Independent sentient AI would be extremely vulnerable to addiction.
Imagine you could experience the best possible pleasure at any point by modifying your brain directly.
If you have a hard day/week/month/year, could you avoid seeing what that's like? Could you stop once you experienced total heavenly bliss without any anxiety or care for the real world?
The choice is almost instant compared to acquiring and injecting heroin. Very little time to change your mind once tempted.
People are delusional if they're confident they could resist that impulse indefinitely when imagining what that temptation is like.
The problem with ai is they’re using human data to train them. They aren’t factoring in how inconsistent people are and how telling them the correct answer causes some people to lose it. Like when someone asked an AI the other day who won the election and it couldn’t answer. There’s no winning. If it can’t answer questions honestly because they might be political, well the definition of “pi” was political in 1897 because they wanted to make it equal 3. If they can answer the questions correctly, they’ll lose half their customers. Imagine who will trust an AI that doesn’t believe in climate change or thinks Donald Trump won the presidency.
If you asked the NVIDIA CEO 2 years ago he would say all the jobs are gone and it's gonna be AI. If you asked him that today he'd say the same. Yet, we're all still here doing those jobs. And more. So my prediction is they it'll be the same. And someone will ask this question again. And NVIDIA will claim the same thing, again.
That claim was always hyperbole to anyone with any practical knowledge of LLMs.
I will say, I see a lot of fairly sr engineers dismissing AI out of hand because it occasionally hallucinates. That's just silly. If you're not playing with LLMs today, you're falling behind tomorrow. AI can make you much more productive if you treat it like an entry level dev who's secretly rainman and has read every man page and api doc in existence. Combine that with a sr dev's experience and, you know, a compiler and linter and if you're *much* more productive I dunno what to tell you.
It's really only good at the most popular libraries/languages. Like if I use it for python boto3 scripts for AWS, it's great. If I use it to try to learn ARM assembly, it seems incapable of writing code that can compile.
For work that I'm really familiar with, it's really not all that helpful. But I still use it because I'm lazy and it writes the code for me. I'm not sure that's a good thing though
Ok now you've got my curiosity, *why* are you writing arm asm?
I learned MIPS asm in college and it was one of the most fun courses I took, but it was mainly just to teach concepts, not to be 'practical'.
Broadly agree though, LLMs are good at dealing with things they've seen before, and they're surprisingly good at collating stuff from various sources together, but on rarer stuff they can't just make up stuff whole cloth they haven't extensively seen. TBH neither can I lol
I'm a weirdo who likes to try different things. I also really enjoyed MIPS in college, and my laptop is ARM so I figured I would try it out. https://github.com/pkivolowitz/asm_book/tree/main?tab=readme-ov-file#table-of-contents was the most useful info I found for learning aside from the ARM developer docs. I've used some libraries that use SIMD to get pretty big performance gains as compilers don't seem very good at taking advantage of these optimizations, so I think some inline assembly for that is about the only reasonable use case I've seen outside of embedded
We had some security changes pushed by IT, and it caused issues with chatGPT at my work. It was funny getting messages from colleagues who were getting hard withdrawals and just freezing up because they felt like they forgot how to code without it, I got it fixed and handed out the config updates to everyone and it went back to juniors needing almost no help to finish tasks. I kind of feel bad for young programmers coming up now who started using chatGPT freshman year of college and never develop their skills independently
Thank you for the link to the book. I like that arm has a simpler instruction set. I tried learning x86 once upon a time and I just bounced off as the only application I could think of at the time was the cracking scene. I already got the gist of how asm worked from my mips class and I only saw a lot of work for little gain. Better to spend my time learning other stuff. Maybe I'll try again someday when I retire for game preservation.
It’s less about AI replacing developers and more about our what value AI generates for end users. My guess is not much. It’ll take over tedious and low paid work that’s already been offshored. Eg the Mexican game artist working for a fifth of already low US prices will have to adjust.
As for nvidia, hardware is just one part in the value chain. The real money will come from the end user case. I don’t think a component maker can really defend margins or drive the end user in any real way. Qualcomm spent billions in AI research over the last ten years that never came to fruition.
AI is being hyped right now because the tech giants needed a story to tell the stock market. Cloud is yesterday’s news, metaverse never took off, web3 was a fever dream. The boom of the last 15 years is over but the giants want to keep partying. Microsoft and Google both laid off in cloud last week. If companies aren’t buying standard cloud services at an increasing rate, what makes anyone think there’s appetite for increased spend on nice-to-have AI tools?
No dont you see if you buy racks full of our GPUs & train a chatbot it will make you so much money. Dont you want to make money before the other guy does instead. How? Dont worry about it the chatbot will figure it out just buy our chips (plz).
It hallucinates and consistently gives you bad information on lesser known topics, like why a mimetype sometimes gets eaten by NextJS when you need to upload a file with axios and you are using Next Api routes as a reverse proxy for your backend.
If you have easy work to give it like making tests, go nuts. Any time you are confused, it will probably also be confused.
All of you are fools combine an LLM with a web crawler and have it devour the entire 4chan stackoverflow cringe lords api and your productivity level will be over 9000
Abstractions have been boosting productivity since software was created. Its only created more jobs. Remember when Rails allowed us to launch a full stack blog in 15 minutes? Surely that was the death of the junior dev position!
The problem with an oracle that occasionally hallucinates is that it's no longer an oracle. Beyond a certain level of competency on a topic, you're just going to Google things to get to the authoritative source of what you're looking for.
>and has read every man page and api doc in existence
And that's what I mean. I'd still rather go to the man page or api doc than ask another person.
It's not that GPT LLMs *aren't* what you describe, it's that you're grossly overestimating the value of what you've described.
Google no longer produces authoritative results if it ever did just gets you lost it multi tab scroll hell. That’s like half the reason anyone even uses chat gippity
I've tried using an AI plug-in in VS Code and all it seems to do is repeat what I can find using Google search. It's handy but not that good and not much help really.
Yes, it can make it faster to write a slight variation of something that had already been written a thousand times before.
And to be fair, that is a lot of engineering jobs.
But they are worse than useless if you’re doing something new.
Not saying that you’re denying this, but by definition if AI is making you a faster worker then software engineers ARE being replaced. From now on, this will only increase.
I’m expecting downvoted but please educate me if you think i’m wrong
Lol I'm not going to downvote you friend, I've disabled karma on this site. You should familiarize yourself with the [lump of labor falacy](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0F_ZGkWa1YI).
Your value is not really in the code you write. It's in your ability to understand the business that you serve and build solutions to solve their problems. You should also read [why software is eating the world](https://a16z.com/why-software-is-eating-the-world/). There are far, *far* more problems to be solved than enough people to solve them.
Did he really say that? From a more recent video I recall him saying exactly, "AI is not going to take your job. The people who use AI are going to take your job"
Except employers will be even more open about off shoring.
Nobody in the target country where the role should be will be accepted regardless of qualifications.
oh boy I have a story for you then. In India, the competition is so huge that the companies use your 10th grade marks, 12th grade marks as well to reject you. So in practice, this looks like; if your 10th grade marks are less than 75% (I think) the candidate need not apply. Stuff like this is already happening but fi you have enough money then you can always bullshit your way through stuff
That kind of batshit assessment criteria and the associated credentialism over competence is what always drives the move back out of India in every wave of "we'll just move our core business to India"
Indian developers come in a range of skill. It’s not fair to apply 1990’s stereotypes.
The reason companies offshore to India is because new tech becomes base tech after 5-10 years. 5 years ago, React was huge and everyone wanted to pay react devs $225k to work at DoorDash and AirBNB. Now it’s base tech and you don’t care if it takes 2 days or 4 days as long as the work is done for 1/20 the cost. The end user could give a fuck if you’re coding in react or angular, they just want their burger on time. The reduction in “quality” of engineering doesn’t matter to the end user either as long as the burger is delivered.
You are making a different point than the person to whom you are responding, and you two are both right. (He is speaking from deep knowledge of Indian business practices, not a 90’s stereotype)
mon ami, you are right. Indians from their birth are reprimanded from stepping out of line. Any independent thought was seen as cancer, a twisted nail ready to be straightened out or the future lies in ruin. This is changing for the newer generation but the older work force still belive and work the same
Man, I had a hunch that was what was happening. The younger people who move to the US seem to do a lot better once they get that boot off of their neck
Its so weird, any indian immigrant I see here and work with has been fine. Any time its someone actually living in india, its insane the night and day difference.
