Lol. Even among those less stupid, most didn’t hire junior developers for the last three years, to hedge their bets.
Well, it’s three years later, AI didn’t solve shit, and we are facing an entire missing cohort of senior developers.
We’ve seen this before - back when web frameworks “made all of us obsolete” back in 2003.-
Here’s what comes next:
Everyone who needs a senior developer gets to start bidding up the prices of the missing senior developers. Since there simply aren’t enough to go around, the “find out” phase will be punctuated.
Losing bidders get to pay 4x rates for 1/3 the output from consulting companies.
Cheers!
Source: I was made obsolete by web frameworks so hard that I entered a delusion where working with web frameworks just let us produce bigger buggier websites even faster - and where the demand for web developers skyrocketed and I made some seriously respectable money while helping train up junior developers to help address the severe shortage.
Wait, people really thought web frameworks would replace Devs? Which frameworks? 😂
It’s very common. Every few years there is some no-code platform claiming no developers are needed anymore in any sector, not just web dev. Invariably these only work if you stay on the narrow path and of course the customer asks something outside of the easy path after the first demo so a lot of work by devs are needed to make of happen.
AI is just one more like that, but with hype on steroids.
And very old. Part of the sales pitch for the COmmon Business-Protected Language was that anyone could learn to code in almost plain English.
Also, the stuff they wind up making is the kind of stuff that people with no coding experience make. Cooking up an ugly website with terrible performance and security isn’t much harder than making an ugly presentation with lots of WordArt. But it never was, either.
Between COBOL and LLM-enhanced “low code” we had other stuff, like that infamous product from MS that produced terrible HTML. At this point I can’t even recall what it was called. The SharePoint editor maybe?
Which frameworks? 😂
Ruby on Rails was probably the peak of the hype wave. It had a tutorial that any manager could follow to build a simple data driven website in minutes.
Is that a “framework”? Anyhow it was first released a year after you claimed this all happened.
Well, forget for a moment everything you know about webpages and now you want a form where the user can create an account. The sales person tells you that the user has entered the data for us, so it just needs to be sent with a request to the backend, which always looks the same. And then it just needs to be put into a INSERT INTO, which also always looks the same.
All of that stuff can clearly be auto-generated by the framework. And 70% of the boilerplate code does exactly that, so that obviously means 70% of the workload of your devs disappears, which means you can get rid of 70% of your developers.
It just makes it really easy to scam people, when they don’t know the technical side…
Damn, sounds like a a good time to start a consulting firm. I wish I was a decent businessman, I’d love to own my own consulting company.
Damn, sounds like a a good time to start a consulting firm.
Yeah. I did it for one do the previous go-rounds of this pattern. It was lucrative, but it also meant I was constantly soothing the egos of assholes.
Assholes make great customers, because everyone else is charging them 4x to 12x the going rate, as well.
But eventually there’s been enough money to pay off my student loans and car loans and I just wanted my daily work to be with intelligent compassionate people, instead.
I was self-employed for around 7 years and finally came to the conclusion that I’m just not a very good businessman. When you’re self employed, you’re running the business more than coding, or doing the things that you’re actually passionate about, and I didn’t enjoy it. Not to mention that sometimes I’d work 15-17 hours per day, 7 days per week, for weeks on end, just to be pretty poor. Plus health insurance is a fucking nightmare without some massive corporation subsidizing it. Maybe that part is better now with the ACA and insurance market website, but idk, because I finally gave up and got a job right around the time that the ACA kicked in. Idk, part of me thinks that I could hire a business manager to do the business parts, and I could just architect solutions, but the more realistic part of me thinks they’d probably steal all of my profits while I was trying to solve coding problems.
Not sure what web framework “made you obsolete” in 2003. I don’t even think jQuery existed then let alone anything you could accurately call a framework
Edit: just looked it up, first jQuery release was 2006 so I’m not sure what you’re smoking but I want some
People genuinely thought ColdFusion would allow untrained businessmen to make complex websites with no coding, only markup. It could generously be described as a “web framework”, and it was released in 1995.
Wysiwygs were all the rage in the late 90s early 00s with a promise that the hard part of development was actually just doing the layout.
Tools like frontpage have been tricking incredulous entrepreneurs that programming is easy since at least then.
I’m assuming he means backend frameworks, like Ruby on Rails, Codeigniter, CakePHP, etc. That fits the timeframe, I think?
Wow. I forget that there are babies on the Internet, now.
There were back-end web frameworks as early as the 1990s. The Internet started long before JavaScript existed.
God I feel old, now. Fuck. Lol.
Yeah, I didn’t do backend stuff for a while so maybe I somehow missed those being called frameworks. Sounds like they were though. And it’s nice of you to say I’m young lol
Can you imagine the absolute misery of working for someone like this.
A person who thinks developers are all useless, and has total contempt for any skills that aren’t “business” stuff.
A person who thinks tech is easy and you can “just” do this and “just” do that and everything will be done, always telling you “this is so easy I could do it myself” while any contribution they make only makes things worse, and if there’s any kind of hold-up it’s because you’re either “lazy” or “incompetent”
No thanks.
Thanks, but the reason I don’t have to imagine is because that job is a memory.
Dev is a large financial drain and a ton of companies accounting departments(or whoever) don’t see the value. Ok the IT department is responsible for the website? The website is ‘done’ though so why are we still paying all these IT/Dev people? Cue massive IT layoffs…wall street/investors are super happy.
No new features/bug fixes/security updates. Customers are unhappy(who cares?, they’re still spending money!). Oh…massive data leak from some unpatched security vulnerability. All the sudden IT budget blows up…
The damage to reputation and future business deals are hindered. The amount of promising you’ve identified the problem and mitigated that from happening again etc. The requirements of other companies that you follow xyz audits to do business with them etc(which can be a good thing, it’s just very costly to a business).
