23 ms·

How much longer can I get paid $150k to write code ?

tsunamifury 2y ago
Often what happens is the golf-course phenomenon. As golfing gets less popular, low and mid tier golf courses go out of business as they simply aren't needed. But at the same time demand for high end golf courses actually skyrockets because people who want to golf either can give it up or go higher end. This I think will happen with programmers. Rote programming will slowly die out, while demand for super high end will go dramatically up in price.
- CapcomGo 2y ago
  Where does this golf-course phenomenon come from? It doesn't really match the real world or how golfing works.
  - tsunamifury 2y ago
    how so, witnessed it quite directly in California. Majority have closed and remaining have gone up in price and are up scale. This has been covered in various new programs like 60 minutes. You can look up death of golfing. Also unsure what you mean by...'how golfing works'. This is the economics of it, not the game
    - EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 2y ago
      Maybe its CA thing? Plenty of $50 golf courses here in Phoenix.
    - CapcomGo 2y ago
      Golfing has had a huge surge in popularity since 2020. Prices are going up but courses aren't closing.
colesantiago 2y ago
Frontier expert specialist programmers will always be in demand. Generalist junior and senior engineers will need to think of a different career path in less than 5 years as more layoffs will reduce the software engineering workforce. It looks like it may be the way things are if progress in the o1, o3, oN models and other LLMs continues on.
- deadbabe 2y ago
  This assumes that software products in the future will remain at the same complexity as they are today, just with AI building them out. But they won’t. AI will enable building even more complex software which counter intuitively will result in need even more human jobs to deal with this added complexity. Think about how despite an increasing amount of free open source libraries over time enabling some powerful stuff easily, developer jobs have only increased, not decreased.
  - dmm 2y ago
    I've made a similar argument in the past but now I'm not so sure. It seems to me that developer demand was linked to large expansions in software demand first from PCs then the web and finally smartphones. What if software demand is largely saturated? It seems the big tech companies have struggled to come up with the next big tech product category, despite lots of talent and capital.
    - deadbabe 2y ago
      There doesn’t need to be a new category. Existing categories can just continue bloating in complexity. Compare the early web vs the complicated JavaScript laden single page application web we have now. You need way more people now. AI will make it even worse. Consider that in the AI driven future, there will be no more frameworks like React. Who is going to bother writing one? Instead every company will just have their own little custom framework built by an AI that works only for their company. Joining a new company means you bring generalist skills and learn how their software works from the ground up and when you leave to another company that knowledge is instantly useless. Sounds exciting. But there’s also plenty of unexplored categories anyway that we can’t access still because there’s insufficient technology for. Household robots with AGI for instance may require instructions for specific services sold as “apps” that have to be designed and developed by companies.
prmph 2y ago
I’ll believe the models can take the jobs of programmers when they can generate a sophisticated iOS app based on some simple prompts, ready for building and publication in the app store. That is nowhere near the horizon no matter how much things are hyped up, and it may well never arrive.
- timenotwasted 2y ago
  The absolutist type comments are such a wild take given how often they are so wrong.
  - tsunamifury 2y ago
    Totally... simple increases in 20% efficiency will already significant destroy demand for coders. This forum however will be resistant to admit such economic phenomenon. Look at video bay editing after the advent of Final Cut. Significant drop in the specialized requirement as a professional field, even while content volume went up dramatically.
    - exitb 2y ago
      Computing has been transforming countless jobs before it got to Final Cut. On one hand, programming is not the hardest job out there. On the other, it takes months to fully onboard a human developer - a person that already has years of relevant education and work experience. There are desk jobs that onboard new hires in days instead. Let’s see when they’re displaced by AI first.
      - tsunamifury 2y ago
        Don't know if you noticed but thats already happening. Mass layoffs in customer service etc have already happened over the last 2 years
        EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 2y ago
        That's until AI has improved enough that it can automatically navigate the menus to get me a human operator to talk to.
deadbabe 2y ago
There’s a very good chance that if a company can replace its programmers with pure AI then it means whatever they’re doing is probably already being offered as a SaaS product so why not just skip the AI and buy that? Much cheaper and you don’t have to worry about dealing with bugs.
- croemer 2y ago
  SaaS works for general problems faced by many businesses.
  - deadbabe 2y ago
    Exactly. Most businesses can get away with not having developers at all if they just glue together the right combination of SaaS products. But this doesn’t happen, implying there is something more about having your own homegrown developers that SaaS cannot replace.
    - croemer 2y ago
      The risk is not SaaS replacing internal developers. It's about increased productivity of developers reducing the number of developers needed to achieve something.
      - deadbabe 2y ago
        Again, you’re assuming product complexity won’t grow as a result of new AI tools. 3 decades ago you needed a big team to create the type of video games that one person can probably make on their own today in their spare time with modern tools. But now modern tools have been used to make even more complicated games that require more massive teams than ever and huge amounts of money. One person has no hope of replicating that now, but maybe in the future with AI they can. And then the AAA games will be even more advanced. It will be similar with other software.
sss111 2y ago
3 to 5 years, max. Traditional coding is going to be dead in the water. Optimistically, the junior SWE job will evolve but more realistically dedicated AI-based programming agents will end demand for Junior SWEs
- lagrange77 2y ago
  Which implies that a few years later they will not become senior SWEs either.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
torginus 2y ago
Well, considering they floated the $2000 subscription idea, and they still haven't revealed everything, they could still introduce the $2k sub with o3+agents/tool use, which means, till about next week.
arrosenberg 2y ago
Unless the LLMs see multiple leaps in capability, probably indefinitely. The Malthusians in this thread seem to think that LLMs are going to fix the human problems involved in executing these businesses - they won't. They make good programmers more productive and will cost some jobs at the margins, but it will be the low-level programming work that was previously outsourced to Asia and South America for cost-arbitrage.
mrdependable 2y ago
I think they will have to figure out how to get around context limits before that happens. I also wouldn't be surprised if the future models that can actually replace workers are sold at such an exorbitant price that only larger companies will be able to afford it. Everyone else gets access to less capable models that still require someone with knowledge to get to an end result.
kirykl 2y ago
If it’s any consolation, Agile priests and middle managers will be the first to go
- dhfuuvyvtt 2y ago
  See ya Cindy.
HarHarVeryFunny 2y ago
You're not being paid $150K to "write code". You're being paid that to deliver solutions - to be a corporate cog than can ingest business requirements and emit (and maintain) business solutions. If there are jobs paying $150K just to code (someone else tells you what to code, and you just code it up), then please share!

