This hit me hard. This article is art. I think I need to sleep on this and read it again in the morning.
People will argue this point. However, when I look at all the things that tech has done thinking it was going to improve society; when in fact, it did the exact opposite is hard to argue. AI is just another item on a very long list of dystopian markers that writers/musicians have warned us about for years.
The scary part now is people denying its happening right in front of them.
No it doesn't. But as a human being, you and everybody still deserves a decent living. And our current system clearly does not provide that for a lot of people.
Note: the above is not claiming AI or LLM can do these jobs. it’s claiming “IF” they can then they will. No greed required
If technological innovation is to liberate us from poverty then it should be a celebration that everytime that a job is automated. Since that is not happening, it implies something deeply wrong about how we structure our society.
Those jobs aren't creative knowledge work.
The advent of digital audio workstations didn't reduce the number of musicians - it increased the amount of music.
Now that we can write code with AI, we (as a civilization) will simply write more code than we used to.
That’s where your idea breaks. There’s a big swathe of people who prefer the feel and simplicity of newspapers over digital hellscape. There’s also a reason why people prefer quality books like Folio Society over books printer on a toilet paper.
> “IF” your job can be automated away or made more efficient it will. That might not be a benefit for your but it’s a benefit to society at large
You can automate away 80% of CEOs by Markov chains, and it would be a benefit to society at large. Yet it doesn’t happen, why?
Now of course there's also jevon's "paradox" here, and the automation does allow us to support a larger population so in that sense not all the increased productivity is just "skimmed off the top" as profit. But on the flipside the crux of the other recent [1] HN post is that the wealth disparity is increasing. And if all the increased productivity directly translated to more "physical resources" in the world, that wouldn't be the case.
So something must be getting skimmed of the top, and intuitively you can feel the "rent seeking" layers in society have increased. Gains in efficiency are no longer resulting in surplus of physical products and decrease in prices.
"No greed required" doesn't seem accurate. One would not use an AI to do the job instead of a human, except for the motivation that they would have more at the end of the day.
That remains to be determined. Most of the examples you'll likely come up with are made at the expense of the environment. We've never consumed as much oil and other limited natural resources as now, in spite of massive gains in productivity.
So far it also looks like digital media is fast tracking us back into fascism, helped by the large concentration of capital that occurred during the transition.
Change and automation are not always societal progress, sadly.
It's a long winding absurdist metaphorical tale, that is really more or less a rant. It's not particularly well grounded.
It's a nice piece of personalized fiction, but it's not particularly good writing and nothing approaching what we'd think of as 'journalism'.
Besides this is an opinion piece, which contains passages comparing programmers who despite AI, make hundreds of thousands of dollars sitting at home or air conditioned offices, to bangladeshi indentured workers.
Even if we do away with hyperbole and take the 'Sara' example, programming are still one of the least physically demanding and best paid jobs out there, especially in the US, even compared to jobs needing hard qualifications. Compared to your hypothetical 'Sarah' keeping the payroll system alive, almost everyone in every profession does more work for less pay.
He also sells (I imagine not cheap) consulting on the side.
You cross mountains. Marshes. You evade pirates, bandits. Help some fellow travelers. Finally, after scouring the land and asking hundreds for clues and direction, you find his location; a small plateau beyond the swamp and rainforest which hugs the southern shore of the great lake.
You notice immediately that the wind dies down. It is now completely calm. Weirdly serene, as if the sudden silence made you notice all the ambient noise, now absent. The sage sits between (edit: beneath) a cherry blossom tree, said to always bloom; the sage is an old man but his wisdom is the most permanent thing on the plateau.
You approach the old man. His eyes are closed. You make sure to exaggerate your approach, make some noise, so as to not startle this frail old man that surely must have seen more than ninety winters. You prostrate yourself, calmly introduce yourself, and sit down beside him.
You calmly breathe in and out. This is it. Don’t rush it. Any erratic movement, any slight irritation could prove fatal to his old shell.
“Venerable Opakaku”, you start. “I know some things about how the world works. Why the cruel rule us. Why the meek suffer. Why the brave die for nothing. Why those of brilliant mind mostly seem to serve the cruel. But my opinions are unimportant. Can you please tell me, Venerable Opakaku, why is the world in this state? And how do we solve it?”
The sage’s parched lips move. He has to wet his throat, it is difficult for him—such is the state of his shell—but he composes himself and opens his white eyes, staring just to the left of your head. His blind eyes widen as he is about to reveal the answer. “Greed!”
I’m being paid the same. I’m still doing 40 hours. The huge gains in productivity are not mine to enjoy, it seems.
