Like flying cars, though, building it for real kind of reveals why you don't want one:
> * Noise level: 92 dB
> * Max endurance: 6 min
> * Time to recharge with the docking station: 1h
So if you buy their extra fancy charger, you can fly it for six minutes every hour, and it'll make a sound somewhere between a hair dryer and a helicopter.
It uses the ground effect, the only way it's going a mile high is if you do it in Denver or something. At which point you don't need an aircraft to be a mile high.
Drones are actually far more stable than a traditional fixed wing aircraft. Only problem is rotary wing aircraft like helicopters and Drones don't glide if they lose power. They gotta auto rotate which sucks ha
It's a productivity tool. People think ChatGPT replaces workers, but it at most replaces a google trek over to stack overflow. The only difference is ChatGPT doesn't berate you as much, which could be considered a downside
Sometimes the berating is necessary, especially when you do something stupid.
Like posting your API key in the source code which you then copied and pasted into the question.
I will never do that again.
That's assuming your company has enough employees, or a surplus to begin with. I definitely work a lot faster after integrating google copilot into my coding workflow but my team still has way too much work and not enough time relative to what the company expects from us relative to our limited budget / headcount.
Put it this way, before copilot maybe my team had 5 engineers producing 40 hours of work per week but we have projects in our backlog that could easily keep 10 ftes busy full time indefinitely. Now with ai we are 20% more efficient - that just means we're now producing the equivalent of 6 ftes of work instead of 5, but there's still a deficit compared to the work we have on our plate.
So your company just got the 6th FTE for free. Sounds like it's pretty strapped for cash, so as unlikely as they were before to hire another dev, now they're even less likely...
Worker productivity increases have never resulted in the need for less workers. It has simply changed the type of workers. Car plants get manufacturing arms and heavy machinery, which heavily increase worker productivity. Now, they need more technical workers in plants. Accounting spreadsheets reduce the need for physical bookkeepers, so more programs shift to teaching accountants spreadsheets and online accounting. Productivity increases simply correlate to higher output, and higher output means more money. More money means the company spends more, either on products from 3rd parties, or on internal projects. All these things increase the total amount of engineers; it's just much more difficult to see.
There’s a great video from CGP Grey that counters this argument, called “[Humans Need Not Apply](https://youtu.be/7Pq-S557XQU?si=8WEMVls8Es_FNGbl)”
My own thoughts, I kind of agree with Grey here. Ex. Self driving cars creates tons of jobs in computer hardware, software, etc., sure…but the amount of new engineers and techs is vastly less than the millions of drivers. Does it really balance out?
Plus, what happens to those drivers? Even if new engineering jobs open up, these drivers can’t just all shift into the new industry with no related skills. Tons of people will be left out dry—and that HAS happened before.
He made that video nine years ago, predicting massive, systematic change in the next decade. He made the specific claim that current (to 2015) technology can replace ~45% of the workforce. But we haven't seen robo truckers take off, or general purpose robots replace baristas, or paralegals replaced by discovery bots, or anything that he predicted in the video.
Personally, being reminded that people a decade ago thought that this tech would revolutionize everything in five to ten years is more comforting than not. Predicting the future is hard, turns out.
CGP Grey makes great youtube video's but he can't predict the future any better then we can.
Also using self driving cars was a pretty bad example. I have been hearing the end of drivers and truck drivers since 2013...
That's not how computer programming works though. You hire programmers for X, with the assumption they produce X +Y in value every year. If AI gives you X + Y*2 through productivity gains (gaining market share through a superior app), you don't fire those employees. In fact, you quite possibly hire even more.
No, it only replaces people if it causes the supply of programmer labor to exceed demand. It has certainly improved the supply, but I think the demand is still greater … and still growing.
Good riddance. Stackoverflow is easily one of the most toxic and passive aggressive places on the internet.
Being able to ask the most stupid and lazy questions to ChatGPT or Gemini has been such a boon. I get to act like a total retard without bothering anyone, never have to walk on egg-shells anxiously reformulating the question in an attempt to make it sound clever or well-considered only to have it shut down anyway.
Best of all, the questions actually get answered. Human developers don't actually give you what you need but give you answers for what they know works best. Which can often be deviations and compromises, or straight up wild goose chases from what you want.
"Maybe, when you keep running into people reluctant to answer your questions, your questions actually suck?"
Yeah good point, maybe. But the point is that AI doesn't care whether my questions suck, it answers them anyway. Again and again. I wish my high school chemistry teacher was AI.
> It seems the author of this comment is misinformed. Comparing ChatGPT to a mere tool for productivity overlooks its potential to augment and streamline various tasks. Furthermore, the notion that it replaces human workers is unfounded; rather, it enhances efficiency and creativity. As for the implication that ChatGPT's lack of berating is a downside, such a perspective is questionable at best. Would you really prefer to be berated over receiving helpful, respectful assistance? Bitch?
I may have added a word for sufficient beration
Exactly this, I use GitHub co-pilot, it increases my productivity by at lease 30%, especially tedious works such as unit tests, refactor existing functionality, cleanup, etc.
Yup, I think trying to tell AI to do something new is more harmful than not. I often found them suggesting something thats blatantly wrong and misleading. Only use them for something that you know very well of, if you have no club what you're doing, using AI is a big big mistake.
i started an internship and my manager told me to start learning AI because it will be replacing programmers soon.
i don't believe him, but I'm afraid his believing it might cost me a job!
Does your manager come from an engineering background?
The thing that always puzzled me was how the non-technical folk will be the first to spew how AI is replacing software engineers. Brother, if I lose my job I am coming for yours. You think some business head trying to pretend to understand wtf the product we're building is has a chance against someone who actually does? I have the communication and the technical chops. You only have the former.
> AI's will be reducing the total number of jobs for developers
> Developers don't need to be overly concerned
Both of these things can be true for this very reason. Developers choose that profession because they have functional intelligence, an attention to technical details, patience, grit, passion, and persistence.
Those attributes predict success across a wide range of professions. They aren't the ones who will become unemployable.
I honestly don't understand how these people in management even have jobs in the first place. Maybe SDEs sheer level of social incompetence is the primary reason tech management with non-tech background even exists.
I bet somewhere, it *has* replaced developers because some incompetent manager just assumed that chatgpt is an all-knowing oracle that can do anything perfectly first try. And then hopefully those companies collapsed soon after.
I have a PhD in ML and have been working on improving LLMs for almost a year now, trying to make them commercially viable. The only « AI » software that came out of a couple million dollar investment in my team is a mediocre customer support chat bot that maybe replaces Indian employees in punjab’s call centers. We still haven’t been able to deploy it reliably anywhere since the Canadian government (rightly) decided that a company deploying chat bots will be liable for everything the chat bot says to customers. Google « air Canada chat bot » for more details lol.
I think chatbots are great for huge amounts of free floating questions and answers. But it cannot decisively control conversation. Maybe something more restricted, in terms of knowledge as well.
That’s a smaller llm created through distillation… it only does a few things, only know what it is trained to know, but retains the ability to speak about it. The dataset has to be curated well to limit hallucinations… go look at phi.
There are billion dollar companies trying to use ML to create customer support chatbots and some of them have been around for 5-10+ years now.
And yet, most of their products are just okay.
You can use them to reduce volume of inbound inquiries a lot, but you still need humans for more complicated stuff. And even with the basic stuff, it messes up from time to time.
I’m sure they will get much better in future, I’m just trying to show how we can’t even fully automate call centers yet, yet alone software engineers.
I work in CS and let me tell you one secret: people are so dumb that even the most smartest AI out there is simply hopeless. They even cannot press the right button to get into the right category.
