[genezeta]

I've had quite a few conversations and read many thoughts on the subject of job security in the software industry through the years. New technologies, various crisis and crashes, just age, incoming "hordes" of less prepared developers, or whatever.

If I had to highlight the one thing all those conversations had in common it would be precisely this:

  I thought that having this knowledge would set me apart

And it never does.

[lwhi]

I think in the future, those who succeed will be equivalent to wayfinders.

People who _can_ see the wood for the trees, and are able to understand multiple (sometimes conflicting) requirements and work out a way through that solves the problems that arise, for all involved parties.

An understanding of domain, the ability to communicate effectively and a mind that can think laterally, will all be vital.

[lelanthran]

> I think in the future, those who succeed will be equivalent to wayfinders.

In the future, those who succeed will be the owners of capital.

[oompydoompy74]

Past, Present, and Future. If you control the means of production you win. Knowledge, skill, and experience are largely irrelevant to the conversation. I’ve held this opinion for quite some time and would be interested to hear alternative perspectives.

[Ferret7446]

That's clearly wrong, because capital doesn't just appear out of thin air. You are ignoring that there's clearly rare skills involved that enable a few to become very successful. Your strawman only applies to the second generation that inherits wealth, and case in point inherited wealth tends to disappear in a couple of generations further proving that skill is required to build and maintain wealth.

[lelanthran]

> Past, Present, and Future. If you control the means of production you win.

Yeah, but we were talking about only success, not winning.

In the past and the present, you could succeed purely on a combination of skill, talent and labour. This approach looks like it will not work much longer.

[lwhi]

I can see where you're coming from.

We exchange our knowledge, time, and skill for money. If this exchange is no longer viable — because similar value can be accessed via LLM agents — we'll have no way of making money.

I do think some (non-billionaire) people will survive the transition, but the question then becomes: what happens to everyone else?

[contingencies]

> In the future, those who succeed will be the owners of capital.

No. In the future, those who succeed will be the children of the owners of capital.

See The Economist, February 2025: https://archive.is/PCoWl

[archagon]

Means of production, yadda yadda… I feel a great sense of deja vu.

[jerkstate]

How do you know those aren’t the same thing?

[Fargren]

Because you can inherit capital.

You can also inherit talent, but "the descendants of those worthy are worthy" is a belief humanity spilled a lot of blood to get away from.

[_doctor_love]

Same as it ever was…

Same as it ever was…

[lwhi]

Well, yes .. but they're going to need people to do their evil bidding /s

[fasterik]

I don't think history bears this out. If you look at the most successful entrepreneurs of the computer age, none of them started out as owners of capital. Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Steve Jobs: yes, they had some level of privilege and opportunity, but they didn't start out as billionaires. Their success came from their ideas.

[marcosdumay]

The fact that you had to separate them into an age should tell you something.

Something happened in the 80s, and it wasn't "the dawn of a new technology". It happened specifically in the US, and was done by their government.

[judahmeek]

Are you referring to the antitrust breakup of AT&T in 1982?

[zdragnar]

Does it surprise you that wealth takes time to accumulate? None of those people had a get rich quick scheme that made them billionaires in their 20's.

[marcosdumay]

Those were mostly the same billionaires 20 years ago.

[Matl]

In the case of Gates at least, it definitely came in part from having access to the right people.

[Calavar]

Gates famously came from a rich family, but Bezos did too - he used hundreds of thousands of dollars in investments from his immediate family members to get Amazon off the ground. Maybe 1 to 2% of Americans would be able draw that much from their family members if they were to launch a startup. If we define "bootstrapped" wealth as starting from an economic background within one standard deviation of the national average, then he doesn't count.

[littlexsparkee]

If the labor -> wealth pipeline is weakening, then the present won't behave like the past, i.e. you would need assets to success since you won't be able to work your way up.

[skybrian]

How does that work? Funding is useful, but we aren't seeing fully-automated startups, and often, founders don't need all that much funding.

[awesomeMilou]

By completely eliminating the need for a human workforce, therefore rendering a majority of humanity obsolete, therefore lots of social inequality, therefore lots of starvation, poverty and death.

