6 ms·

While I'm on the fence about LLMs there's something funny about seeing an industry of technologists tear their own hair out about how technology is destroying t

While I'm on the fence about LLMs there's something funny about seeing an industry of technologists tear their own hair out about how technology is destroying their jobs. We're the industry of "we'll automate your job away". Why are we so indignant when we do it to ourselves...

zamalek 7mo ago
This article isn't really about losing a job. Coding is a passion for some of us. It's similar to artists and diffusion, the only difference being that many people can appreciate human art - but who (outside of us) cares that a human wrote the code?
- ALoverOfLats 7mo ago
  Huge tangent but curiosity is killing me: By any chance is your username based on the Egyptian football club Zamalek?
- jhickok 7mo ago
  I disagree a bit. Coding can remain an artistic passion for you indefinitely, it's just your ability to demand that everyone crafts each line of code artisinally won't be subsidized by your employer for much longer. There will probably always be a heavily diminished demand for handcrafted code.
- andai 7mo ago
  I love programming, but most of that joy doesn't come from the type of programming I get paid to do. I now have more time and energy for the fun type, and I can go do things that were previously inconceivable! Last night "I" "made" 3D boids swarm with directional color and perlin noise turbulence. "I" "did" this without knowing how to do the math for any of those things. (My total involvement at the source level was fiddling with the neighbor distance.) https://jsbin.com/ququzoxete/edit?html,output https://jsbin.com/ququzoxete/edit?html,output Then I turned them into weird proteins https://jsbin.com/hayominica/edit?html,output https://jsbin.com/hayominica/edit?html,output (As a side note, the loss of meaning of "self" and "doing" overlaps weirdly with my meditation practice...)
  - mirsadm 7mo ago
    Yes but did you learn anything?
    - apitman 7mo ago
      Obviously that matters, but how much does it matter? Does it matter if you don't learn anything about computer architecture because you only code in JS all day? Very situational.
      - dolebirchwood 7mo ago
        There's a subset of people whose identity is grounded in the fact that they put in the hard work to learn things that most people are unable or unwilling to do. It's a badge of honor, and they resent anyone taking "shortcuts" to achieve their level of output. Kind of reminds me of lawyers who get bent out of shape when they lose a case to a pro se party. All those years of law school and studying for the bar exam, only to be bested by someone who got by with copying sample briefs and skimming Westlaw headnotes at a public library. :)
        geetee 7mo ago
        It's not that our identity is grounded in being competent, it's that we're tired of cleaning up messes left by people taking shortcuts.
        eslaught 7mo ago
        It's that, but it's also that the incentives are misaligned. How many supposed "10x" coders actually produced unreadable code that no one else could maintain? But then the effort to produce that code is lauded while the nightmare maintenance of said code is somehow regarded as unimpressive, despite being massively more difficult? I worry that we're creating a world where it is becoming easy, even trivial, to be that dysfunctional "10x" coder, and dramatically harder to be the competent maintainer. And the existence of AI tools will reinforce the culture gap rather than reducing it.
- SoftTalker 7mo ago
  I think this is really it. Being a musician was never a very reliable way to earn a living, but it was a passion. A genuine expression of talent and feeling through the instrument. And if you were good enough you could pay the bills doing work work for studios, commercials, movies, theater. If you were really good you could perform as a headliner. Now, AI can generate any kind of music anyone wants, eliminating almost all the anonymous studio, commercial, and soundtrack work. If you're really good you can still perform as a headliner, but (this is a guess) 80% of the work for musicians is just gone.
  - terminalbraid 7mo ago
    > AI can generate any kind of music anyone wants It only sounds like music.
- janderland 7mo ago
  The people outside of us didn’t care about your beautiful code before. Now we can quickly build their boring applications and spend more time building beautiful things for our community’s sake. Yes, there are economic concerns, but as far as “craft” goes, nothing is stopping us from continuing to enjoy it.
  - zrail 7mo ago
    Except that's not really true, because the work expands to fill the time allotted. Now we can build more boring applications with fewer people.
    - janderland 7mo ago
      Yes, it is true that companies are always hungry for more. But once again, those same companies never cared about beautiful code. They wanted us to build something that works as quickly as possible. In my experience, the beauty of programming was often enjoyed outside of work for this very reason, and we can still enjoy it outside of work for it's own sake.
  - terminalbraid 7mo ago
    I'd add part of the craft is enjoying those minutiae, sharing lessons, and stories with others. The number of people you can do that with is going to dwindle (and has been for a long time from the tech sphere's coopting of all of it). That's part that I mourn.