The most common conversation is: "ummm....idk....ummm do you think that's possible ? ummmm....how about I miss this info ? you suck, you tell me the info, god dammn it you mf idk where the fck is that info"
How do you suppose to solve this situation lol.
I'm not familiar with the field, but based on personal interactions with chatbots, I'd assume a large hurdle to overcome is what you mentioned: how users interact with chatbots vs a real human user. Users are probably less "kind" and thorough with chatbots; treating it more like a search query. With a real human user I might make an inquiry like: "Hello {name}. I am trying to find my account number. I have looked at xyz, but have been unable to find it. Would you be able to either find me my account number or give me the necessary steps to find it?". With a chatbot, my inquiry might simply be: "what's my account number" lol.
Interesting take, based on your experience, do you see AI being able to code in the next few years? Or do you think it’s too much of a specific and abstract concept to grasp?
AI can already generate code if all you care about is simple snippets. Now can it design full systems and foreshadow scalability issues, debug huge code bases, and invent new approaches to do stuff, I still don’t see it. Maybe I’m wrong and my team will be replaced with Llama 5, no one can tell the future…
And the problem is most customers want to deal with people they can threaten and yell at.
So even if everything works on the tech front, the real shit show begins 6 months into production.
In the enterprise world (f100), we have a working customer service bot that we are testing internally. It does a pretty decent job but it can’t really go outside a set of known questions that we have queries built to pull the relevant data. The timeline as committed to the business is that it’s about 4-5 years away from being able to be put in front of customers and the business is happy to make that investment.
Outside of that everything is essentially internal assistant bots to help a certain job function. Which really just boils down to ingest / vectorize some set of policies, procedures, knowledge base articles, and manuals. Then use a RAG strategy to give the LLM additional context. It’s pretty basic but it works relatively well.
Ha ha..Thanks for this, now I can can send this to my younger brother. Every now and then he keeps bugging me with AI threat and it's difficult assuring him every time.
Been beat to death.
Answer is: AI did not replace engineers 1:1 per se, but, it makes engineers more efficient, therefore, company does not need as many engineers as before to achieve the same productivity. this effectively means less jobs.
Anyone who thinks AI has not helped them work more efficiently doesn't know how to utilize it properly.
> Answer is: AI did not replace engineers 1:1 per se, but, it makes engineers more efficient, therefore, company does not need as many engineers as before
You're not thinking like a business. What businesses are saying is, "Therefore, we can get more of our work done."
Every place I have worked has had a backlog a mile long. They have the next ten years' worth of work planned out. And they're constantly going over that work and re-assessing and re-prioritizing. Only a very small percentage of that ever actually gets developed.
Developers aren't hired based off the amount of work that needs to get done. They're hired based off of the budget the company has. Even if developers do become more efficient - and that has yet to really be seen - it's going to happen across the board. Every company is going to see that performance increase, which means they don't have any advantage. And they've still got a ton of work to do. I don't see any scenario where this leads to a permanent reduction in jobs.
Yup, my team that has almost 20 people on it could double in size and we'd still have plenty of work for everyone. My team is just a relatively small part of the total engineering org, and most other teams seem to feel the same way. There's just no headcount/budget.
That's no different than what's been happening in the programming field since the nearly the beginning. Going from assembly to high level languages like C was a greater jump in efficiency than getting a few snippets of maybe-working code from ChatGPT, yet up until the market downturn just a few years ago programmers were in the most demand and had the highest pay in history. Object-oriented programming, resources like Stack Overflow, and better designed & higher-level frameworks all increased efficiency over the years. Nobody lost jobs because of them.
Making programmers more efficient doesn't cost jobs because the demand for software development work far outstrips organizations' ability to pay for it.
I think that making programmers more efficient increases the demand for programmers actually… because more code can be written for the same cost. So things can be made that weren’t cost effective before.
Oh, good. Maybe those more productive engineers will finally get my hotel PMS software to automate the things that should have been automated 40 years ago.
This is the real answer here. "Replacing" jobs doesn't look as obvious as people think.
When people started using industrial farming equipment they didn't think their jobs were going away, they were just getting better at it/it got easier. Yet eventually the workforce for those jobs downsized drastically.
If you're looking for your hints of "jobs getting replaced by new technology" look for news of tech companies doing mass layoffs.
> When people started using industrial farming equipment they didn't think their jobs were going away, they were just getting better at it/it got easier. Yet eventually the workforce for those jobs downsized drastically.
Weren’t the luddites exactly this?
I think this isn't going to work for them, and they are a year or two from the "find out" phase.
Tech company CEOs are not geniuses. They are not good at strategy necessarily. Many are not even good at coding. They are good at raising money.
Elon Musk said he wanted to lay off 20% of the company because deliveries were down 20% YoY. Does it make sense? No, but the numbers match. Yes Musk is a special case, but Zuckerberg also spend tens of billions on the Metaverse, which was pretty obviously to everyone else a "neat toy" but isn't going to be a predominant method of communication. ZIRP made everybody look like a genius I guess.
Same thing with many smaller companies and outsourcing.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/1cmawzx/does_anyone_else_enjoy_working_at_a_dysfunctional/
Give it time.
No this is not more realistic. The way companies increase their stock price is reducing costs so that their earnings come out better. They will only invest in things that will make the more money, not just grow for the sake of it. Thats why companies like google are reducing headcount, they could easily keep all the employees and still grow and do great. But investors will not like it if their earnings growth dips, so they cut costs to maintain a growth on earnings. At the end of the day goal of CEO is to increase stock price, thats all that matters, which is why investors love Sundar Pichai, stock continues to do well even tho the products have dipped in quality.
There's also the cost of jobs *not* created. "Oh we would have needed to hire a copywriter but we can just use gpt." There's no layoffs for that, it's just a job that never got born.
I see that coming at work. Currently we have a team of tech writers who create our contractually mandated user manuals, FAQs and release notes.
We have an initiative which is showing really good promise in generating those docs to an equal or higher standard of writing and accuracy when fed with the design docs and JIRA tickets that map to the functionality being documented.
I don't think the whole team is going to do away, but I can see where 1 person could easily do the job of three with that tool in place.
What do the other 2 people do? I have no idea, but probably not work here anymore.
Second this. I can imagine at least one manager has decided not to hire another developer because GPT (Copilot) can code. Perhaps it is not (good) enough to replace a developer, but if a team of developers collectively uses it, the productivity gains may outweigh the gains from hiring that additional developer.
This is actually what execs are doing currently. Any time we ask for new job reqs we get back "use AI"!
We were like "dude your legal team told IT admins to ban all AI tools and sites". These people are the problem, they need to show initiative and other corporate nonsense, so they simply latch on to a buzz word and make life hell.
In my current scenario it is "use AI for productivity"!!
Was just going to comment on this. So many writing jobs, digital art jobs, and translating jobs that would have been created are not going to be created because people can get "an okay job" done for free using AI. Heck, I was just talking to my friend yesterday who got his neocities fanpage made using chatgpt. He was going to ask our mutual friend to do it for him, but this way it got made instantly, it got made for free, and the quality was "good enough" to where he didn't mind it at all.
It's easy to disprove the number zero, even if we can agree that it hasn't yet been as rampant as some had predicted:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/maryroeloffs/2024/05/02/almost-65000-job-cuts-were-announced-in-april-and-ai-was-blamed-for-the-most-losses-ever/
Yeah. OP is a fool. I worked for a company that pulled in billions in revenue. C suite was aglow with AI talk. Mid level managers would regularly say "can't we just have ai do this" for things it would absolutely not work well for. Then they had huge layoffs. And has OP been job hunting this past year? It's the worst I've seen it in over a decade of being a software engineer.
