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Comment by anon7725 | Hacker News Reader

> Emotionally and psychologically I think that some tech and other highly paid knowledge workers just can't accept the sea-change that we are living through.

This is a good way to frame it. As a mid-career person, I’m trying to figure out how to respond to these developments in my own career.

I think there’s a good chance that software development as a career looks very different in 10 years in terms of the day to day work and opportunities for employment.

25 years ago in university, I did roughly the same stuff as I do today. Languages are higher on the abstraction ladder, networks and hardware are faster, etc, but stuff is still roughly the same. I can see a real discontinuity in the work on the horizon.

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I've been calling the mockery and dismissiveness, "nervous laughter". I think we have a sharp crowd here but they either lack imagination or are in denial.

I do not think that is quite true. Most of what I am seeing is hesitance and wariness.

Every innovation can be used both for good and for evil, and it often has unintended side-effects. Just ask Thomas Midgley Jr., who played a major role in both leaded gasoline and CFCs. Or Alfred Nobel, who tried to make mining safer, only to be appalled at an erroneous obituary to describe him as the "merchant of death" due to its military use.

Over the last two decades we've seen tech giants go from a bunch of nerds in garages to parasites invading our personal lives and consuming every bit of data about us they can get their hands on - and social media went from a cute gimmick to a society-destroying tool powering genocides.

AI is undeniably extremely promising, and it is not hard to see that it has the potential to change the world forever. However, we are inherently unable to understand how it works, or to alter it in a meaningful way. It's a Pandora's Black Box: will it give us a better and easier life, or will it destroy us? Nobody knows, least of all the people who are opening it!

We're at a point in time where almost any novel technology is just going to take jobs away, increase wealth inequality, and down the line make the world a worse place. It's difficult to be happy about a new powerful tool finding its way into the hands of tech giants.

I think it'll end at using chatgpt as a great tool. And that seems fine. I think much of the anxiety here is in the unknown.

You have to learn your IDE, but it doesn't make programming harder. It makes it more fun actually.

Chatgpt is going to require that devs are even better IMO because you have to catch its errors and know how to work with it.

Yes, this stuff is fun to work with and use as an aid to programming. But I think what's dawning on a lot of us is that it seems to be able to facilitate a large increase productivity. And given that large productivity increase will industry need as many software developers (and other knowledge workers)?

Your opinion on this probably depends on what your job currently looks like. Everywhere I've worked there's been significantly more stuff we wanted to do than we could actually do. Speeding that up looks awesome to me.

But if you work at BigCo and mostly sit on your hands already, then, yeah. I don't know.

>Everywhere I've worked there's been significantly more stuff we wanted to do than we could actually do. Speeding that up looks awesome to me.

Does it? Slowing our breakneck anti-human business pace and stopping mindless and environmentally and culturally harmful consumption and production of trinkets is surely better!

Huh? Have you attended a local city council meeting recently? I can guarantee you they're running on shoestring budgets with an endless backlog of requests that they are only treading water on because of anemic tax revenue and low prestige for government jobs. "Productivity" isn't just some high tech, consumer bauble producing phenomenon. It helps everyone out. Highly profitable, headcount-bloated big companies are the outlier.

I can guarantee you that the reason they do so, is an explosion of BS requests, extreme bureucracy, and needless requirements, with a simultaneous drop in actual useful basic work - on city instrastructure and such.

> anemic tax revenue

You mean, spending >1/2 their budget on police?

Every BigCo I’ve worked at (and I’ve worked at places that put the B in Big) people aren’t sitting on their hands because there isn’t way more to do than they can feasibly do. It’s usually because they’re fundamentally illsuited for the job and sitting on their hands is better than being homeless, or the people who are illsuited for their jobs feel anxious about being homeless so force everyone into meetings and team building and off sites and retrospectives and sprint planning and burn down chart analysis and whatever else they can conceive of that seems productive but doesn’t change production in any way. To that extent at least an AI would be left alone to write actual code, and those folks can have their endless meetings and still justify their job the same way they ever did. No AI will ever host a breakout session at an offsite to discuss strategy for getting people to work in the horrific hotel seating dehumanized office, they’re too capable.

> No AI will ever host a breakout session at an offsite to discuss strategy for getting people to work in the horrific hotel seating dehumanized office

Well, let’s hope not.

I can already feel it dramatically increasing my personal productivity. I expect it's going to eventually lead to a 2x or 3x time productivity increase for software engineering generally (if not more).

Will that result in less demand for software engineers? I doubt it. I think it will lead to companies and organizations doing way more software engineering.

I was going to use the old "ATMs resulted in more jobs for bank tellers example", but apparently that particular example is flawed: https://www.vox.com/2017/5/8/15584268/eric-schmidt-alphabet-...

> apparently that particular example is flawed

Um, yes. Been in a bank branch lately? Had to visit a bank branch for any reason?

Increased supply doesn't change the demand curve but there are basically no scenarios that don't lead to an increase in volume and a decrease in price.

I mean, people aren't going to be able to solve 100x as many problems because of this.

I don't think anyone is claiming that. But 2 or 3X? Possibly. And that would be enough to be a game changer.

Yeah maybe, but will it lead to less jobs? I am not convinced.

Somewhat similar boat; I just hope it winds up helping me do my job better, instead of me trying to teach it how to do my job. Setting aside professional anxieties, after using chatGPT for a bit I quickly realized I am completely uninterested in prompt engineering. But as a tool, like with an IDE, it could be a big leap forward.

I literally just finished writing some documentation and had Copilot running, sometimes it'd autocomplete something with garbage (and I would just type what I wanted anyway), more than once it autocompleted with several lines of exactly what I wanted to write. This is way better than the phone-type autocomplete I've seen in gmail where it just guesses the next word.

I ducking agree

I have started using it for a few days. Basically asking to write and modify pieces of code, for now small ones where I can easily spot a bullshit. I am very much looking forward for it to improve to the point where I can spend more time thinking about business domain rather then how to translate it to efficient code.

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