- kaffekaka 7mo ago
  Is coding a passion only because other people appreciate it? Is painting a passion because others appreciate it? No, it is a passion in itself. There will always be people appreciating coding by hand as a passion. My passions - drawing, writing, coding - are worthwhile in themselves, not because other people care about them. Almost noone does.
- crvdgc 7mo ago
  At least for this article it's more about the job, or to be precise, the past where job and passion coincided: > Ultimately if you have a mortgage and a car payment and a family you love, you’re going to make your decision. Nothing is preventing the author from continuing to write code by hand and enjoy it. The difference is that people won't necessarily pay for it. The old way was really incredible (and worth mourning), considering in other industries, how many people can only enjoy what they do outside of work.
- mpyne 7mo ago
  > Coding is a passion for some of us. It's a passion for me too, but LLMs don't change this for me. Do they change it for you?
boobsbr 7mo ago
I never thought or felt myself as or my work as someone or something that "will automate your job away".
- EvanAnderson 7mo ago
  Agreed. I've always thought the purpose of all automation was to remove needless toil. I want computers to free people. I guess I subscribe to the theory of creative destruction.
  - thwarted 7mo ago
    Maybe it comes down to the definition of "toil". Some people find typing to be toiling, so they latch on to not having to type as much when using LLMs. Other people see "chores" as toiling, and so dream of household robots to take on the burden of that toil. Some people hate driving and consider that to be needless toil, so self-driving cars answer that—and the ads for Waymo latch onto this. Personally, I am not stymied by typing nor chores nor driving. For me, typing is like playing a musical instrument: at some point you stop needing to think about how to play and you just play. The interaction and control of the instrument just comes out of your body. At some point in my life, all the "need to do things around the house" just became the things I do, and I'm not bothered by doing them, such that I barely notice doing them. But it's complex: the concept of "chores" is front and center when you're trying to get a teenager to be responsible for taking care of themselves (like having clean clothes, or how the bathroom is safer if it's not a complete mess) and participating in family/household responsibilities (like learning that if you don't make a mess, there's nothing to clean up). Can you really be effective at directing someone/something else without knowing how to do it yourself? Probably for some things, but not all.
    - EvanAnderson 7mo ago
      > Maybe it comes down to the definition of "toil". For sure. I idealize a future where people can spend more time doing things they want to do, whatever those avocations might be. Freedom from servitude. I guess some kind of Star Trek / The Culture hybrid dream. The world we have is so far from that imaginary ideal. Implicit in that ideal would be elimination of inequality, and I'm certain there are massive forces that would oppose that elimination.
ares623 7mo ago
For me it's because the same tech is doing it to everyone else in a more effective way (i.e. artists especially). I'm an "art enjoyer" since I was a child and to see it decimated by people who I once looked up to is heartbreaking. Also, if it only affected software, I would've been happy to switch to a more artistic career, but welp there goes that plan.
- Melonai 7mo ago
  I feel very similarly, I always thought of software engineering as being my future career. I'm young, I just really got my foot into the industry in my early twenties. It feels like the thing I wanted to do died right when I was allowed to start. I also always felt that if I didn't get to do development, I would try to get into arts which has always been a dream of mine, and now it feels that that died, too. I wish I was born just a little bit earlier, so that I had a bit more time. :(
  - Revanche1367 7mo ago
    Yeah, the thing that’s different about this technical revolution compared to the previous ones is that it’s not only trying to take out multiple industries, but the creative process as a whole.
bobro 7mo ago
How do you read this article and hear indigence? It’s clearly someone grieving something personal about their own relationship with the technology.
- NeutralCrane 7mo ago
  It may not be a reaction to the article itself but to the many comments in this thread and others that fall under that category.
- badc0ffee 7mo ago
  (Indignance, not indigence. Indigence means poverty.)
AstroBen 7mo ago
I'm very confident in saying the majority of developers didn't get into it saying "we'll automate your job away"
- AllegedAlec 7mo ago
  POSIWID
nilespotter 7mo ago
Per the "About Me" picture, this particular technologist does not have any hair to tear out.
jsrcout 7mo ago
"We" might be such an industry, but I'm not. My focus has always been on creating new capabilities, particularly for specialists in whatever field. I want to make individuals more powerful, not turn them into surplus.

zamalek 7mo ago

This article isn't really about losing a job. Coding is a passion for some of us. It's similar to artists and diffusion, the only difference being that many people can appreciate human art - but who (outside of us) cares that a human wrote the code?

