Comment by agentultra 3 days ago
We haven’t passed the stage where we convince policy makers to stop dumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
We’re not going to convince anyone to keep hiring software developers.
I think we ought to be keeping people trained and employed but it seems we’re not on the winning side here.
On the long term, we're all dead.
I doubt things will recover to 2018 levels. Too many new software devs coming out each year, too much AI, too little big company growth once everyone already has an internet computer in their hands. The Wild West is over and now the digital economy has entered the boring phase.
> I think we ought to be keeping people trained and employed
I never understood this sentiment. We don't have a massive manual weaving industry anymore, 95%+ of people used to be farmers in 1900. Tech comes and replaces humans, and the transition can be extremely painful especially for the people replaced, but ultimately it's better than keeping people artificially employed in obsolete jobs.
(I don't think SWE will be obsolete, but even in this case I'd rather switch careers)
Most deindustrialized regions in the West haven't recovered to full prosperity and are quite depressing to live in, sometimes even 30-40 years later: US Rust Belt, Wallonia in Belgium, the French North East, etc.
At a large enough scale, most people don't really move on, their lives are wrecked and they just suffer through them.
This is predicated on the myth that people can re-skill and move into new industries. Sure the former can happen and people can learn new things. But we're talking about an economy where there are no new industries. And an economy where you have to work in order to live.
What's a software developer in their 30s, 40s, and 50s supposed to re-skill into? Take on debt for the rest of their lives and re-skill into a profession (if they can even afford to take several years out of their lives to go back to school)? Into blue collar work along with the salary cut for which they might not have the physical capabilities for?
There's no social system for providing the necessities for living.
The other side of it is skill. Human societies have lost knowledge before. We've had to rediscover various aspects of metallurgy before. We could lose the ability to understand the technology we've made if we trust everything to the LLMs. There are already vibecoders who don't even be able to review the code that it generates for them because they're starting to lose the critical faculties and skills to understand it.
We gotta gather ourselves and remind companies why they once paid handsomely to not let potential disruptiors run rampant on the market. Long term new teams will form once productivity is valued again and not this giant incestuous GDP-maxmizing scheme.