We went from LEARN TO CODE to NO ONE LEARN TO CODE GET A CONSTRUCTION JOB in about a 3 year span.
I found this thought funny. A few years ago everyone was all learn to code so you don't lose your job! Now there wont be any programming jobs in 10 years. But we will need a lot of manual labor still.
We are still a long ways away from AI being able to replace programmers. The amount of sheer bullshit code and wrong stuff it writes currently will cripple any information system currently keeping economies up and running.
I think a lot of the crunch in the labor market for programmers is "monkey see monkey do" thinking at the big tech companies. It might even be somewhat calculated, though I hesitate to call something a conspiracy when it could simply be due to stupidity on the part of senior management.
Large tech companies tend to have a lot of flexibility and their total headcount because they have a wide variety of departments and tasks that they can set aside for an extended period before it causes any problems. Those problems will eventually catch up with them, though, as will a code base written by somebody who doesn't understand what they're trying to accomplish.
So I think the pendulum is going to swing back to a labor crunch at some point. My guess is at least another 6 months before we see any hint of that, though. I don't think it will be as bad as it was before the advent of LLMs, though. They really are a productivity enhancing tool, particularly for software developers who know what they're doing.
The only field I see LLMs enhancing productivity of competent developers is front end stuff where you really have to write a lot of bloat.
In every other scenario software developers who know what they're doing the simple or repetitive things are mostly solved by writing a fucking function, class or library. In today's world developers are mostly busy designing and implementing rather complex systems or managing legacy code, where LLMs are completely useless.
We're developing measurement systems and data analysis tools for the automotive industry and we tried several LLMs extensively in our daily business. Not a single developer was happy with the results.
Well yeah but I believe the idea is in short the uncertainty, why it's saying "in 10 years". Think of it now as you have a kid graduating high school this year, and asks you what to major in in college that's likely to make enough to pay off those killer loans it's going to take.
Learn code anyway. LLMs can't code worth a shit, so there will be plenty of jobs available to clean up their mess.
LLMs can’t code worth a shit yet. But techbros are determined to change that. The sad reality is that code is just a form of language, and LLMs are good at learning languages. They can’t code worth shit right now, but the progress likely will improve them.
We’ll still need experienced debuggers who can actually code. But in a decade, the broad strokes will likely be done by LLMs, which will vastly shrink the demand for experienced coders.
The sad reality is that code is just a form of language, and LLMs are good at learning languages.
This is debatable. LLMs are prediction machines.
What use is prediction when you are trying to code something new?
Lmfao the hardest part of building a product is understanding customer wants and needs. LLMs are incapable of understanding
Learning a language and forming and expressing complex thoughts in an efficient way are three different things.
Learning the syntax of a programming language doesn't make you a programmer.
Being able to solve complex problems with the programming language makes you a programmer.
Being able to solve complex problems with the programming language in an efficient way makes you a good programmer.
LLMs can recite code when asked properly, with a lot of errors. Trying to put code together with it without understanding how said code works is a greater insanity, than making random numbers with mathematics.
The real reason why there's a downtick in coding jobs is due to Xitter not imploding immediately after the mass firings. Now coders are working overtime with skeleton teams on the same problems, while being overburdened and making more mistakes.
I think AI is a component of the decline.
For decades, companies have operated under the misunderstanding that more software developers equals more success, despite countless works explaining that's not how it works. As a result many of these companies have employed an order of magnitude more than they probably should have and got worse results than they would have. However the fact they got subpar results with 10x a good number just convinced them that they didn't hire enough. Smaller team produce better results made zero sense.
So now the AI companies come along and give a plausible rationalization to decrease team size. Even if the LLM hypothetically does zero to provide direct value, the reduced teams start yielding better results, because of mitigating the problems of "make sure everyone is utilized, make sure these cheap unqualified offshored programmers are giving you value, communicate and plan, reach consensus along a set up people who might all have viable approaches, but devolved into arguments over which way to go".
AI gives then a rationalization to do what they should have done from the onset.
I think the post is about the state of agentic coders in 10 years, not the present.
The Learn To Code hype was being driven by employers to create a work surplus to drive wages down. Now those same employers think they can use AI instead.
