Ask HN: AI impact on future developer career
My friend (who is not in technical field) was asking me if it is good idea that his son chooses a software development career.
If he asked me this question two years ago, I could definitely say that there will be always opportunities for him. Now it looks like it is not that easy to answer this question. We see that the coding performance of LLMs are getting better and better.
If your non-technical friend asks you and what would you suggest?
Do you see in your circle that the demand for junior developers are decreasing?
36 comments
[ 0.24 ms ] story [ 99.3 ms ] threadThe actual "code" was never the hard part to begin with.
Developing software is not going away soon. LLMs only addresses a small part of what it means to develop software.
I expect the demand for junior developers to increase exponentially in the next years when the market adapts to the new AI tools as more than ever, every business will be a tech business.
Re LLMs: most people responding here seem to assume there will be zero progress in ML after today. I don’t understand why. It’s likely we will get gpt-5 later this year, followed by Opus 3.5 and Ultra 1.5. I expect all three to be significantly better at coding than current models. Again, all three are expected within the next 6 months. Next gen after that (gpt-6 level): 2025-2026. Again, I don’t see any reasons not to expect further improvements. At that point (2026 at the latest) it will be strange to pay humans to write code, at least in the typical way we view SWE role today.
Yes, GPT5 will do a lot of damage, as it will be the first model replacing actual human coders. But GPT6 should be able to fix most of the issues. During this transition period I expect human senior developers mostly doing code reviews.
Neither of these are actually needed, all that is needed is to be able to disrupt the pipeline of jobs that interns/junior developers would normally build their initial skills on before moving on to more senior positions. Cutting these entry positions out means continually fewer replacements, and less talent (a deflationary trend, the limited number of positions acts as a filter, and its not necessarily merit based).
Without replacement, eventually older more senior developers will age out, retire, and then everyone will panic but by then it will be far too late (its already cascaded).
If it is not economical to develop or maintain a skill set, the knowledge involved becomes lost knowledge when that population dies out (as we all do given sufficient time).
A perfect corollary is the repair of electronics in the US. There might be 1 person per population of 100-200,000 that goes into business for this sector. If they get hit by a bus, its no longer locally available, and mortality happens to us all.
This is one of the main structural problems with burning bridges in blind marches towards some idealized progress.
How can you go back when all your competitors do the same thing and its no longer economic to run the business except by following the same doom loop as your competitors.
I’m a Principal level SWE, and a team lead. I have junior devs on my team. I only need a similar increase of intelligence from GPT4 as 3.5–>4.0 to replace them.
Anyways I hope you're right to be honest. And let's see.
I would love to the industry to have a higher entrance barrier.
I would love to be able to solve more with less.
I would love industry to deliver more value with a higher speed.
Progress is inevitable. So I would love to start adapting faster and be on top of it even if it will require me to leave my current role and maybe switch to another one.
I've seen too many people here in IT doing the things they don't like or coming to the job simply because "it pays bills". I've seen 25 yoe engineers who know literally nothing because they were doing literally nothing for the last 20 years. I've seen junior developers who barely know fundamentals and I'm speaking of some really dummy things. I hope industry will naturally heal itself even if it'll make me leave or switch.
It would be great if stackoverflow and/or similar companies do the developer survey in the industry.
I don't think LLM will replace software engineers anytime soon, as a whole, but removing the need for the bottom 10% is not a stretch at all. That has massive implications for salary, imo, except for the top end.
If you can phrase all programming in the style of a Stack Overflow or Leetcode problem, AI will solve it easily. But that's what's slower than jumping in. A middle ground is writing tests.
It does really badly on Swift and is benchmarked on Python. So there's still blind spots. It can't do frameworks like Ren'Py either.
This is true in the way that Google Search is able to solve Leetcode problems.
GPT-4 struggles with even simple real world codebases.
The insane lure of gob-smacking amounts of money that got thrown around the tech industry in the past decade with FAANGS unfortunately brought in a lot of people who really weren't passionate about computer science in the first place.
By way of contrast, compare your average software developer with an electrical/mechanical engineer. Just as challenging an industry (if not MORE SO in a lot of ways), and yet the pay is usually a fraction of what a software dev can make. Nobody becomes an EE for the money.
Most every single talented ECE person can easily get any software job with minimal prep. Half of the leetocde style coding questions are pointer manipulations, the other half rely on some n linked lists, both of which you get a lot of exposure to when working with low level algorithms.
Furthermore, in the scope of AI, we aren't really close to AGI, and even if we were, the power draw of compute is still quite large. There is a lot of progress to be made in making the compute more accessible to average person.
So instead of majoring in CS I majored in EE and mathematics. I did a lot of hard math and physical sciences stuff most of my peers didn't, and it still buys me an unusually large amount of latitude in the kinds of work people can trust me to take on.