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Comment by themagician | Hacker News Reader

Things are different now. The reality is that probably close to 80-90% of self-described software engineers face permnanet unemployment as they will be replaced by low paid "prompt engineers", likey from India. It's already happening and it's happening at scale. The top 10% will see enourmous income gains as they will be the only people left who actually know what they are doing and how to correct mistakes that can't be corrected via prompt. If you are great you are good. If you are average you are !@#$ed.

The shift is happening fast. It won't be measured in years, but weeks and months. By year's end everything will be different. In 24 months entire career paths will be obliterated and there is no time to retrain. It's a cotton gin moment.

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While I agree great engineers will continue to grow in scarcity and demand higher and higher compensation, the shift to armies of prompt specialists is not just an overstatement. It's wrong.

Why?

The same was said again and again again about the offshoring programmers. Reality? Here we are with countless unfilled jobs hiring for senior enginners in NYC for over 200k per year.

The gap, at least cultural, between a coder in Bengalore and San Francisco is significant. Imagine compared to an outsourced "consultant" behind a prompt .

Plus, coding is about 10% of the work. If that. What matters in the end is the thinking, design and solutioning.

Putting a WordPress standard looking and doing template together? Sure gpt4 would do and help udemy self taught "programmer" do it just fine. Innovation and building fit for purpose systems? Humans. Even with quantum computers and 7 trillion parameters models, still humans.

It might be necessary to hire more junior engineers to produce enough senior ones.

Wasn't trying to explain where are senior coming from. But that if after 20 years of attempt to offshore tech like we did textile, here we are still looking for upper level qualified enginners in the most expensive cities in the world, it means announcing the offshoring of the industry , all along , was fallacy. Wishful thinking for some.

Here we are at it again. AI will shift all these workers off payroll . Compress salaries. They are just manipulation, fear mongering to make job seekers give in and accept those underpaid vacant jobs.

Where are senior nurtured at? From companies, usually small, and/or those that don't buy the outsourcing/off shoring fallacy, or because it isn't an option for their organization.

The ratio of senior to junior has always been an issue and is independent to the offshoring phenomenon. More new people get into tech, and faster than seniors get formed. So it always seems there are too many junior, not enough senior. It also means there will defacto be far more seniors in the next generation than there are today. Still even less relative to how many we will need though.

Genuinely reads like a scare-mongering myths. I am doing the basic of the basic atm - adding an API endpoint to call an internal API and get a subset of data and ChatGPT can't even accomplish that. I have been reviewing the usability of AI for at least a year now, and it's still nowhere near even replacing juniors, despite these posts.

Nevermind. The downvoting is wild. This is how you end up in a bubble.

And there is no rule saying these things have to be related. Execs acting like lemmings is as feasible an explanation.

And CEOs are well known for never spitting lies to manipulate the audience to get cheaper labour, right?

It already has replaced many junior and even mid level engineers. People are getting good at refining prompts. That's the new skill.

Do you have people under you? If yes, I gurantee they can be replaced by a script kiddie with some prompt experience. If no, well… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HdKqAVpUOwI

OK, so assuming a script kiddy with LLM can be as efficient as a junior without LLM, junior with LLM is going to be even more efficient. So we are back to where we are, except everyone is more efficient.

I myself don't tend to believe that performance improvement is that dramatic.

That's a very weird market you're describing. Can't the top 10% do "prompt engineering" themselves? What's the point of creating a layer of incompetent human programmers in the middle?

That's the normal market reaction to some kind of automation.

The most competent few can do a lot more, and command a higher salary, while the masses discover they are out of jobs.

After that, people discover that the product is now cheaper, so they may or may not buy more of it, maybe or maybe not increasing the total they spend, and maybe or maybe not creating more jobs for the mass that was displaced earlier.

Anyway, believing that LLM-programming is going to have that impact is just ridiculous.

People have been saying this for decades about tech specifically, and for hundreds of years about every major technological innovation.

Yes, and it happens and destroys entire cities, many which never recover.

> The shift is happening fast. It won't be measured in years, but weeks and months. By year's end everything will be different.

What are some real world examples of this that you have personally witnessed that makes you think this is happening so fast?

Yep - Offshoring to india replace me in 2002 and I've been out of work since /s

oh - and AI replaced me in late 1980s just like Doctor Dobbs predicted /s

basically, every 10 years _someone_ is claiming programmers will be obsolete - and its been that way for 40 years. But usually that just means the market cools for a year or two, then comes roaring back...

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