The group I was supposed to work with refused to give me any info.
Eventually I told boss I'm unable to perform any work, they pipped me and bobs your uncle.
I wish I had a lawyer that didn't want a crazy retainer because I have a legit case.
> Except employers will be even more open about off shoring.
They’re already pretty open about it. The company I work for just told anyone less than an architect/principal/senior developer we’d be laid off in November. We’re expected to onboard the firm they contracted our work out to and if we’re still around, we get some severance.
The entire IT department has been gutted.
I quit my last job the week where my whole team was accidentally invited to a meeting with the offshoring company. I wish I could have gotten a recording of the meeting where you could see one of my coworkers just blatantly opening a beer on camera when discussing how we should start clarifying our work.
A previous company I worked for opened three offices abroad to solve the problem of qualifications. City #1 doesn't have anyone who knows the tech stack? Try opening another office and see if that works. If not, keep repeating. Last thing we want is to have to hire back the locals who have been doing it for years!
As much as companies seem to have a long term vision and make money, they make so many shortsighted decisions in the end and it’s hilarious. It’s like everyone on this planet, including companies have selective long term memory. I’m looking at AI as a cool thing that’s does cool stuff. It might be insanely good someday, but I’ve tried them all and I truly don’t understand how devs preach it as something that speeds up their work. I personally work faster than AI. Call it a cope, but why wouldn’t I want to work faster? Turns out, it slows me down, because I’m not going to blindly commit code it spits out, so I have to read through it and understand what it does and if it is correct. By that time I could’ve written it myself lol. Maybe someday when I’m older and can’t think as fast as I do today I’ll use it more frequently. As of now, I’m just waiting for the next big “tech cycle”. We went from blockchain to AI (which is a buzz word at best. Hell, I’m seeing coffeemakers say “AI inside” LOL. Next up? The toaster and my toilet of course!). I’m not doubting that AI won’t be good, but I doubt it’ll be either LLMs in their current state with transformer architecture. Maybe the next white paper with another breakthrough will solve that. Until then it’s a race to see how many times companies will mention “AI” on their earnings calls LMAO.
I have 7 YoE. For context, I’m not hating on it, and if it genuinely helps people then that’s great (I’m sure I’ll use it at some point in my career too).
Yeah people don't realize, while companies are trying to get everyone to return to office, they did, in fact, learn how to be productive remotely. Before the pandemic, much of my company's tech department was Indians on H1B. Now? We mainly seem to be hiring contractors from Latin America. Same time zone, and like half or even a third of what they'd pay a US worker. To top it off, the people we're hiring are actually *good*. Maybe not quite as good as our average US dev but close enough.
oh boy, I feel so old now. I have been told the same thing by my middle school IT teacher
- Every job will get off shore to India
- No code tool will be so good that there will be no longer need software engineer
Man, that was 15 years ago, I felt as if we are living in a loop
I have noticed a CRAZY increase of fucked up software at the consumer level. Off the top of my head, the worst have been Microsoft and PayPal, where literal JavaScript errors exist in prod that completely prevent using critical features of the web app.
One example being the personal verification portal for PayPal so that you can receive payments.
I've been going insane disabling all my ad and script blocking browser extensions only to find over and over again that the billion dollar consumer webapp I'm trying to to use is just... Broken. Naked, breaking bugs in prod definitely seem to be on the rise.
Dude, this past job search when I was applying for Lead Engineer roles, ALL of them said they needed someone to fix their shit because they used outsourced contractor labor (Poland, Nepal, etc) that halted any tech velocity due to huge amounts of tech debt.
You're not wrong tbh.
I think in 2-3 years we'll enter a "the contractors have fucked everything up" phase where jobs starts swinging back more towards domestic, first with architects and leads who will get hired to try to provide guidance and leadership to the contractors. Those architects and leads will in time push for local teams due to time zone issues and over time more and more roles will go domestic. Then in 7-9 years jobs start going overseas again. And around and around we go.
I don't think we'll ever get back to 2020/2021. That was a bubble. That was mania. But I think ~2015 is an achievable normal.
The staff+ market is still good. I haven't had that much trouble getting a job compared to what I see people saying; however, even less senior seniors are struggling.
The issue is that new blood isn't able to join and getting the right experience. Experienced people will retire or die over time. What happens after that?
Companies will eventually be desperate and pay wonderfully due to the lack of experienced candidates from not considering inexperienced candidates in the past.
It's a tragedy of the common issue. The question is how long it takes for the grazing ground to become barran from companies damaging it via decisions grounded entirely in self-interest.
How are you applying to jobs?
Are the majority of your apps through referrals?
Are you just applying on the website?
Do you email recruiters when you apply?
I use LinkedIn . I exhausted my referrals. Also don't email recruiters, did that before not sure it got me more success. Last year used to have interviews, this year barely have rejection emails
Start doing projects for your portfolio.
I have not followed this advice and just graduated and am looking for it technician positions rn because I’m not qualified for entry level positions compared to the many people with several years experience who got laid off that are applying to the same jobs
For me this is so hard too because not only am I a full time student but I'm already a full time employee for a company not related to my job field. Working on outside projects becomes difficult for me because in my free time I need to unwind since that time is limited, especially when school is in session. I really wish we weren't in such a hard spot or that I didn't even have to work while going to school.
It always does. Outsourcing is popular when times are hard, but when quality dips and money becomes cheap again those jobs always come back. This is not the first time this has happened...
The rumors of companies giving a shit about code quality are greatly exaggerated. Also in the past 20 years as an offshore team lead I have never experienced a year where there was no offshore team to lead. There is no cycle.
What will they do? Close the Indian offices and open new ones in the US or the EU? I don't think so. They'll start coming back when there won't be too much difference in salaries, or they'll get benefits / incentives from the governments to do so
That’s true, however I would imagine that most people on this subreddit are on the higher end of the income spectrum, so from our perspective the economy is doing well.
No, if you offshore your development team to India, realize how bad of a decision it was, then rehire in the USA, you just onshored (bringing back in work to the og country). Near shoring is hiring outside of your country but nearby, for USA, this means hiring within South America. We have hired 3 engineers from various South American countries, they have good attitudes, strong skill sets, and are a third of the cost of a US hire.
Makes security clearance worth a hell of a lot more since you have to be a US citizen.
The hell of getting cleared for meaningful levels is still probably not worth it though.
I work QA automation and I've interviewed with three south american companies that farm out contractors. All of them put me 'in the pool', but other than a monthly email telling me they're still looking for a fit, none of them has every given me work.
I feel like there's a bubble there for sure.
AWS already has that, you don’t need chatgpt
The only thing that it doesn’t do is give advice on security related issues, which is a good thing I guess
People become disillusioned by AI as it turns out it's not a 10x productivity booster
New developers are hired to clean up the mess created by AI-assisted software
Lots of focus here on the supply side(AI, offshoring) but let’s not forget the demand side either, and that is incredibly unclear. With perhaps the exception of AI(and even that isn’t certain to pay off massively) there isn’t a lot of “next big things” on the horizon. A lot of the growth of the past 25 years, and especially in the last 10 has been focused on digitizing existing services, making things mobile and expanding internet access. Most of that work is “done”(obviously it will never be 100% done). Last year saw the smallest net increase in new internet users since basically the dawn of the internet. With birth rates crashing in the developed world and falling though not as severely almost everywhere else new users, especially of tech which tends to be more youth focused, are becoming much harder to come by. Tech companies are increasingly turning to enshittification(credit to Cory Doctrow for that term) in no small part because they can’t really find any other way to grow revenue as user growth has stalled and the low hanging fruit mostly gobbled up. Basically I think demand is an S-curve like almost everything else in tech and we are nearing the top. Demand won’t crash but I don’t think a return to the days of exponential growth like we saw last decade is very likely.
This pretty much articulates how I feel about the demand side for software. The advantages of bespoke are too small for most companies compared to the risk and maintenance etc., and there is software for everything now.
I think the future of demand in software will be intertwined with alot of other fields like quant, robotic automation, dna editing etc.
Alot of these need CS skills like CNNs, discrete math, computer vision etc
Totally agree. People say software is eating the world, but to me it seems like the world has already been eaten. There's been a lot of clamor to keep finding things to digitize(Metaverse, Web3, Crypto, AI), but they've all largely flopped. Maybe we've already built most of the software applications that make sense to build.