When billionaires say "think about the trillions of people that will benefit from AI" and some notion of living in a post scarcity world, they are talking about _their_ descendants, not yours.

[SR2Z]

If we're all broke/starving/being exterminated, who will the rich sell to?

Nobody wants to be king of the ashes. The future is going to be the same as now, just with a little less menial work.

[dag100]

> If we're all broke/starving/being exterminated, who will the rich sell to?

Themselves. The economy is a big cycle where money changes hands to drive production i.e. things getting made. AI will simultaneously greatly increase production (especially once humanoid robots are as dexterous as humans) and make the humans whose jobs it will do economically irrelevant.

So the rich will buy and sell very nice things to each other while the rest of us get left out in the cold because we simply cannot compete with the robots. And because they will capture and control all resources (either by law or by force) we won't be able to create a functioning parallel economy either.

[skybrian]

This is dystopian speculation. You don't have to believe every science fiction scenario someone famous talks about.

[dag100]

It's hardly speculative when it is effectively what happened just after the Industrial Revolution, but with more power ceded to capital. In many ways, it's already happening.

[csomar]

In a perfect world, yes. However, the current tech world is akin to a flea market. Those who shout out more stand out more.

[lwhi]

Surely you can judge people by results though?

[RugnirViking]

measuring programmer productivity is notoriously difficult. Does james, who shipped 20 features without testing thoroughly provide more value? or does joe, who patched a security hole in that time and avoided disaster? what about jason, who facilitated communication between them, and kept the infra going so their changes could go into prod without issues?

[lwhi]

We won't be programmers in this scenario.

The results will hopefully be a lot more tangible.

[RugnirViking]

This also was true for teams, and indeed, businesses. It's not a property of the code itself, its a property of products and outcomes. I don't think AI agents doing the day to day changes will affect this directly (but people may have more time to think about these higher level problems, and increased volume of changes may make the issue more important)

[pirates]

It’s clearly Jason in this scenario

[csomar]

How do you do that in practice though? You won't know the engineer is a con-man until after you have spent $$ and months into the process. Then you are in the position of trusting nobody.

[Tanjreeve]

Welcome to the problem of hiring and managing employees generally.

[dist-epoch]

This is the old China fallacy.

"Oh, we'll just ship production to China, and do the design and marketing in US, this is where the real value is anyway, China will never be able to do design and marketing as well as we do".

Literally same thing:

"Oh, we'll just let LLMs code, and we'll just do Taste. LLMs will never be able to do Taste"

[pmg101]

It certainly seems similar.

Except China is just humans in a different location so it shouldn't be surprising they can do things humans in the US can do.

LLMs are a totally distinct type of thing. It's possible they'll be able to do Taste but it's also quite possible they'll never be able to.

[RugnirViking]

does it never? seems to me that people pay me precisely for my knowledge, learned over many years. The knowledge translates into action, sure. But thats like the old parable about a plumber being paid €150 for a 5 minute consult that involves turning a single screw. "i could have turned that screw!" the customer cries, ignoring that yes, they could have. But they didn't know to.

I think perhaps the problem is instead "I thought that having this knowledge would set me apart, forever, without me having to learn anything else"

[esikich]

There's a good chance the apprentice plumber could've fixed it just as quickly. That's where we are now.

[RugnirViking]

right. Apprentices will always grow, and so too must you, if you want to keep being paid. Their job is to come with new tools and new ideas, and your job is to keep a wider view into what you're doing and why, maintaining trust (you need to build the authority to tell apprentices no when their ideas might flood the customer's house), and keep moving towards other parts of the business and solving harder problems (working with sales, hiring, etc to manage customers and apprentices). AI will not build authority for you.

If your argument is that the customer themselves could use an AI or whatever to learn plumbing, that was always an option (libraries, google, youtube). They pay you so they don't have to worry about flooding their house (or at least have someone else to blame).