Often what happens is the golf-course phenomenon. As golfing gets less popular, low and mid tier golf courses go out of business as they simply aren't needed. But at the same time demand for high end golf courses actually skyrockets because people who want to golf either can give it up or go higher end. This I think will happen with programmers. Rote programming will slowly die out, while demand for super high end will go dramatically up in price.

CapcomGo 2y ago
Where does this golf-course phenomenon come from? It doesn't really match the real world or how golfing works.
- tsunamifury 2y ago
  how so, witnessed it quite directly in California. Majority have closed and remaining have gone up in price and are up scale. This has been covered in various new programs like 60 minutes. You can look up death of golfing. Also unsure what you mean by...'how golfing works'. This is the economics of it, not the game
  - EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 2y ago
    Maybe its CA thing? Plenty of $50 golf courses here in Phoenix.
  - CapcomGo 2y ago
    Golfing has had a huge surge in popularity since 2020. Prices are going up but courses aren't closing.

colesantiago 2y ago

Frontier expert specialist programmers will always be in demand. Generalist junior and senior engineers will need to think of a different career path in less than 5 years as more layoffs will reduce the software engineering workforce. It looks like it may be the way things are if progress in the o1, o3, oN models and other LLMs continues on.

deadbabe 2y ago
This assumes that software products in the future will remain at the same complexity as they are today, just with AI building them out. But they won’t. AI will enable building even more complex software which counter intuitively will result in need even more human jobs to deal with this added complexity. Think about how despite an increasing amount of free open source libraries over time enabling some powerful stuff easily, developer jobs have only increased, not decreased.
- dmm 2y ago
  I've made a similar argument in the past but now I'm not so sure. It seems to me that developer demand was linked to large expansions in software demand first from PCs then the web and finally smartphones. What if software demand is largely saturated? It seems the big tech companies have struggled to come up with the next big tech product category, despite lots of talent and capital.
  - deadbabe 2y ago
    There doesn’t need to be a new category. Existing categories can just continue bloating in complexity. Compare the early web vs the complicated JavaScript laden single page application web we have now. You need way more people now. AI will make it even worse. Consider that in the AI driven future, there will be no more frameworks like React. Who is going to bother writing one? Instead every company will just have their own little custom framework built by an AI that works only for their company. Joining a new company means you bring generalist skills and learn how their software works from the ground up and when you leave to another company that knowledge is instantly useless. Sounds exciting. But there’s also plenty of unexplored categories anyway that we can’t access still because there’s insufficient technology for. Household robots with AGI for instance may require instructions for specific services sold as “apps” that have to be designed and developed by companies.

