I found this thought funny. A few years ago everyone was all learn to code so you don’t lose your job! Now there wont be any programming jobs in 10 years. But we will need a lot of manual labor still.
Problem is, people want a silver bullet and there just isn’t one.
You need to create an economy that works for everyone where skilled workers from all professions can be successful. You can’t cram everybody into one job and expect everything to just work out.
Just about all jobs are important, and all workers deserve a living wage and fair compensation.
No amount of Band-Aid job stuffing is going to make up for a leadership that doesn’t believe that everyone ought to be able to live a good life.
We are still a long ways away from AI being able to replace programmers. The amount of sheer bullshit code and wrong stuff it writes currently will cripple any information system currently keeping economies up and running.
That won’t stop large corporations from dramatically reducing programming jobs my friend.
I watched in real time tech bros defending AI about stealing everyone’s art to them realizing that they’re creating something that will replace them. It was sad funny.
Sounds like a lot of opportunities opening up for smaller independent companies.
Well yeah but I believe the idea is in short the uncertainty, why it’s saying “in 10 years”. Think of it now as you have a kid graduating high school this year, and asks you what to major in in college that’s likely to make enough to pay off those killer loans it’s going to take.
Well, Wordpress was meant to replace all professional web builders. Visual programming was meant to obsolete all programmers because everyone will be able to write software. Every decade there’s a new thing that will replace programmers. Nothing did so far.
Nothing did so far.
You have to admit, Visual Basic 3.0 was some cool shit, though, right?
I’ll admit it didn’t replace us, and it’s gone now. But that shit was still cool.
Learn code anyway. LLMs can’t code worth a shit, so there will be plenty of jobs available to clean up their mess.
The Learn To Code hype was being driven by employers to create a work surplus to drive wages down. Now those same employers think they can use AI instead.
then it’s going to inadvertently happen to the trades too 😬
Any new construction job is going to crash because no one will have any money to build new anymore. I’m already seeing stalled projects near me. Not that I have a big problem with that. They like to cut down and cleared trees to build a warehouse instead of tearing down old buildings.
Large corporations will always have the money. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of them get so large they start forming in-house construction companies, initially offering above market pay and benefits, to attract large teams of workers and undercut existing independent (often unionized) construction services. The competition forces the indie union shops to shutter or sell, and now, in control of the entire workforce, the corporations slash the wages and benefits as the workers no longer have other places to apply to.
Race to the bottom, baybeeee
Yes. The billionaire goal is to get back to building company towns.
They’re not going to be building malls and warehouses if no one is buying shit anymore.
can’t wait for all of us to become so poor that they re-legalize company stores and scrip
I think that’s their plan. The billionaires seem inconvenienced by the rest of us living where-ever we want, and buying we want from who we want to buy from. Company towns would solve that, for them.
LLMs can recite code when asked properly, with a lot of errors. Trying to put code together with it without understanding how said code works is a greater insanity, than making random numbers with mathematics.
The real reason why there’s a downtick in coding jobs is due to Xitter not imploding immediately after the mass firings. Now coders are working overtime with skeleton teams on the same problems, while being overburdened and making more mistakes.
I think AI is a component of the decline.
For decades, companies have operated under the misunderstanding that more software developers equals more success, despite countless works explaining that’s not how it works. As a result many of these companies have employed an order of magnitude more than they probably should have and got worse results than they would have. However the fact they got subpar results with 10x a good number just convinced them that they didn’t hire enough. Smaller team produce better results made zero sense.
So now the AI companies come along and give a plausible rationalization to decrease team size. Even if the LLM hypothetically does zero to provide direct value, the reduced teams start yielding better results, because of mitigating the problems of “make sure everyone is utilized, make sure these cheap unqualified offshored programmers are giving you value, communicate and plan, reach consensus along a set up people who might all have viable approaches, but devolved into arguments over which way to go”.
AI gives then a rationalization to do what they should have done from the onset.
I think the post is about the state of agentic coders in 10 years, not the present.
The code will break and they will be back. People are buying into the bullshit until they realize its just marketing and has no practical application
Interestingly, that’s how it works for construction jobs too!
Things will break and they will be back.
Doubtful. The oligarch class only needs a handful of good developers to make working code for rich people use. The rest of us are being stuck with half-assed AI slop. They’re trying to carve 99% of us out of the economy (the parts that pertain to them) and relegate us to backbreaking wage slavery. Killing middle class jobs is the point, they think.
Not saying it’s a good plan, but it sure looks like what they’re trying to do.
That is the plan. But eventually they will start dying to the same buggy hospital code that the rest of us use, or whatever other issue.
There’s a billionaire fantasy that they can afford to buy artisinal everything, and not get poisoned by the results of their own stupid callousness.
I don’t believe it. I do believe they will try, for awhile.
This is 100% what i see the plan to be as well.
They’re not going to make any money selling to other rich people. They didn’t get rich buying someone else’s trash.
They are literally building doomsday bunkers while knowing we’re pretty much heading unavoidably towards cooking the earth alive. The 1% has concentrated more wealth than ever in modern history. They dont care about squeezing a little more money out of us at this point, they’re in their endgame. All that’s left to do is to finish training the AI that’ll be their staff once they seal themselves off and that’s it.