The code will break and they will be back. People are buying into the bullshit until they realize its just marketing and has no practical application
Doubtful. The oligarch class only needs a handful of good developers to make working code for rich people use. The rest of us are being stuck with half-assed AI slop. They're trying to carve 99% of us out of the economy (the parts that pertain to them) and relegate us to backbreaking wage slavery. Killing middle class jobs is the point, they think.
Not saying it's a good plan, but it sure looks like what they're trying to do.
That is the plan. But eventually they will start dying to the same buggy hospital code that the rest of us use, or whatever other issue.
There's a billionaire fantasy that they can afford to buy artisinal everything, and not get poisoned by the results of their own stupid callousness.
I don't believe it. I do believe they will try, for awhile.
This is 100% what i see the plan to be as well.
They're not going to make any money selling to other rich people. They didn't get rich buying someone else's trash.
Interestingly, that's how it works for construction jobs too!
Things will break and they will be back.
It's not so much we need manual labor but skilled technical labor. Like plumbing, electrical, working with pulse logic controllers, Mason, welder, Nursing, emergency room technicians. Etc
My dad is a master mason and can't find anyone at all who wants to do the job. It's hard, hard work. Unfortunately, it seems like he's going to have to retire with no apprentices to carry on all his incredible knowledge.
Maybe he should pay more?
It’s also a job as you allude to where early retirement needs to be part of the plan. It’s a good job but hard on the body and it’s hard to create an efficient way to reduce the amount of weight that they need to lift in a day.
I know a few who were union and pensioned off, retired in their 50s but that doesn’t change the way their joints feel.
Not sure if it’s better or worse than turd herding.
Currently there is a big shortage in Nuclear Medicine (NM) Technicians (with PET and CT certs as well) and ECHO technicians (particularly those with certification with infant ECHO). The hospital I work in started an ECHO school because so many leave to travel or go to the cardiology offices. It is the only way we can keep staffed. NM-- we are reduced in the cardiology offices to hiring on one travel tech per office (we used to have 3 techs at a time). With one tech, they have to provide extra nursing support and it is almost harder to keep office nurses.
Maybe I'm looking in the wrong places but it seems nobody wants to train technical labor at least in northern Alabama. But the political climate has thrown a wrench in jobs rn
Unions are pretty weak in the South. Go North. MA, IL, WI, NY, PA, MI... That said, I think there will be opportunity in AL -- didn't the state get a new industry that will provide a large number of jobs coming-- A new aviation facility? They will have to build it and may need to increase the workforce so there may be training opportunities for that. I know my community has expanded new programs at the CC for Micron's approaching construction and implementation.
Remember when Biden told coal miners to learn to code
"My liberal friends were saying, 'You can't expect them to be able to do that,'" Biden told his New Hampshire audience. "Gimme a break! Anybody who can throw coal into a furnace can learn how to program for God's sake."
These politicians and policy makers don’t know what they talk about when it comes to tech. Any one who tells you that programming jobs will be gone because of AI has never written a complex piece of software before. Also the trades pay well because there is a shortage of workers. If everyone starts going into the trades wages will crater. It’s just cycles. I remember when nobody wanted to go into the trades because it didn’t pay well. This created the shortage of workers. And since salaries are better now because of the shortage lots of people want to go into the trades This will create an oversupply of tradespeople and the cycle will repeat.
Building trades are hell on your body and there is no goddamn way that any construction worker (Electrician, carpenter, plumber, pipefitter, mason etc) can last until SS age-- esp. as they are planning to raise it to 70.
It's two quotes. Miners don't throw coal into furnaces.
My liberal friends were saying, ‘You can’t expect them to be able to do that,’” Biden told his New Hampshire audience. "Anybody who can go down 300 to 3,000 feet in a mine, sure in hell can learn to program as well, but we don't think of it that way," he said.
“Gimme a break! Anybody who can throw coal into a furnace can learn how to program for God’s sake.”
Part of me wants to argue this isn't a cycle of demand and is instead capitalism. The trades didn't pay poorly because there were too many people as much as people willing to work for less and the employer will pocket the difference. I admit this is extremely pedantic of me to split hairs here but people have an effective floor for how much they can work for. Coal miners weren't being told to code because there were too many coal miners but that they could never work for as little as the machines that were replacing them.