prmph 2y ago

I’ll believe the models can take the jobs of programmers when they can generate a sophisticated iOS app based on some simple prompts, ready for building and publication in the app store. That is nowhere near the horizon no matter how much things are hyped up, and it may well never arrive.

timenotwasted 2y ago
The absolutist type comments are such a wild take given how often they are so wrong.
- tsunamifury 2y ago
  Totally... simple increases in 20% efficiency will already significant destroy demand for coders. This forum however will be resistant to admit such economic phenomenon. Look at video bay editing after the advent of Final Cut. Significant drop in the specialized requirement as a professional field, even while content volume went up dramatically.
  - exitb 2y ago
    Computing has been transforming countless jobs before it got to Final Cut. On one hand, programming is not the hardest job out there. On the other, it takes months to fully onboard a human developer - a person that already has years of relevant education and work experience. There are desk jobs that onboard new hires in days instead. Let’s see when they’re displaced by AI first.
    - tsunamifury 2y ago
      Don't know if you noticed but thats already happening. Mass layoffs in customer service etc have already happened over the last 2 years
      - EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 2y ago
        That's until AI has improved enough that it can automatically navigate the menus to get me a human operator to talk to.

deadbabe 2y ago

There’s a very good chance that if a company can replace its programmers with pure AI then it means whatever they’re doing is probably already being offered as a SaaS product so why not just skip the AI and buy that? Much cheaper and you don’t have to worry about dealing with bugs.

croemer 2y ago
SaaS works for general problems faced by many businesses.
- deadbabe 2y ago
  Exactly. Most businesses can get away with not having developers at all if they just glue together the right combination of SaaS products. But this doesn’t happen, implying there is something more about having your own homegrown developers that SaaS cannot replace.
  - croemer 2y ago
    The risk is not SaaS replacing internal developers. It's about increased productivity of developers reducing the number of developers needed to achieve something.
    - deadbabe 2y ago
      Again, you’re assuming product complexity won’t grow as a result of new AI tools. 3 decades ago you needed a big team to create the type of video games that one person can probably make on their own today in their spare time with modern tools. But now modern tools have been used to make even more complicated games that require more massive teams than ever and huge amounts of money. One person has no hope of replicating that now, but maybe in the future with AI they can. And then the AAA games will be even more advanced. It will be similar with other software.

sss111 2y ago

3 to 5 years, max. Traditional coding is going to be dead in the water. Optimistically, the junior SWE job will evolve but more realistically dedicated AI-based programming agents will end demand for Junior SWEs

lagrange77 2y ago
Which implies that a few years later they will not become senior SWEs either.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

torginus 2y ago

Well, considering they floated the $2000 subscription idea, and they still haven't revealed everything, they could still introduce the $2k sub with o3+agents/tool use, which means, till about next week.

arrosenberg 2y ago

Unless the LLMs see multiple leaps in capability, probably indefinitely. The Malthusians in this thread seem to think that LLMs are going to fix the human problems involved in executing these businesses - they won't. They make good programmers more productive and will cost some jobs at the margins, but it will be the low-level programming work that was previously outsourced to Asia and South America for cost-arbitrage.

mrdependable 2y ago

I think they will have to figure out how to get around context limits before that happens. I also wouldn't be surprised if the future models that can actually replace workers are sold at such an exorbitant price that only larger companies will be able to afford it. Everyone else gets access to less capable models that still require someone with knowledge to get to an end result.

kirykl 2y ago

If it’s any consolation, Agile priests and middle managers will be the first to go

dhfuuvyvtt 2y ago
See ya Cindy.

HarHarVeryFunny 2y ago

You're not being paid $150K to "write code". You're being paid that to deliver solutions - to be a corporate cog than can ingest business requirements and emit (and maintain) business solutions. If there are jobs paying $150K just to code (someone else tells you what to code, and you just code it up), then please share!