This should be the case now for anything that is not a prototype. The job has changed from "writing code" to "shipping software". A technical lead.
As AI gets more intelligent and the tooling around it develops and organizations figure out how to get it access to the data, the level of involvement needed for software engineers will decrease. Since the cost of developing software is plummeting, the amount of software being used is going to expand greatly- that will keep the technical lead positions available longer and also create more opportunities for consultant engagements.
Although someone can use AI to rewrite every software dependency and every paid piece of software, its still not worthwhile for them for most software, especially if the price of the software is low compared to the complexity it hides.
Users of a paid software product still need a human to be responsible for it.
As you develop your skills with AI, you now have the ability to develop your own software products. So there's an opportunity to become a small business owner. You didn't want to do these non-technical roles, but now you can continue to direct AI to automate all the aspects of the business.
This makes the technical skills required but not sufficient part of the whole business and there are many businesses (like restaurants) that are bad businesses, because many people are willing to open a restaurant even though most of them are not a good business. This influx of new competitors, make the current restaurant owners profit to go down, because of the increased competition that isn't purely market driven.
In the software world that means "a small product" won't have any moat & pricing power, and your competitors might be wiling to subsidise it for years as a side project, making the whole market suffer from profit erosion (an economic term) leading to zero profit long-term equilibrium.
For example try charging per message (as previously charged by SMS/MMS) in the era of subsidised messenger apps with free calls and messages.
There was a time that I really cared about my work and about my colleagues livelihoods.
Then I realised, it’s just a job. I’ve lost jobs before. I’ve taken shitty, low paid jobs before. It’s just a job. You turn up, they pay you, then you go home to your actual life, the one that matters.
People take their jobs too seriously.
Unfortunately not everyone has that luxury, and as AI continues to devalue intellectual labor, fewer will.
I still feel the same way.
Perspective... there are people crossing the entire world to come and be trashmen or food delivery slaves in our western countries, there are other jobs, you just don't want to do most of them
Don't live like your cushy $$$ desk job is a god given right and you'll be fine
Hot take, but I don't think it actually does, tbh.
Setting aside the temporary delusions of management, the tech itself doesn't devalue anything. It just optimizes away redundant stuff. That was always kinda redundant, but it wasn't "intellectual labor" just because it was done by white-collar workers.
We only have to go back to pre-AI days and look at what kind of mindless nonsense tasks said workers back then complained to see what I mean.
No people ever wanted to do this kind of work anyway, so it is fantastic that they in the future will not have to. The only thing we need to ensure is that the benefits of that will not be harvested by the same rich few. But that was also the mantra before AI, so nothing changed there either.
We can do so, because anything made out of carbon can also be reduced to carbon. Nothing and no one is untouchable, but, ideally, words are the tool. Anything else has unforeseen side-effects.
No one ever wants to do most of the work they do. That is the literal definition of work, as opposed to a hobby. You do it because otherwise you and your children starve. Job satisfaction is optional (and may cut into your salary).
Experience has taught me that investing the OP’s amount of emotional capital into your job leads to unhappiness.
Either you're a helpless waif buffered by the storms of this world, or you're in charge of at least something - picking the first results in reddit-tier apathy and despair.
The second may not cause much immediate change, but at least you'll feel better about it.
Loss of a job/career shouldn’t define a person. Loss of a human being does. For too long we ask people we meet “what do you do for work?” Perhaps the question that lets us better know a person is “who is your family?”
All of this is to say that we have a case of “the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent” on steroids; Capital is going to fight like its life depends on it to stay irrationally convinced in their belief that AI can replace Labor.
AI might be the best thing to happen for labour n fact; because they're going to gain a lot more intelligence for the same amount of work.
This sentence, whenever I see it, makes me chuckle now.
Surely the leopards won't eat my face. I have taste and you can't get that from a machine.
If the higher-ups don't care about the quality of your code when they compel you to tokenmaxx, what on earth gives you the impression they have a clue about your taste? It's not the AI that is going to fire you, it's that arsehole Brad who you made the grave mistake of beating too comprehensively at Catan.
Higher-ups do not need to concur with that. They just get.. how does on say today.. "left behind".
Until the government forbids writing programs by hand, writing programs by hand will remain a satisfying hobby. The only thing that's changing is how much other people appreciate the skill and effort you put into a given program.