To be clear I'm not saying AI is a replacement for programmers, I'm not able to see the future here, but capitalists will attempt to to replace any labor with machines if possible.
I remain deeply skeptical that AI can solve the types of complex problems that require human thought. AIs will never be able to abstract away details correctly or design sensible workflows for boutique problems.
They can't, this is the same shit that happened when the dipshit ceos sent dev jobs over seas to code farms. Devs lost their jobs, and the code went to shit. Then when shit started breaking, they magically rehired everyone again to spend years cleaning up the shit code. LLMs are this all over again, just quicker this time.
The problems start if it can take on a lot of the junior work. If nobody can enter the industry, nobody can get the experience required to do the real engineering.
Open-source and personal work may be the only way to enter the programming field in the next decade.
Now is the worst time to try to enter the field. We need to see the AI bubble burst much more spectacularly, and only then might it be more reasonable. You certainly don't want to try to get into a field when you have a lot of other choices when that field is already flooded with all of these people who have been laid off, combined with the increased availability of programmers in other countries, knowing that at the moment many domestic programmers are not smart enough to form strong unions to protect their own jobs.
AIs will never be able to abstract away details correctly or design sensible workflows for boutique problems.
Not the current direction of AI, no. But the field is ever advancing. I won’t be shocked if we see AI capable of these things within my lifetime.
The reactionary “learn to code” nonsense started a lot further back than a few years! Also, who told you there won’t be any software development positions in 10 years?
Anthropic for starters. What they don’t realize is everyone will be switching to cyber security jobs in 10 years when every vibe coded piece of software is riddle with security vulnerabilities.
Now there wont be any programming jobs in 10 years.
Bullshit.
While "any" is a bit much, I do anticipate a rather dramatic decline.
One is that there are a large chunk of programming jobs that I do think LLM can displace. Think of those dumb unimaginative mobile games that bleed out a few dollars a week from folks. I think LLM has a good chance at cranking those out. If you've seen companies that have utterly trivial yet somehow subtly unique internal applications, LLMs can probably crank out a lot of those to. There's a lot of stupid trivial stuff that has been done a million times before that still gets done by people.
Another is that a lot of software teams have overhired anyway. Business folk think more developers mean better results, so they want to hire up to success, as long as their funding permits. This isn't how programming really works, but explanations that fewer people can do more than more people in some cases can't crack through how counter-intuitive that is. AI offers a rationalization for a lot of those folks to finally arrive at the efficient conclusion.
Finally, the software industry has significantly converted transactional purchases to subscription. With perpetual license, you needed to provide some value to drive that customer who bought from you 5 years ago a reason to upgrade. Now with subscription models, you just have to coast and keep the lights on for those customers. Often with effective lock-in of the customers data to make it extra hard or impossible for them to jump to a competitor, even if competitors could reverse-engineer your proprietary formats, the customer might not even be able to download their actual data files. So a company that acheived "good enough" with subscription might severely curtail investment because it makes no difference to their bottom line if they are delivering awesome new capability or just same old same old. Anticipate a log of stagnation as they shuffle around things like design language to give a feeling of progress while things just kinda plateau out.
With perpetual license, you needed to provide some value to drive that customer who bought from you 5 years ago a reason to upgrade. Now with subscription models, you just have to coast and keep the lights on for those customers.
True, but it's that market preference is a pendulum. It swings back and forth. It's funny how hard companies are pushing today to (fail to) keep it from swimming swinging back towards owning things.
Companies that try to charge monthly for service that isn't improving eventually lose their customers, except in the rare cases where stability is the only customer motivation.
Hes not wrong. Amazon for example is getting rid of SDE roles for AI as per leaked conversation from the head of AWS.
Its coming anyone who thinks other wise will have a surprise pikachu face.
The real answer is somewhere in between.
There's going to be less programming jobs, but there's still always going to be some demand for them, there's always going to be some technical knowledge required, even if just "prompt engineers" or similar concepts. Things still need to be built and fixed, and if you've worked for enough project managers/product managers, you know their lack of technical knowledge would not be enough to even prompt an LLM much less do anything else.
