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rsynnottHNSource author
Lessons learnedExperience excerpt · English

If (a) companies lay too many people off because the magic robots will make engineers unnecessary …

If (a) companies lay too many people off because the magic robots will make engineers unnecessary and (b) the pipeline collapses, because being a software engineer is an undesirable career because it is being replaced by robots and (c) it emerges that the robots are kinda bullshit, then there's going to be one hell of a shortage. When I started a CS degree in 2003, we were still kinda in the "dot com crash has happened, no-one will ever hire a programmer again" phase, and there were about 50 people in my starting class. I think in the same course two years ago, there'd been about 200. The 'correct' number, for actual future demand, was certainly closer to 200 than 50, and the industry as a whole had a bit of a labour crunch in the early 10s in particular.

Original discussionWhere's the shovelware? Why AI coding claims don't add up482 source comments · at import
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InsideOutSantaHN

I believe we are vastly underestimating the number of programmers needed, as some companies reap unusually high rewards from hiring programmers. Companies like Google can pay huge sums of money to programmers because they make even higher sums of money from the programmer's work. This means that they inflate programmer salaries, which makes it impossible for most companies that could benefit from software development to hire developers. We could probably have five times as many software developers as we have now, and they would not be out of work; they would only decrease average salaries for programmers.

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osigurdsonHN

I think it might be worse that that as staff reductions are across the board, not just in software development roles. My hope is start up creation will be unprecedented to take advantage of the complacency. They will wonder why AI deleted their customers when they thought it was supposed to delete their employees.

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