Then a handful of years later they forget it all and repeat…
I work in IT/Dev…oof.
Then a handful of years later they forget it all and repeat…
They don’t forget, they never learned in the first place. In their minds the original engineers messed up, and that’s why there was a vulnerability, or a missing feature. “We need a quick and cheap vendor to fix the mistakes of our awful engineering team that we laid off a year ago”.
The requirements of other companies that you follow xyz audits to do business with them etc(which can be a good thing, it’s just very costly to a business).
I secretly enjoyed getting on the phone (one-on-one) to explain this one to leaders.
“Previous decisions have made us a complete laughing stock among our peers. How would you like me to write that up for the audit report? Okay. I’ll use my judgement.”
I never understood it, but business owners seem to have utter contempt for the people who actually make their money. I’m not talking about support staff, I mean the people that if they stay home, dollars aren’t getting printed for everyone else. In private EMS, the billing staff would constantly get parties and catering and gift cards and shit, while the crews actually running the calls and writing the billable reports got third-hand furniture, moldy stations, ambulances held together with a fucking wish, and constant bellyaching about how paying the crews minimum wage was costing the company too much money. I’m starting to notice the same pattern pop up between the dev team and the product team as my software company scales.
It’s quite easy to understand, even though it’s bullshit.
When the sales department has a good month and makes loads of sales, the business too has a good month. The activity of those individuals directly correlates to revenue on a month by month basis, so management are naturally going to be incentivised to give the sales team perks and bonuses as motivation.
In a given month the IT/dev department doesn’t “generate” any money at all, they only cost. We know they generate value in other ways of course, because the product the sales team sell is surely built and operated by the dev team, but because the relationship is indirect management don’t care to reward you.
Reward sales with nice perks -> Revenue goes up
Reward devs with nice perks -> Revenue doesn’t change
So of course management doesn’t see the benefit in giving more money to tech, because it doesn’t seem like you get anything back.
Of course, the reality is that investment in tech will make the product and the business better and more profitable, but it takes months or years to see the impact of changes, and management has a short attention span.
The best part is when some dufus goes “I’ve got a great idea and the grit to see it through. I just need to hire a tech person to do it for me”.
My first boss was a “just” guy. Thankfully he was also pro dev, being one himself, but sadly he was completely self-taught. This led to some interesting ideas, such as:
“We should not migrate anything to, or start any new projects in, .net framework 3. We should become the experts in .net framework 2, so people who need .net 2 solutions come to us.”
“Agile means we do less documentation.” (But we were already doing no documentation)
“Why are you guys still making that common functions class library? I just copy a .vb file into every project I work on, that way I can change it to suit the new project.” (This one led to the most amusing compound error I’ve fixed for a fellow dev.)
Good guy, all in all. But frustrating to work for often.
I kinda wish it included the dates on these. Not having them makes me a bit dubious
well this happens because people have zero understanding of what programming is. they think that programmers have memorised some “dictionaries” that translate human specifications to machine code with complete disregard for problem solving and design part of things.
when actually everyone knows engineering is all about being able to negotiate precisely which snacks and soft drinks go in the office break room
t’ve always wondered, why lots of people think that if something you do is technical, then it’s inherently not creative? You sure have a bit lesser degree of self-expression, but self-expression is mere an aspect of creativity
Its easy for a passerby to appreciate the work, skill, and creativity that goes into a painting or song. Its hard for the average person to infer those things looking at an electrical box or a plumbing network. An electrician knows when they’re looking at good up to code wiring and a plumber can tell if the plumbing can be put together right. Those are things the average person has no concept of and doesn’t want to think about all unless they have to. One provides instant artistic appeal while having no practical value, the other provides practical value but its systems are too complicated for the average person to appreciate in totality.
Can you blame them? Last month my colleague (we’re both developers) pointed out how fucking deep we got into the woods of the “What if”s and “What should happen here”s of a feature that looked dead simple on its surface.
I love and hate in equal measure the hubris with which one regards a “simple” problem that turns out to be very difficult. I love it because it usually ends up being productive eventually. I hate it because it’s hard to emerge from the rabbit hole once you’ve committed to it.
This man doesn’t even know the difference between AGI and a text generation program, so it doesn’t surprise me he couldn’t tell the difference between that program and real, living human beings.
He also seems to have deleted his LinkedIn account.
AGI is currently just a buzzword anyway…
Microsoft defines AGI in contracts in dollars of earnings…
If you’d travel in time 5 years back and show the currently best GPT to someone, he/she would probably accept it as AGI.
I’ve seen multiple experts in German television explaining that LLMs will reach the AGI state within a few years…
(That does not mean that the CEO guy isn’t a fool. Let’s wait for the first larger problem that requires not writing new code, but rather dealing with a bug, something not documented, or similar…)
LLMs can’t become AGIs. They have no ability to actually reason. What they can do is use predigested reasoning to fake it. It’s particularly obvious with certain classes of proble., when they fall down. I think the fact it fakes so well tells us more about human intelligence than AI.
That being said, LLMs will likely be a critical part of a future AGI. Right now, they are a lobotomised speech centre. Different groups are already starting to tie them to other forms of AI. If we can crack building a reasoning engine, then a full AGI is possible. An LLM might even form its internal communication method, akin to our internal monologue.
While I haven’t read the paper, the comment’s explanation seems to make sense. It supposedly contains a mathematical proof that making AGI from a finite dataset is a NP-hard problem. I have to read it and parse out the reasoning, if true, it would make for a great argument in cases like these.
His disdain for actual human beings is disgusting. “Time to pack their bags”. Fuck you, buddy!
Edit: I just looked at the second screenshot. Of course he’s a real estate developer.
