But ultimately business reality has changed, largely because achieving business goals is dramatically easier with AI tools. This undercuts a lot of the focus on building solid fundamentals, and in a lot of cases that’ll come back to bite the business. But in many scenarios it won’t, and the industry will rumble on.
Those of us working in marketing or journalism or education have already been forced to accept this new reality decades ago, largely because of inventions by software developers. Now devs are just late to their own party.
Would love to see the business and manager types manage software and infrastructure. What's the worst that could happen? Go on, do it. Every time a foot gun goes off it'll be followed by a condescending chuckle.
I used to see 'passion' as the defining factor of how to stay in the field and do well, and that was advice given to people who wanted to join the industry -- who showed the minimum of interest. Now we're going to have these non-technical people who definitely aren't interested and definitely don't have passion for it try to make and manage quality software?
This is the state of the homebuilding industry right now. Most of these homes are sold to people who don't make payment contingent upon passing an inspection. The business knows quality doesn't matter to buyers and you can save lots of money by cutting corners.
This is not just homebuilding, this is the future of every industry. We're putting distilled water in the hydroponics. In tech, it was already happening before AI, just look at the usability decline in every Windows and OSX version.
This sort of thing happened to, for example, Maplin.
The big poster child is sadly Twitter. A lot of people said it would collapse without 90% of the staff, and that hasn't materialized. I suspect they can't deploy huge changes to the backend, but they never did that much anyway.
(also, those of us not in the US and not in FAANG always wondered how such a steep salary differential could have been maintained forever; more than doctors and lawyers? Comparable to finance bros or the fabled quants? All of those are much more onerous jobs with much harder entrance criteria!)
If I'm a business owner, and my point-of-sale software was wildly unreliable, I'd switch if I wasn't constrained by a contract. I can't exactly move off of Facebook as my marketing strategy, though.
If everyone asked for returns, or sued, software companies the same way they deal with other goods, the atittude would most likely have changed by now.
Not to mention the whole EULAs ("we don't have any idea what we are doing here, please sign") disease.
If I would return today to Portugal, I would probably earn less after taxes than in the dotcom days when working for Altitude Software, by moving into my home town.
Sure it is above minimum wage, yet plenty of office workers get similar salary levels, provided they have an university background.
I am also aware that IT salaries in Greece and Italy aren't that great, versus other office workers with high education background, and we all three enjoy our unpaid overtime.
I'm OK with this now, it is what it is, but these years weren't smooth as there were ups and downs and a down after an up can be stressful if you're not ready for it.
not to say AI-tools do not contribute, they lower the bar of entry to the profession after all, but any C-suite/hiring manager is much more arbitrating labor expense than AI-subscriptions.
That doesn’t mean we should accept mediocre. Businesses might not care. Few businesses have bought a product based on how many lines of code it has or how easy the code is to maintain.
Even building software for them for nearly 3 decades it became apparent early on that businesses don’t care. It has always been a point of contention: the struggle to ship now, faster and making sure we ship the right thing and do it well. We had to learn when to give ground and when to pull hard… because in the end there are times when it absolutely matters.
Just because business can’t recognize when it’s about to shoot itself in the foot doesn’t mean we should let them.
This has been the excuse of mediocre developers for decades too. It’s how we ended up with sloppy code in production. Terminals that can’t scroll without flickering or handle much data. Apps that have loading screens on super computers. Software that sometimes works. Ship fast and break stuff.
Programmers used to work with punch cards, then assembly, then low-level languages with odd quirks. Today few developers even think about first-party code size, micro-optimizations, register allocation, etc. LLMs are just another abstraction.
A developer with the ideal AI code writer (which we’re not at yet) must still think about idea, design, scope, etc. like a product owner or manager. And these concepts have theory, sometimes even math (e.g. time complexity).
EDIT to comment on the article: all abstractions are leaky, but sometimes it rarely matters. Today we do still need to understand code quality and architecture when working with LLMs, or the software will get bad enough that it will affect the company. But maybe not next year. An analogy: stack vs heap, memory allocations, etc. still matter in high-performance software, which isn’t uncommon, but programmers almost never think about register allocation.
You cannot be serious.
LLMs are also quite deterministic if you want them to be - generally, their final token selection is deliberately randomized (the model “temperature”). But the word you’re looking for here is probably not actually determinism, it’s probably something closer to predictability.
In any case, it’s perfectly possible to ensure that the output of LLMs is fully deterministic, debuggable, understandable, and testable.
> You cannot be serious.
I don’t think you’re thinking about this clearly.
They didn’t even earn anything close to what they were worth. According to Marx’ Labor Theory of Value anyway.
However the dice fall now, one of the possible outcomes is that the tech billionaires take that 100K USD for themselves. The very deserving individuals whose job is to sit their arses on automation assets.
Meanwhile workers from other sectors can gloat about how they are now in the same boat as them. The boat of accepting your ever-meagre reality.