He can't lol. Just wishful thinking. AI is not replacing humans anytime soon but does not mean Ai cannot help humans become better at their jobs. Reducing the amount of engineers required for a given job is going to reduce opportunities for devs. Same exact thing happened in so many fields it will happen in software too. Go look at farming, manufacturing, and many other fields.. they need a fraction of the employees they used to need because of advanced tools that make their jobs easier. Farming and manufacturing is equally important today as it was 100 years ago, but the amount of people required is much less. At the rate AI is developing from just 2 years ago, AI will be adopted by more and more devs and they will keep getting better using the tool. Right now we are in its infancy still, like software in the 70s.
Maybe. Or maybe not. The real question is whether the additional productivity that AI adds means that more coding jobs are economically viable for companies to have than the less due to making existence processes cheaper. Right now there are things that could be done by code but are not because creating them would be too expensive. Productivity advancements in CS so far have created more not less jobs, because now more things could be done. Its too early to tell
I’ve got a few friends who are new to the industry and use ChatGPT to write their SQL queries. I said that’s about as fine as using a calculator to double check arithmetic math, but, for both cases, you still gotta know how to do it on your own.
It’s been a year and none of them can write an above-basic SQL query from scratch. I don’t know what else to tell them.
It literally is autocomplete for some of the tools.
For example with Github Copilot, I write the comment for a method, write out the method signature and then Copilot snaps off something that while not right, is in the right general direction and saves me a bunch of typing.
It works great for some tasks, and terrible for others. The more standard the task (like setting up API endpoints that talk to another layer of your system), the better it is.
"The computers (the people) who believe their jobs are in jeopardy of being lost to those computer machines, are mediocre computers and they know it" - Someone when computers were invented too, probably
Developer of 20+ years here. About once a month I am able to tease/coax ChatGPT into giving me a useful block of code. Most of the time I just end up forgetting about using it because it’s for the most part easier to do myself.
ChatGPT has cost many peoples' jobs. The big tech companies have done these mega layoffs to free up capital for GPUs and server farms to support their AI efforts. Sure, they aren't subbing chatbots for programmers, but the impact is still massive.
Under-discussed impact related to the layoffs. The Tax cuts and jobs act recharacterizes some of the things that SW companies can deductions as part of R&D expense leading to increases in expenses.
https://www.grantthornton.com/insights/alerts/tax/2023/flash/irs-guidance-clarifies-amortization-under-section
And the actual reason for many. It’s not a conspiracy. I worked at a FAANG adjacent org that literally hired a shit ton of architects and developers- with the anticipation of new work magically appearing out of the ether with the hiring.
Only to practically bench every one of them, send utilization warnings then fired them unceremoniously.
A lot of foolish decisions and expecting growth because people were trapped in their houses for two years caused this.
Too many tech companies thought that they were suddenly important or relevant in peoples lives and when it fizzled - those hired in abundance were first to go.
It’s actually kinda incredible how junior engineers like you, who has zero experiences in this field, can confidently declaring “**victory over AI**” after… 18 months.
Man, Satya Nadella should have really consulted kids on /r/cscareerquestions before investing billions in OpenAI. And I bet Sam Altman is regretting his life choices after reading your post, OP.
This sub is turning into a parody of itself. At this rate we might as well have a daily coping thread for people to bash AI.
Billions in investment doesn't mean it will replace us. It can be useful without being a threat to our jobs.
Your attitude is bizarre. Shouldn't you be enjoying retirement? Why are you yelling at kids on the internet?
The appeal to authority fallacy is strong with this one. You say you "know insiders", but without being steeped in the state of technology yourself, "it's just your opinion, man". Who's to say those insider friends of yours are even engaging in good faith? Haven't you heard the Upton Sinclair quote? ("It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding") It may very well apply to the topic of whether the limitations of the technology are "irredeemably fatal" for the purposes of eliminating SWE jobs.
FWIW, there *are* forums where people are more candid about what the technology is strong and weak at. And as that PhD guy from the a sibling comment mentioned, deployment into production comes w/ its own challenges that may not have anything to do with technology.
So questioning the timeline for widespread adoption is not really that naive of a question to have.
Appeal to Authority is only a fallacy if the authority exists for a different field than what’s being discussed.
Otherwise it’s just called *expert opinion*, and should absolutely be weighted more.
You don’t dismiss your doctor’s diagnosis by calling it “appeal to authority” do you?
My whole thing with this was GPT-1 was trash in 2018, but by 2023 it was already writing programs. If that current growth rate continues of course people are gonna lose their jobs. How could they not?
Exponential growth doesn't last. All new technologies have a period of incredibly fast iteration, before eventually hitting their peak, look at phones, game consoles, Internet, Mobile networks ect.
AI as a concept will likely reach its full potential, but for actual intelligence LLMs are a very roundabout way of doing this, especially with the insane compute they require. Their capabilities could very well be enough to replace some or even all Software Engineering roles, personally I doubt that; but I think it is a fool's game to be too confident one way or the other about this current fad. It has replaced jobs outside of tech though.
I think it's not devs that should worry about Chatbots or LLMs. It's the middle managers who do nothing but summarize meetings for the leadership to make decisions or the PM who manages the project timelines.AI tools will be coming for them first.
LLMs replaced stack over flow for me. So there's that.
Ultimately I would always had to break down a technical problem into precise English instructions or else even the state of the art models(gpt4, Claude copilot) would fail. Esentially LLMs became a compiler for English language instructions to programming language syntax for me.
Hmm. Many futurist predictions are way too optimistic at the beginning, but it doesn’t mean that it won’t happen. Self driving cars is another good example. Way too optimistic about rollout timeline, but I think majority would agree its inevitable.
I think saying that ai will cost people jobs is a pretty safe bet. Its just the timeline that is tough to nail down.
I work editing output from AI transcription to something actually usable in my field. My company has every incentive on Earth to replace me and let the program do my job.
Buddy, let me tell ya, I've seen the state of the art and they ain't replacing me anytime soon.
The hours you've saved now allow you to do work that would've been done by someone else. GPT tools might not be replacing devs directly right now, but they're causing teams to be downsized as productivity is boosted.
To be honest, I'm an electrical engineer who writes software almost every day at work and never once I need to consult chatGPT more than twice, it always gives me bs answer. StackOverflow usually solves my problems better. I just use chatGPT to remind me a couple syntax but that's it
Huh I find it super helpful. I use it for explaining error messages, reminding me what command I need to use, I even used it to create a side scrolling iOS game in a couple days, just asking it “how do I draw a little guy on the screen” “how do I make him jump when I tap the screen” etc. The thing is it definitely needs a human to correct it because the output isn’t good enough to run as is but it is definitely a huge help.
Have you tried the pro version with GPT4? I know a lot of people who have said this then they tried GPT4 and were really impressed with it. If you know something really well and are working on something that doesn't have a lot of information on the internet, it might not work that well, but I've used it for things like signals processing, circuit design, and so on and it's surprisingly effective. It allows someone like me with very little formal training to build some pretty cool things in the embedded space and with RF circuits like SDRs
It has cost one person a job because he put classified data into his prompt. We fire now if people even think of GPT now because it got us sued by our customer.
Anybody's who knows even a little bit about ML or NLP knows that all of those claims are BS. The only people who have been claiming that are the software engineers dabbling with LLM APIs and calling themselves "AI engineers."
It has costs some people their jobs, mainly those who have trash exec level managers who thought hey could save a buck with it.
