And once LLM companies start charging more money than they spend, the “we’ll just have Claude maintain the code” types and vibe coding crowd could either be stuck with extremely heavy subscription fees, or a totally unmanageable code base.
The problem isn’t whether or not companies need us— it’s about how many of us they need (demand), and how many of us there are (supply), because that determines our value. Companies pay people what they’ll work for, not based on how much they contribute to the bottom line; in economics, paying more than you have to for anything, including labor, is the irrational path. A steady, high demand for software developers has kept salaries high because that’s the only way they could get capable people to work for them.
The higher-end of markets aren’t immune to this. As the demand for lower-level workers drops, people will upskill trying to move up rather than get lopped off. Since there are fewer positions the further up the hierarchy you get, you don’t need a huge increase in supply to affect demand. That’s when you start seeing the most experienced, highest-earning people getting shit-canned because someone is willing to do a good-enough version of their role for 2/3 their sizable salary.
This can all happen without a single entire role being completely automated out of existence.
Go for it. I got out of that ridiculous ouroboro of an industry years ago. That might be great for you, but surely you can’t imagine VC funding enough startups to save the software labor market? The tech workforce is giant. Do you think there are tens or hundreds of thousands of ways to make unique new software products where even a single digit percentage are commercially viable? Software isn’t fungible: it needs to solve specific problems that people have, and do it well enough to deal with the hassle of switching software.
This isn’t an individual problem— it’s an industry-wide problem.
(I pulled the 2/3 number out of a hat to illustrate the point. I put exactly zero analysis into that.)
> If what you describe happens (33% cut to salaries) then the bar for your own startup to be worth it is suddenly lower.
That sounds like a material reduction in quality of life. Running a startup seems like it would entail way more hours worked and way more pressure, even if you were making better money. IMHO, that's not a good trade off.
> Running a startup seems like it would entail way more hours worked and way more pressure, even if you were making better money.
It is also ignoring scalability issues in the sense that if a large number of people now working regular jobs in tech are forced down this path, the amount of competition among these startups would be astronomical which would result is downward pressure on both the ability to fundraise and the ability to generate revenue for your particular startup.
Impossible for me to believe each individual startup founder would find some profitable niche to fit into.
Low effort drive-bys were easy to spot because the amount of code was minimal, documentation was nonexistent, they didn’t use the idioms and existing code effectively, etc. Low-skill drive-bys were easy to spot because the structure was a mess, the docs explain language features while ignoring important structural information, and other newbie gaffes.
One latent effect of LLMs in general is multiplying the damage of low-effort contributions. They not only swell the ranks of unknowingly under-qualified contributors, but dramatically increase the effort of filtering them out. And though I see people argue against this assertion all the time, they make more verbose code. Regardless of whether it’s the fault of the software or the people using it, at the end of the day, the effect is more code in front of people that have to revise code, nonetheless. Additionally, by design, it makes these things plausible looking enough to require significantly more investigation.
Now, someone with little experience or little interest in the wellbeing of the code base can spit out 10 modules with hundreds of tests and thousands of words of documentation that all sorta look reasonable at first blush.
Sounds like a better way to make sure you have to be part of a clique to get your changed reviewed. I’ve been a long-time bug fixer in a few projects over the years without participating in IRC. I like the software and want it you work, but have no interest in conversing about it at that level, especially when I was conversing about software constantly at work.
I always provided well-documented PRs with a narrow scope and an obvious purpose.
The lead time on a national magazine ad was usually longer than a month and they generally weren’t tied to a specific magazine’s publishing schedule— they were probably parts of longer thematic/strategic campaigns. They probably also appeared in trade rags for other tech-heavy (mechanical engineering) or tech-adjacent (finance) publications.
The real reason ads look shittier now is the marketing world shifted their investment from the ads themselves to ad targeting. You just don’t need to make great ads if you can shove them in the face of the most receptive people at the right time. It’s also not feasible to make a few great ads when your marketing team has 8 different approaches tailored to specific demographics in multiple languages.
I’m kind of sick of how readily the non-managerial tech world accepts “what happens is someone else does this immoral thing before us?!” rhetoric as a real answer to questioning whether or not we should contribute our talent and ideas to something that we, deep down, know is bad for fellow humans.
> Why is it rhetoric? This goes beyond whatever malignant thing was perceived in this study, but why is it a rhetorical non-answer?
You seem hung-up on my using the word rhetoric. Just so we’re on the same page here:
> rhetoric, n : the art of speaking or writing effectively: b)the study of writing or speaking as a means of communication or persuasion
The business writing class I took in college was called Business Rhetoric. It’s not a bad word.
If you’re crafting arguments to get other people to support specific actions or products or policies or whatever, that is unambiguously rhetoric.
> this feels like real rhetoric.
Sure? Rhetoric that implores people to value their principles over theoretical security concerns or FOMO or greed? I wouldn’t exactly call that rakish.
It’s a non-answer because if you really feel doing something is bad, consider yourself a consequential actor in the world whose contributions meaningfully advance the projects you work on, then why would you want to help someone be there first to do a bad thing? If you don’t feel it’s bad, then there’s no problem. You’re just living your life. That is clearly not the position expressed by the content I responded to. If there are actual concrete concerns that don’t essentially boil down to “well they’re going to make that money before I do,” then that would be an actual answer.
Calling your criticism a stretch would be far too charitable. I made it clear what I meant and I’ve got better things to do than nitpick over semantics.
Yes, after the fact; that is after my response they provided a definition.
> the person you're responding to shared the definition they are using
No, technically they didn't. They provided a definition, they didn't say it was the one they are using here. If it's not pedantic tangent, it seem correct to assume that is the definition they are using, but that's what "Implying" means, so I trying to explicitly get a clarification on that.
"Why?" you might ask? Not every discussion is in good faith. The more that is assumed, the more leeway you allow for people to weasel out of countered arguments.
Yes. They provided their definition in response to your (mis?)reading of their original words. They are not the party bringing bad faith to this conversation.
It got upvoted because this hype is essentially running on faith at this point, and the only way to fight someone questioning your faith is calling them crazy, confused, or evil.
What percentage of companies that use salesforce employ software developers? Many don’t even have IT workers.
It’s easy to assume the conditions in software companies are generalizable to everyone else but they’re really not. For the majority of companies, which have no software development expertise, it would be a catastrophe. Hiring someone to do it, and managing the initiative, would cost more than salesforce.
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