Edit: To put a finer point on this, generally,employed people don't get paid more for the excess value they produce, they get paid more for for the delta in perceived value between them and the next best option to fill the position (on a grand statistical scale for careers).
* There are exceptions to this in the form of commission based jobs.
So all that productivity increase didn't result in higher profits either, end users mostly captured it by getting a lot of free services that previously used to cost money. International communication used to be extremely expensive but today I exchange hundreds of messages with people across the sea daily for almost nothing.
The productivity increase religion has never really been about workers. Any increase in productivity is used to reduce the workforce count and to bleed dry existing workers who now have to overproduce in place of their fired coworkers. Its sad how occasionally some people obsess about their productivity on HN as-if they're unaware that they're buying into the very thing that will get them fired and/or burned out.
Hell, I paid for my own programming environment (SlickEdit) years ago with my own money and still didn't expect to get paid more. I did it because it helped me deliver higher quality work more efficiently and I was proud of that.
Yeah man I don't know if mommy and daddy are paying your rent and healthcare (as I often see from people with this attitude). Or maybe you're one of the 45 year old tech workers whose mid life crisis involves a music project no one will listen to and going to work on some startups with your FIRE nest egg until you come crawling back to a big tech company. But for now I, like most millennial Americans, am reliant on wage labor to afford a dignified life in a tolerable town.
As to juniors, first time I heard someone brag about AI removing the need to hire juniors was in 2022. every junior I know is struggling to find work. It's not hard to find reddit threads with people sharing their experience to that effect. The fact that some do get hired is not evidence to the contrary.
I dont think much has changed. It has always been who you know. I was fortunate enough to have an uncle.
Every single new hire i see is either the child of two fango mango parents or a visa. I rarely ever talk to someone with a different background.
In startup world, everyone had theater degrees or dropped out. It was amazing. I miss it.
They also struggled in 2000, and in 2008. There was no AI at the time.
Well perhaps now, when AI halves your salary, and then halves it again, and the only people left are those who do it for some reason other than a salary, you'll be happier?
CITATION NEEDED
From my perspective it seems like they're just not hired basically at all anymore
How does a medium-sized SME were all the payrolls depends on Sara and her USB stick do if, literally, their servers do catch fire.
You've got backups, then what? How automated is the reinstallation of your typical SME's infra?
The closest I saw to that scenario was some documentary where some little trading firm had just time to fetch the backup hard drives before leaving the building on fire after a plane crashed into it on 9/11. The CEO (I think it was the CEO) was explaining that had he not grabbed a HDD with the backups, the company was done (not that I advice onsite/offline backups on HDDs that you must not forget to grab when the shit hits the fan as a solution btw).
I understand the "just drink the cloud kool-aid" angle: but are SMEs typically doing that?
How many SMEs out there are depending on Sara's knowledge of the USB memory stick and how to use it?
I've definitely seen similar things. And I'm sure many of you did too.
Many houses of cards?
I devised a system to perform bare-metal backups onto an easily-swapped, external 2.5" hard drive, using Acronis. I provided a plurality of these hard drives, and they were to be rotated off-site. The system was tolerant of human error and would proceed with making valid, current backups even if the drives were rotated incorrectly, or if not rotated at all on any given day. The backup drives each had complete file history (yay shadow copies) from an ever-advancing date, so any given drive could be used as a time machine of varying resolution, and also as the single source from which to independently start fresh.
I'd watch the logs to see that it was done, and for the most part: Whoever was assigned to that role normally did it properly-enough.
I documented it and showed the other technical folks how it works.
Sometimes I'd wander back and make sure the backup drives weren't accumulating on-site (there should never be more than 2 on-site). I'd periodically test these backups by restoring them completely onto identical hardware, to make sure the system hadn't got crufted up somehow and that it still continued to perform its task of restoring a working system from zero.
It worked fine for years and years. We never had to use that backup, but I had every confidence that it would be useful if that ever became necessary.
Eventually, my role changed and those things rather officially became Not My Problem.
Later, they moved the accounting system from that lineage of stout Proliant boxes to a trash-tier small-form 1u Lenovo machine that someone found used, on eBay, for cheap.
Backups are handled by the clown, somehow. The last I heard anything about it, the person doing the talking was very pleased with the money they'd saved and that they'd no longer have to pay "extortion" to Acronis.
I have every expectation that nobody has ever restored these backups. They're probably relying on the sheer hope that they'll never have to restore them, much less from zero.
And I also hope they never have to restore them, lest they may find out exactly what that data is worth to them.
Like every job, we overestimate our importance.
