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simonwHNSource author
Lessons learnedExperience excerpt · English

Prior to open source software development was awful

… Prior to open source software development was awful. We spent all of our time re-inventing wheels - or, if we were lucky, licensing expensive badly shaped wheels from vendors and crossing our fingers that they would work (because we couldn't fix them if they didn't). As a result, very few companies developed software - it's not worth hiring a software engineer if it takes them six months to deliver that initial login screen. Open source started taking off about 25 years ago, and software productivity skyrocketed. The result was a multi-decade boom in jobs and salaries for us software engineers.

Original discussionThe great AI delusion is falling apart137 source comments · at import
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didibusHN

I've always thought that I'd probably be paid even more and have the choice of many more jobs if open source didn't exist. Could it be there'd be less jobs because it would have prevented some businesses to bootstrap and stay afloat? That's also possible. And this is really the thing with AI, some think it'll grow the pie, therefore increasing the demand for developers. Some think it'll just shrink the size of the piece of pie that's for developers. If we could predict the former, and be sure of it, I doubt anyone would be against AI. Aside that though, as a developer, you are also concerned with, is this actually making my job better/faster/more-fun. Or am I just forced into an annoying process of using a tool that doesn't help and will just cause more problems I'll have to deal with.

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didibusHN

It's plausible, I just want to point out it's hard to know if that's just coincidental, as opposed to causal.

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thunkyHN

> We spent all of our time re-inventing wheels Still do. At least back then it probably felt more like we were doing something new because 8000 versions of the same thing wasn't right at your fingertips.

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