That was in regards of not trying to fly when conditions were marginal, but it applies to much more.
Good advice regarding psychological investment.
Not so useful advice when the job provides your actual livelihood, and the changes (e.g. outsourcing or AI or some industry change) mean you might soon hold a "will work for food" sign in some street corner.
I mean these days, it's not usually that people made some particular job their whole personality and "center of their life", the reason that they worry about losing it.
It's that their job is what puts food on the table, and the job pools are drying up.
Also a lot of tech workers earn a higher salary compared to most of other professions, so I'd expect people to put away some buffer for a rainy day.
Management's response? It doesn't matter - for the price they could get cheap offshore workers to do it over again 5 times and still save money.
The "it saves money" mindset is bad for everyone, distorts everything away from valuable work and investments that generate the most revenue.
Self hosting is a complex investment. Competitors need an stupidly expensive amount of hardware to enter the scene if they're going to serve SaaS. Chinese backed models can be regulated out of competition. Openai and Anthropic will soon be semi exclusive sources of training data as development happens on private conversations.
Success is not guaranteed, but it is crystal clear that the goal is replacing us and then pricing the replacement as the largest possible percentage of our salaries possible.
It's the oldest trick in the book. Place a heavily discounted supermarket in town, wait for all local businesses to close, raise prices.
That's the point gp was making. If the big labs all increase prices 10x, the cost of running your own open models stays the same
I rather expect them to go up. I bought a bunch three years ago and a lot more recently. All of them I could sell for 2x what I paid.
Who are these investors subsidizing random inference providers on https://openrouter.ai/ ?
The rug pull is every software engineer losing their job.
I wonder when this comes from other white class jobs— process engineering, autocad drafter, electronics design.
Now that the unbelievable damage is done to families, towns, and cultures of entire regions of the US, they can swoop in and fix it for white collar workers.
Amazing.
(And I assume that there's a sliver of people who never went this route in the first place, and another sliver who never stopped).
See this over and over on hn and Reddit - CEOs are stupid and don’t understand how much pain offshore/AI causes. No…they’re taking a calculated risk on the organisations resilience and know the people whining about CEOs being stupid will be the ones patching over the cracks
Being replaced by a machine is different -- but still, not in a way that I can authoritatively say ought not to happen. If you could get your shirt made by a woman, or the same shirt made by a machine that costs 5% of what it would cost to pay the woman, you will pick the machine 99% of the time. Almost anyone would.
Being replaced by other people, or by a machine, is a very sad thing for the person being replaced. But I can't persuade myself that all by itself it is morally wrong in any sense.
Every step introduces misunderstanding and miscommunication, and minds change, and when you go down the wrong path it is hard to alter course or start over while avoiding blame and ill feeling.
Offshoring quality was not as good as the original, because the original was being produced by developers who were close to the clients and steeped in the same assumptions.
With offshoring, all of the weight was borne by the specification - if something was not captured, it did not exist. It doesn't matter how much it was just a basic assumption that something would work that way - if you didn't say precisely what you wanted, you didn't get anything even close.
So someone close to a product could implement something in a week for x money. Management would see that "week" as a fixed unit of work that could be given to someone who would work for less - but that other person would require an order of magnitude more "prompting" in order to produce what you really wanted, because they didn't have the same knowledge and assumptions.
So their calculus was, well, it might actually take 5 weeks to get the same output, but it was still cheaper. But that completely overlooks the local overhead of 5 failed iterations, and the cost to client relations, or the cost to internal staff burning out in frustration at what was once simple becoming multiple needless failures, or the additional cost of documenting the spec to such a degree nothing gets left out. And the latter, you can't do until you've failed enough to know both sides different assumptions and knowledge gaps.
(Edit: also my point wasn't don't do it or that this can never work - it was that in this case management simply didn't care about the demonstrable quality problem because the cost of reiterating was so low they could afford to write off the first couple of failed attempts, and this is exactly the attitude we'll get with AI. If you can get something that's superficially most of the way there in an hour with a prompt all by yourself, there's no cost to just changing your mind, retrying, trying other things, all with no pesky engineers slowing things down)
To quote the wise Lord Farquaad: "some of you may die, but that's a sacrifice I'm willing to make."
We're gettin' old, xxs. Waves cane and yells "Get off my LLM!"
In other words, would those people have kept their jobs at current interest rates if there was no AI?