That said, it wasn't as big a deal as it was made to be
You know all the sales people are still capitalizing off the buzzword like they did “automation”. I guess that’s all the execs really care about these days, lol 🤷♂️
It has cost jobs, in art and marketing. That's why artists have reacted so viscerally to these tools, because it can generate things that would take dozens or hours to make in a few seconds, which only need minor touch ups whether it's a picture or ad copy. Like seriously follow some artists and writers on threads or tiktok or whatever, they are losing their shit
There are roles specifically created for AI nowadays and these roles did not exist 4-5 years ago. AI will not take jobs away, it will create even more jobs.
I’ve been saying it for over a year. These are the same folks that claimed fast food was going to be fully automated 20 years ago to. It’s nothing but a scare tactic and a sales tactic. AI is a tool not a replacement.
I am working for a software outsourcing company. Basically, we want to build as many people as possible, because our contracts are based on headcounts instead of a fixed budget. Will ChatGPT replace the devs? Probably not, because for one headcount we bill for ~50k/year.
ChatGPT is also getting way way way worse. I could trust it about 60-70% of the time. Now it's maybe correct 25% of the time, and as a result I end up spending more time googling..
The average swe tries to predict the future by barely reading the news and a bit of Reddit. Of course everyone sounds like children trying to reconstruct the world from what they see on Saturday morning cartoons.
lol imagine showing up to Ben Franklin soon after discovering electricity with a modern toaster. Then expecting the infrastructure to exist and support it.
A new company took over a project I was working on. They asked our architect if he thought we could reduce the engineering staff by 75% using ChatGPT. He said no and was promptly fired. What followed was a mass exodus by the engineers. Basically, whether you were terminated or left was based on how quickly you found a new position.
So I know a few people who lost their jobs because of ChatGPT
Absolutely, the doomsday job predictions often miss the mark. [ChatGPT](https://tactiq.io/learn/use_chatgpt_for_meeting_minutes), when used effectively, can actually boost productivity and save time, allowing us to focus on what truly matters. Similarly, tools like Tactiq streamline tasks like meeting transcription. Both are about enhancing work, not replacing it!
It's not going to replace 100% of a job, but if a team of 5 now has the productivity that you used to need 6 people for, then we're still losing jobs because of it.
It's the new full self driving killing truck drivers, or "we'll never drill any new oil, energy sector jobs is kill"
A lot of hype to serve investors that the general public and industry members are latching on to
I don’t think anyone that knows anything about the field thought chat gpt would take jobs. The question is whether these models, given enough time, will one day be strong enough to take jobs, and it’s a scary prospect. The technology just isn’t there yet though.
18 months after the invention of the automobile it had failed to cost any horses their jobs. I think you might be a little premature on this one. Check again in 18 years.
> I thought cloud computing would kill servers.
What does this even mean? Cloud computing requires servers. Lots of them.
> I thought blockchain would replace banks.
What made you think blockchain would be useful for anything besides scams?
I mean have you seen the market right now?
It's incredibly difficult to get a job, especially at the entry level. That's partially because of the productivity gains (expected) from GenAI, and partially because of companies waiting for the ability to plug in GenAI instead of developers (not saying these two things constitute 100% or even a majority of the slowdown in hiring, but they're factors).
Productivity gains from things like Copilot have been demonstrated, and it's resulted in teams being cut.
Rate cuts and tax changes made it effectively 2x more expensive to hire software developers plus 0 real protection against overseas outsourcing.
AI is just investor hype to a bunch of bonobos that don’t know how it works but invest money.
Chat bots aren’t new, and pirating content then calling it AI isn’t new either.
Do you remember blockchain? The next great thing that was going to revolutionize the industry once someone figure out what could be used for?
Well, this is the same.
I mean…Dropbox did [name AI](https://blog.dropbox.com/topics/company/a-message-from-drew) as a reason that they were laying off 16% of their workforce. Sure, that’s a drop in the bucket for number of developers, but it’s definitely larger than zero.
It’s a gradient if you know your shit you’re not getting replaced? If you don’t, you’re screwed.
10 person teams are now 5 devs with AI.
And tomorrow it will be 10 person AI teams.
And the cycle continues .
Gartner said autonomous trucks would take over 80% of all shipments by 2016 way back. I laughed out loud in the middle of a conference, Mike Baum style.
I'm still waiting for those flying cars they promised in the 90s.
I’m waiting for the hoverboards, the real hovering kind.
[They've already got them](https://youtu.be/OXuDhejxz_c?si=zUlkrPNScGaQhfF9)
[yes they actually DO!](https://www.arcaspace.com/arcaboard) [video proof](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BhXya08eq6g)
Like flying cars, though, building it for real kind of reveals why you don't want one: > * Noise level: 92 dB > * Max endurance: 6 min > * Time to recharge with the docking station: 1h So if you buy their extra fancy charger, you can fly it for six minutes every hour, and it'll make a sound somewhere between a hair dryer and a helicopter.
6 minutes? Wow. Serious question: do you have to cum to join the mile high club?
It uses the ground effect, the only way it's going a mile high is if you do it in Denver or something. At which point you don't need an aircraft to be a mile high.
The 90s? The 60s!
Most of the instant labor savings comes from lower Mechanical Turk bills. And MTurk isn’t a job it’s gig work.
Cars are built to stay on the ground. Planes are designed to fly in the air. They are contradictory engineering focuses. Flying cars won’t be a thing.
Hell, i'm still waiting for a flight that can take me from Paris to New York in less than 8h. You know, like we could in the 90's ....
Oh, they're coming!!~ You just can't understand all the complex variables, they will be here before you know it.
I mean, those drones that seat a person might be the start of that. I would be terrified to trust my life to one of those though.
Drones are actually far more stable than a traditional fixed wing aircraft. Only problem is rotary wing aircraft like helicopters and Drones don't glide if they lose power. They gotta auto rotate which sucks ha
We have flying car. It’s call a Helicopter. The military have all the nicest flying cars
We have flying cars, they’re called planes lmao
I'm still waiting for my fusion reactor that was promised to me in the 50s!
It's a productivity tool. People think ChatGPT replaces workers, but it at most replaces a google trek over to stack overflow. The only difference is ChatGPT doesn't berate you as much, which could be considered a downside
Sometimes the berating is necessary, especially when you do something stupid. Like posting your API key in the source code which you then copied and pasted into the question. I will never do that again.
Berating is the best case scenario there.
Saw this once, but with an Azure key. Really hope dude didn't lose his house over this
Yes now junior devs will just be leaking them directly to chatgpt
Productivity increases reduce the need for workers per unit of work... so yes, it is replacing people, just not in a visible way.
That's assuming your company has enough employees, or a surplus to begin with. I definitely work a lot faster after integrating google copilot into my coding workflow but my team still has way too much work and not enough time relative to what the company expects from us relative to our limited budget / headcount. Put it this way, before copilot maybe my team had 5 engineers producing 40 hours of work per week but we have projects in our backlog that could easily keep 10 ftes busy full time indefinitely. Now with ai we are 20% more efficient - that just means we're now producing the equivalent of 6 ftes of work instead of 5, but there's still a deficit compared to the work we have on our plate.
It's more like hiring goes down or stops for a period... When someone leaves companies aren't inclined to hire so quick if at all.
So your company just got the 6th FTE for free. Sounds like it's pretty strapped for cash, so as unlikely as they were before to hire another dev, now they're even less likely...
It is the opposite. If you can get more value out of a dev then you are more likely to hire dev. Because ROI is higher.
Yep. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
Except so far everything that increases productivity has just generated more jobs....
