Hopefully you've been living below your means and saving.
- People in other industries actually have specialist knowledge (this is something IT people forget)
- AI is coming for those jobs too
- and so are lots of other people, not just displaced techies but from any number of other industries.
Thinking about it in advance should include training yourself up for other sectors.
If AI is successful, it will be a very different world of jobhunting. If it’s unsuccessful there will still be job losses for a while because of overspending, and because of the wider economic issues.
Software engineering on one end is going to be more like finance or medicine where the cost of poor performance is actually higher than the risk that they wont be worth what you pay them (ie there isn’t any amount of pay where it’s worth it to hire them). Then on the other it’ll be like knowing how to use PowerPoint. All the new tech categories have too many bottlenecks and challenges beyond just producing code to consolidate like that.
Are you going to trust a vendor who has been running for years with your business critical operations or brad_69's awesome saas skills and agents? Do you think these businesses are going to shift their whole product to be in Altman's walled garden when they don't need to?
When they have full DevOps, with multiple environments for testing, compliance with security best practices, can do database updates and data migrations, move the app smoothly between different platforms, streamline costs, and scale to at least hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of users without crashing and burning... then go ahead and worry. We aren't anywhere near that.
On the other hand, if you are purely a coder, and cannot run a project that does all of the above... maybe start your worrying earlier.
We aren't, but the AI Labs no doubt are. They just can't release it right now because their bread and butter is still developers burning tokens, so there is still a business problem to solve.
A team I was managing spent a whole year converting government forms into a web app. It took a while and there was a lot of discussion with the end users and a bunch of back and forth (keep in mind this is government software with a lot of onerous legal requirements). Then about 4 months ago, we just fed Codex the forms, along with the UI design and the legal requirements and it spat it out in 1 hour. Was it perfect? No. But our iterative loop became make the web app, show it to end users and then incorporate feedback and completely cut out the UX team, product etc. We were able to complete the conversion in 2 weeks with one guy (something like 150+ government forms/applications). For most simple to medium corporate development work it’s basically over.
I just don't see how we keep going like this without layoffs. The company cannot responsibly continue paying for this many engineers, when half, or less, could do the same job.
Like, why is it all still so buggy? Why does no website seem to consider 96 PPI displays in its design? Why don't we have ostensibly useful features like undo trees everywhere? Why is everything still a RAM hog? Why does the proportion of websites that pay no heed to accessibility seem to be going up rather than down?
I'm told we're living in the future, but it sure doesn't feel like it.
Flawless software isn't the goal, ever. Feature development is almost always the primary goal, and fixing bugs and performance issues is only done if the bug is bad enough.
Like the old quip that a cup of coffee lets you do stupid things faster.
Lack of information. When you are on the building side you become blind to its faults. Consumers almost never tell you what isn't good about it.
> why is it all still so buggy?
Also lack of information. I haven't seen any bugs in years in the things I've worked on. LLMs have closed every last obvious testing gap, squashing any outstanding bugs there. That's not to say it is all bug-free now, but what bugs users may be experiencing aren't being reported.
AI is good at building software, but it is still not good at consuming software like actual consumers do.
I have been the lone developer on a project for quite some time and was already feeling that way. Yet, recently found out that a second is being added to the team and a third is to come. I guess I'll enjoy what is effectively a paid vacation before it all comes crumbling down.