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Comment by DrewADesign | Hacker News Reader

Right, but if things progress as they promised, it will require far fewer people to do the same work, which means the industry already has all the people it so need for at least a couple decades. That’s what happened with tool and die guys when offshoring kicked off, and now they’re scrambling to get apprentices because the last of the OG ones are retiring. There were decades that pretty much nobody (relative to prior eras) got trained for that work.

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You are assuming that the amount of work is finite, so more productive people implies fewer people are required. Is that the case though? Has it ever been?

> You are assuming that the amount of work is finite, so more productive people implies fewer people are required. Is that the case though? Has it ever been?

How many horse farriers have you met? How many coopers, blacksmiths, or shoemakers?

Not a fair comparison. Unlike shoemaker or coopers who do ONE thing, a SWE doesnt do just one thing.. atleast in general. I churned through basic, logo, c, c++, java, c#, python, go and now agents. The executable building on single machine died when distributed systems came in. It again evolved when cloud took over. We have been reinventing our work every few years. Every job change requires us to learn new skills.

How much did a horse farrier have to learn if they switched their employers?

No profession uses only one skill. I’ve had a few, the longest-running as a developer, and there is nothing uniquely varied about working in software. One thing that is pretty unique to software is how superior they feel to most other professionals, when in reality, it’s a pretty mediocre discipline compared to electrical or mechanical engineering, medicine, chemistry…

Cobblers design, make and repair shoes of various kinds, boots for various purposes, slippers and moccasins with leather, cloth, rubber, and many kinds of threads using punches, knives, various machines, glues…

How much does a developer need to learn about their core competency when switching employers? Not even close to as much as a machinist. It’s not a useful comparison.

You asked for counterexamples, so I gave you a few. Did I misinterpret your question?

They absolutely still exist just not in the US. Bad comparison IHMO. What they make is just imported into the US and they often work in factories in low wage countries like Bangladesh, Pakistan, Cambodia. They were just offshored

> They absolutely still exist

That is precisely the point. They still exist, but it is a far less common occupation than it once was.

The amount of work in any given market at any given time is finite. Beyond that, developers likely won’t even be the bottleneck if everyone is a 10x ultradev 3000.

> Has it ever been?

Well… yes? So very many industries shrank, even disappeared in practical terms, because efficiency, automation and technological improvements. Industrial revolution? Calculators? Computerized accounting? I mean the list is giant.

The amount of work is not a fixed number, it's more of a supply/demand curve. Do we need 100 programs? Yes definitely! 10k? Yes. 1m? Probably. 100m? Uhm... 1bn? Probably not.

So there will always be a point where people aren't willing to hire more software developers because there are enough already.

Considering the dev job market right now, lack of developers doesn’t seem to be a bottleneck for the industry.

You're making an assumption on what AI lab have promised? The same AI labs that have made a strategy out of lying for hype? Thats crazy man, regardless of whether anything else you're saying is valid.

That’s why I said “if” and not “when.”

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