What do they do? They pay everyone the same as last month as a temporary measure, ask you to talk to your manager if your pay should be more this month, warn everyone that they're going to recalculate the payroll and adjust any differences next month. Then they calculate everyone's pay from the inputs, which really isn't such a hard problem when the alternative is failure. Maybe they pay some fancy consultants or an SAAS provider for a few months. Maybe they have to cut a few corners. Maybe they even get fined by their state's DoL. Life goes on.
I think at least in part, that is the point: orgs are missing the part of the equation where the institutional and organizational knowledge is critical. Sure, the code to accomplish parts B and C can be re-duct-taped together in a month or so by off-shore, or maybe an agent... but part A, its plumbing, and why it does what it does the way it does it due to historical failures and the knowledge behind that is probably what keeps it going.
Those things are learned starting at the ground level by bumping into them in the trenches.
The SpecOps guys have the following bit of wisdom on offer: "Two is one and one is none".
Maersk ground to a halt because it got done nearly 100% by cryptolocker. IIRC they went to hard copy records, called everyone, got all of IT together with some company credit cards to get new laptops and flash drives and shit and literally rebuilt their infra from scratch.
https://www.itnews.com.au/news/maersk-had-to-reinstall-all-i...
I read a better post mortem but thats the highlights.
>How many SMEs out there are depending on Sara's knowledge of the USB memory stick and how to use it?
Part of my day job is finding, documenting and remediating these sort of issues.
"The CEO Coded this application in VB5 15 years ago, the entire business relies on it, theres no source code, theres no binary backups and the one computer it runs on just had its PSU fail"
"Theres a cron somewhere that compresses, zips and transports the payroll database interstate, outside of our network, before our weekly pay run"
"Theres been no documentation of this environment for 20 years, most of the hardware is that old, and the team that developed it just sold all their shares and left"
This shit is my life lmao.
Theres obviously some bias, because the good companies aren't asking me to do it for them. But I make a decent living examining, documenting and remediating this shit.
This is just not true. Working in tech was awesome for me for at least thirteen years from 1988 - 2000. Probably well beyond, actually. The main reason it began to suck was due to business -- corporate acquisitions and mergers -- not tech. Working for a good company, solving fun problems, making meaningful software, and having happy customers was tech heaven.
1983-1990, I had a few jobs, with varying levels of agita, but I always loved the tech aspect.
In 1990, I got a job at a top-shelf Japanese technology corporation, and stayed there for almost 27 years. I worked as a peer, with some of the top engineers and scientists in the world. My business card opened a lot of doors. There were lots of problems, too (it wasn’t Disneyland, by any means), but I was proud to work there, and resisted calls to leave.
In 2017, I was finally made redundant (long story, but it was expected, and I was prepared).
When I emerged into the new tech industry, it really sucked. There was a lot of money, sloshing around, but also, an awful culture. I was horrified.
Fortunately, I had the means to take my toys and go home.
I feel awful for the folks that never got to experience The Joy of Tech.
It’s a great article. Thanks, Steven!
It raises the question of how much text I have read that I did not realise was LLM-generated. I think I have a decent nose for it but I’m not perfect, there must be false negatives (and false positives, as it certainly might be with this article). What will it mean when I can no longer tell the difference?
Edit: thinking on it a little more, I hope the author doesn’t feel insulted by my comment given the subject matter of the article at hand. Sorry, it’s early morning! I’m sure I am wrong about my assessment. Which now really makes me wonder about the above
No AIs were harmed in the writing of this post, either physically or by the sharing of earlier (cringe) drafts.
It just means that you will have to evaluate prose on its own merits (aesthetic, logical, etc).
The main problem with LLM-assisted writing is that effort-to-write is now much lower than effort-to-read -- the LLM-prose-style is simply an imperfection that can sometimes help the reader bail on a piece (and there might be false-positives).
Most people are already biased against reading long pieces, and seem to skim them more often than not. These people are _probably_ a little worse off than before, but they are not paying full-price for being hoodwinked. The people who end up paying full-price are probably going to become more sophisticated in how they choose what to read. I can't tell if this will be good/bad for publishers and/or advertisers.
I don't want to make any accusations, just give some evidence to the above comment.
----
I'm absolutely tired at work on how many people are writing with em-dashes with obvious AI prose. I feel a little bit insulted but then I remember we all participate in this charade.
You can't (accurately, beautifully and incisively) show us the real culpable in a very engaging way without repercussions.
Nice article by the way!
As this post was inspired by "Programming Sucks," that the traffic generated by it made something break is quite on point.
I don’t know how someone takes the familiar anxiety around AI replacing developers and turns it into something this beautiful and funny.