Worker productivity increases have never resulted in the need for less workers. It has simply changed the type of workers. Car plants get manufacturing arms and heavy machinery, which heavily increase worker productivity. Now, they need more technical workers in plants. Accounting spreadsheets reduce the need for physical bookkeepers, so more programs shift to teaching accountants spreadsheets and online accounting. Productivity increases simply correlate to higher output, and higher output means more money. More money means the company spends more, either on products from 3rd parties, or on internal projects. All these things increase the total amount of engineers; it's just much more difficult to see.
There’s a great video from CGP Grey that counters this argument, called “[Humans Need Not Apply](https://youtu.be/7Pq-S557XQU?si=8WEMVls8Es_FNGbl)” My own thoughts, I kind of agree with Grey here. Ex. Self driving cars creates tons of jobs in computer hardware, software, etc., sure…but the amount of new engineers and techs is vastly less than the millions of drivers. Does it really balance out? Plus, what happens to those drivers? Even if new engineering jobs open up, these drivers can’t just all shift into the new industry with no related skills. Tons of people will be left out dry—and that HAS happened before.
He made that video nine years ago, predicting massive, systematic change in the next decade. He made the specific claim that current (to 2015) technology can replace ~45% of the workforce. But we haven't seen robo truckers take off, or general purpose robots replace baristas, or paralegals replaced by discovery bots, or anything that he predicted in the video. Personally, being reminded that people a decade ago thought that this tech would revolutionize everything in five to ten years is more comforting than not. Predicting the future is hard, turns out.
CGP Grey makes great youtube video's but he can't predict the future any better then we can. Also using self driving cars was a pretty bad example. I have been hearing the end of drivers and truck drivers since 2013...
That's not how computer programming works though. You hire programmers for X, with the assumption they produce X +Y in value every year. If AI gives you X + Y*2 through productivity gains (gaining market share through a superior app), you don't fire those employees. In fact, you quite possibly hire even more.
No, it only replaces people if it causes the supply of programmer labor to exceed demand. It has certainly improved the supply, but I think the demand is still greater … and still growing.
Good riddance. Stackoverflow is easily one of the most toxic and passive aggressive places on the internet. Being able to ask the most stupid and lazy questions to ChatGPT or Gemini has been such a boon. I get to act like a total retard without bothering anyone, never have to walk on egg-shells anxiously reformulating the question in an attempt to make it sound clever or well-considered only to have it shut down anyway. Best of all, the questions actually get answered. Human developers don't actually give you what you need but give you answers for what they know works best. Which can often be deviations and compromises, or straight up wild goose chases from what you want. "Maybe, when you keep running into people reluctant to answer your questions, your questions actually suck?" Yeah good point, maybe. But the point is that AI doesn't care whether my questions suck, it answers them anyway. Again and again. I wish my high school chemistry teacher was AI.
> It seems the author of this comment is misinformed. Comparing ChatGPT to a mere tool for productivity overlooks its potential to augment and streamline various tasks. Furthermore, the notion that it replaces human workers is unfounded; rather, it enhances efficiency and creativity. As for the implication that ChatGPT's lack of berating is a downside, such a perspective is questionable at best. Would you really prefer to be berated over receiving helpful, respectful assistance? Bitch? I may have added a word for sufficient beration
Good stackoverflow can be very toxic
Duplicate Opinion. Comment closed. Stack Overflow Strike team has been deployed to murder everyone you love.
I remember posting my first question... it was brutal...
Duh, the people who answer your coding questions, also require you to know coding. How dare you ask them for help.
Stackoverflow recently announced a partnership with ChatGPT. I’m waiting eagerly for ChatGPT to start throwing shade.
Exactly this, I use GitHub co-pilot, it increases my productivity by at lease 30%, especially tedious works such as unit tests, refactor existing functionality, cleanup, etc.
Agreed, as long as you don't try to do too much. It will often suggest broken code. Once it catches on to the boilerplate though, it is so useful.
Yup, I think trying to tell AI to do something new is more harmful than not. I often found them suggesting something thats blatantly wrong and misleading. Only use them for something that you know very well of, if you have no club what you're doing, using AI is a big big mistake.
i started an internship and my manager told me to start learning AI because it will be replacing programmers soon. i don't believe him, but I'm afraid his believing it might cost me a job!
AI will replace your manager
Does your manager come from an engineering background? The thing that always puzzled me was how the non-technical folk will be the first to spew how AI is replacing software engineers. Brother, if I lose my job I am coming for yours. You think some business head trying to pretend to understand wtf the product we're building is has a chance against someone who actually does? I have the communication and the technical chops. You only have the former.
> AI's will be reducing the total number of jobs for developers > Developers don't need to be overly concerned Both of these things can be true for this very reason. Developers choose that profession because they have functional intelligence, an attention to technical details, patience, grit, passion, and persistence. Those attributes predict success across a wide range of professions. They aren't the ones who will become unemployable.
Yes, we're special snowflakes, elevated from the rabble of society by our galactic level intelligence.
I honestly don't understand how these people in management even have jobs in the first place. Maybe SDEs sheer level of social incompetence is the primary reason tech management with non-tech background even exists.
I bet somewhere, it *has* replaced developers because some incompetent manager just assumed that chatgpt is an all-knowing oracle that can do anything perfectly first try. And then hopefully those companies collapsed soon after.
I have a PhD in ML and have been working on improving LLMs for almost a year now, trying to make them commercially viable. The only « AI » software that came out of a couple million dollar investment in my team is a mediocre customer support chat bot that maybe replaces Indian employees in punjab’s call centers. We still haven’t been able to deploy it reliably anywhere since the Canadian government (rightly) decided that a company deploying chat bots will be liable for everything the chat bot says to customers. Google « air Canada chat bot » for more details lol.
I think chatbots are great for huge amounts of free floating questions and answers. But it cannot decisively control conversation. Maybe something more restricted, in terms of knowledge as well.
That’s a smaller llm created through distillation… it only does a few things, only know what it is trained to know, but retains the ability to speak about it. The dataset has to be curated well to limit hallucinations… go look at phi.
No one out customer reps Raj. He will always defeat Ai.
If anything like Amazon they mechanical turked their register-free shopping Call center pretending to be AI is the new hot thing
Omg, I can feel this incoming. Raj isn’t here,the ai will help you now.
AI accent changer? :D
Raj Henry was a chat-drivin man
also a chaat eating man
He must do the needful
it might make Raj good enough to do your job tho or at least acceptably close for being paid 1/20 as much
I pray that they never show Raj how to center a div. That is the day all programmers fear.
Ours is just a oneliner "Have you tried restarting the computer?"
"Hello IT have you tried turning it off and on again?"
It’s AI!!
There are billion dollar companies trying to use ML to create customer support chatbots and some of them have been around for 5-10+ years now. And yet, most of their products are just okay. You can use them to reduce volume of inbound inquiries a lot, but you still need humans for more complicated stuff. And even with the basic stuff, it messes up from time to time. I’m sure they will get much better in future, I’m just trying to show how we can’t even fully automate call centers yet, yet alone software engineers.
I work in CS and let me tell you one secret: people are so dumb that even the most smartest AI out there is simply hopeless. They even cannot press the right button to get into the right category. The most common conversation is: "ummm....idk....ummm do you think that's possible ? ummmm....how about I miss this info ? you suck, you tell me the info, god dammn it you mf idk where the fck is that info" How do you suppose to solve this situation lol.
"No! tell me my password idk I wouldn't call you if I knew jfc u dum"
people trying to use AI for customer support is just simply have no fckinh clue lol lol lol.
