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Comment by applfanboysbgon | Hacker News Reader

Hello, efficient market fallacy. Markets are not actually efficient, and especially not instantaneously so. There are a million ways to observe various market inefficiencies[1], so it's childishly naive to assert that they are in fact perfectly efficient according to some ideological belief of yours without considering reality.

[1] Some examples: https://danluu.com/nothing-works/

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What I say has nothing to do with efficient market hypothesis. Here the question is simpler: in small companies where there are competitors, who does the wrong choices will be seriously hit since customers will star preferring less slop and more reliability, if AI is mis-used. And companies that instead of firing, hire the folks that are "ideas people" and can use AI efficiently, and now how to control the quality of the output, will deliver more and better. For bigger companies: AI is driving salaries at a more normal level (honestly we want a bit too high, in recent years, even for people with a very low level of knowledge, didn't we?) and to marginally reduce total spending and not deliver the timeline they have, and are used to observe for years, will be noticed. Also companies in the past had a dangerous tendency to over-hire. I don't think now they will invert the direction and over-fire. I have the feeling many managers will instead reason in terms: what is today the great programmer fit? The one with low level knowledge of each algorithm, or the one that has good ideas and understands product, quality, processes, other than programming? And they will try to mix AI and people in order to have an edge.

I think we're in partial agreement on some things. I agree that the software field overhired and overpaid people who should never have had jobs in software in the first place, and that a correction is/was overdue. I also generally agree that small companies cannot afford to produce garbage software, and if they make poor decisions about hiring or AI usage, they will die in the womb. But startups failing is not really what I think of when somebody says "companies will be replaced" or "your job security is contigent on what management thinks of AI capabilities". Those sentences both convoke images of already-successful enterprise companies, and already-successful enterprise companies are the ones that are most resistant to market forces. Indeed, we already see this in the real world, because most enterprise companies produce truly horrifyingly bad software, even before AI. The secret is that you need to produce good software to become successful, and then once successful, network effects take over and your company can become unbelievably inefficient and have little to no fear of being replaced. Tech is a ridiculously winner-take-all field, and it's very common for a single company to capture over 50% of their market, after which point they are effectively irreplaceable no matter how many bad decisions they make, at least for many years if not decades.

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