Cory Doctorow’s “The Masque of the Red Death” is my current favorite endgame for those doomsday shelter billionaires… Here’s a free audio of it: https://ia902908.us.archive.org/1/items/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_332/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_332_-_The_Masque_of_the_Red_Death.mp3
That’s not happening in their lifetime. Unless all they want is something to talk to as they go senile and starve themselves.
Remember when Biden told coal miners to learn to code
“My liberal friends were saying, ‘You can’t expect them to be able to do that,’” Biden told his New Hampshire audience. “Gimme a break! Anybody who can throw coal into a furnace can learn how to program for God’s sake.”
These politicians and policy makers don’t know what they talk about when it comes to tech. Any one who tells you that programming jobs will be gone because of AI has never written a complex piece of software before. Also the trades pay well because there is a shortage of workers. If everyone starts going into the trades wages will crater. It’s just cycles. I remember when nobody wanted to go into the trades because it didn’t pay well. This created the shortage of workers. And since salaries are better now because of the shortage lots of people want to go into the trades This will create an oversupply of tradespeople and the cycle will repeat.
Building trades are hell on your body and there is no goddamn way that any construction worker (Electrician, carpenter, plumber, pipefitter, mason etc) can last until SS age-- esp. as they are planning to raise it to 70.
I remain deeply skeptical that AI can solve the types of complex problems that require human thought. AIs will never be able to abstract away details correctly or design sensible workflows for boutique problems.
They can’t, this is the same shit that happened when the dipshit ceos sent dev jobs over seas to code farms. Devs lost their jobs, and the code went to shit. Then when shit started breaking, they magically rehired everyone again to spend years cleaning up the shit code. LLMs are this all over again, just quicker this time.
The problems start if it can take on a lot of the junior work. If nobody can enter the industry, nobody can get the experience required to do the real engineering.
Open-source and personal work may be the only way to enter the programming field in the next decade.
Now is the worst time to try to enter the field. We need to see the AI bubble burst much more spectacularly, and only then might it be more reasonable. You certainly don’t want to try to get into a field when you have a lot of other choices when that field is already flooded with all of these people who have been laid off, combined with the increased availability of programmers in other countries, knowing that at the moment many domestic programmers are not smart enough to form strong unions to protect their own jobs.
It was really hard in the mid 1980s to find a job as a new grad as all the Boomers who had been laid off during the recession were hired first as they had experience. It was McJobs or nothing unless you were a computer science/programming grad. Things have changed dramatically since then. It is a different world.
It’s not so much we need manual labor but skilled technical labor. Like plumbing, electrical, working with pulse logic controllers, Mason, welder, Nursing, emergency room technicians. Etc
My dad is a master mason and can’t find anyone at all who wants to do the job. It’s hard, hard work. Unfortunately, it seems like he’s going to have to retire with no apprentices to carry on all his incredible knowledge.
Maybe he should pay more?
Can he afford to?
Current trades are underpaid for what is expected from them.
Then he needs to charge more if he can’t afford to pay his employees more.
If people are willing to pay, sure. But you can pay as much as you want but people won’t necessarily be interested in a skilled trade if the pay in general is low. That is a long term commitment and not solved by a single employer.
It’s a labor market. Employers are not owed slaves.
The other side of the coin is that customers aren’t obligated to buy. There’s always a limit to how expensive you can make a product/service before people will simply stop paying for it. Trying to find that balance point can be damned difficult.
Yeah, that’s a market.
A lot of union halls have expanded their apprentice programs – they just need qualified people to apply and unfortunately, many do not choose to stay preferring an air conditioned office or remote work from home or even the big box store vs the dirty, hot construction site+ classes (our IBEW actually has apprentices working 4 days and school 1 day, when my husband apprenticed, he went to school to nights a week after work). It is hard work, lifting heavy things, random drug testing, working off ladders, carrying a lot of tools and requires a good working knowledge of trigonometry (although many use apps on their phones now-- didn’t exist when he entered it). They are a lot more nicer to apprentices these days as well. It is interesting that we are seeing more middle aged people entering the apprentice programs now, second careers.
Maybe I’m looking in the wrong places but it seems nobody wants to train technical labor at least in northern Alabama. But the political climate has thrown a wrench in jobs rn
Unions are pretty weak in the South. Go North. MA, IL, WI, NY, PA, MI… That said, I think there will be opportunity in AL – didn’t the state get a new industry that will provide a large number of jobs coming-- A new aviation facility? They will have to build it and may need to increase the workforce so there may be training opportunities for that. I know my community has expanded new programs at the CC for Micron’s approaching construction and implementation.
Currently there is a big shortage in Nuclear Medicine (NM) Technicians (with PET and CT certs as well) and ECHO technicians (particularly those with certification with infant ECHO). The hospital I work in started an ECHO school because so many leave to travel or go to the cardiology offices. It is the only way we can keep staffed. NM-- we are reduced in the cardiology offices to hiring on one travel tech per office (we used to have 3 techs at a time). With one tech, they have to provide extra nursing support and it is almost harder to keep office nurses.
