Software developers are not okay

markhammond68

After 40 years in development I have never known a time like this. Half of my colleagues seem to be in denial, the other half seem to be slowly cracking up. The future is going to be very different, very soon.

rootusrootus

Reading the stories, I’m happy to be working at a place where management is AI-skeptical. They do allow developers to use LLMs, but the token budget is $5. I’ve decided not to complain.

jubilee33

Nobody really cared when factory jobs were replaced, or food processing, or farming, or any number of waves of "menial", so called "low skill" labor jobs. There was an arrogance that those people deserved it because they couldn't upgrade themselves. Nobody will feel sorry for software devs, who have been privileged enough to have had high respect and pay for quite a long time. İt may be sad but it's just the case that the only thing different this time is the fact that's its "knowledge work" that's being replaced, and the smart people now find themselves in the position where the common man has found themselves time and time again. İ do feel sorry for devs as overall they are quite a good group of people, As opposed to bankers and brokers and lawyers who I personally am praying they get replaces asap, unfortunately the only thing protecting them at the moment are the regulatory moats. People will simple have to find some new work, it sucks but some of us have been dealing with not being wanted by corpo-world our whole lives despite our skills, and we are still here. You will all be fine. Much love to all who are going through this.

anovikov

What i observe here from the 3rd world country (technically European Union, but everything outside of the Valley is 3rd world when it comes to coding) is by far not as traumatic. People who used to do coding jobs in order to extract the money from Americans, just switched to different kinds of online scams, which they believed coding to be simply one of, perhaps legitimately so.

kren

I definitely had to leave my job after realizing what was happening to the company and to my brain on LLMs. Constantly using AI is not healthy and there’s no out except to leave. At my employer, every incentive, every metric, every conversation, was aligned behind using AI. Every team performance meeting pulled up graphs on whether velocity was increasing beyond last quarter’s metrics, which should be going up because of AI. Choosing not to use it inevitably means getting let go since I’d be working at slower speeds. But as team lead this was already happening because all my time was spent reviewing slop and I had no time to produce my own code, because the entire team was being reckless with their submissions. I was going at 1/3 the speed of everyone else trying to keep things coherent. My manager preferred to fix forward rather than address my concerns that we were producing tech debt at 10x speeds, so none of my comments were addressed. As soon as our prototype was done, the other most senior engineer and I pleaded that we rewrite it from scratch before getting it to prod, but that of course would have been a two month setback. By now, all of upper management were ending every quarterly meeting with “If you don’t like AI, then leave now”. I haven’t looked back, and I don’t think it will go well for them.

dasil003

I think the capital vs labor structure here obscures the most interesting dynamics going on. I mean, sure there are a bunch of greedy execs that would love to reduce head count and are pretty out of touch so that they have a high degree of not really knowing or caring about the people on the front lines while also not really understanding what they do or if it even can be replaced. This is the same story since the dawn of the industrial revolution, and probably well before that. But one of the things I find interesting at the ground level is that AI can be incredibly empowering to individuals on the front lines, because suddenly one person can run down code, data, logs, and other tedious scope to cut through layers of bureaucracy that served no real purpose except to manage human bandwidth constraints. Now obviously this is not a panacea, it doesn't work everywhere, can be disruptive, lead to new ambiguities, etc. It's too early to see how it will actually pan out once model capabilities and human ways of working stabilize, and I'm sympathetic to the anxiety this produces. But my point is, bad management notwithstanding, modern AI tends to be most empowering to software engineers and other detail-oriented people, and I don't see this changing any time soon.

Supermancho

> I keep coming across videos of people talking about burning out I also keep coming across videos of people talking about quitting Warhammer 40k. This doesn't mean there's a crisis, as much as a self-reinforcing pattern of interest. My employer retains thousands of devs. I have a handful of software developer friends outside of work. These people are all happy (not to the same degree or the same usage patterns ofc) with the improvements to quality and process that AI has actively sourced or helped produce. I don't understand where all these AI burnouts are coming from, but it's a minority. It's likely less than ~30% efficiency haircut for the industry - so there's likely to be no additional impact if you're unhappy. This is far from the implication that all Software Developers are not okay .

pull_my_finger

Duplicate of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50025798

retrac98

I’m fine. I’ve made a career out of automating work previously done by people. I’ve no right to complain now I’m less of a bottleneck in the process.