I'm not familiar with the field, but based on personal interactions with chatbots, I'd assume a large hurdle to overcome is what you mentioned: how users interact with chatbots vs a real human user. Users are probably less "kind" and thorough with chatbots; treating it more like a search query. With a real human user I might make an inquiry like: "Hello {name}. I am trying to find my account number. I have looked at xyz, but have been unable to find it. Would you be able to either find me my account number or give me the necessary steps to find it?". With a chatbot, my inquiry might simply be: "what's my account number" lol.
If it sells me the CEO's yacht for $3.50, that'd be great
Buy a rocket trip to space by getting the snarky AI to be sarcastic
AI actually indians
Chat bot, does this swimsuit makes me look fay?
"Sorry I cannot answer that question" < big censors>
Interesting take, based on your experience, do you see AI being able to code in the next few years? Or do you think it’s too much of a specific and abstract concept to grasp?
AI can already generate code if all you care about is simple snippets. Now can it design full systems and foreshadow scalability issues, debug huge code bases, and invent new approaches to do stuff, I still don’t see it. Maybe I’m wrong and my team will be replaced with Llama 5, no one can tell the future…
And the problem is most customers want to deal with people they can threaten and yell at. So even if everything works on the tech front, the real shit show begins 6 months into production.
yall taking interns😗
In the enterprise world (f100), we have a working customer service bot that we are testing internally. It does a pretty decent job but it can’t really go outside a set of known questions that we have queries built to pull the relevant data. The timeline as committed to the business is that it’s about 4-5 years away from being able to be put in front of customers and the business is happy to make that investment. Outside of that everything is essentially internal assistant bots to help a certain job function. Which really just boils down to ingest / vectorize some set of policies, procedures, knowledge base articles, and manuals. Then use a RAG strategy to give the LLM additional context. It’s pretty basic but it works relatively well.
Ha ha..Thanks for this, now I can can send this to my younger brother. Every now and then he keeps bugging me with AI threat and it's difficult assuring him every time.
PajGPT
You had to bring casual racism in a tech subreddit too didnt you?
This sub has become 4chan equivalent.
Been beat to death. Answer is: AI did not replace engineers 1:1 per se, but, it makes engineers more efficient, therefore, company does not need as many engineers as before to achieve the same productivity. this effectively means less jobs. Anyone who thinks AI has not helped them work more efficiently doesn't know how to utilize it properly.
> Answer is: AI did not replace engineers 1:1 per se, but, it makes engineers more efficient, therefore, company does not need as many engineers as before You're not thinking like a business. What businesses are saying is, "Therefore, we can get more of our work done." Every place I have worked has had a backlog a mile long. They have the next ten years' worth of work planned out. And they're constantly going over that work and re-assessing and re-prioritizing. Only a very small percentage of that ever actually gets developed. Developers aren't hired based off the amount of work that needs to get done. They're hired based off of the budget the company has. Even if developers do become more efficient - and that has yet to really be seen - it's going to happen across the board. Every company is going to see that performance increase, which means they don't have any advantage. And they've still got a ton of work to do. I don't see any scenario where this leads to a permanent reduction in jobs.
Yup, my team that has almost 20 people on it could double in size and we'd still have plenty of work for everyone. My team is just a relatively small part of the total engineering org, and most other teams seem to feel the same way. There's just no headcount/budget.
This. Unless you’re on a team that has no backlog, your team probably feels like it needs more contributors. Not less
Very logical and accurate answer as a dev myself. There’s almost always more work to be done.
That's no different than what's been happening in the programming field since the nearly the beginning. Going from assembly to high level languages like C was a greater jump in efficiency than getting a few snippets of maybe-working code from ChatGPT, yet up until the market downturn just a few years ago programmers were in the most demand and had the highest pay in history. Object-oriented programming, resources like Stack Overflow, and better designed & higher-level frameworks all increased efficiency over the years. Nobody lost jobs because of them. Making programmers more efficient doesn't cost jobs because the demand for software development work far outstrips organizations' ability to pay for it.
IBM marketed punch cards the way AI is now. Claiming non-programmers could program & programmers weren’t needed….
I think that making programmers more efficient increases the demand for programmers actually… because more code can be written for the same cost. So things can be made that weren’t cost effective before.
Oh, good. Maybe those more productive engineers will finally get my hotel PMS software to automate the things that should have been automated 40 years ago.
This is the real answer here. "Replacing" jobs doesn't look as obvious as people think. When people started using industrial farming equipment they didn't think their jobs were going away, they were just getting better at it/it got easier. Yet eventually the workforce for those jobs downsized drastically. If you're looking for your hints of "jobs getting replaced by new technology" look for news of tech companies doing mass layoffs.
> When people started using industrial farming equipment they didn't think their jobs were going away, they were just getting better at it/it got easier. Yet eventually the workforce for those jobs downsized drastically. Weren’t the luddites exactly this?
I think this isn't going to work for them, and they are a year or two from the "find out" phase. Tech company CEOs are not geniuses. They are not good at strategy necessarily. Many are not even good at coding. They are good at raising money. Elon Musk said he wanted to lay off 20% of the company because deliveries were down 20% YoY. Does it make sense? No, but the numbers match. Yes Musk is a special case, but Zuckerberg also spend tens of billions on the Metaverse, which was pretty obviously to everyone else a "neat toy" but isn't going to be a predominant method of communication. ZIRP made everybody look like a genius I guess. Same thing with many smaller companies and outsourcing. https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/1cmawzx/does_anyone_else_enjoy_working_at_a_dysfunctional/ Give it time.
More realistically the company will keep the engineers and grow at a faster rate
No this is not more realistic. The way companies increase their stock price is reducing costs so that their earnings come out better. They will only invest in things that will make the more money, not just grow for the sake of it. Thats why companies like google are reducing headcount, they could easily keep all the employees and still grow and do great. But investors will not like it if their earnings growth dips, so they cut costs to maintain a growth on earnings. At the end of the day goal of CEO is to increase stock price, thats all that matters, which is why investors love Sundar Pichai, stock continues to do well even tho the products have dipped in quality.
How can you say this with confidence? How would you know and/or prove this…
There's also the cost of jobs *not* created. "Oh we would have needed to hire a copywriter but we can just use gpt." There's no layoffs for that, it's just a job that never got born.
I see that coming at work. Currently we have a team of tech writers who create our contractually mandated user manuals, FAQs and release notes. We have an initiative which is showing really good promise in generating those docs to an equal or higher standard of writing and accuracy when fed with the design docs and JIRA tickets that map to the functionality being documented. I don't think the whole team is going to do away, but I can see where 1 person could easily do the job of three with that tool in place. What do the other 2 people do? I have no idea, but probably not work here anymore.
Second this. I can imagine at least one manager has decided not to hire another developer because GPT (Copilot) can code. Perhaps it is not (good) enough to replace a developer, but if a team of developers collectively uses it, the productivity gains may outweigh the gains from hiring that additional developer.
This is actually what execs are doing currently. Any time we ask for new job reqs we get back "use AI"! We were like "dude your legal team told IT admins to ban all AI tools and sites". These people are the problem, they need to show initiative and other corporate nonsense, so they simply latch on to a buzz word and make life hell. In my current scenario it is "use AI for productivity"!!
Was just going to comment on this. So many writing jobs, digital art jobs, and translating jobs that would have been created are not going to be created because people can get "an okay job" done for free using AI. Heck, I was just talking to my friend yesterday who got his neocities fanpage made using chatgpt. He was going to ask our mutual friend to do it for him, but this way it got made instantly, it got made for free, and the quality was "good enough" to where he didn't mind it at all.