They might be able to "one shot" simple fixes that you might previously have assigned to an apprentice, but believe me, AIs are not about to start doing complex things for the layman that actually required seniors previously in either programming or plumbing, because very few of those things were just "type better into a computer". (build trust, speak confidently, know what doesn't work, take responsibility, test without breaking systems, communicate and work together with other professionals, have opinions)

[ufocia]

Libraries, Google and YouTube were/are not nearly as efficient at conveying _targetted_ _actionable_ expertise as AI is.

[RugnirViking]

I agree that it is easier than ever to start doing stuff, instead of reading. I don't think that means its easier to jump right to doing large projects. The problems to be solved there are often subtler, of a different class, and manifold, and a layman may not realise what has gone wrong until long afterwards or never (this also happened before, many people took on projects they weren't ready for and reinvented the wheel trying to solve issues they ran into)

it's oft debated, but I do fall on the side of "you should still know maths even in the age of the calculator/matlab/llms". I have found productive employment, and indeed tickets to speak to the big boys in their gilded palaces many times because graphs and charts are their favorite toys and knowing maths got me there. They have always been able to make things with excel, with matlab etc. Often they actually can make charts themselves, but they don't care to become experts in what data is important and what isn't.

The LLM isn't yet good enough to tell you what data matters. People act like LLMs are magical gods that do everything, but it is but another tool. It has limitations, just as it has strengths. It is not ultimately convincing, it is not infallible, and experts will keep finding edge cases all the damn time. Anyone working with them every day knows this, and you need to know it too.

[ValentineC]

On the flip side: it's trivial to search "how to fix that pipe" on YouTube, see a bunch of success videos, and trust them all.

I'm not sure I can trust any single AI, or even multiple AI models, to not hallucinate overconfidence in certain real world domains.

[smcg]

targeted, expertise, fast... pick 2

[altmanaltman]

I think a more sane minded customer would not mind paying for the assurance and having someone to blame in case things go wrong, not necessarily because of their domain knowledge.

I could theoretically learn everything about plumbing but would still rather call a professional for the peace of mind that it was done "correctly" and it the process goes wrong, I would have an instant fix instead of trying to go back and educating myself on plumbing more.

Could you consider that as part of knowledge? Yeah and also no. Because the knowledge can be copied and put into a LLM but legally a LLM cannot sign off on things like NDAs or take accountability like a human has to in these roles.

[RugnirViking]

I agree. I also think that deciding that LLMs encode all knowledge perfectly, either now or in an imagined future, is foolish. My experience is that they match the average general state of experts among the field. The sort of thing a junior might read to start to grasp the general ideas and issues in a field. They rarely have opinions, or good intuitions around more specific scenarios. This is why the current equilibrium of a senior piloting one works so well- theyre leaning on it to speed up, but pushing it away from the "average" where circumstances demand.

We can argue about imagined future progress, but I don't see that getting much better, given that the literature doesn't often do that, and how often experts in one scenario end up being poorly suited given another set of facts.

[yankee_dodge]

Knowledge depreciates, so it is clarifying to add time explicitly: I thought this knowledge would set me apart...

Forever? That seems over-optimistic for all occupations in all eras.

For the rest of my working career? This really hasn't been true in a long time either, especially in software, where technology changes on the order of years.

For the duration of my mortgage? The fondest hope, but pretty much like the above.

For the next 10 years? Here is the big change. Even for fields like medicine, where knowledge really did set you apart. The AI can adapt faster. AI is inside the human OODA loop.

[OJFord]

The good news I think is that you have to be really really specialist for the specialist knowledge to actually be the important bit; for most it's the ability to obtain specialist knowledge, and apply it.

As long as we can adapt, move on to the next knowledge-needed area, we'll hopefully be alright.

(I think there are many analogies here to things people have always said about undergraduate study – e.g. it's about teaching you to learn, not teaching you the specific things you're taught, to be remembered and applied forever.)

[sifar]

May be for OO not yet for DA. Existential pressure drives better(fruitful) decisons and actions. AI has yet to incorporate that into training/inference.

[lukan]

Some knowledge does set you apart - the ability to ship things, people pay for.

Not producing holy code in the academic best language.

