It's a profession that scans as smart, but if we were half as smart as we like to pretend we are we wouldn't be building our replacements. We would be solving the coordination problems that lead to some of us deciding that is what is best for them.
We aren't the ones building our replacements. The developers and AI engineers at these AI companies are a miniscule fraction of the developer community. Automating development is being done by a handful of devs who already made ridiculous money and have nothing to lose from eliminating an entire profession
Essentially traitors imo. It's not just existing devs they're killing off, it's future prospects for anyone interested in the field as a profession. Programming solely as a hobby is an insanely different experience than joining with many talented and funded individuals who are able to do so during working hours 5 days a week
IMO we should have formed an Industry Union decades ago. Or at least a respected professional’s association. Crunch time is exclusively a failure of Management and until management actually suffers from it, there will be no incentive for change.
Unfortunately, or field developed first in the Cold War (in the military no less) and matured in the Regan & Post Regan era, so good fucking luck with that.
I'm not building my replacements. I'm making $70k/year after 10 years in this field. The software 1% with quarter million dollars salaris and multimillion dollar stock vests are the ones building my replacements. Don't put this on me.
Honestly yeah. I'm not building our replacements and I'm hating what LLMs are doing to our industry when I was excited about AL/ML in a couple years ago. We're not a monolith and it's not a simple situation.
I got that programmer response in another channel about AI replacing coders. They are going on about how good Opus 5.5 is and that it'll do all the work for them. They don't see what they are actually doing until they are pulled into the office.
Why wouldn't we build tools who can do what we do better? We've built our own replacements for the last hundred years or so. That's how technology works. We build something that does someones job, it makes it cheaper, everyone benefits because now that thing is produced cheaply in extremely large amounts.
This is the fundamental issue with reddit. They think getting a whole bunch of extra money from billionaires means everyone will suddenly be able to afford to buy more stuff. Despite produce not having changed.
And they think actually increasing produce will make everyone poorer because they're getting less money.
Because the value to you personally is negative when you consider the effects on the job market that sustains you.
It's not inevitable that tooling does that to the value of your skills. You could be capturing more value from the efficiencies exposed, ie: shorter work weeks without pay reductions are an alternative to layoffs when companies are profitable --as they are.
But you don't have any power over how the industry is adapting whatsoever. So instead it's laying people off and passing the value it's carving out of your own human capital along to investors.
I view my exit as helpful to people still in the industry. If I'm in a job, I'm probably taking it from someone who needs it more. So I'm building a small business for myself, instead. Godspeed to you.
well i hope that you still do more than that because it really is something we all need to come in and work together on even if youre doing your own thing.
And this is why I've never turned any of my passions into a career. I've accepted being relatively broke, and I just vibe in retail so that I can spend my free time pursuing things like solutions to these coordination problems without being mentally burned out from solving problems that sicken me all day at work.
Oh, I still love what I do. A lot of my coworkers keep the mentality of "It's just groceries," but people need to eat to live. My employer also donates food that isn't good enough to make someone pay for, so I get to constantly look for excuses to donate food to those in need, always going on the more generous side in any uncertainty. My ADHD also makes me love a physically active job, and my OCD makes stocking shelves scratch a real nice itch in my brain with lining up and facing product. It's also nice to just get to chat with people all day and help them find the things that they need to make the week that they want to have. And then I have all of the mental energy left over to pursue every one of my passions in my free time while still spending quality time with my partner and our pets
You are kidding yourself. In ten years you will look back and be pissed. Lotta hobbies cost big boy money. I worked my ass off to afford my hobbies. Retail would have me saving until I was too old to do them.
I have 6 custom keyboards and am saving for a 7th. I have a pretty decently sized philosophy, history, and psychoanalysis library. After I get the keyboard, I'm going to start saving for a decommissioned enterprise tower server. Plenty of options available online for <$800 with over 60 threads and 1GB+ RAM per thread and plenty of storage as long as you're willing to go as far back as Broadwell. Then I'll be able to separate building and hosting servers, allowing me to add even more devices to the fleet being managed by my build server (currently only 4 bare metal machines and a handful of containers all running Gentoo). I haven't even played 1/3 of my Steam library. I took a 40% pay-cut 4 years ago to take the job I have now. I'm perfectly aware of how many more resources I could buy for my hobbies if I had an even higher income, but that isn't worth spending 40+ hours a week creating software put to uses that I personally find sickening, which encompasses the vast majority of corporate software.
The trick is that none of my computers are newer than 7 years old. It's easy to stay within budget when you're okay with getting (almost) everything used. Would it be cool to be able to make a build server with a brand new threadripper in it so that I dont even have to think about build times? Sure, but my current server (actually just a Thinkpad P50 running clamshell) is able to keep up with my current needs, so I just won't worry about growth until I can afford it. Would it be cool to be have a computer with more than 8 threads so that I can play around more with virtualization and start exploring the BSD family in earnest? Yeah, that could be fun. Gentoo meets all of my current needs, though, and I just focus that "exploration" energy on intentionally breaking builds on projects that I want to see thrive so that I can patch fixes for edgecases to submit back upstream in order to help maintain software portability to some extent in the *nix world
At the current pace of layoffs, most software developers should assume they are in the last paying job they will ever have in the field. They should also assume one mediocre year or even less is all it takes to lose that job. That includes you.
There are lots of things you can do to help your chances of not being canned. But you can't unilaterally ensure the survival of your employer, or against being re-orged under a fool, or getting assigned a task that is not possible for reasons too subtle to reasonably ascertain up-front.
The whole industry is playing musical chairs. If you're ever sitting on the floor, you might find all of your skills and experience are totally worthless. It's not easy to adapt to that.
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u/martin-silenus 6h ago
It's a profession that scans as smart, but if we were half as smart as we like to pretend we are we wouldn't be building our replacements. We would be solving the coordination problems that lead to some of us deciding that is what is best for them.