I've been hearing that line for more than 20 years. Anytime there is a tech downturn you hear it loudly - this has happened several times since 2000. However the fact remains that most coders make far more money than most people in construction. The exceptions tend to be people who own their construction business - though if you do the paperwork construction is one of the easiest businesses to work for yourself in once you have skills.
When I began my career, other senior engineers said they had heard the line since the 1970s/1980s.
Typical pork cycle. By the time everybody was pushed towards IT/Coding and all the hundred ways to get into IT popped up, there were already too many people wanting an IT job. You were basically called stupid if you didn't "just learn to code" to get a well paid, stable job. It's your own fault for chosing a manual labor job instead of applying yourself and learning some coding skills! So everybody was pushed towards IT and made to feel stupid if they didn't try to learn coding.
I can think of no better way to train an AI to hate humanity enough to invent Skynet and kill us all, than to introduce them to MS Teams meetings with managers who all want things that are completely incompatible with what they asked for the last time, and require you to throw away about 40% of what you already wrote.
the only job that can't be replaced is... venture capital guy
The ai that's been trained specifically to predict trends: ;3
Well, anyone who knows anything about the current iteration of AI knows that it's not really happening.
Btw, people have been saying that since GPT-3 (which everyone nowadays admits was kinda shit if it wasn't for the novelty), so only 5 years left until my career is over.
Nah, it's just changed from
Learn to code
to
Learn to AI prompt engineer, bro!
From Learn to Code to Build to Code.
The use of AI by non-developers to produce code will greatly increase the hourly rate I can charge.
The number of security holes produced is absolutely fabolous.
Back when I practiced law, I thought the same thing about services like LegalZoom. Thing is, laypeople are terrible at evaluating risk in a professional way. All they see are prices and marketing. Nobody cares about cybersecurity until they get ransomwared AND have a financial motive for preventing it. And most attacked companies now just shrug and hand out a year of credit monitoring from a company no one's heard of.
Yeah that doesn't fly in the EU.
https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/cyber-resilience-act
The companies care when it is company money being stolen.
As an aside, the overlaps between lawyers and tech is huge.
I was wondering if the AI would expand the role of humans in the security sector of tech.
I'm fairly sure the "learn to code" thing was just a media campaign by corporations to assure an abundance of programmers, leading to decreased labor rates. Years earlier it was a push for electronic engineers and technicians.
As soon as I graduated, 'too many people are fighting for IT jobs, depressing salaries, meanwhile we're paying plumbers $100/hour.'
That was 2001. Almost 25 years later, I recently paid a plumber $300/hour.
The plumber wasn't making that much though. That $300/hr includes a lot of buisness costs - someone needs to pay for the fancy van they drive in, the office workers (which is often private equity backed and has a lot of office staff and CEO that you don't care about), advertising, and whatever other costs. Plus the plumber often only has 20 minutes of work in your house, but between jobs taking an unknown amount of time, and drive time to the next job they need to charge for a lot of time that they are not working.
You paid the plumbing company $300/hour. The plumber would be lucky to make $30 of that.
It really IS ridiculous. I even took a beginners coding class in high school. In the end, we will always needs programmers so if coding is your thing, keep doing it.
But I would personally rather construct a small home with my bare hands than learn to properly program. (I am not good at it...haha)
That's the key point I reckon "if coding is your thing" many people are trying to learn a complex thing they have no interest in.
Yes! I met someone who said he had no passion for programming, but just did it for the paycheck, but also had not reached a particularly good paycheck.
I asked, "If you have no passion for it, what carries you through the soul crushing aspects?"
And now he and I don't talk about programming, anymore.
If machine intelligence is indeed a different form of intelligence, then it can be observed and judged on the basis of its own merits, as opposed to a messianic waiting for a moment where it might equal or eclipse (weakly defined) human intelligence. This would even render obsolete the question as to whether or not machines can think—which in itself willfully glosses over the corresponding opposite question, “Can humans think?” posed by the former Fluxus artist (and Emmett Williams collaborator) Tomas Schmit in the year 2000 (Schmit et al. 2007, 18–19). — Crapularity Hermeneutics: Interpretation as the Blind Spot of Analytics, Artificial Intelligence, and Other Algorithmic Producers of the Postapocalyptic Present. Florian Cramer.