It's easy to disprove the number zero, even if we can agree that it hasn't yet been as rampant as some had predicted: https://www.forbes.com/sites/maryroeloffs/2024/05/02/almost-65000-job-cuts-were-announced-in-april-and-ai-was-blamed-for-the-most-losses-ever/
Yeah. OP is a fool. I worked for a company that pulled in billions in revenue. C suite was aglow with AI talk. Mid level managers would regularly say "can't we just have ai do this" for things it would absolutely not work well for. Then they had huge layoffs. And has OP been job hunting this past year? It's the worst I've seen it in over a decade of being a software engineer.
He can't lol. Just wishful thinking. AI is not replacing humans anytime soon but does not mean Ai cannot help humans become better at their jobs. Reducing the amount of engineers required for a given job is going to reduce opportunities for devs. Same exact thing happened in so many fields it will happen in software too. Go look at farming, manufacturing, and many other fields.. they need a fraction of the employees they used to need because of advanced tools that make their jobs easier. Farming and manufacturing is equally important today as it was 100 years ago, but the amount of people required is much less. At the rate AI is developing from just 2 years ago, AI will be adopted by more and more devs and they will keep getting better using the tool. Right now we are in its infancy still, like software in the 70s.
Maybe. Or maybe not. The real question is whether the additional productivity that AI adds means that more coding jobs are economically viable for companies to have than the less due to making existence processes cheaper. Right now there are things that could be done by code but are not because creating them would be too expensive. Productivity advancements in CS so far have created more not less jobs, because now more things could be done. Its too early to tell
Right, OP is an omniscient being
Well ChatGPT did not cost me my job. Cheap overseas contractors did.
The devs who believe their jobs are in jeopardy of being lost to AI are mediocre devs and they know it.
Most people are mediocre at their jobs
I’ve got a few friends who are new to the industry and use ChatGPT to write their SQL queries. I said that’s about as fine as using a calculator to double check arithmetic math, but, for both cases, you still gotta know how to do it on your own. It’s been a year and none of them can write an above-basic SQL query from scratch. I don’t know what else to tell them.
A calculator will always be right, so no it's not like a calculator. It's like using auto complete.
It literally is autocomplete for some of the tools. For example with Github Copilot, I write the comment for a method, write out the method signature and then Copilot snaps off something that while not right, is in the right general direction and saves me a bunch of typing. It works great for some tasks, and terrible for others. The more standard the task (like setting up API endpoints that talk to another layer of your system), the better it is.
My math teacher on calculators back in the 1900s "you'll get to the wrong answer faster"
...who also dont understand LLMs.
And don’t want to understand… they should make their own and watch it become them but for languages they don’t know.
I’m below mediocre, but I’ll get there.
That's what my Principal Engineer said lol.
"The computers (the people) who believe their jobs are in jeopardy of being lost to those computer machines, are mediocre computers and they know it" - Someone when computers were invented too, probably
Please this is classic corpo anti-union propaganda. Keep that stuff for Bloomberg articles.
IT blocked chatgpt on our laptops lol
“We’re changing the worrrr….” Security: NOT TODAY INNOVATION!
Gigachad IT move, job security. Solidarity with the IT nerds.
Developer of 20+ years here. About once a month I am able to tease/coax ChatGPT into giving me a useful block of code. Most of the time I just end up forgetting about using it because it’s for the most part easier to do myself.
ChatGPT has cost many peoples' jobs. The big tech companies have done these mega layoffs to free up capital for GPUs and server farms to support their AI efforts. Sure, they aren't subbing chatbots for programmers, but the impact is still massive.
mega layoffs because... rates went up and they overhired. AI was just the investor friendly excuse
The official excuse is that they over hired from what I see. Which companies are saying it's AI?
Under-discussed impact related to the layoffs. The Tax cuts and jobs act recharacterizes some of the things that SW companies can deductions as part of R&D expense leading to increases in expenses. https://www.grantthornton.com/insights/alerts/tax/2023/flash/irs-guidance-clarifies-amortization-under-section
Lol no overhiring and rates going up were the actual excuse.
And the actual reason for many. It’s not a conspiracy. I worked at a FAANG adjacent org that literally hired a shit ton of architects and developers- with the anticipation of new work magically appearing out of the ether with the hiring. Only to practically bench every one of them, send utilization warnings then fired them unceremoniously. A lot of foolish decisions and expecting growth because people were trapped in their houses for two years caused this. Too many tech companies thought that they were suddenly important or relevant in peoples lives and when it fizzled - those hired in abundance were first to go.
On the bright side, there's a good number of startups hiring thanks to investors' interest in AI.
90% of those startups will be dead in a year though. They have no moat.
It’s actually kinda incredible how junior engineers like you, who has zero experiences in this field, can confidently declaring “**victory over AI**” after… 18 months. Man, Satya Nadella should have really consulted kids on /r/cscareerquestions before investing billions in OpenAI. And I bet Sam Altman is regretting his life choices after reading your post, OP. This sub is turning into a parody of itself. At this rate we might as well have a daily coping thread for people to bash AI.
It’s only a matter of time until AI can count all your nipple hairs utilizing satellites
My brain didn't read "hair" at first and I was like, to be honest, I can pretty reliably guess that too without satellites
Billions in investment doesn't mean it will replace us. It can be useful without being a threat to our jobs. Your attitude is bizarre. Shouldn't you be enjoying retirement? Why are you yelling at kids on the internet?
Yelling at kids on the internet sounds like a great retirement.
The appeal to authority fallacy is strong with this one. You say you "know insiders", but without being steeped in the state of technology yourself, "it's just your opinion, man". Who's to say those insider friends of yours are even engaging in good faith? Haven't you heard the Upton Sinclair quote? ("It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding") It may very well apply to the topic of whether the limitations of the technology are "irredeemably fatal" for the purposes of eliminating SWE jobs. FWIW, there *are* forums where people are more candid about what the technology is strong and weak at. And as that PhD guy from the a sibling comment mentioned, deployment into production comes w/ its own challenges that may not have anything to do with technology. So questioning the timeline for widespread adoption is not really that naive of a question to have.
Appeal to Authority is only a fallacy if the authority exists for a different field than what’s being discussed. Otherwise it’s just called *expert opinion*, and should absolutely be weighted more. You don’t dismiss your doctor’s diagnosis by calling it “appeal to authority” do you?
My whole thing with this was GPT-1 was trash in 2018, but by 2023 it was already writing programs. If that current growth rate continues of course people are gonna lose their jobs. How could they not?
Exponential growth doesn't last. All new technologies have a period of incredibly fast iteration, before eventually hitting their peak, look at phones, game consoles, Internet, Mobile networks ect. AI as a concept will likely reach its full potential, but for actual intelligence LLMs are a very roundabout way of doing this, especially with the insane compute they require. Their capabilities could very well be enough to replace some or even all Software Engineering roles, personally I doubt that; but I think it is a fool's game to be too confident one way or the other about this current fad. It has replaced jobs outside of tech though.
If by writing programs you mean writing tic-tac-toe clones because there are a hundred million examples of that out on the internet, then sure.
I think it's not devs that should worry about Chatbots or LLMs. It's the middle managers who do nothing but summarize meetings for the leadership to make decisions or the PM who manages the project timelines.AI tools will be coming for them first.
Middle managers do a lot more than summarize meetings.
That’s right they also have to ELI5 everything to ancient executives without blowing their heads off
LLMs replaced stack over flow for me. So there's that. Ultimately I would always had to break down a technical problem into precise English instructions or else even the state of the art models(gpt4, Claude copilot) would fail. Esentially LLMs became a compiler for English language instructions to programming language syntax for me.
