AI in reality : programmer

[–] MajorHavoc@programming.dev 198 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (13 children)

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.

[–] rayquetzalcoatl@lemmy.world 68 points 5 months ago (3 children)

Wait, people really thought web frameworks would replace Devs? Which frameworks? 😂

[–] Aqarius@lemmy.world 99 points 5 months ago (1 children)

People thought COBOL would let managers write code.

[–] Gutek8134@lemmy.world 38 points 5 months ago (1 children)

What.

[–] Aqarius@lemmy.world 55 points 5 months ago

It's by design very verbose and "English"-like, like instead of x=y*z it would go "MULTIPLY y BY z GIVING x", the idea was that it would read almost like natural language, so that non-tech staff could understand it.

[–] SlopppyEngineer@lemmy.world 56 points 5 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] syklemil@discuss.tchncs.de 29 points 5 months ago (6 children)

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?

[–] SlopppyEngineer@lemmy.world 25 points 5 months ago

Even SQL was originally called SEQUEL, Structured English QUEry Language. They got sued for the name and changed it to SQL. It was also pitched to retrieve data with plain language.

[–] brisk@aussie.zone 8 points 5 months ago

Microsoft Frontpage?

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[–] MajorHavoc@programming.dev 21 points 5 months ago (3 children)

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.

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[–] PeriodicallyPedantic@lemmy.ca 168 points 5 months ago (2 children)

I kinda wish it included the dates on these. Not having them makes me a bit dubious

[–] TheSlad@sh.itjust.works 22 points 5 months ago

The screenshotted tweet was from dec 20th. The linkedin post from dec 9th. You can see them in the link to his linkedin post in another comment.

[–] Chip_Rat@lemmy.world 5 points 5 months ago

Yeah I read this twice and didn't understand, because I didn't know the order. Kept scrolling and saw an article about it and went "oh ok, that's what that was about, and scrolled back to confirm.

[–] tiramichu@lemm.ee 153 points 5 months ago (7 children)

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.

[–] conditional_soup@lemm.ee 15 points 5 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] tiramichu@lemm.ee 6 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

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.

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[–] sunbeam60@lemmy.one 9 points 5 months ago (1 children)

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”.

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[–] iAvicenna@lemmy.world 112 points 5 months ago (4 children)

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.

[–] funkless_eck@sh.itjust.works 31 points 5 months ago (2 children)

when actually everyone knows engineering is all about being able to negotiate precisely which snacks and soft drinks go in the office break room

[–] blackluster117@sh.itjust.works 12 points 5 months ago

It's a delicate balance!

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[–] CheesyFox@lemmy.sdf.org 27 points 5 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] Smokeydope@lemmy.world 25 points 5 months ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] GenderNeutralBro@lemmy.sdf.org 15 points 5 months ago

Mathematicians: "First time?"

[–] bleistift2@sopuli.xyz 6 points 5 months ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] ArchRecord@lemm.ee 104 points 5 months ago (4 children)

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.

[–] WhatAmLemmy@lemmy.world 43 points 5 months ago

Dude's clearly a dunce. There was never any chance he was gonna succeed.

[–] lemmydividebyzero@reddthat.com 21 points 5 months ago (2 children)

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...)

[–] cynar@lemmy.world 44 points 5 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] Mikina@programming.dev 11 points 5 months ago (5 children)

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.

https://lemmy.world/comment/14174326

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[–] Bronzebeard@lemm.ee 11 points 5 months ago

Ah yes, AGI... Automation Generating Income

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[–] otter@lemmy.ca 85 points 5 months ago (2 children)

I found the screenshot order confusing at first, and it's not OPs fault since the original article got the screenshots backwards too

From the article:

Synopsis Wes Winder, a Canadian software developer, is facing backlash after his controversial decision to replace his development team with Al backfired. Once a trending topic on Reddit and a source of widespread ridicule, Winder is now in an awkward position as he turns to Linkedln in search of web developers to hire.

[–] andioop@programming.dev 7 points 5 months ago

Oh thank goodness I am not the only one. Just the way I, an American, read things, and my cynicism about people trying to replace devs with AI says top (trying to hire real devs) goes first and bottom (fired everyone) second; title and the fact this was posted in Programmer Humor implies it's bottom first and top second.

