[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.