I think most wouldn't and leadership would be saying something else.
As a product manager my approach and execution of my daily work has massively changed in the last half a year. It never stops making me baffled how little people out of software development understand about what is happening right now.
What do you expect them to understand?
It amazes me how little people IN software engineering understand what's happening. Go ahead, listen to your bosses and write all your knowledge in AGENTS.md files, you're definitely special and won't be laid off.
Ask anyone in manufacturing how writing things down for your cheaper replacements works out for you.
Ever since LLMs took over everything I'm working or have worked on, I no longer have fun, no longer feel joy, or challenged to solve issues.
My question is, what now? What's the backup skill or job to develop next and still feel joy with it?
Not sure what to recommend for you though.
Is it you though?
Last week "I" have chased down a really sneaky performance bug in a shutdown routine of one of our applications, if it went to prod it would cost us a lot of grief. How did I do it? Well, I didn't, I gave Claude access to kubectl, described the behavior and how to trigger it, and went for a coffee. After 10 minutes of didly-dalling I took a sip of coffe, then copy-pasted 100% spot-on response to a JIRA ticket and sent it to developers for a fix.
I did maybe 2% of work there.
I created here something similar to how intranets work, where I can easily define a service as public or internal in k8s through the ingress class
If it's internal, it's accessible only through tailscale, if it's public, it's accessible by anyone, now for some reason internal services have insane delays or very very bad bandwidth, never understood why and couldn't figure out how to even debug this
Ran codex, gave access to the whole node, ah yeah just lower the MTU to this value, lo and behold it fixed everything
The other day I got a cheap thermal printer with the only way to use it is through an app, I thought ok I'll try to reverse engineer it, try to understand the protocol, then write a script to print, few days later and progress was very slow, I thought let's try to let an LLM so it
It reversed the entire protocol, wrote me a web app where I can print whatever I want, I got what I needed, but feel zero accomplishment
I get these and the fix ai suggests is often wrong or hallucinated!
But I think it is important we all emphasise that this LLM-age giddiness sits squarely in those businesses where influence and product have always been their thing. It is unfortunate but, here we are. I don't believe a VP or MD or CXO is ever going to admit they were played by their peers on this one (agentic development).
The positive perhaps is the hardening of personal development, by need or necessity. LLM and agents are terrible at domain expertise still, and only until memory availability becomes abundent again (in end-user equipment), that is not going to change.
My big concern for the industry is when that happens, and anyone can build anything, but with the ability to tune to domain expertise via their own terms; this is the collapse, where no 'moat' exists at all, we are already seeing the collapse of the subscription model, and I believe pay-on-demand / purchase _is_ authentication is a tracking metric to that collapse. I forsee regulation being pushed to ensure the model however and foresee regulation on user equipment.
Larger institutions are perhaps 1-2 years lagging (for regulatory reasons) on uptake and perhaps that is the point in all this giddiness.
ChatGPT can go long way designing printed circuit boards with text based KiCad. Luckily most companies stick to the expensive overengineered (for normal boards) tools like Altium. That part of workforce is safe for a while.
I am moving from electrical engineer to electrician right now. The money is the same (in Germany). I vibecoded my CRM/invoicing/protocol generation/warehouse tool by myself. Over 120 iterations with ChatGPT. And this was scary!!! A decade ago such development would cost 6 figures to develop and 5000-8000€ a year to use. Now it’s on my computer working the way I want. <100€, no need for software team.
I used to repair cars. I guess if nothing else works, I can do that until EVs take over that.
By the way, my local bike shop has a one month long (!!!) queue for repairs. Just saying.
Where I live many, many older people are now on e-bikes. They are good paying customers, and most don't want to work on their bikes themselves (unlike hobbyists with the pushbikes).
And today they are taken aback by any reasonable hourly rate because a new bike from China costs less than a few hours of your work. Good luck! Oh, and if you really follow through on this make sure you copy Sheldon's pages just in case they ever go down, you'll have an edge over the rest.
Why do we have middle managers still, while we're replacing programmers? Really says a lot about how decisions are made, we're hierarchical monkeys at the core.
If you have only bad middle management around you then it might be time to either step up and do it better or find a different place to work, since there are places with excellent middle management.
I'll believe this the day an AI model can golf with an executive, or wine and dine and call hookers in an overnight business meeting. Sure, that's not every exec, but that's common enough that AI isn't going to work there.