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[–] yarr@feddit.nl 44 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Plans like this work great for the first couple of weeks. Turns out software engineering isn't this simple fucking thing. Making anything beyond a toy takes actual work. There are lots of people learning this first hand right now. There is some kind of belief that ChatGPT version 0.1+ (whatever ships in 2 weeks) will be able to take over the job of software development entirely. Well, guess what? Doing anything relatively complex in software takes actual intelligence. Once there is an AI that can just code by itself, it will also be smart enough to be a doctor, civil engineer, consultant, etc.

A lot of fucking companies are going to learn this first hand. They are either firing their staff thinking the AI wave is already here, and in reality, it may never come.

The near future of AI is skilled software engineers using AI to augment their productivity. By the time you can take the human out of the loop, AI will be so powerful it will slay any white collar job, but this won't be for years and years and years and by then it won't just be software that is in trouble as a career; it will be many, many industries.

[–] Anticorp@lemmy.world 9 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (2 children)

Plus there's the problem of a limited context window. Real software projects are spread across dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of files. Then they are deployed, sometimes compiled, run on a variety of devices and clients, and need to meet a couple dozen criteria to be acceptable, even more to be great. The AI can't track all of that and your request too, its context window is far too small. It can barely track a single file and your request, plus request changes. Tracking all of this from day-to-day, over months and years is just one part of an engineer's job, and it's going to be a long time before an AI can do that one small part of the job. Ask an AI why some part of the project was changed 12 months ago. Just try it. It'll evaluate the code, try to reason, and make something up. Ask a person and they'll remember the exact reason why, both in the context of the requested change and the coding project limitations.

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[–] ByteOnBikes@slrpnk.net 37 points 5 months ago (3 children)

https://m.economictimes.com/magazines/panache/instant-karma-employer-who-replaced-his-tech-team-with-ai-asks-for-new-developers-on-linkedin-heres-what-happened-next/articleshow/116625826.cms

[–] Tetsuo@jlai.lu 12 points 5 months ago (2 children)

I just got to say this website is a nightmare. At least 4 popups overlays just opening the article. The remove ads button just leaves the article and offer you to pay to remove ads. There is also delayed popups appearing while you read the article...

Are they speedrunning obsolence by making sure nobody read their articles online?

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[–] Anticorp@lemmy.world 19 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

"Does anyone want to come clean up my mess? As a gig fee of course though, I don't need employees. I keep all the money. It's mine! All mine!"

[–] agilob@programming.dev 12 points 5 months ago (4 children)

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/activity-7270936955436056576-ZksM/

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[–] Quexotic 10 points 5 months ago

This is great, but where's the post from one month later where this fool is begging for work after being fired?

[–] someacnt@sh.itjust.works 9 points 5 months ago (2 children)

My mother is currently like, AI will eliminate all junior jobs and everyone will be on the managerial position. It's honestly exhausting. Damn, when will the hype end???

[–] MajorHavoc@programming.dev 9 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

My mother is currently like, AI will eliminate all junior jobs

There's a little truth to it.

The junior jobs did dry up, due to speculation by ignorant leaders, about three years ago.

But now everyone who didn't hire then has progressed through awkwardness then worry toward outright panic, as AI can't deliver everything they were promised. AI still might deliver what they need someday, but it now even the CEO can see that it clearly won't be in time to save the CEO's next bonus.

In my past experience, three years is about as long as most companies can get away with not hiring developer talent - before unfixed problems turn into crisis.

Sure enough, we're starting to see the leading edge of the panic hiring, now.

Things could still calm back down - due to more speculation, or another coordinated effort by CEOs to suppress developer salaries. I'm not a time traveler.

But the junior jobs will come roaring back with a vengeance one way or another.

My money is on this year.

That's actually literal, in my case.

I successfully made a case to spent some extra on developer bonuses this year to hopefully proactively avoid having to do any backfills during 2025 - when I, personally, expect developer hires to be particularly expensive (relative to inflation).

I've also spent the last three years building up some internal non-developer staff toward readiness to be an emergency backfill, in case I need a developer backfill in 2025, and cannot afford any at prevailing market rates.

Of course, I've lived through enough "developers are ludicrously expensive" years, that I just always prepare for them. If it's not 2025, it'll be 2026 or whenever, and my team will survive because I kept our options open. Probably will help that I also didn't piss off the talent by trying to replace them with bad automation, lol.

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[–] Zementid@feddit.nl 6 points 5 months ago

Ai is nice for code snippets that you don't have to look up any more. I switch between C and Python regularly and some days, coming back from a month of Python, I just need some reminders on how brackets work.

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