[curiousguy]

> Most people I've worked with go home and watch football after 5pm.

Unfortunately, the job market is getting more and more competitive.

Software engineers had easy in the last 10 years due to high demand, but things are changing now IMO.

Automation and AI will make most basic programming jobs redundant. Combine with saturation of entry level programmer. Everyone will need to push harder to differentiate from others. Race to the bottom..

[gloosx]

>Automation and AI will make most basic programming jobs redundant

You are probably not an engineer, since you should understand GPT makes programming harder, not easier. You won't necessarily make something easier by making it more high-level. Following your logic, you could conclude introduction of C made Assembler engineers redundant or that introducing Python left C engineers without a job. This is not true, using GPT to code is leveraging a natural highest-level language for the job, which is certainly leading to trouble, because it's not the best tool for the job – people specifically invented new languages so it's easier to express the business algorithm, all the attempts to make coding look easier by making it more as natural language failed, and the thought of GPT would suddenly change something? It is naive and ignorant, doing code is a pure thought process and fingers have long learned to tap it out by heart with the usual syntax without falling for the trap of ambiguities and inconsistencies in natural language. You just can't build reliable things with the prose, you do it with stricter rules of expression in mind

[mmargerum]

I stepped into a project at work to help out knowing almost no typescript and wrote angular http routines that just worked in a few hours with chatGPT. first we started with any and then we built out an interface and it helped me use the map function in http to build out a result array without any intermediate array creation.

I 100% would not have written the code as well as it came out with gpt's help.

[gloosx]

Of course, GPT remains the best (after real human teacher) learning/discovery tool available nowadays, so it summarised (luckily for you, not hallucinated this time) some information together to get your job done. However, one could use his tooling documentation manuals to get the same job done in the same amount of time without prior knowledge? A senior engineer would just do it as fast as his fingers can type without the need to learn it prior. Oh, also he will be able to maintain it!

[manicennui]

Unless you are new to software engineering, this shouldn't take you more than a few hours with or without ChatGPT's help.

[datpiff]

How would you have done with just google?

[curiousguy]

> makes programming harder, not easier

That’s exactly my point. The current scenario where someone can just go into a 3 months javascript bootcamp won’t be enough.

In my team, there is a grad dev doing bare minimum work. He has no initiative and struggles to understand basic requirements. I need to break down the task so much that I’m almost doing the work. In a few years, with better tooling/copilot/gpt, I will be able to just “finish” the job myself, and this kind of dev is made redundant.

Maybe this kind of dev is not common in FANG, but I met several, from small to big companies, in my over 10 years software engineer career.

[Clubber]

>That’s exactly my point. The current scenario where someone can just go into a 3 months javascript bootcamp won’t be enough.

Realistically 3 months of any bootcamp was never enough.

>In my team, there is a grad dev doing bare minimum work. He has no initiative and struggles to understand basic requirements.

This kind of person has been around all over my 25+ year career, starting in the dot boom. "You should get into programming because of the money!" This is the result. With programming, you have to have an almost unhealthy obsession with it to be successful. These people get weeded out during the crashes, in which we are in the midst of.

FWIW, we have one of those too.

[gloosx]

Your case sounds like this - we have an engineer assigned to our team, we don't like his performance, and we can't do anything about it. Kind of a dead end which is bad for business. I prefer strong teams which were assembled by team leaders and members, not by business. I think the biggest problem in tech hiring is who makes the hire, it's pure luck if you don't have a ton of comprehension in the field and just assign someone as a business owner. The second biggest problem is that the wrong people don't get churned in the first few weeks So hire ONE senior engineer who will get stuff done in a way you like, – let him do the rest of the team hires, give him the responsibility to fire those who don't fit in the first few weeks. Voila, you have a self-sustained, well-communicating, and motivated team of people who get stuff done in a way you like.

[BurningPenguin]

> Automation and AI will make most basic programming jobs redundant.

I kinda doubt that. You still need someone to act as a translator between user and machine.

[atraac]

I find it that the people who say "AI will replace developers" are the same ones that were thinking that CMSes will replace the need for developers, then no/low-code will replace the need for developers. But no, users are too stupid to handle stuff. Best case scenario developers will automate the easiest and time consuming things like UI creations and boilerplate using those tools. Most companies I know that use CMSes still have devs changing every single bit of the page because they either customized it so heavily or they simply implemented it wrong. I haven't seen a single successfully low-code company yet(though that just might be me). The same will happen with ChatGPT. It will become a tool, professionals still will be needed to use it properly.

[screwturner68]

Remember when "the cloud" was going to replace ops and on-prem and yet here was are 17 year since the release of AWS and we've only seen a 40% shift to the cloud and a massive need for ops people. Coders aren't going away they will just shift.

[scarface74]

You’re literally off by a factor of 10. Andy Jassy himself said that only 4% of all IT spend is on any cloud provider.

[jliptzin]

We talk to the machines so the users don’t have to. Can’t you people understand that??

[curiousguy]

My comment was about entry level programming job.

AI/automation will help more seniors developer to a point that most basic tasks can be done instantly and you don’t need to ask a junior dev to do it.

[HPsquared]

LLMs have the potential to make that job a lot easier, so a larger pool of people are able to do it.

[falcor84]

> Everyone will need to push harder to differentiate from others. Race to the bottom.

That actually sounds to me like the opposite, i.e. "Race to the top", or just "a race".

[jjk166]

It's a race to the bottom in terms of work-life balance/compensation - ie everyone is putting in more effort to stay at the same level of employment until the industry bottoms out and people can't realistically work any harder for any less.

[falcor84]

It sounds to me that you're just describing the supply-demand curve of employment, i.e. capitalism as prescribed. Are you suggesting an alternative approach?

[urthor]

I'd agree... for the 250k (or more, much much much more) Silicon Valley jobs.

My university internship and first job was at an insurance company.

Know who works less than employees in the insurance industry?

Almost nobody. I don't think anyone I've ever met in my entire life worked less than people at my first tech job.

[manicennui]

The phenomenon you are seeing is present at all large organizations. I promise you that there are thousands of people at Google who do very little.

[smashface]

My first two internships were at an insurance company. Everyone was busy. Not saying your job wasn't what it was but I can't say it's representative of everything outside Silicon Valley.

[chinchilla2020]

chatGPT isn't helping anyone write code unless they are writing the simplest school assignments.

Actual programming is more complex and involves tons of non-code logic.