ALoverOfLats 7mo ago
Huge tangent but curiosity is killing me: By any chance is your username based on the Egyptian football club Zamalek?
jhickok 7mo ago
I disagree a bit. Coding can remain an artistic passion for you indefinitely, it's just your ability to demand that everyone crafts each line of code artisinally won't be subsidized by your employer for much longer. There will probably always be a heavily diminished demand for handcrafted code.
andai 7mo ago
I love programming, but most of that joy doesn't come from the type of programming I get paid to do. I now have more time and energy for the fun type, and I can go do things that were previously inconceivable! Last night "I" "made" 3D boids swarm with directional color and perlin noise turbulence. "I" "did" this without knowing how to do the math for any of those things. (My total involvement at the source level was fiddling with the neighbor distance.) https://jsbin.com/ququzoxete/edit?html,output https://jsbin.com/ququzoxete/edit?html,output Then I turned them into weird proteins https://jsbin.com/hayominica/edit?html,output https://jsbin.com/hayominica/edit?html,output (As a side note, the loss of meaning of "self" and "doing" overlaps weirdly with my meditation practice...)
- mirsadm 7mo ago
  Yes but did you learn anything?
  - apitman 7mo ago
    Obviously that matters, but how much does it matter? Does it matter if you don't learn anything about computer architecture because you only code in JS all day? Very situational.
    - dolebirchwood 7mo ago
      There's a subset of people whose identity is grounded in the fact that they put in the hard work to learn things that most people are unable or unwilling to do. It's a badge of honor, and they resent anyone taking "shortcuts" to achieve their level of output. Kind of reminds me of lawyers who get bent out of shape when they lose a case to a pro se party. All those years of law school and studying for the bar exam, only to be bested by someone who got by with copying sample briefs and skimming Westlaw headnotes at a public library. :)
      - geetee 7mo ago
        It's not that our identity is grounded in being competent, it's that we're tired of cleaning up messes left by people taking shortcuts.
        eslaught 7mo ago
        It's that, but it's also that the incentives are misaligned. How many supposed "10x" coders actually produced unreadable code that no one else could maintain? But then the effort to produce that code is lauded while the nightmare maintenance of said code is somehow regarded as unimpressive, despite being massively more difficult? I worry that we're creating a world where it is becoming easy, even trivial, to be that dysfunctional "10x" coder, and dramatically harder to be the competent maintainer. And the existence of AI tools will reinforce the culture gap rather than reducing it.
SoftTalker 7mo ago
I think this is really it. Being a musician was never a very reliable way to earn a living, but it was a passion. A genuine expression of talent and feeling through the instrument. And if you were good enough you could pay the bills doing work work for studios, commercials, movies, theater. If you were really good you could perform as a headliner. Now, AI can generate any kind of music anyone wants, eliminating almost all the anonymous studio, commercial, and soundtrack work. If you're really good you can still perform as a headliner, but (this is a guess) 80% of the work for musicians is just gone.
- terminalbraid 7mo ago
  > AI can generate any kind of music anyone wants It only sounds like music.
janderland 7mo ago
The people outside of us didn’t care about your beautiful code before. Now we can quickly build their boring applications and spend more time building beautiful things for our community’s sake. Yes, there are economic concerns, but as far as “craft” goes, nothing is stopping us from continuing to enjoy it.
- zrail 7mo ago
  Except that's not really true, because the work expands to fill the time allotted. Now we can build more boring applications with fewer people.
  - janderland 7mo ago
    Yes, it is true that companies are always hungry for more. But once again, those same companies never cared about beautiful code. They wanted us to build something that works as quickly as possible. In my experience, the beauty of programming was often enjoyed outside of work for this very reason, and we can still enjoy it outside of work for it's own sake.
- terminalbraid 7mo ago
  I'd add part of the craft is enjoying those minutiae, sharing lessons, and stories with others. The number of people you can do that with is going to dwindle (and has been for a long time from the tech sphere's coopting of all of it). That's part that I mourn.
kaffekaka 7mo ago
Is coding a passion only because other people appreciate it? Is painting a passion because others appreciate it? No, it is a passion in itself. There will always be people appreciating coding by hand as a passion. My passions - drawing, writing, coding - are worthwhile in themselves, not because other people care about them. Almost noone does.
crvdgc 7mo ago
At least for this article it's more about the job, or to be precise, the past where job and passion coincided: > Ultimately if you have a mortgage and a car payment and a family you love, you’re going to make your decision. Nothing is preventing the author from continuing to write code by hand and enjoy it. The difference is that people won't necessarily pay for it. The old way was really incredible (and worth mourning), considering in other industries, how many people can only enjoy what they do outside of work.
mpyne 7mo ago
> Coding is a passion for some of us. It's a passion for me too, but LLMs don't change this for me. Do they change it for you?