I do.
You don't need any sort of fancy harness as claimed.
All you need to do is type vague ideas into a text box. Then you need some UX taste to pick good concepts.
The building of the software happens trivially now. You do not need a software engineer, sorry guys.
What you need next is someone with time and patience to QA test the software and provide feedback for the AI.
I guess ideally the same person, with the UX taste.
Give it a few weeks and the product is done, without the need for a team of 5-10. All it takes is one competent human.
I know that many here vehemently disagree and raise concerns about the viability and maintainability of the software.
I believe not a single one of them has made that experience, these concerns are based on their imagination of what they think would happen. Usually they tell you that they essentially review every line of code in their projects.
Often, the agent will fix a problem without assessing if the fix is worth it, optimal or defective. It's fine to merge fixes like this in codebases occasionally - humans have been managing to do this and to work around this for ages. I'd like to see a software project that is purely LLM driven and doesn't devolve into chaos because of this.
I understand that many doubt this and would like to see evidence. The recent Photoshop clone, PhotoCraft, that gathered 200 contributors in a few days seems like a good example to watch. I understand it's currently around 500k LOC in Rust.
Let's see if their app is going to beat eg. GIMP.
I agree - let's wait and see. I think the outcome of prompting a model will vary wildly depending on who is doing the prompting. Natural language can only get you so far. And if I'm wrong - oh well, I guess I'll need to uproot my life.
The actual reality is, that it is too early to actually say where this is going to end. Either AI is going to fix what it is causing right now or not.
We are screwed either way. So is the person or prompter behind the message above.
If Ai is universal there is no need for UX, because a real personal assistant, that takes personal care of you is the only UX necessary in the end.
After >500 hours of work over six months.
I don't think we are screwed. There's risks, but it is also highly likely that living standard will go up for everyone and working time down dramatically.
Yes. If AI doesn't slow down soon, there will no longer be need to build most software. This is not the case yet, and in my opinion we are now at at great time for building new products.
This part is quite "load-bearing".
I heard from someone who worked at Lovable that what most customers produce with that magical textbox is software that shouldn't go anywhere near production. Apparently the problem of thinking like an engineer is not solved by these AI tools. Most people who are not software engineers by trade are not capable of verifying what they produced, nor would they even consider needing to.
No offence, I think you might be a classic case of "senior who forgot how it feels to be junior", where after a lot work experience deva start taking their software engineering instincts for granted and forget that they are a skill that takes years to master. You can prompt an AI for a solution, you can even prompt it for ideas, but you cannot prompt it to think for you.
Is it really so hard to select Opus 5.5 in Claude Code and type into the box that you'd like an audit for production readiness?
I think you need a competent person, perhaps a product owner, in front of it to make sense of the output and direct it.
Maybe you are right and for a non-technical person this is harder than I imagine. But it is getting easier every month now, isn't it?
This is a very good point. It's now easy to just do things, so discernment has become more valuable than ever. If you leave things to Opus 5.5, it'll just say that you need to implement every product-bloating change, and "here let me take care of that for you".
This sums it up well and will ring true no matter which side of the argument you're on.
We're heading towards the end of the year and I still do not see how these copy-machines with "super intelligence" inside are going to replace humans. What they have done is convince those with money to spend differently on their fellow humans.
It is also a political question, on which many techies have been maneuvered into abdicating. Stripped of agency, agents they are bamboozled to depend on.
This I feel is a strong point. At least in my social-bubble, I notice that many of the vibe-coding CEO's now loose the plot on what their company actually does, and are too focused on solving just any problem any customer presents them. Whether or not that matches their actual company-strength, or their product, is then secondary.
And I miss that. I miss beeing able to say "I work for X, we do Y to solve Z".
Which all sound a bit alarmist, but it needs to break at some point where investing money will not work because there will be no payoffs.
What will break first? The people or the system.
Most were just let go. No severance, or comp packages. Just a good luck with your job search, it was nice while it lasted.
For his next gig, he worked in fisheries. His 10 years of experience at the factory didn't mater, and he started with entry level pay. This lasted some years, until some bigger company bought his employer, and merged. Lots of people had to go, him included.
Then he landed work delivering mail. Worked there for 15 years, until the postal service started downsizing due to ever decreasing volume in mail being delivered.