[catmanjan]

Ability can't really be compared to knowledge... e.g. you might lose the ability to play the piano, yet retain the knowledge about how to

[lukan]

I don't know (also english is not my first language), but to me it takes knowledge to know what is the right tool for the job. To know what is required to make the client happy. To know where great code matters and where quick and dirty or nowdays vibe code is sufficient. And that knowledge can be complex. It usually requires knowing how people think and act, who don't know how to open a terminal. Because those are the main people using software.

[kamaal]

>>I thought that having this knowledge would set me apart

The whole leetcode movement was designed to sell this idea that knowing a solution that can be looked up in a matter of minutes on the internet some how puts you astronomically ahead of those who don't. Strangely enough go look at that site itself and thousands submit working solutions to those problems.

Knowing a solution discovered by somebody the first time, is no test of capacity or ability to get work done. It would probably matter if you discovered solution to a novel problem by yourself. How does knowing the end result of a long process by other people decide your ability to do anything at all?

During interviews I have seen companies go to absurd lengths to justify these tests. Including asking candidates to imagine they might not have internet and might need to know these solutions.

The only skill that really matters in our line of work is today most popularly known as high agency lifestyle. And delivery skills largely depend on ownership. In my decades of experience with software work, not knowing a thing isn't even a correlating factor in getting things done.

[TimTheTinker]

Agreed. The ability to learn new things, and what characteristics their ability to learn has -- that's one dimension that strongly differentiates people in nearly any domain.

But there are other dimensions as well that differentiate people and determine their value to business, like the ability to be handed problems no one else can solve and stick with them through sheer stubbornness until solutions begin to emerge.

[nlawalker]

My concern is less about knowledge and more about the ability to communicate and make good decisions. I'm not sure how well it holds up against technology that can sometimes make a good showing at it, but is most importantly automated, cheap and subservient.

[matheusmoreira]

If knowledge doesn't set us apart, then what does? How do we make it in this brave new world?

Anomie is at an all time high. It feels like the world's unreadable right now. No idea what to do.

[AndrewKemendo]

Everyone but insane people like me want some kind of durable stability to their life

they don’t want to be forced to reinvent themselves every five years because the world is changing faster than it ever has

While I understand where people are coming from to an extent that’s just never been my lifestyle and so when I see people looking for some kind of long-term stability I just kind of baffled at what makes them think that that was ever possible.

It’s like the propaganda from the American 1950s nuclear family idealism really got locked in in a way that people believe that there was a real thing

And while it was certainly true that American baby boomers got to ride the economic pax Americana that happened from 1949 to today, that period is over

While it is still possible for you to have a career your career is most likely going to change every 5 to 10 years now and that’s just a fact of the society that we have built

we did not build society intentionally

It was built via attrition and the current leaders are the ones who are fully committed to monetary based global domination

[Npovview]

Red Queen hypothesis is a hypothesis in evolutionary biology proposed in 1973, that species must constantly adapt, evolve, and proliferate in order to survive while pitted against ever-evolving opposing species.

Why do we always assume environments and other agents will always remain static.

[AndrewKemendo]

I think the people that survive don’t assume environments stay the same

All the people I know who have a bunch of kids are planning a century ahead

[kristjank]

Knowledge often does not produce competence, especially in the applicable market. I work on the system administration side of things, and I have encountered many output-competent developers that were immeasurably stupid, but very little incompetent ones with tons of cryptic knowledge and intuitive understanding of the systems they worked on.

It seems to me that knowledge doesn't always imply competence, but the lack of knowledge often very well explains incompetence. And, since the LLM is replacing the competence part without imprinting any knowledge on the one that wields it, it generates a lot of competent imbeciles that pass interviews and appear as though they not only do things, but know things as well. And once you reach that critical mass, sheeeeesh

[dag100]

> Knowledge often does not produce competence

From your example, perhaps you mean "competence does not imply knowledge" or more accurately in fact "lack of competence implies lack of knowledge" i.e. !competence -> !knowledge, in that competence && !knowledge is common but !competence && knowledge is rare.

[kristjank]

Yeah I think you're right. My ESL is pushing through, I guess.