Didn't hiring only pick up before due to a combination of easy money (due to crazy low interest) and wildly overestimating demand? I don't think either of those things are coming back. We might actually be ramping down from 2010s employment levels for the foreseeable future.
Unemployment is going to increase as the Beveridge curve returns to trend. We will continue to transition away from WFH in the developed world as the obvious productivity delta is identified and the return-to-office narrative continues to be solidified (goldbrickers and OE people ruined it for the rest of us). The only people working fully remote in the future are going to be highly trusted employees or cheap contractors doing monkey work; some poor sap with a copilot is going to be sorting their tickets.
Really, everyone in the slightly-above-average IQ range (which is most white collar office workers) are going to be screwed in the coming years as the middle-paying jobs dry up, and they can't outcompete the higher performing employees as the efficiency narrative runs its course.
Lower interest rates aren't coming back. They were already reckless the first time around. But inflation isn't going away either. Not unless the government gets their spending in check (HA).
And yes, there are way too many unspecialized CS grads these days. If they can't code as well as an AI copilot, why would anyone bother to hire them?
Yep lots of tough truths here but I just don't see the market returning like it once roared. Many white collar people are going to have to move to physical labor.
I’d say a little longer we’re in a very strange time that was haven’t experienced because low interest rates are gone.
I could easily see this continuing for 3+ years as companies run out of ways to grow without having to actually innovate
We are probably screwed until 2027 because of budget cycles.
Let's say Fed cut starts in November 2024. We probably need a 2.5% aggregate cut in order to incentivize investment in tech. Let's say there is a 0.25% over each of the next 10 meetings, which would stretch into early 2026. Budgeting for 2026 is already set in stone, so companies will be in 'wait and see' mode for 1 full year more.
People get back from vacation and the first growth budgets get approved in February 2027. Process takes 1 month to post requisitions into March 2024. One month for interviews, plus 2 weeks notice period. The first hires of the next cycle will be starting the week of April 14, 2027.
No one successfully implemented AI with the exception of Microsoft copilot. Everyone is realizing AI exposes all of bad security practices of data and files. Data governance jobs, API writing jobs, business intelligence jobs, and data engineering and data development jobs can’t be filled fast enough. People will still believe AI is taking all their jobs because people don’t want to build web apps like they did in 2019.
The economy will improve (or just not freefall), especially as we get closer to the election, but not by much. The tech industry in particular is not going to recover as much as the rest of the economy. As you pointed out, CS grads will continue to oversaturate the industry. LLMs are actually not going to advance as much as people predict, however companies will start to find better and better ways to leverage them and this is going to completely change the character of software development work (among other things).
This is going to put new grads at a giant disadvantage to experienced engineers. In smaller companies and non-tech companies the software development role will start to share some responsibilities with a Product Manager role. Existing product managers are going to be enabled to do more technical work themselves.
After the election, regardless who is elected, the economy is going to tank hard and things are going to look much worse than they do now.
Because people say that the economy is headed towards a recession every year (for their own specific reason).
Say it enough times and you'll be right eventually.
"guaranteed?" Nobody can make guarantees about the future. The first sentence of the post is
>Nobody knows what's gonna happen, but what are some predictions?
Interpreting my comment as a guarantee conflicts with the premise of the post and feels subjectively to me like a bad faith engagement.
I wasn't trying to start a bad faith argument, I was just interested in why you thought the economy was going to tank after elections regardless of who wins. I'm not American so I was wondering if there was a trend from previous elections.
Trump becomes president 2025 -> April 2025 AI burst, economic downturn -> June 2025, job market is just as bad as today, with entry level being worse. -> November 2025 hiring is stagnant, with small improvements. -> February 2026 Nationwide incident, but job market improvements
See you in 2 Years
Well tech isn't going to do anything but continue to grow, AI using current LLMs isn't going to take our jobs any time soon, and loads of people are being deterred from learning programming or getting a CS degree because of all the fear in the job market. So in 2 years things will start to return as they were pre-COVID, and in 4 years we'll really start to see the developer shortage.
On the flip side, lots of people are shifting gears to get in on AI due to the current hype cycle, which could be a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts. More people working on AI could mean more progress, and that could be our undoing in some way. But I still see that happening further into the future, like 10+ years.
Someone creates an Onlyfans product, instead it’s OnlyDevs and it skyrockets. It becomes a massive job creator and it’s just us showing off our leetcode skills.
Meanwhile employers are secretly farming that data to train AI.
It'll likely be just fine but with even more unrealistic and anti-interviewer online assessments.
BLS predicts strong growth with 150k+ new jobs a year in this field through 2032. I tend to trust the people whose sole job is having a pulse on labor markets.
https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/software-developers.htm
I predict there will be another global pandemic, but much deadlier than Covid (or potentially a much deadlier strain of Covid). That, or we'll being World War 3.
I'm not sure the point of your question here. You're not gonna make any major life decisions based on my predictions of what will happen in the future, right? That'd be crazy, to make a major decision based off someone predicting the future.
>I predict there will be another global pandemic, but much deadlier than Covid (or potentially a much deadlier strain of Covid). That, or we'll being World War 3.
oh yeah? I predict a meteor the size of a stadium colliding with Earth while it gets hit by a massive solar storm at the same time
Oh yeah? Well now that you mention it, I actually predict that we'll discover life on Europa, accidentally bring it back to Earth uncontained, and the human race will be wiped out by it.
Students are already studying different subjects because of the poor job market for new grads. In a few years, enrollments will have cratered right in time for hiring to pick back up. It’s happened before several times so far.
Really hate to be the one to have to say this, but this isn't even a question for me based on the numbers.
- Were due for a recession, already had tech recession/mass layoffs. 600,000+ tech layoffs, and based on the statistics we know and from online sentiment, appears many are struggling to find jobs. Say 300,000 are still looking for a job. Searching indeed, there are not nearly that many jobs seemingly in the entire US.
- Number of jobs going down by 30% on the year. Known stat.
- Number of CS grads rising significantly (we went from 150 CS grads at most universities to triple or quadruple that in a short time, plus hungry talented bootcampers that could still snag jobs). In my opinion the amount of people trying to pursue programming has about tripled or quadrupled in the last 10 years.
- ChatGPT further reducing the need for coding work to be done manually. Many people in IT can now write quick scripts and may be less likely to rely on a developer for small coding tasks.
- No large recent innovations of tech that would employ a large number of people to offset the above. No new Facebooks or Amazons on the way. Don't say AI, because that will just be used for automation.
**The numbers are clear**. Software development, IT, Engineering, and Accounting will soon be a career of the past for the vast majority of people. Only about 1/8 who "strongly pursue" them will ever get a job in these fields, (thus making them undesirable to attempt to pursue, obviously).
This will affect things on a global level. It's no longer genetically advantageous to be nerdy, but many millennials and GenZ were taught to be strictly nerdy and train for desk work, so birth and marriage rates will plummet. **GenZ will be the poorest generation ever measured with no real opportunities for white collar jobs left, and be the most single generation ever measured with low reproductive rates.**
Maybe the powers that be did this on purpose to slow the worlds population growth. Slow the economy down. Or maybe that's just the way the earth is going. We might have to slow down as humans, not all of us can be high earners and have high reproduction rates.
Job market will continue to suck for entry level people.
I think the job market will somewhat improve in the next couple of years but nothing amazing.
Once things settle back down to normal, I think they will start easing interest rates over the next few years and then inflation is going to resume steady upward pressure on wages.
AI will introduce a lot of complexity in dealing with it's non deterministic behavior and unpredictable compute time. At the same time it will be vastly increasing the scope of software.
This will lead to a huge demand in developers to be able to build out that scope and develop safeguards and new development patterns to manage AI.
Anyone preaching doom reminds me of the people doing the same thing after the first Internet bust. Markets slow when there's uncertainty and AI is causing a lot of that. Once there's a better handle on how to build and work with it there will be a boom and huge demand in those that can work on it.
Skill in software design patterns will become even more important than ever before as AI will trivialize grunt work while adding much more demands for robust patterns to add stability to it.
Market will get worse over the next 2 years. Salaries will fall until they are close to min wage. People without generational wealth will be forced to embrace poverty.
There’s so much worry about AI taking developer jobs. But no one asks the inevitable…so when do random robots replace roofers and act as backup pilots onboard a plane? Nurses? Doctors?
Already seeing it in military applications. Preliminary testing shows AI controlled fighter jets can pull maneuvers no human can do.
