Developers who know how to use LLMs are some % faster and more productive. You can increase the % enough so that overall demand for developers goes down or doesn't grow as much as it would have otherwise.
It's not "my company laid us all off and replaced us with an LLM" but more like "this year our team is hiring for 3 new people instead of 4" - that's still a significant impact on the job market. And who knows how those numbers will change as LLMs get better.
I believe this is a rational assessment in general. A lot of the discussion around this topic seems to be negligent of market dynamics.
However, the crux is in the details:
> You can increase the % enough so that overall demand for developers goes down or doesn't grow as much as it would have otherwise.
I would be at least skeptical of this. Every push for commodification that we've seen in the software space so far has been absorbed by demand. Will this continue forever? Nobody knows. At least where I work the backlog is filled to the brim, and every new iteration of tooling begets more babysitting to unlock the promised gains. And customers still have a never-ending list of hyper-specific feature requests.
The friends and colleagues at the Senior/Staff level who are using Copilot/GPT-4 (and have admittedly become much better than me at prompting) didn't exactly become "hyper-productive". Sure, they get code pushed out faster, but they still work long hours and complain about deadlines.
This is not to say that we're all fine forever and things will not change. But as long as we don't experience an across-the-board temperature shift in the job market decoupled from macro-economic events I wouldn't put too much attention there. In the end, doom scrolling is also just a form of procrastination.
That would be true if demand for development in general would remain static. My opinion is that software demand has a lot of room to grow.
If cars become cheaper, car infrastructure gets better people will use more cars, not the same amount. Except I believe there is a lower limit in the amount of cars a person can use vs the amount of automation (through software) a person can use.
> his year our team is hiring for 3 new people instead of 4
Na. We'll be able to do more with less... but the amount of work to be needed will increase, hence more people will be needed as well. Same old story. Compilers didn't get massive people fired.
I don't think anyone can claim certainty on this either way.
My view is that in the past the increases in productivity have come in a period of exponential growth of the software industry and that growth can absorb the additional productivity. But exponential growth doesn't last forever and if you have a period of a declining / flat / slowly growing software field, a significant enough productivity improvement from tools like LLMs can reduce the overall demand for software development.
You need something more sophisticated, otherwise it's easy to confuse high skill and/or well memorised lines with cheating. And a good cheater will be smart enough to either use engine assistance only in difficult spots and/or frequently pick the second/third best moves from the engine.
Correct. My idea is actually that with some grace number of moves that players can play by the book (i.e. openings). After that, run the analysis I mentioned. I agree that playing OTB is more stressful and that is difficult to model in such an approach. I was hoping to at least get some signal to filter out the mostly obvious cheaters and so focus on the remainder that should be less obvious.
Kind of embarrassing that he doesn't have the self-awareness especially after the false accusations that he cheated during his WC match and that whole scandal years ago.
That’s not what the discussion would be about. It’d be about hyper-specific grievances customers had with the company and rarely about actually working there.
Is this really a bad thing, in a "there's no such thing as bad press" sense? I've never heard of most of these companies, and it would help to understand some of their daily work, common pain points, or just plain interesting discussions about them while considering them as a potential employer.
Most of these posts link straight to a job description and it's up to the reader to guess how the company is. Maybe that information asymmetry is purposeful (to avoid negative comments?), but it gives off a "has something to hide" vibe inadvertently, especially compared to the openness of the rest of HN.
As an example, we get both positive and negative stories about Cloudflare, Vercel, OpenAI, etc. all the time, but they have no trouble recruiting people. And it's much clearer what they do and how they do it, vs all these new startups that nobody's heard of yet.
This is bad advice. OP has experience in a popular stack, no way that the language is their problem. They'll have an even more difficult time finding a job if they decide to switch stacks now.
*For you. I think it's a obvious and great advice, software engineers shouldn't define themselves by their stack (Java programmer?).
> They'll have an even more difficult time finding a job if they decide to switch stacks now.
That's why planning your career on changing stacks is such a good advice: you do it before you really need. I have kept a main stack and a "side project" stack for my whole career, going from PHP, ASP, .NET, RoR, clojure, Python then JavaScript for the longest with Rust currently as the side stack I'm learning. Had I got stuck on PHP I would regret it badly.
You're confusing the general "don't limit yourself to one language" which is good advice, with the specific "OP's problem in the past year has been that they know Java and are looking for Java roles" which the GP commenter has no way of knowing and is extremely unlikely to be the case.
Just assume you made a confusion when you got the wrong understanding to state it is a bad advice. You can do that in place of trying to change OP to fit a narrative.
No, that's not how anything works. The point is that it's alive as long as someone is running a node.
Whether the price will move up or down in the future - I think it's naive to think that you can profitably speculate on its price movement (long or short).
What does "popping" mean concretely? That some new companies that aren't profitable... won't last long and won't be profitable, just like it's expected from most startups? Why should anyone who isn't an employee/customer/investor/founder care?
In my view, the bursting of this bubble will mirror the internet bubble of 2000, creating a significant shake-up akin to a seismic event in the realm of tech.
You're grossly overestimating the significance of these businesses - AI startups that integrate with a LLM API are a rounding error in the overall market. They're tiny and there isn't as many of them as you think, nothing like 2000.
When you talk about something waking up, you're already into science fiction and not talking about anything which exists, or is remotely similar to anything which exists, or is currently being worked on, or attempted in any way.
Developers who know how to use LLMs are some % faster and more productive. You can increase the % enough so that overall demand for developers goes down or doesn't grow as much as it would have otherwise.
It's not "my company laid us all off and replaced us with an LLM" but more like "this year our team is hiring for 3 new people instead of 4" - that's still a significant impact on the job market. And who knows how those numbers will change as LLMs get better.