Comment by ecshafer

Comment by ecshafer 21 hours ago

3 replies

Programming is pretty lucky that there is also large demand for programmers, and the product is high grossing, because the salaries are good. Most other fields with a passion component are low paying. Almost all of the arts Film, Music, Writing, Art pay very low if you are not the absolute top of the field. Millions of people are out there writing short stories, drawing manga, shooting student films, etc for free to land jobs for salaries that the average CS grad would laugh at.

OkayPhysicist 19 hours ago

We're in that position because the work is both hard and appears hard. The kneejerk response most people have to a wall of source code is to run in terror. We know that "being able to read the moon runes" is not the valuable part of our profession, but it has served as a convenient first line of defense. People are more willing to pay ridiculous sums of money to people doing things "I could never", as opposed to "I could, if I wanted to". Art mostly is in the "is hard, looks easy" category. Just look at the average person's response to Barnett Newman's paintings, for example.

IMO, this is the most imminent risk with vibecoding. Not that it'll reduce the demand for software developers, but that it'll damage the perceived difficulty of our work.

  • silisili 19 hours ago

    I agree with the last part, but in many ways that had already been done or at least accelerated in the era of bootcamps.

    I had the displeasure of working with more than a few folks who got into it for the money and claimed it was easy, who thought it was a job of mainly Googling and copy pasting. The sad thing is that these people often survive fine in a big enough org.

    Yeah, maybe I'm gatekeeping a bit, but it felt like it really cheapened the image of the job.

    But you're right, vibecoding is likely going to accelerate such diminishing further.

  • [removed] 18 hours ago
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