Once again, the programming industry has robbed literature of a potential Nobel Prize candidate.
I felt the pang in my bones reading this. All of us peons are just wading through this brave new world trying to do what we know is right but ultimately having no choice but to give in to life's needs.
For the benefit of people who don't absorb the entire article (spoiler alert):
>> … AI didn't take our jobs. Greed did. …
In a year but probably sooner, when software systems start collapsing, and they will, hiring in tech sector will skyrocket. In fact, I don't believe the world have enough developers to backfill for the AI deficiencies.
To me the math is obvious. Assuming humans touch a 1% of all software systems created, something we know it is simply never going to be true given the current state and upcoming regulations, the 47 million developers world-wide (and that includes all kinds of developers) are simply not enough.
However, although jobs will be back and it will be better payed, programming will "suck" even more and I don't think it will be for everyone. If you are not the kind of person that enjoys reversing a piece of tangled mess it might not be for you.
If AI is everything and AI is software then everything is software and everyone would like to have a piece of that software.
Meanwhile, millions are arguing otherwise.
They also often believe that anything they can think of must be easy - just a matter of a worker spending a little time. Or maybe an AI can do it.
Management rarely learns from group failures, because they naturally assume that since the project was “easy”, it must be a problem with the workers.
CEOs routines run companies into the ground and the switch to a new company, fist full of cash on the way out. Once in a while, one of those repeat failures ascends into politics.
So we've ended up with a low SNR culture where everything is noisy, nothing is real, and trends and fads created by grifters are more important than reality.
Obviously, this won't end well in any of the many different ways it's playing out.
The but is simply to remind people that programming can still be fun. Programming as a career? Not really.
If you don't believe me, that programming is still fun, go do some programming for your own personal project. (Still fun.)
(But, yeah, so glad to have left. I recall toward the end of my career, a coworker and I having lunch in Apple Park and sitting there, lost in thought watching a gardener tending the plants and trees in the center of the "park". When my co-worker started to say something about the gardener I knew instantly where his thoughts had also been going and what he was going to say next.)
There is essentially zero accountability for harm.
There is no button on your toaster that blows up the toaster.
But there's a link in your email. And that's a button.
And no one has figured out how to punish Microsoft or Apple or Google for allowing that to continue, though we do this just fine elsewhere.
Someone or something has to be punished, regulated or otherwise hurt for anything to change here.
Gotta sue people and companies. Gotta get governments to do more regulation. I know this place is kind of allergic to that, but hey.
This is just not true. Working in tech (starting 1989) was awesome for me for at least 20 years, and tolerable for quite some time after. The main reason it began to suck was due to business -- corporate acquisitions and mergers and tech-ignorant MBA decisions, for example -- not tech. Working for a good company, solving fun problems, making meaningful software, collaborating with committed peers, and having (and directly supporting) happy customers was tech heaven.
> ... to which they nod before moving on to a lighter topic, like whether we're going to nuke Iran or not.
> There are no more juniors. There was a funeral for their passing in 2024. Nobody came.
> AI didn't take our jobs. Greed did.
Love the sarcasm, it carries a cynical form of experience :)
was good too
Really enjoyed it, and went back and read "Programming Sucks" which is also full of delightful nuggets like this:
"The only reason coders’ computers work better than non-coders’ computers is coders know computers are schizophrenic little children with auto-immune diseases and we don’t beat them when they’re bad."
Please check back later Error 1027 This website has been temporarily rate limited
is brilliant writing. It's such good writing that it might convince you it's true. But it's cope. By that point, all senior engineer jobs will be automated too. And companies with old unknown chron jobs and USB sticks will get replaced by ones that innovate.
Yet the topic is also what makes it so good. It's written by someone who has also seen the vastness of impact technology has had, who has a firm grasp of the difference between technology and industry. Someone who knows the technology didn't get people addicted to social media and short-form videos and click-bait headlines and microtransactions, it was the industry that consciously chose greed and harm.
I love technology, and I'll keep wielding and mastering it until I'm dead in the ground. It's the industry aspect that I'm increasingly dissatisfied and disillusioned with.
AI is just repeating the pattern.
You have a software group, and there's a young engineer that goes and tries some new technology. He spends weeks reading about it, and does a lot of stuff in his head, and then he does something for the group using it and shows it off.
And management wonders about it. If the technology costs money, they will quietly push it off because they have no budget for a $50 tool. If it saves money, they will quietly push it off because reasons. But if it saves headcount and they get to get rid of "annoying fred with the red stapler", they might show interest. And interest means they have quietly accepted it in their mind.
Thing is jr guy spent every waking hour on this thing, chose the problem carefully, and didn't talk about the impractical, the gotchas, or the things it affects that he doesn't know about.