So his last attempt was to just go to trade school, and try some trade. 50+ years old working on a apprentice salary, once again starting at the bottom rung of the ladder.
My point is, there are many people out there that have lived this life. For every software developer that have made bank for the past 20 years, and are now faced with the reality of being made obsolete, there are probably 10 people who've gone through this multiple times, but gone from one minimum wage job to another. Going back to start every time.
It sucks for everyone. But you just have to adapt. I guess one silver lining is that when the "white collar professional jobs"-apocalypse arrives, that's when we'll finally look at things like UBI.
Time and time again, we've seen that when working class jobs disappear, it is met with some sort of aw-shucks / but-they'll-find-something-else-to-do reaction. Whereas when the middle/professional class is affected, it is seemingly a end of times sign.
It is hard to know if it is just bot traffic to sow discord, or if plenty of people are genuinely delighted that office workers are finding themselves unemployed.
Yes, but this time around there may be nothing left to adapt to.
But, I think the cold hard truth is that if you're a professional worker, with a six figure salary, the idea of going back to school, and working with something completely unrelated to your interest - all while taking a steep pay cut...it is unthinkable for many.
The alternative is of course unemployment.
But that's true for anybody that need to start as a beginner in a new industry.
This hits home. It's both a shame and infuriating what's happening in the market right now. One (unsolicited) piece of advice I would give to anyone impacted is to build their own shit. If these companies stop paying for your lunch, then eat their fucking lunch with the same gimmicks they convinced themselves are adequate to stop paying for your lunch.
I'm not just talking about the enterprise giants - build competing products , lower their margins build similar products and offer them for less. Cut out the middle-men. They might have the contract now but their operating costs are higher. In the long run they are uncompetitive.
Seems like we're now crossing into bargaining and depression.
I have empathy for those who were open minded enough not to mock those of us who were warning against this or swiftly dismissed our opinions. I hope you can now be open minded to the fact this will continue, and will extend to ALL jobs, that our society WILL dramatically change to the point of becoming unrecognizable in the not so distant future. We tend to be consistent in making the same errors when predicting the future. You just need to look into past predictions about our present time. Most people still make those errors. But once you see them you can try to avoid them, though unfortunately not making those mistakes usually leads you to seem crazy to others, which is also part of the reason those mistakes are so common.
Ultimately in the future (near? middle? far?), Capital will also be useless because the marginal value of everything will be driven towards zero, and who will be the buyers? Certainly not those with Capital, because the marginal cost of anything being close to zero would mean that they would not need to buy from others - they can just make their own. And those without Capital won't have the means to buy anything, even when the cost is close to zero.
Interesting times ahead?
Anyone care to speculate what that future will look like? Two different eras: post-employment, and post-capitalism?
Capital is that fraction of produce set aside for future production. OpenAI is capital but not all wealth is capital. And capital isn't going anywhere - the machines will have gigafactories etc. The value of labor will plumet but present-day capital that is usable by the machines or can be scrapped and repurposed will retain value.
The value of square meter of land + mineral/sunlight rights (not capital) is likely to rise - the amount of wealth that somebody would give you for that asset would probably increase, as more wealth can be generated from it.
Individuals without wealth now will likely end up with a much lower allocation of those things which retain value (land, materials, etc) while having a much higher quantity (relative to now) of those things whose value will drop - AI tokens, electronics, entertainment, etc.
Essentially our current trajectory taken to the limit. Land expensive, food expensive, interest low, smartphone cheap.
> who will be the buyers
Imagine an impoverished and technologically backward country which has been colonized/occupied, and where the most valuable assets are exported well below market price or stolen. The people still trade their own labor for subsistence. They still produce some goods which have value in outside countries, they receive some charity, there is still tourism, their labor has some value (servitude, trafficking). AI would be the same (assuming laws hold up) - e.g. you could rent out your solar panels to OpenAI in exchange for a loaned domestic robot and a token subscription.
Mega corp will advance technology exponentially, but for the rest of us we will live in a mix of medieval life style assisted by robotic and low tech. People will exode city and go back to the countryside.
For what concern my self, I'm buying arable land, maybe in couple of years home food production will be fully automated.
Awfully optimistic. Why would they let you do that?
