before and I wonder what the ratio of people who dislike it and people who like it, is. For me, writing code is one of the most enjoyable aspects of programming.
- hnick 3y ago
  It's my favourite part, except maybe debugging. I really like getting into the guts of an issue and working out why it happens which I suppose will be around for a while yet with AI code. It's a lot less fun with transient network issues and such though.
kossTKR 3y ago
If you dislike writing code were you pushed into this field by family, education or because of money? Because not liking code and being a dev is absolutely bizarre to me. One of the most amazing things about being able to "develop" in my view is exactly in those rare moments where you just code away, time flies, you fix things, iterate, organise your project completely in the zone - just like when i design, paint or play music, do sports uninterrupted, it's that flow state. In principle i like the social aspects but often they are the shitty part because of business politics, hierarchy games or bureaucracy. What part of the job do you like then?
- Toutouxc 3y ago
  I enjoy the part where I'm putting the solution together in my head, working out the algorithms and the architecture, communicating with the client or the rest of the team, gaining understanding. I do not enjoy the next part, where I have to type out words and weird symbols in non-human languages, deal with possibly broken tooling and having to remember if the method is called "include" or "includes" in this language, or whether the lambda syntax is () => {} or -> () {}. I can do this second part just fine, but it's definitely not what I enjoy about being a developer.
  - kossTKR 3y ago
    Interesting, i also like the "scheming" phase, but also very much the optimisation phase. I completely agree that tooling, dependencies and syntax / framework github issue labyrinths have become too much and GPT-4 already alleviates some of that but i wonder if the scheming phase will get eaten too very soon from just a few sentences of business proposal - who knows.

pydry 3y ago

Market consolidation (Microsoft/Google/Amazon) might cause a jobpocalypse, just as it did for the jobs of well paid auto workers in the 1950s (GM/Chrysler/Ford). GM/Chrysler/Ford didn't have to be better than the startup competition they just had to be mediocre + be able to use their market power (vertical integration) to squash it like a bug. The tech industry is headed in that direction as computing platforms all consolidate under the control of an ever smaller number of companies (android/iphone + aws/azure/gcloud). I feel certain that the mass media will scapegoat AGI if that happens, because AGI will still be around and doing stuff on those platforms, but the job cuts will be more realistically triggered by the owners of those platforms going "ok, our market position is rock solid now, we can REALLY go to town on 'entitled' tech workers".

geodel 3y ago
Seems about right to me. Hyper-standardization around few architecture patterns using Kubernetes/Kafka/Microservice/GraphQL/React/OTelemetry etc can roughly cover 95-99% of all typical software development when you add a cloud DB. Now I know there are ton of different flavors in each of these tech but they will be mostly distraction for employers. With heavy layer of abstraction of above pattern and SLAs by vendors as you say Microsoft/Google/Amazon etc employers will be least bothered vast variety of software products.
- quonn 3y ago
  The technologies you mentioned are merely the framework in which the work is done. 25 years ago none of that was even needed to create software. Now they are needed to manage the complexity of the stack, but the actual content is the same as it used to be.
- pydry 3y ago
  I've noticed over the years that those abstractions have moved up a step too. E.g. we used to code our own user auth with OSS, now we use cognito. At some point it'll become impossible to build stuff off platform because it'll have to integrate to stuff on platform to be viable. Your startup might theoretically be able to run on 3 servers but your customers' first question will be "does it connect to googazure WS?" and googazure WS is gonna be like "you wanna connect to your customers' systems? Pay us. A lot.". There goes your profit margins. Then, if your startup is really good googazure WS will clone it. There goes your company.

dgb23 3y ago

> this discussion will soon be futile Yes we could simply ask the AGI what to do anyways. I hope it's friendly.

butlike 2y ago
Equal ins, equal outs. Compassion is key on our end as well.

adrianN 3y ago

You don’t have to completely replace people with machines to destroy jobs. It suffices if you make people more effective so that fewer employees are needed.

MrBuddyCasino 3y ago
If software developers become more effective, demand will also rise, as they become profitable in areas where previously they weren't. The question then becomes which of those two effects outpaces the other, which is an open question.
63 3y ago
The number of people/businesses that could use custom software if it were cheaper/easier to develop is nearly infinite. If software developers get more productive, demand will increase
- bamboozled 2y ago
  There is just less people now too. Every single country seems to have a negative or break even birthrate. If we want to maintain the standard of living we have now, we need more efficient people.
  - defrost 2y ago
    > There is just less people now too. Global population is still increasing and will most likely continue to do so until 2100. > we need more efficient people. It take less people to mine, process, and produce a billion tonne of steel today than it did in the 1970s. Efficiency has steadily increased.
    - bamboozled 2y ago
      It take less people to mine, process, and produce a billion tonne of steel today than it did in the 1970s. Why do you think that is? Efficiently gains, which is what I said... Global population can't just "go up", you need people who are educated in doing things and using tools efficiently. We also have an incredible amount of elderly people to take care of, that puts a huge burden on younger people. Also don't forget how fast 100 years actually goes. It not a long time. There is a limit to all of this though, there's absolutely no way 10 billion people colliding with the climate crisis will end well. We'd be better off with 6 billion efficient people than 10 billion starving and thirsty "workers".

