[spacebanana7]

Generally the demand for software engineers has increased as their productivity has increased, looking back over the past few decades. There seems to be effectively infinite demand for software from consumers and enterprises so the cheaper it gets the more they buy.

If we doubled agricultural productivity globally we'd need to have fewer farmers because there's no way we can all eat twice as much food. But we can absolutely consume twice as much CSS, try to play call of duty on our smart fridge or use a new SaaS to pay our taxes.

[zelphirkalt]

Oh but we can absolutely let all that food go to waste! In many places unbelievable amounts of food go to waste.

Actually, most software either is garbage or goes to waste at some point too. Maybe that's too negative. Maybe one could call it rot or becoming obsolete or obscure.

[raw_anon_1111]

I have been around for “the past few decades”. Then you saw the rapid growth of the internet, mobile and BigTech. Just from the law of large numbers, BigTech isn’t going to grow exponentially like it did post 2010.

It’s copium to think that with the combination of AI and oversupply of “good enough” developers, that it won’t be harder for developers to get jobs. We are seeing it now.

It wasn’t this bad after the dot com bust. Then if you were just an ordinary enterprise developer working “in the enterprise” in a 2nd tier city (raises hand), jobs were plentiful.

[sanderjd]

I think the better way to think of this is whether it will be harder for people who are good at using AI tools to accomplish things with computers to get jobs. Maybe, but I don't think so. I think this skill set will be useful in every line of work.

[raw_anon_1111]

That doesn’t solve the problem. It’s easy enough to be “good enough” at AI tools just like it’s easy enough to be a decent enterprise CRUD full stack/back end/mobile developer. It will still be hard to stand out from the crowd.

I saw this coming on the enterprise dev side where most people work back in 2015. Not AI of course, but the commoditization of development.

I started moving closer to the “business”, got experience in leading projects, soft skills, requirements gathering, AWS architecture etc.

I’m not saying the answer is to “learn cloud”. I am saying that it’s important to learn people skills and be the person trusted with strategy and don’t just be a code monkey pulling well defined tickets off the board.

[sanderjd]

My point is: I don't think there will be way more jobs for "AI developers", I think there will be plenty of jobs for people who are employed in an industry and adept with using AI tools to be effective at their job. These people would not be differentiating themselves from other "AI developers", but from other people who do their role in whatever industry they are in, but who aren't as adept with these tools.

[lelanthran]

> Generally the demand for software engineers has increased as their productivity has increased, looking back over the past few decades. There seems to be effectively infinite demand for software from consumers and enterprises so the cheaper it gets the more they buy.

I see this fallacy all the time but I don't know if there is a name for it.

I mean, we make used fun of MBAs for saying the same thing, but now we should be more receptive to the "Line Always Goes Up" argument?

[kasey_junk]

Jevons paradox and it’s not a fallacy. It’s an observable behavior. The problem is it’s not predictive.

[lelanthran]

> Jevons paradox and it’s not a fallacy. It’s an observable behavior. The problem is it’s not predictive.

I was referring specifically to this point, which, IMHO, is a fallacy:

>>> There seems to be effectively infinite demand for software from consumers and enterprises so the cheaper it gets the more they buy.

There is no way to use the word "infinite" in this context, even if qualified, that is representative of reality.

[ambicapter]

As counter-anecdata, I have a family members that are growing businesses from scratch and they constantly talk to me about problems they want to solve with software. Administrative problems, product problems, market research problems, you name it. I'm sure they have other problems they don't talk to me about where they're not looking for software solutions, but the list of places they want software to automate things is never-ending.

[falloutx]

There consumer internet is mostly cropped up by white collar people buying stuff online and clicking on ads. Once the cutting starts, the whole internet economy just becomes a money swapping machine between 7 VC groups.

The demand for paid software is decreasing cause these AI companies are saying "Oh dont buy that SAAS product because you can build it yourself now"

[dasil003]

SaaS is not just software though, it’s operationalized software and data management. The value has increasingly been in the latter well before AI. How many open source packages have killed their SaaS competitors (or wrappers)?

