"ChatGPT is gonna steal our jobs" No. No it won't. There are many reasons why but the main one is that dev work has a human element that can't currently be reproduced by AI. Not by a long shot. What it WILL do is make the industry more competitive. Why? Because the efficacy of the average developer will increase. Imagine this: in a team you have juniors, mid and senior level devs working with each other to solve problems. Typically seniors are tasked with mentoring. This limits their productivity for handling more complex tasks and the pressure for more experienced help is created. Currently if you are a experienced developer in this industry then you can solve this demand issue. That's why things are great for 5+ year devs. Enter AI development : AI assisted IDE's, auto-generated boilerplate code, AI assisted code review and more. AI will make the average developer into a GOOD developer. Now, instead of seniors having to hand hold the other developers, AI helps fill in the gap by helping juniors and mids be useful. Seniors can become more productive on their own code using AI and now the pressure on that team to get new skilled developers is gone. The demand for skilled developers on the market goes down. This is the first outcome of advancements in AI. The second outcome is AI will fill the skill gap between any developer not involved in business logic, design or complex problem solving. Basically junior and mid level engineers become indistinguishable. Combine this with an increased supply of developers (because barrier to entry is even lower) and everyone under 5 years experience will have a VERY hard time finding jobs (i.e. tougher interviews, more arbitrary resume filtering ect.) Where does that leave senior+ engineering? Developers that are good have to be even BETTER to stand out and elitism comes into play. Similar to law, finance and academia, the name brand of the institutions you belong to will become a main differentiator (in addition to talent). You'll have to be truly exceptional all around to be senior at a major company. How do I know this will happen? It already does at pinnacle software companies (post-faang) where most applicants are highly skilled already. Check out openai employees on linkedin for example: you'd be hard pressed to find an engineer who didn't both work at faang AND go to a top 5 CS school. Imagine this but at all major companies. Worst still, any senior unable to compete at these high levels can't retreat to smaller companies for decent tc because those roles are taken by cheaper mid-level engineers who are now capable enough to handle complexity with the help of AI. Companies that can afford exceptional seniors will pay but competition will be, as like with major companies, be insane. Therefore, the vast majority of senior engineers get stuck at the wages of mid-level engineers. Wages will be capped at a mediocre level for most devs. TLDR: AI won't take your job but it will make more people into capable developers. Since more people are capable, demand for skilled developers goes down. Lowered bar to entry causes supply of devs to outstrip demand below senior level. Senior+ level development remains financially lucrative only at top companies. Senior hiring will be determined by more arbitrary factors like prestige of companies worked at/schools attended (as a differentiator between a glut of already highly qualified engineers). Seniors unable to compete get stuck at mid-level TC. SUPER TLDR: AI will cause unexceptional devs (pretty much 99% of us in this case) to be stuck at the same mediocre TC for the rest of our career. Put a lot of thought and research into this write up so feel free to question me in the comments. Just as a disclaimer, I think it'll be at least 10 years things REALLY look like this so it's not an immediate threat. Thanks
Your TLDR; is too long to read man, but I get what you're trying to say by the title.
I added a super TLDR 😂
You are assuming the AI assisted tools are good enough to be as productive as you said. In reality, they aren't. Not yet there. May be 10 years from now. The current assistant is somewhat too buggy. Because it either involves writing a tight unit tests which is almost coding or having a developer to review the AI output
Yep I added that 10 year disclaimer in the last paragraph. I guess the write up is so long people are missing details 😂
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I see a number of SWE's suck even at basic Google search. Even ChatGPT requires a person to ask the right questions. Nothing that ChatGPT returns isn't available on Google. So, it will make the already great engineers more great & efficient. Okay engineers will also become more efficient but their gains will be max 2x. It will hurt the entry level engineers the most. Because ChatGPT is not good for learning. It just outputs a okay ish code.
What I'm more excited about is that generative ai will replace bureaucracy and middle management. All those middle brokers that exist just to write emails can be automated by generative ai.
Asked chatGPT to rewrite this in one sentence. OP is redundant now.
Lol thanks for that. Working smarter right here
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Screw it. Don't care anymore. Let Israel take it. One state solution.
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How can my idiot brother who does real estate afford this
i ain’t reading all that. i’m happy for you tho. or sorry that happened.
Lol understandable. This is more of a reddit post tbh