fullstackchris 3y ago

and does even AGI change the bigger picture? we have 26.3 million AGIs currently working in this space [1]. I've never seen a single one take all the work of the others away... [1] https://www.griddynamics.com/blog/number-software-developers-world#:~:text=and%20developer%20demographics.-,How%20many%20software%20developers%20are%20there%20in%20the%20world%3F,hit%2029.3%20million%20by%202027 https://www.griddynamics.com/blog/number-software-developers....

zeroonetwothree 3y ago
What do you think the “A” stands for?
threecheese 2y ago
Presumably, the same ability we have to scale software which drives the marginal cost of creating it down will apply to creating this kind of software. The difference here though is the high compute cost might upset this ability to scale cheaply enough to make it worthwhile economically. We won’t know for a while IMO; new techniques could make the algorithms more efficient, or new tech will make the compute hardware really cheap. Or maybe we run out of shit to train on and the AI growth curve flattens out. Or an Evil Karpathy’s Decepticons architecture comes out and we’re all doomed.

pizzafeelsright 3y ago

I would argue future engineers should be worried a bit. We no longer need to hire new developers. I was not trained professionally yet I'm writing production code that's passing code reviews in languages I never used. I will create a prompt, validate it compiles, passes tests, have it explain so I understand it was written as expected and write documentation about the code, write the PR, and I am seen as a competent contributor. I can't pass leet code level 1 yet here I am being invited to speak to developers. Velocity goes up and cost of features will drop. This is good. I'm seeing at least 10 to 1 output from a year ago based upon integrating these new tools.

supriyo-biswas 3y ago
To be fair, Leetcode was never a good indicator of developer skills, though primarily because of the time pressure and the restrictive format that dings you for asking questions about the problem.
- politician 3y ago
  Speaking of Leetcode... is anyone selling a service to boost Leetcode scores using AI yet? It seems like that's fairly low hanging fruit at this point.
  - ioblomov 3y ago
    Based on their demos, HackerRank is doing this as part of their existing products. Which makes sense since prompt engineering will soon become a minimum requirement for devs of any experience level.
visarga 3y ago
Yeah, it sounds to me your teammates are going to pick up the tab at the end, when subtle errors will be 10x harder to repair, or you are working on toy projects where correctness doesn't really matter.
- nyrikki 3y ago

zeroonetwothree 3y ago

I still think it’s much more an “if” than a “when”. (Of course I am perhaps more strict with my definition)

brailsafe 3y ago

software engineers already need to be worried about either losing their current job or getting another one. The market is pretty much dead already unless you're working on something AI

mixmastamyk 3y ago
Do you know how many hype trains I’ve seen leave the station? :-D
- brailsafe 2y ago
  True, but I didn't say dead permanently, just evidently and relatively dead since about late 2022

schaefer 3y ago

If AGI and artificial sentience comes hand in hand, I fail to see how our plans to spin up AGI's as a black box to "do the work" is not essentially a new form of slavery. Speaking from an ethics point of view: at what point do we say that AGI has crossed a line and deserves self autonomy? And how would we ever know when the line is crossed?

hathawsh 3y ago
Humans can't be copied. It seems like the inability to copy people is one of the pillars of our morality. If I could somehow make a perfect copy of myself, would I think about morality and ethics the same way? Probably not. AGI will theoretically be able to create perfect copies of itself. Will it be immoral for an AGI to clone itself to get some work done, then cause the clone to cease its existence? That's what computer software does all the time. Keep in mind that both the original and the clone might be pure bits and bytes, with no access to any kind of physical body. Just a thought.
- int_19h 3y ago
  If humans fundamentally work in the same way as any such hypothetical AGI, then they can be copied in the same way.
  - hathawsh 3y ago
    If we ever do find a way to copy humans (including their full mental state), I suspect all law and culture will be upended. We'll have to start over from scratch.
- voxl 3y ago
  > Humans can't be copied. There is no reason to believe this, and every reason to believe that humans can, in fact, be cloned/copied/whatever. It may not be an instant process like copying a file, but there is nothing innately special about the bio-computers we call brains.
  - 2y ago

acchow 3y ago

Depends how expensive the AGI is. If it requires $1M of electricity per year to run, it will for sure not replace human jobs paying only $100k. The highest paying jobs will probably get replaced first.