As a skilled technical laborer, I utilize AI to remind me of niche topics I’ve forgotten on the fly, and it’s shockingly accurate. I think I’ve seen one mistake in 2 years, and it was a minor one at that. Luckily, we’re not quite at the point where robotics can replace me, but I could see it replacing 50% of my workplace in my lifetime.
The reactionary “learn to code” nonsense started a lot further back than a few years! Also, who told you there won’t be any software development positions in 10 years?
Anthropic for starters. What they don’t realize is everyone will be switching to cyber security jobs in 10 years when every vibe coded piece of software is riddle with security vulnerabilities.
Anthropic and others are over hyping their product so they can sell it. They are likely wrong.
And yeah your point stands.
Wait AI is overhyped? /s
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Now there wont be any programming jobs in 10 years.
Bullshit.
While “any” is a bit much, I do anticipate a rather dramatic decline.
One is that there are a large chunk of programming jobs that I do think LLM can displace. Think of those dumb unimaginative mobile games that bleed out a few dollars a week from folks. I think LLM has a good chance at cranking those out. If you’ve seen companies that have utterly trivial yet somehow subtly unique internal applications, LLMs can probably crank out a lot of those to. There’s a lot of stupid trivial stuff that has been done a million times before that still gets done by people.
Another is that a lot of software teams have overhired anyway. Business folk think more developers mean better results, so they want to hire up to success, as long as their funding permits. This isn’t how programming really works, but explanations that fewer people can do more than more people in some cases can’t crack through how counter-intuitive that is. AI offers a rationalization for a lot of those folks to finally arrive at the efficient conclusion.
Finally, the software industry has significantly converted transactional purchases to subscription. With perpetual license, you needed to provide some value to drive that customer who bought from you 5 years ago a reason to upgrade. Now with subscription models, you just have to coast and keep the lights on for those customers. Often with effective lock-in of the customers data to make it extra hard or impossible for them to jump to a competitor, even if competitors could reverse-engineer your proprietary formats, the customer might not even be able to download their actual data files. So a company that acheived “good enough” with subscription might severely curtail investment because it makes no difference to their bottom line if they are delivering awesome new capability or just same old same old. Anticipate a log of stagnation as they shuffle around things like design language to give a feeling of progress while things just kinda plateau out.
With perpetual license, you needed to provide some value to drive that customer who bought from you 5 years ago a reason to upgrade. Now with subscription models, you just have to coast and keep the lights on for those customers.
True, but it’s that market preference is a pendulum. It swings back and forth. It’s funny how hard companies are pushing today to (fail to) keep it from swimming swinging back towards owning things.
Companies that try to charge monthly for service that isn’t improving eventually lose their customers, except in the rare cases where stability is the only customer motivation.
Being able to just cut off access to the application means a customer has little choice.
For a competitor to pass them, they first have to catch up. To catch up, the customer needs to be able to extract the data from the application to give competition a chance. If they get closer to catching up, they tend to be bought out. Lot of speedbumps to discourage competition. Also, to get funding those competitors have to pretty much promise investors they will also do “as a service”.
For assets versus expense, I see a pendulum, largely based on how appreciation/depreciation pans out versus acquisition cost and loan interest rates, as well as uncertain start up versus steady business. I’m not sure software is giving enough choice in the matter the let that swing.
Hes not wrong. Amazon for example is getting rid of SDE roles for AI as per leaked conversation from the head of AWS.
Its coming anyone who thinks other wise will have a surprise pikachu face.
The real answer is somewhere in between.
There’s going to be less programming jobs, but there’s still always going to be some demand for them, there’s always going to be some technical knowledge required, even if just “prompt engineers” or similar concepts. Things still need to be built and fixed, and if you’ve worked for enough project managers/product managers, you know their lack of technical knowledge would not be enough to even prompt an LLM much less do anything else.
Yea pretty much you will still need a handful of SDEs either way to validate and work on the AI models but those big teams where they hire shit ton of devs those will soon be a thing of the past. Even IT outside of break fix hardware support will be replaced by AI at a help desk/IT Support level. (Already seeing that at my job as an IT analyst)
For the most part I’ve only ever been on smaller teams anyway, my largest team has been my current job with like 15 developers but there’s so much work to go around, so many projects constantly being worked on it’s kind of expected to have this many (and still be hiring more every year) lol
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The ai that’s been trained specifically to predict trends: ;3
I can think of no better way to train an AI to hate humanity enough to invent Skynet and kill us all, than to introduce them to MS Teams meetings with managers who all want things that are completely incompatible with what they asked for the last time, and require you to throw away about 40% of what you already wrote.
Well, anyone who knows anything about the current iteration of AI knows that it’s not really happening.
Btw, people have been saying that since GPT-3 (which everyone nowadays admits was kinda shit if it wasn’t for the novelty), so only 5 years left until my career is over.
I’m fairly sure the “learn to code” thing was just a media campaign by corporations to assure an abundance of programmers, leading to decreased labor rates. Years earlier it was a push for electronic engineers and technicians.
