bdangubic

shows you that 14% layoffs wasn’t enough, if they did 34%…

the problem is that very few to none SWEs “doing their own thing” will ever make a penny out if it. whatever they do, if it actually makes a little traction, will be cloned and copied in a week by someone else. this whole idea that “we’ll see a 1-person billion dollar startup” is as silly as it gets

AI-written obviously as well

more impressive than “17” but less impressive than “15”

I love this optimism but I after a (too) long career I think that 3rd thing will win out - "how we do new things - but cheaper (or as cheap as possible)" there are sooooo many different articles that have been discussed here on HN that basically argue "coding has never been the bottleneck" which to me is the biggest lie SWEs are currently trying to tell themselves, I have been coding 30+ years now and coding has always been the bottleneck. hiring new developers has always been justified with "we have all this work that needs to be done and not enough people to get the work done." with llms in the fold, I am questioning how will these decisions be made in the future? perhaps in the most simplistic view:

1. run a bigger "agent army"

2. hire more people to control and guide the existing "agent army"

I think it'll be #1 and SWEs will be expected to do more work and work longer hours in the future (those that are able to keep their jobs). this is more pessimistic outlook than yours so I hope you are right more than I am :)

edit: just now on the HN front page: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/08/technology/meta-ai-employ...

My daughter did the same thing. She actually “lost the fight” but no one messed with her ever since

facts!

but we can see trends and for your livehoood it is important to be able to make educated predictions based on trends. not saying everyone should start making AI predictions (though many already do)

China, Germany, any country in Scandinavia, Poland, Japan… it is a long list

> Especially for software developers it looks increasingly that after huge turmoil it's likely we will need +/- the same number of developers in the world.

what exactly are you basing this opinion on? All I am seeing personally across multiple projects I am working on and other friends at other places is that downsizing is either begun or is planned (to exclude from here all the “public” layoffs we see on the news). Given how most business operate in the USA I think most of “AI strategies” are “we can do same with -40% staff” vs. “we can do XX% more work with same staff.”

I think this entirely depends on what kind of Java is being written. If you are Java developer on say Spring stack, moving to Go never ends up well in my experience. On several projects I worked on there was a push (strong word, more like investigation/POC) to start writing some services etc in Go and there was almost universal rejection at the end. So I think there is more to just language selection/preference but more like an entire ecosystem depending on what you are hacking

> When llms start contributing meaningfully to their own development, that would be a convincing indicator imo.

This has been the case for awhile now already…

https://kersai.com/the-48-hours-that-changed-ai-forever-clau...

sorry mate, I was just joking :)))

I would back that claim though with some citation cause like in my “circle” (personal and professional) nothing but big fans of AI art

the post was not written by human :) “humans, on average…” lol

(hallucinated) ai hard at work

the best way to deal with a bully is to punch her/his lights out. the schools should have a martial arts / mma trainer on staff. whover gets bullied has to take classes with martial arts / mma fighter until they can hit the bully hard enough for her/him to eat through a straw for a month. this is the way.

> A lot of human hard work involved

no there wasn’t and it is very obvious that it wasn’t

Tesla has a Dog mode

No backups?

like cybertruck? :)

exactly, that is DEI hard at work. he ran a campaign and his supporters were all like "DEI bad" while Zuck was getting rainbow flags tattooed on his forehead and then we ended up with the DEI-iest of DEI Presidents ever. and it is not just kash, it is all of them, through and through. too funny

   Let me tell you a highly stylized version of the American story.

   In the beginning, there was a startup called the United States, which we’ll refer to by its stock-ticker symbol, USA. It was young, scrappy, and hungry and needed to figure out how to deliver value to its citizens users.

   So it did a bunch of things: It created a central bank. It expanded its territory. It established mass communications (the postal service) and roads and public education. Eventually, it took the painful step of expunging slavery.

   This startup grew in size and productivity and market cap. Its user base became enormous. After about 160 years, USA became the biggest company on the planet, at which point it achieved a bunch of important network effects. Because USA benefited from free trade, it developed a military that could enforce a globalized system of free trade. Capital—both human and financial—flowed into USA. People—both users and clients4—loved USA. And for another 70 years it delivered good results for both. Its stock couldn’t have been higher.

   But then USA went down the road toward enshittification...

https://www.thebulwark.com/p/the-enshittified-states-of-amer...

so silly, right??! and of all the checkouts Costco is bussin! I am always with my daughter, we open a package of 85 croisants and eat like 5 while also opening 60lbs bag of walnuts and munch together while taking bets whether we picked the right line based on complex algorithms of who is working at checkout, who is in line and how much stuff they bought and another billions parameters :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yrIvEgqAuo =)

If you are on the right team with the right professionals you can measure. when we first started using LLMs we decided to run the same process as if they did not exist, same sprint planning meetings, same estimation. we did this for 6 months and saw roughly 55% increase in output compared to pre-LLM usage. there are biases in what were tried to achieve, it is not easy to estimate something will take XX hours when you know some portion (for example writing documentation or portions of the test coverage) you won’t have to write but we did our best. after we convinced ourselves of productivity gains we stopped doing this. saying you can’t measure something is typical SWE BS like “we can’t estimate” and the other lies we were able to convince everyone off successfully

Perhaps but how did America get “more developed than competition”? Bangladesh cannot “use diplomacy and superpower status” to push other countries around…

“The world is run by old men in a hurry”

https://www.ft.com/content/1d41a591-940d-4936-b79f-4c7857138...

He, just like about every single person working in this Administration, is a textbook definition of DEI hire (someone holding a job many other people are more qualified for :) ).

Comparing a drunk FBI Director frivolous lawsuit to military group chat leak is all sorts of crazy. No one's subscription numbers are going up for reporting about should-be-in-AA-meetings-and-not-running-FBI DEI hire (or even worse the eventual drop/dismissal of this case).

Suing is highly publicized thing, the "he dropped the lawsuit" or "lawsuit was dismissed" will be Friday news dump not covered by anything or anyone (especially now when one party control most if not all media - including "social" media)

in my experience this is because there are very very very very few thoughtful designers and engineers, especially compared to people that are cranking out code.

it is exactly this. I am self-employed and have been managing my solo 401k for 15+ years now. while I am fully aware of market being overvalued I will still max out my 401k this year ($80k, I am over 50 :) ) and that money needs to go somewhere. I could theoretically sell and sit on the cash and wait on "crash" but I could have technically done that a year ago (this were similarly not very rosy) or even earlier and that obviously would have been a terrible financial decision. no one can time the market and therein lies the core issue, money will always be flowing in...