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Comment by okdood64 | Hacker News Reader

As an SRE I'm not too worried on a 25 year horizon. Yes I pulled that number out of my ass.

Depending on the quarter only 10% to 25% of my time is writing code. The other is dealing with: finding high level reliability concerns, figuring out what solutions to implement, diving into complex acute production issues, evaluating trade-offs for fixes, finding ways to make things more efficient, negotiating what to prioritize with other teams/orgs/leadership, etc.

Could an AI do some of these things? Sure. Are they going to be able to figure out the right stakeholder to talk to, negotiate with them, get buy-in and decide on overall designs/solutions? No.

I'd be a bit concerned if I was a frontend developer (though any decent one could pivot to something else.) however.

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Why? Frontend development is one of the most challenging roles and for any non-trivial UI application, there is a ton of "non-code" user context that isn't even available to an AI. AI might be able to spit out template websites, but it can also spit out Cloudformation templates.

It is extremely challenging! (Based on my brief foray into it.) But leveraging LLMs to create really good starting point for a new feature would reduce the amount of frontend developers needed.

I guess what I mean to say as SRE/Systems, we code so little already that it being able to spit out a CF template wouldn't reduce the needs for cross-functional ops type work.

I think a review of the state of frontend tooling will show that efficiency with respect to developer hours is not a widely shared priority. I only say this with only 50% intention of starting a flame war.

well the presumed doomsday is presumably going to hit everybody, because how hard is it to retrain from a just-made-redundant programmer to an SRE? if your life depends on it? so the jobs that are still needed will get flooded with people from adjacent specialties because people want to eat.

or so it goes, no idea if this is going to actually happen.

okdood64 says>"As an SRE I'm not too worried on a 25 year horizon. Yes I pulled that number out of my ass."<

I so wish you had not done that: the number 25 is now tainted in my workmates' collective memory, no one of them is willing to touch it, yet I fear we shall need it again soon.

You should have instead "pulled that number out of a hat":

https://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/pull+out+of+a+hat

As you can see by the following, there is a difference:

https://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/pull+out+of+ass

Perhaps you can be forgiven this once, being a back-end developer, but, in the future, please consider your audience.

Those two phrases are very commonly used interchangeably.

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