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.
Problem is, people want a silver bullet and there just isn’t one.
You need to create an economy that works for everyone where skilled workers from all professions can be successful. You can’t cram everybody into one job and expect everything to just work out.
Just about all jobs are important, and all workers deserve a living wage and fair compensation.
No amount of Band-Aid job stuffing is going to make up for a leadership that doesn’t believe that everyone ought to be able to live a good life.
Demand for human workforce is primarily caused by the economy’s growth. It requires significantly less human workers to maintain an economy.
That really can’t be correct. Growth adds some jobs for sure, but not as many as you’re implying. While “maintaining” an economy, you still need just as much health care, food production, retail stores, education, road maintenance… I mean just about everything I can think of with the one exception of construction won’t be significantly different in a growth economy.
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)
Well it’s good to know my schooling might not be a complete waste at least
I’ve known more than one person who found a completely different career and never went back. You might take a job in Real Estate as one person I know did and discover you like it better and so all that time in school was a waste now that you know you don’t want to do that. Or maybe not - you might take that job to make ends meet (as I once had to take a non-tech job) and decide you hate enough that you don’t want to go back.
So true. I bet it happens a lot. I got my degree in English with an eye towards becoming an editor. Now I work with CRMs.
I don’t have the insight to say for sure why (though I have some guesses),
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.
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
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.
That won’t stop large corporations from dramatically reducing programming jobs my friend.
I watched in real time tech bros defending AI about stealing everyone’s art to them realizing that they’re creating something that will replace them. It was sad funny.
They will be forced to replace the laid off workers when they see that AI doesn’t replace them. Having a skill will still be valuable. Search “Klarna AI rehire”. That’s just support agents. Coders will be fine.
Sounds like a lot of opportunities opening up for smaller independent companies.
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.
Well, Wordpress was meant to replace all professional web builders. Visual programming was meant to obsolete all programmers because everyone will be able to write software. Every decade there’s a new thing that will replace programmers. Nothing did so far.
Nothing did so far.
You have to admit, Visual Basic 3.0 was some cool shit, though, right?
I’ll admit it didn’t replace us, and it’s gone now. But that shit was still cool.
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?
The vast majority of coding isn’t making something new, it’s using existing patterns and tools and arranging them to fit a specific use case.
Llms may not be able to create a new framework or design pattern, but neither will most coders in there day to day.
The vast majority of coding isn’t making something new, it’s using existing patterns and tools and arranging them to fit a specific use case.
I would argue that arranging something to fit a specific use case is making something new.
Ask any designer how difficult it is to get a spec sheet from a client and meet their expectations. We’re expecting LLMs to suddenly solve this problem.
Llms may not be able to create a new framework or design pattern
Until they can do this, there is little threat to designers. There will be less grunt work, of course.
Right now they are. Who knows what tomorrow will bring.
Compared to just 20 years ago we’re living in the future. You may not have noticed the progress because you’d expect the future to includes hoverboards.
Right now they are. Who knows what tomorrow will bring?
We do. Experienced programmers who have been promised we’re about to be obsolete several times, now. For many of us, this isn’t our first rodeo.
As an expert in computers, there’s two things I can guarantee about the future of computers:
- Computers will just keep getting smarter.
- After decades of getting smarter, computers remain deeply stupid in ways that non-experts cannot imagine. However dumb you think your computer might be, I promise it’s somehow significantly dumber than that.
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.
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.
then it’s going to inadvertently happen to the trades too 😬
Any new construction job is going to crash because no one will have any money to build new anymore. I’m already seeing stalled projects near me. Not that I have a big problem with that. They like to cut down and cleared trees to build a warehouse instead of tearing down old buildings.
Large corporations will always have the money. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of them get so large they start forming in-house construction companies, initially offering above market pay and benefits, to attract large teams of workers and undercut existing independent (often unionized) construction services. The competition forces the indie union shops to shutter or sell, and now, in control of the entire workforce, the corporations slash the wages and benefits as the workers no longer have other places to apply to.
Race to the bottom, baybeeee
Yes. The billionaire goal is to get back to building company towns.
