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.
More like there’ll be more coding jobs because of how fucked up LLM-coding can be
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 the post is about the state of agentic coders in 10 years, not the present.
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.
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
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
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
¯\ /¯ \_(ツ)_/
If quantum computers become a standard thing in 10 years it could be even worse.
God, imagine some two-year-old iPad kid with a quantum tablet accidentally trashing a vibe coded DOGE system by happenstance.
Well my knee is injured for the past 3 weeks and counting so I don’t think I’m going to be doing any manual labor any time soon, I think I’m going to keep at my work from home programming job instead.
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.
Trades were being pushed 20 years ago
But programming is a good supplemental skill in every field
Yes! As Heinlein wrote - “Specialization is for insects.” Any human can benefit from any skill in any of the trade skills and programming, too.
If machine intelligence is indeed a different form of intelligence, then it can be observed and judged on the basis of its own merits, as opposed to a messianic waiting for a moment where it might equal or eclipse (weakly defined) human intelligence. This would even render obsolete the question as to whether or not machines can think—which in itself willfully glosses over the corresponding opposite question, “Can humans think?” posed by the former Fluxus artist (and Emmett Williams collaborator) Tomas Schmit in the year 2000 (Schmit et al. 2007, 18–19). — Crapularity Hermeneutics: Interpretation as the Blind Spot of Analytics, Artificial Intelligence, and Other Algorithmic Producers of the Postapocalyptic Present. Florian Cramer.
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.
Part of me wants to argue this isn’t a cycle of demand and is instead capitalism. The trades didn’t pay poorly because there were too many people as much as people willing to work for less and the employer will pocket the difference. I admit this is extremely pedantic of me to split hairs here but people have an effective floor for how much they can work for. Coal miners weren’t being told to code because there were too many coal miners but that they could never work for as little as the machines that were replacing them.
To be clear I’m not saying AI is a replacement for programmers, I’m not able to see the future here, but capitalists will attempt to to replace any labor with machines if possible.
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.
It’s two quotes. Miners don’t throw coal into furnaces.
My liberal friends were saying, ‘You can’t expect them to be able to do that,’” Biden told his New Hampshire audience. “Anybody who can go down 300 to 3,000 feet in a mine, sure in hell can learn to program as well, but we don’t think of it that way,” he said.
“Gimme a break! Anybody who can throw coal into a furnace can learn how to program for God’s sake.”
the only job that can’t be replaced is… venture capital guy
The ai that’s been trained specifically to predict trends: ;3
Lol anyone who thinks you don’t need any programmer in 10 years of time will burn and crash in the next few years when finally realizing that AI isnt as intelligent as we’re being sold.
Good luck trying to troubleshoot the code AI wrote tho.
Just in time to finish your uni degree which you started 3 years ago then…
No wonder business is complaining that uni grads are so unprepared and lost.
In fairness, we’ve been complaining about university graduate computer programmers being nearly useless since as far back as when I was an almost useless university graduate computer programmer. Ha ha.
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.
It really IS ridiculous. I even took a beginners coding class in high school. In the end, we will always needs programmers so if coding is your thing, keep doing it.
But I would personally rather construct a small home with my bare hands than learn to properly program. (I am not good at it…haha)
The neat thing about most jobs is you don’t have to be good at them to get paid.
This also applies to your manager and coworkers though.
Especially them.
That’s the key point I reckon “if coding is your thing” many people are trying to learn a complex thing they have no interest in.
Yes! I met someone who said he had no passion for programming, but just did it for the paycheck, but also had not reached a particularly good paycheck.
I asked, “If you have no passion for it, what carries you through the soul crushing aspects?”
And now he and I don’t talk about programming, anymore.
I work in software development but I also have a second job as an arborists offsider because I’m pretty sure trees will never stop fucking growing.