In Germany for instance I've seen many a company that treated their programmers as a cost center and they actually were (probably a mutually reinforcing self-fulfilling prophecy).
Too many instances of programmers being deployed in such a way that I couldn't possibly see a way that they would get back even that meagre investment that was being made. Fully irrational dev teams doing useless busy work.
Most German "startups" used to be replaceable with Zapier and Pipedrive. That has probably only gotten worse with the advent of LLMs.
Don't even really have anything else to say other than that, but maybe commenting it somewhere helps someone else realize they're not alone. I don't know how that helps you or me, but that's what I got. Maybe there's still something for us somewhere, but it is very difficult to stay motivated, and I don't have an answer.
I enjoy software development and hopefully one day I will return to it, but I am but one tiny kernel of corn in such a mighty ocean of shit so I might as well right the waves instead of fighting them. Maybe your calling is scamming Indians or scamming Americans or scamming Indian scammers. You aren't alone but the attitude you have will never stop mattering. See if you want to go back to school, start a tutoring program for kids. Motivation is for morons, do something.
I have spent months adjusting my resume, applying for all
jobs where my skill set may be of use, building
proof-of-concepts using Claude, and doing cold outreach to
anyone who may be interested in my potential products or my
services. The well has gone dry.
It is analogous to email spam in the 90's, before anti-spam technology was mature.
Staffing companies have recruiters which vet candidates to varying degrees of success. At minimum, they establish the candidate:
- is a human
- lives where they claim to live
- has worked where they claim to have worked
- has eligibility to work for one or more of their clients
If nothing else, the above eliminates much of the "99% resume fraud" problem companies are dealing with now.
Everyone that praises how they get more productive always forgets that means big corp now needs less of us.
I work on enterprise consulting, and have watched how the change into managed cloud infrastructure, followed by low-code/no-code tooling, has had an impact on team sizes, meaning less devs for the same outcome.
AI driven development is reducing those team sizes even further.
In many European countries, gettting jobs at a later age is really an almost impossible task, the easiest solutions end up trying to get early retirement status, or go self employed, which also isn't without its own set of complications.
By now... I see in my country high prices for laptops with only 4Gb of Ram and Celerons.
It could do wonderful things if in 2000s people didn't buy the argument that hardware is so cheap so lets write unefficient code. Same hardware that could play an Youtube video in 2000s today cannot even open the website. Electron send hugs...
Now people are mad about AI until when? Oceans be drought like in Oblivion movie?
And professionals? The generation of specialists will pass... and people will blindly depend on Ai soon if the course of things doesn't stop or at least be corrected.
I think the author could have brighter days in future (and still thing in present in some hidden niches) as knowledge will always precious.
The main lesson I have is buy less TI and every buzz promises and find the place where knoledge and craft walk side by side.
Marcus Aurelius the historical figure was a monster who killed a measurable portion of humans alive at the time
More and more places just want Jira tickets done fast instead of someone that's going to push back or question if this is the best way to build some thing. They want the thing, they don't care if it works well. They don't care if it's efficient. They want it now.
We've been moving to React, replacing an internal framework that's worked wonders for us we've been using for over a decade. The biggest part of the move is "hiring".
My general sense is that nobody understands how React works under the hood. The answer I get when I ask questions is generally just "don't worry about it".
Everything is giant overbuilt and terrible because most people never bothered to learn even a single level up from where they do most of their work. The people that do become unhirable. Everything takes hundreds or thousands more cycles and electricity it should because people can't be bothered to understand what they're doing.
This is one of the most alienating things about the modern software engineering industry. Someone who grew up just fucking around with computers since they were 5 is supposedly now on even footing with someone who took a 16 week bootcamp and a Claude subscription and has never seen a terminal before.
I was at a drum and bass show recently and talked to one of the other people there. It was obvious I didn't really listen to that much drum and bass as I couldn't name anybody except the most popular artists. You see peoples' reactions change slightly when they discover you are not really part of their music scene - you're an outsider, or a tourist, or even a poser. That's not even a problem, that's just the way subcultures are - you've either lived and breathed that way of life, or not.
What LLMs are doing is they are automating the manufacture of posers and cultural appropriators at scale - you don't really understand the nooks and crannies of this territory, you never actually lived on IRC or in the bash terminal - but you can sure wave around these oversimplified maps of the territory with all the back alleys and laneways missing, and use your pocket book of translated phrases to pose as a native.
> My general sense is that nobody understands how React works under the hood. The answer I get when I ask questions is generally just "don't worry about it".
The problem in software is it seems that we are losing the ability to distinguish between appropriators of computer geek culture and those who do "speak" programming languages natively. The bar has fallen so low that I can't even expect people to understand the difference between runtime and compile time. Anybody who brings up such advanced and esoteric (read: high school level computing) topics is viewed with scorn, as if their ability to expose ignorance on foundational topics presents an existential (or career) threat.