Who knows, maybe I'm just imagining this and AI is different.
Hey, that's agile!
Such a great write-up!
When the script doesn't run and throws an error, it could trigger an AI that has some skill to reconfigure and rerun the script so that it can run again. Seems like the perfect fit depending on the complexity.
Also I think it's always worth repeating the risk of losing long-term institutional knowledge when opting for AI as an explicit replacement for junior devs. Another tragic case of short-term gains prioritized over long-term success.
We all wanted gigabyte per second downloads not gigabyte per second life changes.
Did we solve the ageism problem by mistake?
I guess I'll be in the industry until it eventually spits me out, but if the rippling effects of software being devaluated can be so big that I don't know what I'll even do once this chapter of my life is over.
No I don't. I remember flagging that a tool is bugged, my manager-but-also-engineer-himself telling me "why cannot you do this, just press this button here" and then my entire work for that week getting obliberated because surprise surprise, the tool was bugged. And his voice "What? This wasn't supposed to happen.".
> You told yourself the seniors could absorb the missing hands, that the agents would cover the gap.
In every company I've been to the correlation between age, seniority, and skill, was very loose. I'll never forget going to my first job, talking to literally the oldest man there, and him telling me that smart pointers in C++ are silly and real men use bare pointers.
> You knew what happens to a codebase when the people who'd catch the errors get pushed out, or learn to stop catching them.
Recently I thought that we as a society need to stop expecting everything digital to work 24/7. Adding more nines to availability costs exponentially more effort but the gains are minimal. Imagine a world where every year for two days we just shut down the internet - one day for Postgres upgrade, and the other just for chilling on the beach. Would the society collapse? I don't think so. Managers understand this, but they prefer faulty software over giving their overly eager programmers a break.
> Of course, juniors weren't valuable for what they produced, they were valuable for who they would become: the senior engineer who knows where the bodies are buried.
Not all of them. Not even most of them. Very few would become valuable contributors, most of them would never make code better than AI does. That's the sad truth. I sit in a meeting with 6 seniors and we spend an hour discussing irrelevant shit and eventually postponing the decision until "later time" aka "we'll quickly do whatever once the situation becomes urgent". How is that better than vibe-coding a functionality?
> When she dies, the thing that produces people like her is already gone.
Literally not a problem because if every single company is fighting the same issue, then your company isn't disadvantaged by also having the issue.
“If greed were not the master of modern man--ably assisted by envy--how could it be that the frenzy of economism does not abate as higher "standards of living" are attained, and that it is precisely the richest societies which pursue their economic advantage with the greatest ruthlessness? How could we explain the almost universal refusal on the part of the rulers of the rich societies--where organized along private enterprise or collective enterprise lines--to work towards the humanisation of work? It is only necessary to assert that something would reduce the "standard of living" and every debate is instantly closed. That soul-destroying, meaningless, mechanical, monotonous, moronic work is an insult to human nature which must necessarily and inevitably produce either escapism or aggression, and that no amount of "bread and circuses" can compensate for the damage done--these are facts which are neither denied nor acknowledged but are met with an unbreakable conspiracy of silence--because to deny them would be too obviously absurd and to acknowledge them would condemn the central preoccupation of modern society as a crime against humanity.”
― From the book, Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered by E.F. Schumacher.
1) See wikipedia for an overview/links to the book etc. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_Is_Beautiful
2) Small is Beautiful Revisited 50 Years On: A New Study Guide to Small is Beautiful - https://centerforneweconomics.org/envision/library/small-is-...
Don't forget, for most software out there, but not all, its development time is ridicoulus compared to its life cycle.
Sure. But when it comes to coding, even greed couldn't do it without AI. At best it could outsource, still giving it to humans.
AI will do all the "later" things we could not do and the civilisation will flourish. :')
The doll catches the fire.
The greed of gullible CEOs. I assure you there's a talent pipeline collapse that's in progress and you'll be hard press to find senior engineers in few years because AI output is not something a junior can ride easily and you killed that pipline of junior engineers today.
Slaying the goose that lays the Golden eggs in your corporate greed.
You'll pay pack with interest and then some.
Good luck.
Build it greenfield 7 years ago, everyting is well documented, everything special screams at you if it breaks and tells you how to fix it (if it even needs fixing).
We spend time on upgrading stuff because of external dependencies and otherwise add new features.
Programming doesn't suck.
Very good simple explanation for what is happening.
The Moloch article from Scott Alexander. Covers the broader themes.
Software just seemed immune from it for a couple decades, but Moloch caught up to it.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
