AI is a real threat to programming compensation. It's already kind of happening as junior dev work has become much harder to find (and consequently people will take jobs paying less), and senior devs are starting to lean on LLM's for basic code.
If you are paying attention, this is a pretty terrifying prospect if you are building a $200k+/yr life on the basis that SWE will pay like this forever. A machine is coming along that genuinely might be 80% of your skill set in a few years, makes it very difficult to negotiate generous packages with the remaining 20%.
> A machine is coming along that genuinely might be 80% of your skill set in a few years
Something similar happened when COBOL came out. Same with website builders. The big difference between most industries versus software is we aren't even close to satisfying the world's desire for software yet, so increases in productivity just gives us bigger leverage.
From a greybeard, I'll say this: This is nothing new. I don't see that this will disadvantage anybody other than those with a failure to adapt. This is about on par with IDEs that can stub out tests and method signatures on the scale of things to worry about.
> A machine is coming along that genuinely might be 80% of your skill set in a few years
Is this supposed to be scary? This scenario is absolute stonks if you're a developer worth your salt. A machine makes me 5 times more productive, and I don't even have to commoditize my complement because they're taking care of that themselves?
This assumes companies have finite backlogs. AI will raise productivity, but to date no company has said 'our software is done, send all the programmers home.' Instead companies expand what they want from their software.
The rate of change could make the short term bumpy as companies try to play around with less dev work. Eventually though competition will push companies to raise their productivity to the new baseline (programmers + AI).
One thing that is a danger is if devs ignore what's happening in AI. I remember when Google first came out having to learn the art of querying Google to get what I was looking for. AI/LLMs looks to be the same - ignore learning how to leverage them at your own peril.
This 100% does happen, all the time, mostly in SMB.
Hire a team to build a project, when it's finally satisfied most of your requirements, you progressively cut staff until only Jim is left, and Jim spends the next two decades maintaining the system, growing out his hair and beard, piling kludge on top of kludge, and drinking heavily until retirement.
The HN bubble, focused so intently on BigTech and FAANG, is woefully unaware of how things work basically everywhere else.
According to Fidelity, Twitter has gone from a 44 billion dollar company to less than 10 in 2 years. Clearly we should not be using it as an example of how to run a technology business.
I think we're misidentifying AI as the catalyst when it's more like the accepted excuse for diminishing compensation for software developers. Ownership wanted to drive down costs as salaries were getting out of control. This includes not just wages but work/life balance and other perks.
Personally I think its cyclical as software is such a key component of communication and automation - and so we'll see future growth periods but probably not to the same extent as the last decade where seemingly every undergrad was compelled to study Computer Science.
I don’t think that software salaries are coming down yet as a result of Copilot/ChatGPT, they’ve come down because of overexpansion during COVID and a big rise in interest rates that makes raising funding and investment much more challenging for most technology companies and forces them to become profitable sooner rather than later (with some not able to make that transition and therefore failing).
Junior positions being hard to find are the result of the post Covid market correction and the relative expense of borrowing money in a high interest rate environment, not of chatbots replacing juniors. Executives might be saying it's AI but they're wrong.
If you are paying attention, this is a pretty terrifying prospect if you are building a $200k+/yr life on the basis that SWE will pay like this forever. A machine is coming along that genuinely might be 80% of your skill set in a few years, makes it very difficult to negotiate generous packages with the remaining 20%.