They probably won't. EU is not the same economic bloc that it was up to 2004 anymore. I am not sure that there is big country in EU that is having consistent high growth. I expect in the next 15 years the western eu countries to experience the joy of living standards collapse that the eastern bloc enjoyed during the 90s. But without some of the factors that made it bearable for the east.
1. There are plenty of things being outsourced, They can be done locally.
2. There are plenty of things currently not being done by locals - like elderly care.
3. We can find new things to do.
4. We can work less.
And even if those things raise living standard somewhat, the efficiencies from AI/robots should be more than enough to compensate.
But, in a capitalistic globalized economy this isn't how things work. So we'll see some shift from that. And it will work better in countries with a more democratic socialistic leaning rather than capitalistic.
We're already starting to see that, with the recent EU trade deal with china, limiting the amount of cars china can send to Europe.
In a word, bleak.
Everything looks to be a lot different. Once AI is better than humans at knowledge work, why would you even keep human in the loop? (That's assuming AI reaches the level of being better than humans - I'm not arguing for that assumption, but about it's consequences and that in this scenario we won't get much new jobs).
You can give a workman a power tool and he shouldn't instantly assume that his housebuilding job is under threat, because corporations will build a house-building power tool.
Why won't he think that? Two reasons: 1) any tool that becomes more powerful tends to become more specialised and expensive to operate, so an electric drill doesn't scale to a house-building drill without incredible tradeoffs, and 2) he isn't reading a million breathless class warfare-igniting articles whose writers are paid through attention.
I guess I'm not using this tech enough :-)
There are interesting parallels between LLMs and biological structures as well, for instance spontaneous oscillation in nervous systems lacking inputs but with a feedback loop in the topology.
Any kind of feedback system is riding a fine line between amplification/generation and runaway behavior resulting in a loop. Electronics, mechanical control systems, biological systems and LLMs all share the same property: some fraction of the output is coupled back to the input. With LLMs the fraction is 100%. It's a small miracle they don't loop more than they do!
It makes me think about how many people just stop reading because it's not comfortable, and they don't bother turning on reading mode.
[1]https://www.makonea.com/en-US/casual/fixing-a-vibe-coded-app
More so was agile having developers replace the heavy old product and project management organizations a lot of enterprises had. And then came devops were developers replaced sys admins? Remember those folks?
The billionaire class tell us the utopia is coming. Why should we believe them? Given that they’ve failed to share the benefits of the massive productivity gains of the last 50 years (stagnant pay, 30 hour work weeks, health care and social safety net?) why should we trust them to share this? We shouldn’t imo.
We will expand the job market and create new jobs that weren't possible before.
1. jobs being automated implies companies can do way more with fewer workers
2. this means they have extra profit that they can push somewhere
3. they will push it again to capital by finding new ventures to scale out
4. for achieving (3) they need labour pool, which is where we come in
Few open questions
- What kind of new ventures? Colonising Mars is an example, but ambition is unlimited
- Will companies choose to scale out or just eat profits? I think they will scale out due to ideology and market dynamics
- Biggest question: can humans still provide value in some dimension where AI can't? I don't know..
I was part of it in online poker world. You needed 2 functioning braincells to make 6 figures while playing a few hours a day back in 2005/2006. It got more and more difficult from there. First it got guys "living their life" while hustling on the side who thought it's an easy mode forever and didn't even bother to learn new tools. Then it turned previously good players into marginal grinders and then only a small group of winners remained. Many went to different/easier pastures - private games, heavy game selection at (super) high stakes. Most though lost their income and with it years of life that now seemed wasted in front of the computer.
Among my friends I've seen suicides (two), lost families (more than two), despair and poverty (too many to count). There are also positive stories - people who started doing something else, adjusted their expectation and are now living happy life even though their income will never be close to what their experienced in their early twenties.
In online poker - instead of Fable - we had ever developing tools. Databases, HUDs, HUDs connected to databases, auto-seating scripts (where a script looks for "donks" and auto seats you at the table when they seat) and then bots and solvers. I was on the frontier lab side I guess as the author of the most popular solver when they first came out. Now Fable is coming after my edge.
I am still a tech optimist. I think it will be a better and more abundant world at the end of it. There is still a lot of jobs we are not doing now because we don't have enough people. The transition is going to hurt though, especially those who don't have energy to start from scratch.
