Hacker News Reader

Comment by ta78373764 | Hacker News Reader

Right now developer salaries have greatly risen at the top end - the max has risen much faster than the median. Much of the top end growth has been at companies benefitting from easy investor capital.

I think this will follow a typical business cycle. When the next recession comes, investors and companies will focus on shorter term ROI, and many high end developers and long term projects will seem too expensive. Reduced competition will dramatically affect the top end, and non-salary benefits may drop quite a bit. The median salary will probably remain sticky but lose a bit when adjusted for inflation. Eventually the next expansion starts but it may take a very long time for the top end competition to heat up to this degree again.

I don't expect low-code, AI, or developer productivity jumps to have any real impact anytime soon; there's no real evidence of a true jump in the productivity of the overall project.

View on HN

> I don't expect low-code, AI, or developer productivity jumps to have any real impact anytime soon; there's no real evidence of a true jump in the productivity of the overall project

I respectfully disagree. I don’t think those productivity gains will be evenly distributed throughout the industry, but I think AI and developer tooling will evolve radically over the next decade and programming in 2032 will look quite different for some. Things like Github Copilot are just the beginning. Once programming becomes a matter of operating the AI, there will probably be very different hiring strategies and incentive structures for developers.

It's certainly possible, I just don't see any real evidence for it yet. AI has a history of promising demos and then very long (decades) stalls in progress. I could be wrong, but I'm skeptical of the current round of AI as well. It will generate code in the same way as AI generates online articles or music - not very well.

I think that by 2030 we should have conversations that produce most of business software. Think of CLI + AI. There are already people working on this. My bet is on Microsoft or them buying winning startup

My experience is that the problem with producing business software is not the lack of programming knowledge. Rather it's a lack of people who understand the business and are capable of abstract thought and formalizing processes. I don't see AI helping with that any time soon.

But who will verify results of this conversation? Who will be the one to make changes, create changes, verify that changes are correct? Who will take blame if error happens?

Customer or user of this software?

Agreed, I see junior devs in their first job every semester. Some people with CS backgrounds, other with engineering backgrounds.

Software development sucks so much, folks waste ungodly amounts of time with trivial stuff like setting up their programming language correctly* or figuring out how to use undocumented libs.

I'm confident AI and investiment in dev tools will make programming much more accessible.

However, senior devs are another story. They are generally paid to make architectural decisions and solve weird problems. I don't see their salary bring affected to much by said technologies.

* Using dev containers made that A LOT better

Reply on news.ycombinator.com