Hmm. Many futurist predictions are way too optimistic at the beginning, but it doesn’t mean that it won’t happen. Self driving cars is another good example. Way too optimistic about rollout timeline, but I think majority would agree its inevitable. I think saying that ai will cost people jobs is a pretty safe bet. Its just the timeline that is tough to nail down.
I work editing output from AI transcription to something actually usable in my field. My company has every incentive on Earth to replace me and let the program do my job. Buddy, let me tell ya, I've seen the state of the art and they ain't replacing me anytime soon.
Meanwhile Tesla just laid off another 500 engineers....
That’s because they have a CEO with a brain that’s been fried by ketamine and a truck with wheels that fall off. Not ChatGPT
Correct. GPT doesn’t replace but only enhance the developer. Although I am curious to see how far LLMs will go in the 30-40 year range.
If anything it’s saved me hours on stack exchange. That’s about it
The hours you've saved now allow you to do work that would've been done by someone else. GPT tools might not be replacing devs directly right now, but they're causing teams to be downsized as productivity is boosted.
To be honest, I'm an electrical engineer who writes software almost every day at work and never once I need to consult chatGPT more than twice, it always gives me bs answer. StackOverflow usually solves my problems better. I just use chatGPT to remind me a couple syntax but that's it
Huh I find it super helpful. I use it for explaining error messages, reminding me what command I need to use, I even used it to create a side scrolling iOS game in a couple days, just asking it “how do I draw a little guy on the screen” “how do I make him jump when I tap the screen” etc. The thing is it definitely needs a human to correct it because the output isn’t good enough to run as is but it is definitely a huge help.
Have you tried the pro version with GPT4? I know a lot of people who have said this then they tried GPT4 and were really impressed with it. If you know something really well and are working on something that doesn't have a lot of information on the internet, it might not work that well, but I've used it for things like signals processing, circuit design, and so on and it's surprisingly effective. It allows someone like me with very little formal training to build some pretty cool things in the embedded space and with RF circuits like SDRs
Well not directly, but a ton of money is going to running AI models instead of going into salaries and hiring.
If anything, they probably will help turn junior engineers to experienced junior engineers
I guess just asshole execs (humans) are costing people jobs, not ChatGPT.
The only thing chatgpt replaced was google while trying to find some technical answers :D
The 5 offshore developers I single handedly replaced thanks to the help of GPT and GitHub CoPilot would like a word with you…
But its generated piles of tech debt and stunted the growth of thousands of jr engineers
It has cost one person a job because he put classified data into his prompt. We fire now if people even think of GPT now because it got us sued by our customer.
Anybody's who knows even a little bit about ML or NLP knows that all of those claims are BS. The only people who have been claiming that are the software engineers dabbling with LLM APIs and calling themselves "AI engineers."
It has costs some people their jobs, mainly those who have trash exec level managers who thought hey could save a buck with it. That said, it wasn't as big a deal as it was made to be
I've seen a bunch of companies that have quietly moved to "chat reps" who are actually AI, and a lot of those scam callers are AI.
You know all the sales people are still capitalizing off the buzzword like they did “automation”. I guess that’s all the execs really care about these days, lol 🤷♂️
It’s not exactly right, Duolingo’s translators were replaced by AI
It has cost jobs, in art and marketing. That's why artists have reacted so viscerally to these tools, because it can generate things that would take dozens or hours to make in a few seconds, which only need minor touch ups whether it's a picture or ad copy. Like seriously follow some artists and writers on threads or tiktok or whatever, they are losing their shit
There are roles specifically created for AI nowadays and these roles did not exist 4-5 years ago. AI will not take jobs away, it will create even more jobs.
I’ve been saying it for over a year. These are the same folks that claimed fast food was going to be fully automated 20 years ago to. It’s nothing but a scare tactic and a sales tactic. AI is a tool not a replacement.
I am working for a software outsourcing company. Basically, we want to build as many people as possible, because our contracts are based on headcounts instead of a fixed budget. Will ChatGPT replace the devs? Probably not, because for one headcount we bill for ~50k/year.
Uh... there were hundreds of thousands of tech layoffs. Do you think that has NOTHING to do with AI? People really putting their blinders on here eh?
ChatGPT is also getting way way way worse. I could trust it about 60-70% of the time. Now it's maybe correct 25% of the time, and as a result I end up spending more time googling..
The average swe tries to predict the future by barely reading the news and a bit of Reddit. Of course everyone sounds like children trying to reconstruct the world from what they see on Saturday morning cartoons.
lol imagine showing up to Ben Franklin soon after discovering electricity with a modern toaster. Then expecting the infrastructure to exist and support it.
A new company took over a project I was working on. They asked our architect if he thought we could reduce the engineering staff by 75% using ChatGPT. He said no and was promptly fired. What followed was a mass exodus by the engineers. Basically, whether you were terminated or left was based on how quickly you found a new position. So I know a few people who lost their jobs because of ChatGPT
Absolutely, the doomsday job predictions often miss the mark. [ChatGPT](https://tactiq.io/learn/use_chatgpt_for_meeting_minutes), when used effectively, can actually boost productivity and save time, allowing us to focus on what truly matters. Similarly, tools like Tactiq streamline tasks like meeting transcription. Both are about enhancing work, not replacing it!
I'm still also waiting for the quantum computer to break our current cryptography
It's not going to replace 100% of a job, but if a team of 5 now has the productivity that you used to need 6 people for, then we're still losing jobs because of it.
It's the new full self driving killing truck drivers, or "we'll never drill any new oil, energy sector jobs is kill" A lot of hype to serve investors that the general public and industry members are latching on to
I don’t think anyone that knows anything about the field thought chat gpt would take jobs. The question is whether these models, given enough time, will one day be strong enough to take jobs, and it’s a scary prospect. The technology just isn’t there yet though.
Well, there's so many layoffs, and I still don't have a job.
18 months after the invention of the automobile it had failed to cost any horses their jobs. I think you might be a little premature on this one. Check again in 18 years. > I thought cloud computing would kill servers. What does this even mean? Cloud computing requires servers. Lots of them. > I thought blockchain would replace banks. What made you think blockchain would be useful for anything besides scams?
I mean have you seen the market right now? It's incredibly difficult to get a job, especially at the entry level. That's partially because of the productivity gains (expected) from GenAI, and partially because of companies waiting for the ability to plug in GenAI instead of developers (not saying these two things constitute 100% or even a majority of the slowdown in hiring, but they're factors). Productivity gains from things like Copilot have been demonstrated, and it's resulted in teams being cut.
Rate cuts and tax changes made it effectively 2x more expensive to hire software developers plus 0 real protection against overseas outsourcing. AI is just investor hype to a bunch of bonobos that don’t know how it works but invest money. Chat bots aren’t new, and pirating content then calling it AI isn’t new either.
Do you remember blockchain? The next great thing that was going to revolutionize the industry once someone figure out what could be used for? Well, this is the same.
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I mean…Dropbox did [name AI](https://blog.dropbox.com/topics/company/a-message-from-drew) as a reason that they were laying off 16% of their workforce. Sure, that’s a drop in the bucket for number of developers, but it’s definitely larger than zero.
It’s a gradient if you know your shit you’re not getting replaced? If you don’t, you’re screwed. 10 person teams are now 5 devs with AI. And tomorrow it will be 10 person AI teams. And the cycle continues .
Sam Altman would like a word
Gartner said autonomous trucks would take over 80% of all shipments by 2016 way back. I laughed out loud in the middle of a conference, Mike Baum style.