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Comment by visarga | Hacker News Reader

> What if SWEs get 50% more efficient and they fire half?

Zero sum game or fixed lump of work fallacy. Think second order effects - now that we spend less time repeating known methods, we will take on more ambitious work. Competition between companies using human + AI will raise the bar. Software has been cannibalizing itself for 60 years, with each new language and framework, and yet employment is strong.

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Fair, there are probably two threads to this.

New product that push that bar and can command a decent margin (and good staff salaries) as long as there's a business case/demand and feature-sets that currently command a decent margin will be available for dirt cheap prices (managed by one or two person outfits).

Your comment really got me thinking, it's time to upskill haha. Aside from biotech and robotics do you see any areas particularly ripe for this push?

For example, it the core field of innovation is biotech, there will be unexpected needs in downstream and upstream fields like medical tooling, biosensors, carbon capture and novel materials. Internet blossomed into a thousand businesses, I expect the same thing to happen again - we gain new capabilities, they open up demand for new products, so we get new markets and industries. Desires always fill up the existing capability space like a gas fills a room.

It's probably true, but just not for SWEs. Many roles will go the way of secretarys; the cost of making an administrative tool will decrease to the point where there is less need for a specialised role to handle it. The question is going to be about the pace of disruption, is there something special about these new tools?

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