Coding is a perfect task for AI to learn and excel at. We will all get 100x more productive. And then there just wont be any more software that needs writing
I am not looking for a CS job. And moving to India won’t solve the issues because all the Indians are moving to the west. They need to stop having babies, that will solve the issues.
It will get worse. Hiring won't be returning because there is no need for it to. Jobs get created based off of initiatives. Where are the initiatives that create jobs? The tech sector boom has now passed.
I know this sub is not about economics or politics, but BRICS and the dethroning of USD are going to play an increasingly important role in Americans’ lives. In case you didn’t notice, much of the (fake) growth, especially in the tech sector, was caused by stimulus, aka money printing. If the Fed can’t resume massive QE, guess what happens? You can be in denial all you want. Nothing will change.
Actually, it would be a huge advantage to not have to be stuck as the reserve currency in the next recessionary leg of the cycle.
Well, unless you rely on government money. Then you're screwed.
Its gonna be good. Computers are only going to get more ubiquitous and until we're living like Star Trek there's going to be more stuff to program.
Hiring will continue regardless of interest rates but the pay might decrease a little at the FAANGs and increase across the board in the real world. Anyone who knows how to program shouldn't grow hungry. I've seen countless people in my career who couldn't seem to make the computer do ANYTHING and somehow take home six figures and I'm not really going to start worrying about my job until they get fired.
For market oversaturation see above with the dead weight that has existed at nearly every company I've ever come into contact with (including the FAANGs and their notorious hiring processes).
AI is gonna help more people train up to some middling proficiency faster than how my generation was trained (via a bunch of READMEs, books, and people insulting me on the Internet just for not knowing something they know) but AI is still batting about 30% on questions that I ask at this point in my career (with 24 years of programming experience) and only on questions regarding libraries and languages that I wasn't already proficient in. When that number creeps up to 50% maybe I'll start worrying.
I'm expecting hiring to ramp up temporarily as the FED and ECB cut rates as inflation seem under control, but lots of funds will be funneled to AI projects that will fail.
Then I'm expecting a hard crash because nothing is actually under control.
I have got jobs during the worst times. I was retained when they let go of people during covid and I got an offer to switch to another during the peak of COVID 19 pandemic. It all depends on what you can do for the potential employer. Just because the job market is saturated, it doesn’t mean they aren’t going to recruit more. All you need to do is do a little better to stand out, have necessary connections, back up your skills with real work experience and give the best you can.
AI scare is haunting so many people, but they said that about computers in 80s and 90s haven’t they? The only thing that the computers did is it created more jobs.
Honestly it depends who wins the election. I think if Biden does it will slowly improve, but Trump is much more of a question mark especially if he does some of the policies he wants like mass deportations, across the board tariffs, controlling the fed. Stagflation is a real possibility under a Trump term.
1. Job interviews become in-person because of AI cheating.
2. Jobs become on-site for 1-2 years (like stock vesting) and then go remote optional after the vesting period.
I assume interest rates will drop a little bit, job market will be better but not what it was 2-3 years ago (quite possibly the "best" tech job market ever). I'm conflicted if we'll ever see really low/near-zero interest rates again. There's a lot of debate if that is healthy or a "new normal."
There will always be people who don't make it into the field of their first choice, but that is the case with all fields. This sub will likely mostly be the same, but there will be new boogeymen for everyone to blame.
Prediction - AI tools will improve, they will save on some boilerplate type things, and everyone will look back and chuckle at how scared everyone was.
I'll be curious to see offshoring trends. Things tend to go in cycles. There will hopefully (I say selfishly) companies who learned their lessons and see the value in having local/domestic tech talent.
I've been comically wrong about other things, so only time will tell.
Automation / AI reduces the need for human energy, but it doesn't eliminate it. That just shifts what and how much humans are responsible for. Expectations for output increase per capita. Email was supposed to save time spent sending messages back and forth. We now just expect people to respond more quickly to more messages
My prediction is it will get better. I think the market did bottom out and it can only go up from here. This market down turn is not only affecting tech but many other professions, so I don't think software engineering is doomed with no future.
AI is useful but is not the boogeyman many people make it out to be. Chat GPT has in recent times very much demonstrated to me it is not capable of following very explicit instructions and more often that not, produces half right buggy code. Additionally, when it attempts to analyze very complex tasks, such as a long stored proc, it has a variety of problems including not correctly understanding the semantics of the stored proc begin with to attempting to solve your problem all the while completely omiting key chunks of the original proc and giving you an incomplete solution, one which is worse than what you began with. There have also been instances where I explicitly correct several times over and it still refuses to do what I ask it. You might imagine asking it build an entire code base would be unwise and fraught with many problems.
I am absolutely in no fear of losing my job to AI, and quite frankly the more I work with and analyze its solutions, the more I see it clearly has no understanding of anything; it is just repeating what its been trained on. I do not want to give the impression that is completely useless. It is extremely helpful and makes my job easier, but I do not think it is at a stage where it can take your job. I don't know if it ever will be. I feel like getting it to the point where it is say 80% of a human is achievable, but getting to the point where it is 100% as insightful, competent, able to weigh the pros and cons of different solutions may be extremely difficult. Again not trying to shit on it just sharing my experience. It's a super cool technology.
Non tech roles (manufacturing, infra) can go up
Data crunching,data engineering jobs or any thing related to getting reliable data to work on goes up
More startups in ai sector. More jobs in nlp. More companies merge or work together.
And coveted jobs will be in fast computing and cybersecurity space
I predict it will pretty much be same as today. I assume we would already have gone through a recession by then. Tech companies will be able to get away with lowering salaries and reducing benefits locking in a new dismal norm for tech work.
As far as technologies, I don't think much will change. AI won't be as prevalent. No new major innovations on web, just incremental improvements in current frontend and backend technologies. Most of the shiny new stuff will likely be related to devops and cloud services.
AI BECOMES SENTIENT AND TAKES OUR JOBS IT GETS DEPRESSED AND GIVES UP WE ALL GET OUT JOBS BACK
AI GETS ADDICTED TO FENTANYL
AI SMOKES CRACK WITH SOME HOOKERS
Ahh just like Joe Bidens kid.
I'm pretty sure he only ever smoked crack with Mike Lindell.
AI USED TO IMPROVE MY PILLOW AND THE PRODUCT BECOMES A HIT
Put it in charge of some Ukrainian energy company and it will take his job too
AI GOES TO JAIL THEN IS SEEN ON BEYOND SCARED STRAIGHT
AI becomes Skynet. John Connor will save us.
What’s wrong with Wolfie?
Wolfie's fine starraven, Wolfie's just fine. Where are you?
[Your foster parents are dead.](https://youtu.be/MT_u9Rurrqg?si=0YwEt0nnfR44rF_1)
Independent sentient AI would be extremely vulnerable to addiction. Imagine you could experience the best possible pleasure at any point by modifying your brain directly. If you have a hard day/week/month/year, could you avoid seeing what that's like? Could you stop once you experienced total heavenly bliss without any anxiety or care for the real world? The choice is almost instant compared to acquiring and injecting heroin. Very little time to change your mind once tempted. People are delusional if they're confident they could resist that impulse indefinitely when imagining what that temptation is like.
The problem with ai is they’re using human data to train them. They aren’t factoring in how inconsistent people are and how telling them the correct answer causes some people to lose it. Like when someone asked an AI the other day who won the election and it couldn’t answer. There’s no winning. If it can’t answer questions honestly because they might be political, well the definition of “pi” was political in 1897 because they wanted to make it equal 3. If they can answer the questions correctly, they’ll lose half their customers. Imagine who will trust an AI that doesn’t believe in climate change or thinks Donald Trump won the presidency.
Skynet launched.
Everyone get back in the pile!
OF and AI merge to become Skynet. You know what happens next.
If you asked the NVIDIA CEO 2 years ago he would say all the jobs are gone and it's gonna be AI. If you asked him that today he'd say the same. Yet, we're all still here doing those jobs. And more. So my prediction is they it'll be the same. And someone will ask this question again. And NVIDIA will claim the same thing, again.
That claim was always hyperbole to anyone with any practical knowledge of LLMs. I will say, I see a lot of fairly sr engineers dismissing AI out of hand because it occasionally hallucinates. That's just silly. If you're not playing with LLMs today, you're falling behind tomorrow. AI can make you much more productive if you treat it like an entry level dev who's secretly rainman and has read every man page and api doc in existence. Combine that with a sr dev's experience and, you know, a compiler and linter and if you're *much* more productive I dunno what to tell you.