Yeah sorry that's my fault. I literally started to learn to code 2 months before all the articles started... Then all the YouTube videos were "no one will ever hire JR devs again!" and so I stopped. Since I've stopped it looks like the consensus has gone back to "learning to code is still a good idea."
I'll let other people enjoy a good life, so I won't try to learn it again and ruin it for everyone I'll stay in this shit factory lol
It is, it was and it will be a good idea. If you like coding, learn it.
I have a great deal of job security by not being a software engineer and knowing "how to code"
they love me at my job in supply chain b2b marketing because I can build an API connector to the DoT database, and build a simple savings calculator in WordPress that connects to hubspot and Salesforce, or I can parse 20 csvs and exclude all duplicates in python...
all low level stuff but if you don't know what a variable even is it seems like magic
It might be a little unintuitive, but that's actually called "high level" - "low level" is the exact opposite.
seems like magic
Hey dawg, it’s bad practice to use magic vars or nums
Construction jobs? Buddy. We can 3D print houses now.
Yet it's not a popular way to do it, and multiple company closed after a few years of operating.
That's right. I've seen 3d printed houses that were every bit as complete and ready to use as any vibe code program!
(This is an attempt to humorously point out that both are cool and useful for an actual professional, while useless to anyone not willing or able to actually finish the job.)
Someone still have to assemble it.
That's what the 3D printer is doing.
You can 3D print a concrete hull with limited structural strength. All the rest still needs to be done by humans.
Also you could achieve the same effect in terms of manpower required for the structure just using prefabricated concrete modules.
I work in software development but I also have a second job as an arborists offsider because I'm pretty sure trees will never stop fucking growing.
Just in time to finish your uni degree which you started 3 years ago then...
No wonder business is complaining that uni grads are so unprepared and lost.
In fairness, we've been complaining about university graduate computer programmers being nearly useless since as far back as when I was an almost useless university graduate computer programmer. Ha ha.
Trades were being pushed 20 years ago
But programming is a good supplemental skill in every field
Yes! As Heinlein wrote - "Specialization is for insects." Any human can benefit from any skill in any of the trade skills and programming, too.
I think there's a massive oversupply of software engineers world-wide, and investors and executives are heavily pushing offshoring to countries where there are even more engineers that are even more desperate to find work. The ideology or focus of the entire US investor/executive class seems to have shifted as soon as Musk gutted Twitter. I fear this may be another, "these jobs aren't coming back," kind of thing the manufacturing industry went through. Perhaps we'll see a boom of bootstrapped start-ups ran by engineers (or preferably worker-cooperatives), but that's extremely hard to do.
Get a construction job so you can continue to enjoy coding
Well my knee is injured for the past 3 weeks and counting so I don't think I'm going to be doing any manual labor any time soon, I think I'm going to keep at my work from home programming job instead.
The two things are related
As a software engineer who uses AI agents daily, let me tell you: now is as good a time as any to learn to code. LLMs won't replace any developers.
Well the job market for developers is still pretty tight at the moment. I don't have the insight to say for sure why (though I have some guesses), but I know that for me and every junior developer I know it's rough out there.
As a junior dev with prior working experience, currently not working as a programmer, yeah. I can only agree.
We might understand AI won't actually solve the same problems we are able to solve, but the people deciding budgets dont understand that.
Having been around for a few decades now I can tell you that the job market comes and goes. Things have been tight before, and there has been more openings than people to work them many times in the past. I can't tell you when things will turn around, but odds are they will. (this is sadly not helpful if you are one of those currently needing a job)
In the USA, there's a tax break for research teams expiring this year. Supposedly it made software develoent team salaries fully tax deductable.
In the USA, I suspect this is the real motive for using the AI hype train to justify layoffs.
I'm willing to admit "Most CEOs are stupid" also has merit, of course.
LLMs are going to replace some developers, the companies that do that will fold because their product doesn't work, the developers will get jobs elsewhere.
The market can stay irrational for longer than you can afford not to eat
As a graduate from good university in computer science who is struggling to find a job. Go learn something that can be aided by code, but don't make code the center of your career...
"any developers?" bad choice of words. I can promise you with absolute certainty that SOME developers WILL be made redundant because of AI.
not all, not lots, not the majority, but some