[rowanajmarshall]

As much as I appreciate the difference between literal infinity and consumers' demand for software, there's just so much bad software out there waiting to be improved that I can't see us hitting saturation soon.

[Ragnarork]

This reasoning is flawed in my opinion, because at the end of the day, the software still has to be paid for (for the people that want/need to make a living out of it), and customers wallet are finite.

Our attention is also a finite resource (24h a day max). We already see how this has been the cause for the enshittificaton of large swathes of software like social media where grabbing the attention for a few seconds more drives the main innovation...

[jimbokun]

Most software is paid for by businesses, not consumers.

[torben-friis]

the demand for software has increased. The demand for software engineers has increased proportionally, because we were the only source of software. This correlation might no longer hold.

Depending on how the future shapes up, we may have gone from artisans to middlemen, at which point we're only in the business of added value and a lot of coding is over.

Not the Google kind of coding, but the "I need a website for my restaur1ant" kind, or the "I need to agregate data from these excel files in a certain way" kind. Anything where you'd accept cheap and disposable. Perhaps even the traditional startup, if POCs are vibecoded and engineers are only introducer later.

Those are huge businesses, even if they are not present in the HN bubble.

[falloutx]

> "I need a website for my restaurant" kind, or the "I need to aggregate data from these excel files in a certain way" kind

I am afraid that kind of jobs were already over by 2015. There are no code website makers available since then and if you can't do it yourself you can just pay someone on fiverr and get it done for less than $5-50 at this point, its so efficient even AI wont be more cost effective than that. If you have $10k saved you can hire a competitive agency to maintain and build your website. This business is completely taken over by low cost fiverr automators and agencies for high budget projects. Agencies have become so good now that they manage websites from Adidas to Lando Norris to your average mom & pop store.

[wolpoli]

Just to add to the point: no code web site makers have already incorporated AI to simplify marketing tasks like drafting copies/blogs/emails.

[csa]

I wonder exactly what you do, because almost none of your comment jibes with my knowledge and experience.

Note that I own an agency that does a lot of what you say is “solved”, and I assure you that it’s not (at least in terms of being an efficient market).

SMBs with ARR up to $100m (or even many times more that in ag) struggle to find anyone good to do technical work for them either internally or externally on a consistent basis.

> I am afraid that kind of jobs were already over by 2015.

Conceptually, maybe. In practice, definitely not.

> There are no code website makers available since then

… that mostly make shit websites.

> and if you can't do it yourself you can just pay someone on fiverr and get it done for less than $5-50 at this point,

Also almost certainly a shit website at that price point, probably using the no-code tools mentioned above.

These websites have so many things wrong with them that demonstrably decrease engagement or lose revenue.

> its so efficient even AI wont be more cost effective than that.

AI will be better very soon, as the best derivative AI tools will be trained on well-developed websites.

That said, AI will never have taste, and it will never have empathy for the end user. These things can only be emulated (at least for the time being).

> If you have $10k saved you can hire a competitive agency to maintain and build your website

You can get an ok “brochure” website built for that. Maintaining it, if you have an agency that actually stays in business, will be about $100 minimum for the lowest effort touch, $200 for an actually one line change (like business hours), and up from there from anything substantial.

If you work with a decent, reputable agency, a $10k customer is the lowest on the totem pole amongst the agency’s customer list. The work is usually delegated to the least experienced devs, and these clients are usually merely tolerated rather than embraced.

It sucks to be the smallest customer of an agency, but it’s a common phenomenon amongst certain classes of SMBs.

> This business is completely taken over by low cost fiverr automators and agencies for high budget projects.

This is actually true. Mainly because any decent small agency either turns into one that does larger contracts, or it gets absorbed by one.

That said, there is a growing market for mid-sized agencies (“lifestyle agencies”?).

> Agencies have become so good now that they manage websites from Adidas to Lando Norris to your average mom & pop store

As mentioned above, you absolutely do not want to be a mom and pop store working with a web agency that works with any large, international brand like Adidas.

I appreciate your points from a conceptual level, but the human element of tech, software, and websites will continue to be a huge business for many decades, imho.