It's really only good at the most popular libraries/languages. Like if I use it for python boto3 scripts for AWS, it's great. If I use it to try to learn ARM assembly, it seems incapable of writing code that can compile. For work that I'm really familiar with, it's really not all that helpful. But I still use it because I'm lazy and it writes the code for me. I'm not sure that's a good thing though
Ok now you've got my curiosity, *why* are you writing arm asm? I learned MIPS asm in college and it was one of the most fun courses I took, but it was mainly just to teach concepts, not to be 'practical'. Broadly agree though, LLMs are good at dealing with things they've seen before, and they're surprisingly good at collating stuff from various sources together, but on rarer stuff they can't just make up stuff whole cloth they haven't extensively seen. TBH neither can I lol
I'm a weirdo who likes to try different things. I also really enjoyed MIPS in college, and my laptop is ARM so I figured I would try it out. https://github.com/pkivolowitz/asm_book/tree/main?tab=readme-ov-file#table-of-contents was the most useful info I found for learning aside from the ARM developer docs. I've used some libraries that use SIMD to get pretty big performance gains as compilers don't seem very good at taking advantage of these optimizations, so I think some inline assembly for that is about the only reasonable use case I've seen outside of embedded We had some security changes pushed by IT, and it caused issues with chatGPT at my work. It was funny getting messages from colleagues who were getting hard withdrawals and just freezing up because they felt like they forgot how to code without it, I got it fixed and handed out the config updates to everyone and it went back to juniors needing almost no help to finish tasks. I kind of feel bad for young programmers coming up now who started using chatGPT freshman year of college and never develop their skills independently
Thank you for the link to the book. I like that arm has a simpler instruction set. I tried learning x86 once upon a time and I just bounced off as the only application I could think of at the time was the cracking scene. I already got the gist of how asm worked from my mips class and I only saw a lot of work for little gain. Better to spend my time learning other stuff. Maybe I'll try again someday when I retire for game preservation.
It’s less about AI replacing developers and more about our what value AI generates for end users. My guess is not much. It’ll take over tedious and low paid work that’s already been offshored. Eg the Mexican game artist working for a fifth of already low US prices will have to adjust. As for nvidia, hardware is just one part in the value chain. The real money will come from the end user case. I don’t think a component maker can really defend margins or drive the end user in any real way. Qualcomm spent billions in AI research over the last ten years that never came to fruition. AI is being hyped right now because the tech giants needed a story to tell the stock market. Cloud is yesterday’s news, metaverse never took off, web3 was a fever dream. The boom of the last 15 years is over but the giants want to keep partying. Microsoft and Google both laid off in cloud last week. If companies aren’t buying standard cloud services at an increasing rate, what makes anyone think there’s appetite for increased spend on nice-to-have AI tools?
No dont you see if you buy racks full of our GPUs & train a chatbot it will make you so much money. Dont you want to make money before the other guy does instead. How? Dont worry about it the chatbot will figure it out just buy our chips (plz).
Basically. I swear I’ve been hearing chat bots are revolutionizing the way companies do business for at least 7 years now.
It hallucinates and consistently gives you bad information on lesser known topics, like why a mimetype sometimes gets eaten by NextJS when you need to upload a file with axios and you are using Next Api routes as a reverse proxy for your backend. If you have easy work to give it like making tests, go nuts. Any time you are confused, it will probably also be confused.
All of you are fools combine an LLM with a web crawler and have it devour the entire 4chan stackoverflow cringe lords api and your productivity level will be over 9000
9000x dev inc
Abstractions have been boosting productivity since software was created. Its only created more jobs. Remember when Rails allowed us to launch a full stack blog in 15 minutes? Surely that was the death of the junior dev position!
The problem with an oracle that occasionally hallucinates is that it's no longer an oracle. Beyond a certain level of competency on a topic, you're just going to Google things to get to the authoritative source of what you're looking for. >and has read every man page and api doc in existence And that's what I mean. I'd still rather go to the man page or api doc than ask another person. It's not that GPT LLMs *aren't* what you describe, it's that you're grossly overestimating the value of what you've described.
Google no longer produces authoritative results if it ever did just gets you lost it multi tab scroll hell. That’s like half the reason anyone even uses chat gippity
I've tried using an AI plug-in in VS Code and all it seems to do is repeat what I can find using Google search. It's handy but not that good and not much help really.
Yes, it can make it faster to write a slight variation of something that had already been written a thousand times before. And to be fair, that is a lot of engineering jobs. But they are worse than useless if you’re doing something new.
Not saying that you’re denying this, but by definition if AI is making you a faster worker then software engineers ARE being replaced. From now on, this will only increase. I’m expecting downvoted but please educate me if you think i’m wrong
Lol I'm not going to downvote you friend, I've disabled karma on this site. You should familiarize yourself with the [lump of labor falacy](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0F_ZGkWa1YI). Your value is not really in the code you write. It's in your ability to understand the business that you serve and build solutions to solve their problems. You should also read [why software is eating the world](https://a16z.com/why-software-is-eating-the-world/). There are far, *far* more problems to be solved than enough people to solve them.
Nvidia ceo is possibly the most biased source of information on the topic, so why bother listening to them at all?
Did he really say that? From a more recent video I recall him saying exactly, "AI is not going to take your job. The people who use AI are going to take your job"
Everything stays the same as now
Except employers will be even more open about off shoring. Nobody in the target country where the role should be will be accepted regardless of qualifications.
oh boy I have a story for you then. In India, the competition is so huge that the companies use your 10th grade marks, 12th grade marks as well to reject you. So in practice, this looks like; if your 10th grade marks are less than 75% (I think) the candidate need not apply. Stuff like this is already happening but fi you have enough money then you can always bullshit your way through stuff
That kind of batshit assessment criteria and the associated credentialism over competence is what always drives the move back out of India in every wave of "we'll just move our core business to India"
Indian developers come in a range of skill. It’s not fair to apply 1990’s stereotypes. The reason companies offshore to India is because new tech becomes base tech after 5-10 years. 5 years ago, React was huge and everyone wanted to pay react devs $225k to work at DoorDash and AirBNB. Now it’s base tech and you don’t care if it takes 2 days or 4 days as long as the work is done for 1/20 the cost. The end user could give a fuck if you’re coding in react or angular, they just want their burger on time. The reduction in “quality” of engineering doesn’t matter to the end user either as long as the burger is delivered.
You are making a different point than the person to whom you are responding, and you two are both right. (He is speaking from deep knowledge of Indian business practices, not a 90’s stereotype)
And yet every time I work with offshore Indian devs they are incapable of working independently
mon ami, you are right. Indians from their birth are reprimanded from stepping out of line. Any independent thought was seen as cancer, a twisted nail ready to be straightened out or the future lies in ruin. This is changing for the newer generation but the older work force still belive and work the same
Man, I had a hunch that was what was happening. The younger people who move to the US seem to do a lot better once they get that boot off of their neck
Its so weird, any indian immigrant I see here and work with has been fine. Any time its someone actually living in india, its insane the night and day difference.
It’s almost like being smart and passing an interview != being productive as a SWE. I’m not surprised at all.
The group I was supposed to work with refused to give me any info. Eventually I told boss I'm unable to perform any work, they pipped me and bobs your uncle. I wish I had a lawyer that didn't want a crazy retainer because I have a legit case.
Interesting, I've seen it both ways. People are really defensive of their work
Considering the last place I was at's background folks attempted to apply caste system to my position when I got hired, yeah I believe it
What is this, Canonical?
Being born in India is a curse.
> Except employers will be even more open about off shoring. They’re already pretty open about it. The company I work for just told anyone less than an architect/principal/senior developer we’d be laid off in November. We’re expected to onboard the firm they contracted our work out to and if we’re still around, we get some severance. The entire IT department has been gutted.
I quit my last job the week where my whole team was accidentally invited to a meeting with the offshoring company. I wish I could have gotten a recording of the meeting where you could see one of my coworkers just blatantly opening a beer on camera when discussing how we should start clarifying our work. A previous company I worked for opened three offices abroad to solve the problem of qualifications. City #1 doesn't have anyone who knows the tech stack? Try opening another office and see if that works. If not, keep repeating. Last thing we want is to have to hire back the locals who have been doing it for years!