boobsbr 7mo ago

I never thought or felt myself as or my work as someone or something that "will automate your job away".

EvanAnderson 7mo ago
Agreed. I've always thought the purpose of all automation was to remove needless toil. I want computers to free people. I guess I subscribe to the theory of creative destruction.
- thwarted 7mo ago
  Maybe it comes down to the definition of "toil". Some people find typing to be toiling, so they latch on to not having to type as much when using LLMs. Other people see "chores" as toiling, and so dream of household robots to take on the burden of that toil. Some people hate driving and consider that to be needless toil, so self-driving cars answer that—and the ads for Waymo latch onto this. Personally, I am not stymied by typing nor chores nor driving. For me, typing is like playing a musical instrument: at some point you stop needing to think about how to play and you just play. The interaction and control of the instrument just comes out of your body. At some point in my life, all the "need to do things around the house" just became the things I do, and I'm not bothered by doing them, such that I barely notice doing them. But it's complex: the concept of "chores" is front and center when you're trying to get a teenager to be responsible for taking care of themselves (like having clean clothes, or how the bathroom is safer if it's not a complete mess) and participating in family/household responsibilities (like learning that if you don't make a mess, there's nothing to clean up). Can you really be effective at directing someone/something else without knowing how to do it yourself? Probably for some things, but not all.
  - EvanAnderson 7mo ago
    > Maybe it comes down to the definition of "toil". For sure. I idealize a future where people can spend more time doing things they want to do, whatever those avocations might be. Freedom from servitude. I guess some kind of Star Trek / The Culture hybrid dream. The world we have is so far from that imaginary ideal. Implicit in that ideal would be elimination of inequality, and I'm certain there are massive forces that would oppose that elimination.

ares623 7mo ago

For me it's because the same tech is doing it to everyone else in a more effective way (i.e. artists especially). I'm an "art enjoyer" since I was a child and to see it decimated by people who I once looked up to is heartbreaking. Also, if it only affected software, I would've been happy to switch to a more artistic career, but welp there goes that plan.

Melonai 7mo ago
I feel very similarly, I always thought of software engineering as being my future career. I'm young, I just really got my foot into the industry in my early twenties. It feels like the thing I wanted to do died right when I was allowed to start. I also always felt that if I didn't get to do development, I would try to get into arts which has always been a dream of mine, and now it feels that that died, too. I wish I was born just a little bit earlier, so that I had a bit more time. :(
- Revanche1367 7mo ago
  Yeah, the thing that’s different about this technical revolution compared to the previous ones is that it’s not only trying to take out multiple industries, but the creative process as a whole.

bobro 7mo ago

How do you read this article and hear indigence? It’s clearly someone grieving something personal about their own relationship with the technology.

NeutralCrane 7mo ago
It may not be a reaction to the article itself but to the many comments in this thread and others that fall under that category.
badc0ffee 7mo ago
(Indignance, not indigence. Indigence means poverty.)

AstroBen 7mo ago

I'm very confident in saying the majority of developers didn't get into it saying "we'll automate your job away"

AllegedAlec 7mo ago
POSIWID

nilespotter 7mo ago

Per the "About Me" picture, this particular technologist does not have any hair to tear out.

jsrcout 7mo ago

"We" might be such an industry, but I'm not. My focus has always been on creating new capabilities, particularly for specialists in whatever field. I want to make individuals more powerful, not turn them into surplus.