Gambling for living taught me no income stream is forever. Especially lucrative ones are going to be competed for and will dry out. Live below your means, try to save money, don't compete for status. It was always a good advice but it never hits until it's you who it applies to.
but it also seems like tech workers are getting a taste of their own automation medicine they've been happily developing for the last 50 years.
This seems a bit arbitrary to me. Why 1969, exactly? Personally I'd go for the "democratization of Internet" as the start of the slope. So perhaps 1989 ("1989: Quantum Computer Services and Apple end their partnership. Quantum Computer Services renames itself America Online. Two years later, America Online for DOS is released, and a year after that, America Online for Windows.")? Or arguably even a bit later...
Yeah they are.
Two pizza team = 2 person team + Opus 5.5
Or for the really enterprising, solopreneur scaling to > $2.5 ARR (more than Goog's revenue per employee).
This is a fundamentally different game now.
I don't know why anyone assumes it just stops here.
You can probably even promise 99% uptime (sounds good enough to most buyers probably?) even if people sleep 8 hours a day as long as the failures comes no earlier than than 15 minutes into their sleep and only happens at most once a month (1% of 30 days is 7,8 hours).
Almost all 24/7 on call is support theater anyway.
>Also bus factor start to be pretty big if there is only two persons etc.
Not if a newcomer can be assisted by the other person or even just by AI in understanding the codebase.
The dark truth is that tech executives have been extremely pissed off by tech workers in the 2010s leveraging their specialist knowledge into exorbitant salaries, autonomous working conditions and even political demands (remember the Google in China backlash?), and they are now using AI as an excuse to do mass layoffs in order to scare the uppity proles-craftsmen into falling in line. As Kalecki said, they value discipline in the factories more than raw profits
That requires having enough good new ideas for everyone to work on, and sadly a lot of companies don't have those
I think startups have an easier time for 2 reasons: They are innovating on the product side already, and probably were already capacity constrained for work on the top ideas. They also have a high proportion of tech debt which never bubbled to the top of effort vs reward (competing against product work) before but would still be valuable to fix. E.g. https://posthog.com/blog/sql-parser was on the HN frontpage a few months ago, and this work would never have happened in the before times
If it's easier for startups, it's for the same reason doing a "pivot" is easier: they usually don't have much of a product or revenue or customer base to begin with, they throw things out there and see what sticks.
Because they don't need 10x the existing value, nor is the extra value they can actually use and benefit from that expandable.
And despite being quick to call this "dumb", you missed the most obvious reason: by not keeping the whole team they save money. Which makes their expenses lower and their VCs/shareholders happy. Keeping the team and "delivering 10x the existing value" doesn't leverage AI for reducing costs, and is hardly guaranteed to bring in much in the way of returns either.
Usable new value goes through a "pipe" so to speak, which constrains how much you can use or need. And that's the business and market and regulation realities.
If you're making Instagram for example you aren't going to change everything "just because you can", nor is there any reason to make 10x intrusive changes to the backend "to make it faster" or something with the danger of disrupting something, if it goes predictably well enough already.
Your marketing team, your engineering team (what's left of it), your business team, also need to understand and pace any changes, and have a specific vision, not just "anything possible, even 10x the things".
10 people don't 10x. They barely 3x.
That's likes rocket science, av, automata and things like that.
Less than 1% engineers work on that and even they are using ai.
For other 99%, one person knowing what to build is enough.
Corpo culture is disgusting around layoffs. Zero notice terminations should not be legal, anywhere. Have some fucking heart guys.
We will lay you off in 3 months - and having for a 3 months dead man walking in the company is probably worse for everyone. Since said employee probably won't break records for productivity during this period - it is easier for everyone just to give the one let go some lump sum.
Anyway I think that in this post the context is that they will be let go during good times - without the informal - we know the company is in trouble and layoffs as coming common knowledge that big companies have.
What kind of 3rd world country do you live in where this is legal? I just want to point out that businesses needing to balance their workforce is normal. Living in a society where letting go of employees without notice is not. Maybe that's the part that needs to be addressed as a matter of urgency, not the management's delusions of AI capabilities - those will verify themselves very quickly in practice - employment law takes time and effort to change
"we can't ship your stuff because of some material restriction or let you pick up a box with some dignity, so we destroyed your stuff"
Really? never heard of anything like this even when I was in the states. If anyone tried this anywhere in Europe the case would almost certainly end up in a parliamentary questions session.