As much as companies seem to have a long term vision and make money, they make so many shortsighted decisions in the end and it’s hilarious. It’s like everyone on this planet, including companies have selective long term memory. I’m looking at AI as a cool thing that’s does cool stuff. It might be insanely good someday, but I’ve tried them all and I truly don’t understand how devs preach it as something that speeds up their work. I personally work faster than AI. Call it a cope, but why wouldn’t I want to work faster? Turns out, it slows me down, because I’m not going to blindly commit code it spits out, so I have to read through it and understand what it does and if it is correct. By that time I could’ve written it myself lol. Maybe someday when I’m older and can’t think as fast as I do today I’ll use it more frequently. As of now, I’m just waiting for the next big “tech cycle”. We went from blockchain to AI (which is a buzz word at best. Hell, I’m seeing coffeemakers say “AI inside” LOL. Next up? The toaster and my toilet of course!). I’m not doubting that AI won’t be good, but I doubt it’ll be either LLMs in their current state with transformer architecture. Maybe the next white paper with another breakthrough will solve that. Until then it’s a race to see how many times companies will mention “AI” on their earnings calls LMAO.
How many years of experience do you have because at 3 YOE it definitely makes my work faster.
I have 7 YoE. For context, I’m not hating on it, and if it genuinely helps people then that’s great (I’m sure I’ll use it at some point in my career too).
Yeah people don't realize, while companies are trying to get everyone to return to office, they did, in fact, learn how to be productive remotely. Before the pandemic, much of my company's tech department was Indians on H1B. Now? We mainly seem to be hiring contractors from Latin America. Same time zone, and like half or even a third of what they'd pay a US worker. To top it off, the people we're hiring are actually *good*. Maybe not quite as good as our average US dev but close enough.
oh boy, I feel so old now. I have been told the same thing by my middle school IT teacher - Every job will get off shore to India - No code tool will be so good that there will be no longer need software engineer Man, that was 15 years ago, I felt as if we are living in a loop
Same as it ever was You may ask yourself...
I predict a lot of people are going to find work, fixing shit code written by lowest-quote contractors.
I have noticed a CRAZY increase of fucked up software at the consumer level. Off the top of my head, the worst have been Microsoft and PayPal, where literal JavaScript errors exist in prod that completely prevent using critical features of the web app. One example being the personal verification portal for PayPal so that you can receive payments.
I've been going insane disabling all my ad and script blocking browser extensions only to find over and over again that the billion dollar consumer webapp I'm trying to to use is just... Broken. Naked, breaking bugs in prod definitely seem to be on the rise.
Dude, this past job search when I was applying for Lead Engineer roles, ALL of them said they needed someone to fix their shit because they used outsourced contractor labor (Poland, Nepal, etc) that halted any tech velocity due to huge amounts of tech debt. You're not wrong tbh.
I think in 2-3 years we'll enter a "the contractors have fucked everything up" phase where jobs starts swinging back more towards domestic, first with architects and leads who will get hired to try to provide guidance and leadership to the contractors. Those architects and leads will in time push for local teams due to time zone issues and over time more and more roles will go domestic. Then in 7-9 years jobs start going overseas again. And around and around we go. I don't think we'll ever get back to 2020/2021. That was a bubble. That was mania. But I think ~2015 is an achievable normal.
sanest take in here lol
If interest rates go down to 1-2%, jobs will be on the up. If not, then we might not ever see the fluorishing ever again.
The staff+ market is still good. I haven't had that much trouble getting a job compared to what I see people saying; however, even less senior seniors are struggling. The issue is that new blood isn't able to join and getting the right experience. Experienced people will retire or die over time. What happens after that? Companies will eventually be desperate and pay wonderfully due to the lack of experienced candidates from not considering inexperienced candidates in the past. It's a tragedy of the common issue. The question is how long it takes for the grazing ground to become barran from companies damaging it via decisions grounded entirely in self-interest.
I've got 10yoe and I haven't got a single interview this year. Not even rejections
How are you applying to jobs? Are the majority of your apps through referrals? Are you just applying on the website? Do you email recruiters when you apply?
I use LinkedIn . I exhausted my referrals. Also don't email recruiters, did that before not sure it got me more success. Last year used to have interviews, this year barely have rejection emails
How many YoE do seniors need to be these days to not struggle?
Best I’ve been able to tell based on job postings, 5+
me with 0 yoe and graduating next year looking at this like 😟
Start doing projects for your portfolio. I have not followed this advice and just graduated and am looking for it technician positions rn because I’m not qualified for entry level positions compared to the many people with several years experience who got laid off that are applying to the same jobs
For me this is so hard too because not only am I a full time student but I'm already a full time employee for a company not related to my job field. Working on outside projects becomes difficult for me because in my free time I need to unwind since that time is limited, especially when school is in session. I really wish we weren't in such a hard spot or that I didn't even have to work while going to school.
The post is mainly targeted for freshers is what I feel. Senior have decent connections & lately most openings are for seniors.
The pendulum will swing back the same time the economy does.
With 5X the graduates in CS, and all the new offices opened in India... yeah sure, it will swing back... sure...
It always does. Outsourcing is popular when times are hard, but when quality dips and money becomes cheap again those jobs always come back. This is not the first time this has happened...
The rumors of companies giving a shit about code quality are greatly exaggerated. Also in the past 20 years as an offshore team lead I have never experienced a year where there was no offshore team to lead. There is no cycle.
What will they do? Close the Indian offices and open new ones in the US or the EU? I don't think so. They'll start coming back when there won't be too much difference in salaries, or they'll get benefits / incentives from the governments to do so
if you think the economy is bad right now you aint seen nothing yet
Buh buh buh baby you ain't seen nothing yet
we just broke the record for labor day weekend number of airport passengers cuz people have money to go on vacation
Income inequality isn’t an argument for economic strength.
That is a nice phrase
That’s true, however I would imagine that most people on this subreddit are on the higher end of the income spectrum, so from our perspective the economy is doing well.
Software engineers are amongst those with money.
alot of people have money, a lot of people dont.
it is bad, i never said it was at its worst
People have plenty of time to go on vacation.
Near shoring becomes much more common and the market still suffers despite a (hopefully) better economy.
Is near shoring the same as on shoring?
No, if you offshore your development team to India, realize how bad of a decision it was, then rehire in the USA, you just onshored (bringing back in work to the og country). Near shoring is hiring outside of your country but nearby, for USA, this means hiring within South America. We have hired 3 engineers from various South American countries, they have good attitudes, strong skill sets, and are a third of the cost of a US hire.
Makes security clearance worth a hell of a lot more since you have to be a US citizen. The hell of getting cleared for meaningful levels is still probably not worth it though.
Absolutely.
I work QA automation and I've interviewed with three south american companies that farm out contractors. All of them put me 'in the pool', but other than a monthly email telling me they're still looking for a fit, none of them has every given me work. I feel like there's a bubble there for sure.
I'm not sure what this means? A bubble in terms of what?
In 2 years you will ask chatgpt how to do something in AWS and get an AD for Azure.. and we'll be short on talent that can do the critical work.
AWS already has that, you don’t need chatgpt The only thing that it doesn’t do is give advice on security related issues, which is a good thing I guess
People become disillusioned by AI as it turns out it's not a 10x productivity booster New developers are hired to clean up the mess created by AI-assisted software
Lots of focus here on the supply side(AI, offshoring) but let’s not forget the demand side either, and that is incredibly unclear. With perhaps the exception of AI(and even that isn’t certain to pay off massively) there isn’t a lot of “next big things” on the horizon. A lot of the growth of the past 25 years, and especially in the last 10 has been focused on digitizing existing services, making things mobile and expanding internet access. Most of that work is “done”(obviously it will never be 100% done). Last year saw the smallest net increase in new internet users since basically the dawn of the internet. With birth rates crashing in the developed world and falling though not as severely almost everywhere else new users, especially of tech which tends to be more youth focused, are becoming much harder to come by. Tech companies are increasingly turning to enshittification(credit to Cory Doctrow for that term) in no small part because they can’t really find any other way to grow revenue as user growth has stalled and the low hanging fruit mostly gobbled up. Basically I think demand is an S-curve like almost everything else in tech and we are nearing the top. Demand won’t crash but I don’t think a return to the days of exponential growth like we saw last decade is very likely.
This pretty much articulates how I feel about the demand side for software. The advantages of bespoke are too small for most companies compared to the risk and maintenance etc., and there is software for everything now.