There's been a rise of anti-intellectualism in software from people with non-STEM backgrounds who actually disdain seeking out and possessing such knowledge. It's utterly useless to study - just like math. I find it harder and harder to locate hobbyists, especially here in Toronto, who bother to go below the abstractions not just because they want to, but because they are compelled to understand.
When I graduated, I was shocked to learn that no company cared about any of the architectural concepts that I had learned. UML class diagrams, sequence diagrams, ER diagrams, etc... had been on the way out. At one point, as large internet companies where scaling up, there was a brief resurgence of interest in sequence diagrams... But it didn't really last. Nowadays most software is riddled with race conditions and deep exploitable architectural flaws. Cryptocurrencies have been victims to many such attacks. Billions of dollars have been lost to race conditions... And that's just the ones which were discovered. It's so bad that it seems as though some people wanted it to be that way.
That's one thing I never care to do unless I'm the one making the technical decisions. What I do is to build the thing, but with defensive programming in place. I take care of making that my code is good, then harden any interface so that I can demonstrate that I'm not the cause for new bugs. People will be careless, so make sure that you have blast doors between your work and theirs.
And I do take time to learn about the abstractions of the new shiny tools, even when it's overengineered. Going blind and making mistakes is not my cup of tea.
That's why you see hundred level call stacks, polymorphism with a single implementation and still errors are hidden or root causes hidden behind "exception caught".
I spoke a million words
They didn't mean that much to me
They rang around my head
Like empty tuneless harmonies
Love's great abstraction mine “Duplication is far cheaper than wrong abstraction."just share the damn thing, someone may have something for you ;)
...I've kind of rarely seen these ppl complaining about work actually sharing their resume or a condensed description of their skills, knowledge and experience
so, a path could be picked from what you know:
1. devops/sre - really hard to get above entry-level without real experience and you _will_ be competing head on with AI ...ouch
2. cyber - same with whitehat as with devops/sre ...basically go full red-team / blackhat / offesinve for a while, the get certs and portofilio, then job in "real cyber" ...BUT ppl that do this tend to have a "very specially broken brain", so if you haven't done this already you're probably not one of them [probably for the best]
...but they're probably all bad, so better DO SOMETHING ELSE ENTIRELY:
...gtfo of software, you're likely not gonna become an "agents hearder" with skillset, mentality and experience - in the US probably going full on on agriculture [recent US protectionism and isolationism will give you decent levels and shield for globalized markets], learning some minimal hardware tinkering to automate drones and later manage android workers, software for planning farming automation etc... hire hands for physical labour and BUILD AND MANAGE A FARM or something like that (maybe farm + restaurant or smth else form tourism / hospitality)
E: Farm automation probably has some juice though, regardless of how close the androids I keep seeing in demos actually are.
Some “Java in the 90s” understanding of abstraction. Proper abstractions break complexity into composable elements. Hence, fidelity of our understanding increases.
there will be a reset at some point, and software developers will be needed. especially when every piece of software stops working. idk if that will happen before or after an economic collapse tho.
i have no idea where things will go in the future, but i doubt it will be much fun
I don't think most of those jobs will be in the West, though.
I do suspect that developing software in California in 10-20 years may be looked at as if one were proposing a sweatshop to sew pants there right now.
In the 1980s, we also relied on abstraction during development, but removed much of it as we moved closer to the hardware.
Abstraction wasn’t something permanent — it was something we used and then deliberately reduced.
The fact that modern tech has disintermediated people with problems to solve from the need for a "priest class" to commune with the machine to solve the problem is a great thing. It's the goal. The more we do it the better we are making the world for humans.
... the fact that people need to work to eat or provide anything above a subsistence quality of life is not only tragic, it's increasingly abhorrent in a world where automation and simplification via machines has freed up this much raw resource and free time.
If we're pitting LLMs against people's ability to provide for their families, we have lost the thread on why we're doing any of this.
However there are tasteful ways of doing it. And google and meta in particular certainly are not.
It sounds more like a packaging issue. I know he's attempted to edit his resume, but there's missing information here that OP may not even be aware of.
For instance, I recently became the last of two candidates interviewing for a great opportunity that I sadly lost. When I received feedback, it turned out the hiring committee had a completely different sense of one aspect of my work than I had attempted to convey. I'm glad I got the feedback, but it was frustrating to lose after so many interviews.
Then just recently, I interviewed a candidate at my current company who reminded me of OP. Laid off worker, very nice guy, but he had no idea how to portray himself as a dev at the level he was applying for.
I wanted to call him up and coach him, but it didn't seem appropriate, especially since he didn't ask for feedback.
If you are in this position, find a free coaching program that can help you revamp and resell what you have to offer.
It's not fair to have to do that just to get a chance to be paid a fair wage. But companies get thousands of resumes a month and do dozens of interviews.
We try to give candidates a chance to show us who they are, but if what they are showing us doesn’t line up with the role, or their strengths are buried, there’s only so much we can infer. It sucks, because the resume and interview are not the job. But they are the gate you have to get through before anyone sees the work.