They’re not going to be building malls and warehouses if no one is buying shit anymore.
can’t wait for all of us to become so poor that they re-legalize company stores and scrip
I think that’s their plan. The billionaires seem inconvenienced by the rest of us living where-ever we want, and buying we want from who we want to buy from. Company towns would solve that, for them.
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 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
Interestingly, that’s how it works for construction jobs too!
Things will break and they will be back.
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.
They are literally building doomsday bunkers while knowing we’re pretty much heading unavoidably towards cooking the earth alive. The 1% has concentrated more wealth than ever in modern history. They dont care about squeezing a little more money out of us at this point, they’re in their endgame. All that’s left to do is to finish training the AI that’ll be their staff once they seal themselves off and that’s it.
Cory Doctorow’s “The Masque of the Red Death” is my current favorite endgame for those doomsday shelter billionaires… Here’s a free audio of it: https://ia902908.us.archive.org/1/items/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_332/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_332_-_The_Masque_of_the_Red_Death.mp3
That’s not happening in their lifetime. Unless all they want is something to talk to as they go senile and starve themselves.
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.
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?
Can he afford to?
Current trades are underpaid for what is expected from them.
Then he needs to charge more if he can’t afford to pay his employees more.
If people are willing to pay, sure. But you can pay as much as you want but people won’t necessarily be interested in a skilled trade if the pay in general is low. That is a long term commitment and not solved by a single employer.
He can only charge what the market will bear. Since he has skills he can do the work fast and make a good living. However he cannot afford to invest in someone new who can’t work as fast and thus could not make a good living. If a new guy would work for free for a couple years the new guy would be good and could get a good income - but I don’t blame new people for not wanting to work for free and it is likely illegal anyway. Also while there is a good income possible, I wouldn’t call it great, and so I’m not sure if it is worth getting into vs other options.
So yeah, he needs to charge more, but he can’t because people will just do without masons if they charge more.
Apprentices are paid and get full benefits. They typically get raises about every 6 months or every year depending on the program.
It’s a labor market. Employers are not owed slaves.
The other side of the coin is that customers aren’t obligated to buy. There’s always a limit to how expensive you can make a product/service before people will simply stop paying for it. Trying to find that balance point can be damned difficult.
Yeah, that’s a market.
A lot of union halls have expanded their apprentice programs – they just need qualified people to apply and unfortunately, many do not choose to stay preferring an air conditioned office or remote work from home or even the big box store vs the dirty, hot construction site+ classes (our IBEW actually has apprentices working 4 days and school 1 day, when my husband apprenticed, he went to school to nights a week after work). It is hard work, lifting heavy things, random drug testing, working off ladders, carrying a lot of tools and requires a good working knowledge of trigonometry (although many use apps on their phones now-- didn’t exist when he entered it). They are a lot more nicer to apprentices these days as well. It is interesting that we are seeing more middle aged people entering the apprentice programs now, second careers.
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.
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.
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.
As a skilled technical laborer, I utilize AI to remind me of niche topics I’ve forgotten on the fly, and it’s shockingly accurate. I think I’ve seen one mistake in 2 years, and it was a minor one at that. Luckily, we’re not quite at the point where robotics can replace me, but I could see it replacing 50% of my workplace in my lifetime.
Lol anyone who thinks you don’t need any programmer in 10 years of time will burn and crash in the next few years when finally realizing that AI isnt as intelligent as we’re being sold.
Good luck trying to troubleshoot the code AI wrote tho.
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.
It was really hard in the mid 1980s to find a job as a new grad as all the Boomers who had been laid off during the recession were hired first as they had experience. It was McJobs or nothing unless you were a computer science/programming grad. Things have changed dramatically since then. It is a different world.
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.
Anthropic and others are over hyping their product so they can sell it. They are likely wrong.
And yeah your point stands.
Wait AI is overhyped? /s
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¯\ /¯ \_(ツ)_/
If quantum computers become a standard thing in 10 years it could be even worse.
God, imagine some two-year-old iPad kid with a quantum tablet accidentally trashing a vibe coded DOGE system by happenstance.
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.
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.