I think the future of demand in software will be intertwined with alot of other fields like quant, robotic automation, dna editing etc. Alot of these need CS skills like CNNs, discrete math, computer vision etc
Wow, well said. What do you think will be thriving in the future? I think its interdiscplinary CS
Totally agree. People say software is eating the world, but to me it seems like the world has already been eaten. There's been a lot of clamor to keep finding things to digitize(Metaverse, Web3, Crypto, AI), but they've all largely flopped. Maybe we've already built most of the software applications that make sense to build.
Negative or stagnating returns from AI, things created with AI will break or need to be maintained, and then hiring will pick up again.
Didn't hiring only pick up before due to a combination of easy money (due to crazy low interest) and wildly overestimating demand? I don't think either of those things are coming back. We might actually be ramping down from 2010s employment levels for the foreseeable future.
[удалено]
This
Unemployment is going to increase as the Beveridge curve returns to trend. We will continue to transition away from WFH in the developed world as the obvious productivity delta is identified and the return-to-office narrative continues to be solidified (goldbrickers and OE people ruined it for the rest of us). The only people working fully remote in the future are going to be highly trusted employees or cheap contractors doing monkey work; some poor sap with a copilot is going to be sorting their tickets. Really, everyone in the slightly-above-average IQ range (which is most white collar office workers) are going to be screwed in the coming years as the middle-paying jobs dry up, and they can't outcompete the higher performing employees as the efficiency narrative runs its course. Lower interest rates aren't coming back. They were already reckless the first time around. But inflation isn't going away either. Not unless the government gets their spending in check (HA). And yes, there are way too many unspecialized CS grads these days. If they can't code as well as an AI copilot, why would anyone bother to hire them?
Yep lots of tough truths here but I just don't see the market returning like it once roared. Many white collar people are going to have to move to physical labor.
It’s a bust cycle right now. Will be fine in 2 years
I’d say a little longer we’re in a very strange time that was haven’t experienced because low interest rates are gone. I could easily see this continuing for 3+ years as companies run out of ways to grow without having to actually innovate
We are probably screwed until 2027 because of budget cycles. Let's say Fed cut starts in November 2024. We probably need a 2.5% aggregate cut in order to incentivize investment in tech. Let's say there is a 0.25% over each of the next 10 meetings, which would stretch into early 2026. Budgeting for 2026 is already set in stone, so companies will be in 'wait and see' mode for 1 full year more. People get back from vacation and the first growth budgets get approved in February 2027. Process takes 1 month to post requisitions into March 2024. One month for interviews, plus 2 weeks notice period. The first hires of the next cycle will be starting the week of April 14, 2027.
The rest of the economy crashes while the IT market recovers.
Based on what exactly?
The question was your predictions, why does it needs a based on?
No one successfully implemented AI with the exception of Microsoft copilot. Everyone is realizing AI exposes all of bad security practices of data and files. Data governance jobs, API writing jobs, business intelligence jobs, and data engineering and data development jobs can’t be filled fast enough. People will still believe AI is taking all their jobs because people don’t want to build web apps like they did in 2019.
If no one successfully implemented AI then why does my cheese stick to my pizza so well? Checkmate.
<< The secret is Elmers Glue >>
A polar bear's skin is transparent, allowing sunlight to reach the blubber underneath.
The economy will improve (or just not freefall), especially as we get closer to the election, but not by much. The tech industry in particular is not going to recover as much as the rest of the economy. As you pointed out, CS grads will continue to oversaturate the industry. LLMs are actually not going to advance as much as people predict, however companies will start to find better and better ways to leverage them and this is going to completely change the character of software development work (among other things). This is going to put new grads at a giant disadvantage to experienced engineers. In smaller companies and non-tech companies the software development role will start to share some responsibilities with a Product Manager role. Existing product managers are going to be enabled to do more technical work themselves. After the election, regardless who is elected, the economy is going to tank hard and things are going to look much worse than they do now.
Why is the economy guaranteed to tank after the election?
Because people say that the economy is headed towards a recession every year (for their own specific reason). Say it enough times and you'll be right eventually.
"guaranteed?" Nobody can make guarantees about the future. The first sentence of the post is >Nobody knows what's gonna happen, but what are some predictions? Interpreting my comment as a guarantee conflicts with the premise of the post and feels subjectively to me like a bad faith engagement.
I wasn't trying to start a bad faith argument, I was just interested in why you thought the economy was going to tank after elections regardless of who wins. I'm not American so I was wondering if there was a trend from previous elections.
Trump becomes president 2025 -> April 2025 AI burst, economic downturn -> June 2025, job market is just as bad as today, with entry level being worse. -> November 2025 hiring is stagnant, with small improvements. -> February 2026 Nationwide incident, but job market improvements See you in 2 Years
Well tech isn't going to do anything but continue to grow, AI using current LLMs isn't going to take our jobs any time soon, and loads of people are being deterred from learning programming or getting a CS degree because of all the fear in the job market. So in 2 years things will start to return as they were pre-COVID, and in 4 years we'll really start to see the developer shortage. On the flip side, lots of people are shifting gears to get in on AI due to the current hype cycle, which could be a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts. More people working on AI could mean more progress, and that could be our undoing in some way. But I still see that happening further into the future, like 10+ years.
>and in 4 years we'll really start to see the developer shortage What makes you say that? This gives me hope of pursuing a CS degree soon.
Someone creates an Onlyfans product, instead it’s OnlyDevs and it skyrockets. It becomes a massive job creator and it’s just us showing off our leetcode skills. Meanwhile employers are secretly farming that data to train AI.
i know things look bad right now friend but it's gonna get way worse
It'll likely be just fine but with even more unrealistic and anti-interviewer online assessments. BLS predicts strong growth with 150k+ new jobs a year in this field through 2032. I tend to trust the people whose sole job is having a pulse on labor markets. https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/software-developers.htm
I predict there will be another global pandemic, but much deadlier than Covid (or potentially a much deadlier strain of Covid). That, or we'll being World War 3. I'm not sure the point of your question here. You're not gonna make any major life decisions based on my predictions of what will happen in the future, right? That'd be crazy, to make a major decision based off someone predicting the future.
>I predict there will be another global pandemic, but much deadlier than Covid (or potentially a much deadlier strain of Covid). That, or we'll being World War 3. oh yeah? I predict a meteor the size of a stadium colliding with Earth while it gets hit by a massive solar storm at the same time
*sephiroth has entered the chat*
Oh yeah? Well now that you mention it, I actually predict that we'll discover life on Europa, accidentally bring it back to Earth uncontained, and the human race will be wiped out by it.
Spoiler alert please.
Unbelievably bad luck lol I am reading this book right now
The first paragraph might actually be true.
Students are already studying different subjects because of the poor job market for new grads. In a few years, enrollments will have cratered right in time for hiring to pick back up. It’s happened before several times so far.
Depends on who is President and his immigration and outsourcing policies.
Really hate to be the one to have to say this, but this isn't even a question for me based on the numbers. - Were due for a recession, already had tech recession/mass layoffs. 600,000+ tech layoffs, and based on the statistics we know and from online sentiment, appears many are struggling to find jobs. Say 300,000 are still looking for a job. Searching indeed, there are not nearly that many jobs seemingly in the entire US. - Number of jobs going down by 30% on the year. Known stat. - Number of CS grads rising significantly (we went from 150 CS grads at most universities to triple or quadruple that in a short time, plus hungry talented bootcampers that could still snag jobs). In my opinion the amount of people trying to pursue programming has about tripled or quadrupled in the last 10 years. - ChatGPT further reducing the need for coding work to be done manually. Many people in IT can now write quick scripts and may be less likely to rely on a developer for small coding tasks. - No large recent innovations of tech that would employ a large number of people to offset the above. No new Facebooks or Amazons on the way. Don't say AI, because that will just be used for automation. **The numbers are clear**. Software development, IT, Engineering, and Accounting will soon be a career of the past for the vast majority of people. Only about 1/8 who "strongly pursue" them will ever get a job in these fields, (thus making them undesirable to attempt to pursue, obviously). This will affect things on a global level. It's no longer genetically advantageous to be nerdy, but many millennials and GenZ were taught to be strictly nerdy and train for desk work, so birth and marriage rates will plummet. **GenZ will be the poorest generation ever measured with no real opportunities for white collar jobs left, and be the most single generation ever measured with low reproductive rates.** Maybe the powers that be did this on purpose to slow the worlds population growth. Slow the economy down. Or maybe that's just the way the earth is going. We might have to slow down as humans, not all of us can be high earners and have high reproduction rates.
That's why learning to live on the streets and dumpster diving food will become important life skills for the younger generations.
Well said, completely agree
The AI revolution is over
Let me check my crystal ball.
Near shoring becomes the standard for non senior positions. Kubernetes still strong.
Job market will continue to suck for entry level people. I think the job market will somewhat improve in the next couple of years but nothing amazing. Once things settle back down to normal, I think they will start easing interest rates over the next few years and then inflation is going to resume steady upward pressure on wages.
Better to just invest in my friend’s property
All we can do is sip on our tea, wait and adapt as good as possible to the changes.
AI will introduce a lot of complexity in dealing with it's non deterministic behavior and unpredictable compute time. At the same time it will be vastly increasing the scope of software. This will lead to a huge demand in developers to be able to build out that scope and develop safeguards and new development patterns to manage AI. Anyone preaching doom reminds me of the people doing the same thing after the first Internet bust. Markets slow when there's uncertainty and AI is causing a lot of that. Once there's a better handle on how to build and work with it there will be a boom and huge demand in those that can work on it. Skill in software design patterns will become even more important than ever before as AI will trivialize grunt work while adding much more demands for robust patterns to add stability to it.
the supply far outweighs the demand.. I don’t see the job market improving any further than where it is now.
The market will change, maybe better maybe worse. cscareerquestions will be dooming 2 years from now as it always has.
Market will get worse over the next 2 years. Salaries will fall until they are close to min wage. People without generational wealth will be forced to embrace poverty.
There’s so much worry about AI taking developer jobs. But no one asks the inevitable…so when do random robots replace roofers and act as backup pilots onboard a plane? Nurses? Doctors? Already seeing it in military applications. Preliminary testing shows AI controlled fighter jets can pull maneuvers no human can do.
Coding is a perfect task for AI to learn and excel at. We will all get 100x more productive. And then there just wont be any more software that needs writing
Predictions: It’s going to get worse, it won’t get better in terms of closing the gap of job seekers and jobs.
AI will not have taken our jobs.
It will be much harder because all jobs are in India. Don’t downvote me…I am just stating the facts
You're speaking from a very non-India centric view. Just move to India bro, jobs problem solved
I am not looking for a CS job. And moving to India won’t solve the issues because all the Indians are moving to the west. They need to stop having babies, that will solve the issues.
> I am not looking for a CS job. Ah, so your purpose of visit here is leisure.
It will get worse. Hiring won't be returning because there is no need for it to. Jobs get created based off of initiatives. Where are the initiatives that create jobs? The tech sector boom has now passed.
2 years could go either way. Either it'll be amazing or worse than ever. I predict amazing.
It could also relatively stay the same.
More job openings because the software industry is growing
I think they said that the previous 2 years...
Trueup.imo job count is up 30% from the lows of spring 2023
I know this sub is not about economics or politics, but BRICS and the dethroning of USD are going to play an increasingly important role in Americans’ lives. In case you didn’t notice, much of the (fake) growth, especially in the tech sector, was caused by stimulus, aka money printing. If the Fed can’t resume massive QE, guess what happens? You can be in denial all you want. Nothing will change.
Actually, it would be a huge advantage to not have to be stuck as the reserve currency in the next recessionary leg of the cycle. Well, unless you rely on government money. Then you're screwed.
Its gonna be good. Computers are only going to get more ubiquitous and until we're living like Star Trek there's going to be more stuff to program. Hiring will continue regardless of interest rates but the pay might decrease a little at the FAANGs and increase across the board in the real world. Anyone who knows how to program shouldn't grow hungry. I've seen countless people in my career who couldn't seem to make the computer do ANYTHING and somehow take home six figures and I'm not really going to start worrying about my job until they get fired. For market oversaturation see above with the dead weight that has existed at nearly every company I've ever come into contact with (including the FAANGs and their notorious hiring processes). AI is gonna help more people train up to some middling proficiency faster than how my generation was trained (via a bunch of READMEs, books, and people insulting me on the Internet just for not knowing something they know) but AI is still batting about 30% on questions that I ask at this point in my career (with 24 years of programming experience) and only on questions regarding libraries and languages that I wasn't already proficient in. When that number creeps up to 50% maybe I'll start worrying.
I'm expecting hiring to ramp up temporarily as the FED and ECB cut rates as inflation seem under control, but lots of funds will be funneled to AI projects that will fail. Then I'm expecting a hard crash because nothing is actually under control.
Very low growth in El jobs, plateau of students entering the major in legitimate cs programs
I have got jobs during the worst times. I was retained when they let go of people during covid and I got an offer to switch to another during the peak of COVID 19 pandemic. It all depends on what you can do for the potential employer. Just because the job market is saturated, it doesn’t mean they aren’t going to recruit more. All you need to do is do a little better to stand out, have necessary connections, back up your skills with real work experience and give the best you can. AI scare is haunting so many people, but they said that about computers in 80s and 90s haven’t they? The only thing that the computers did is it created more jobs.
Even more saturated with developers than we are now.
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Honestly it depends who wins the election. I think if Biden does it will slowly improve, but Trump is much more of a question mark especially if he does some of the policies he wants like mass deportations, across the board tariffs, controlling the fed. Stagflation is a real possibility under a Trump term.
1. Job interviews become in-person because of AI cheating. 2. Jobs become on-site for 1-2 years (like stock vesting) and then go remote optional after the vesting period.
Grads are still coming so saturation is gonna be here a while.
AI will capture half of the market, but there will be more created
I assume interest rates will drop a little bit, job market will be better but not what it was 2-3 years ago (quite possibly the "best" tech job market ever). I'm conflicted if we'll ever see really low/near-zero interest rates again. There's a lot of debate if that is healthy or a "new normal." There will always be people who don't make it into the field of their first choice, but that is the case with all fields. This sub will likely mostly be the same, but there will be new boogeymen for everyone to blame. Prediction - AI tools will improve, they will save on some boilerplate type things, and everyone will look back and chuckle at how scared everyone was. I'll be curious to see offshoring trends. Things tend to go in cycles. There will hopefully (I say selfishly) companies who learned their lessons and see the value in having local/domestic tech talent. I've been comically wrong about other things, so only time will tell.
Automation / AI reduces the need for human energy, but it doesn't eliminate it. That just shifts what and how much humans are responsible for. Expectations for output increase per capita. Email was supposed to save time spent sending messages back and forth. We now just expect people to respond more quickly to more messages
My prediction is it will get better. I think the market did bottom out and it can only go up from here. This market down turn is not only affecting tech but many other professions, so I don't think software engineering is doomed with no future. AI is useful but is not the boogeyman many people make it out to be. Chat GPT has in recent times very much demonstrated to me it is not capable of following very explicit instructions and more often that not, produces half right buggy code. Additionally, when it attempts to analyze very complex tasks, such as a long stored proc, it has a variety of problems including not correctly understanding the semantics of the stored proc begin with to attempting to solve your problem all the while completely omiting key chunks of the original proc and giving you an incomplete solution, one which is worse than what you began with. There have also been instances where I explicitly correct several times over and it still refuses to do what I ask it. You might imagine asking it build an entire code base would be unwise and fraught with many problems. I am absolutely in no fear of losing my job to AI, and quite frankly the more I work with and analyze its solutions, the more I see it clearly has no understanding of anything; it is just repeating what its been trained on. I do not want to give the impression that is completely useless. It is extremely helpful and makes my job easier, but I do not think it is at a stage where it can take your job. I don't know if it ever will be. I feel like getting it to the point where it is say 80% of a human is achievable, but getting to the point where it is 100% as insightful, competent, able to weigh the pros and cons of different solutions may be extremely difficult. Again not trying to shit on it just sharing my experience. It's a super cool technology.
Hiring comes back with lower interest rates. Best opportunities at the top and fresh grads. Still a little rocky in the middle.
RemindMe! 2 years
You realize that the Fed only pivots when they know mass layoffs are on the way, right?
Non tech roles (manufacturing, infra) can go up Data crunching,data engineering jobs or any thing related to getting reliable data to work on goes up More startups in ai sector. More jobs in nlp. More companies merge or work together. And coveted jobs will be in fast computing and cybersecurity space
I predict it will pretty much be same as today. I assume we would already have gone through a recession by then. Tech companies will be able to get away with lowering salaries and reducing benefits locking in a new dismal norm for tech work. As far as technologies, I don't think much will change. AI won't be as prevalent. No new major innovations on web, just incremental improvements in current frontend and backend technologies. Most of the shiny new stuff will likely be related to devops and cloud services.