It also seems like the value of quality tutoring that doesn't primarily function as social/class signaling goes down as tools capable of automating high quality intellectual work are more widely available.
100%. I think there are some clear distinctions between AI training and human learning in practice that compound this. Humans learning requires individual investment and doesn't scale that efficiently.
If someone invests the time to consume all of my published work and learn from it, I feel good about that. That feels like impact, especially if we interact and even more if I help them. They can perhaps reproduce anything I could've done, and that's cool.
If someone trains a machine on my work and it means you can get the benefit of my labor without knowing me, interacting with my work or understanding it, or really any effort beyond some GPUs, that feels bad.
And, it's much more of a risk to me, if that means anything.
If it doesn't work, it's an annoyance and you have to argue with it.
If it does work, it's one more case where maybe with the right MCP plumbing and/or a slightly better model you might not be needed as part of this process.
Feels a bit lose-lose.
Certainly not my intention. Some of my post is projection: I don't like the implications of the AI enthusiast stance, and I know I want "actually, AI can't fully take over the task of programming" to be true even though my recent experience with uses it to handle even moderately complex implementation has been quite successful.
I've also seen the opposition narrow in scope but not firmness over the last year from some coworkers while watching others outsource nearly all of their actual code interaction, and I think some of the difference is how invested they are in the craft of programming vs being able to ship something.
So, if you like the part AI is expected to take over and see it as part of your value, it makes sense that your threshold are higher for accepting that outcome as accurate. Seems like typical psychology rather than an attack.
I suspect that lots of developers who are sour on relying on AI significantly _would_ agree with most of this, but see the result of that logic leading to (as the article notes) "the skill of writing and reading code is obsolete, and it's our job to make software engineering increasingly entirely automated" and really don't like that outcome so they try to find a way to reject it.
"The skillset you've spend decades developing and expected to continue having a career selling? The parts of it that aren't high level product management and systems architecture are quickly becoming irrelevant, and it's your job to speed that process along" isn't an easy pill to swallow.
I don't doubt that many love it. I'm just going based on SF non-tech people I know, who largely see it as the thing vaguely mentioned on every billboard and bus stop, the chatbot every tech company seems to be trying to wedge into every app, and the thing that makes misleading content on social media and enables cheating on school projects. But, sometimes it is good at summarizing videos and such. I probably have a biased sample of people who don't really try to make productive use of AI.
Anecdotally, lots of people in SF tech hate AI too. _Most_ people out of tech do.
But, enough of the people in tech have their future tied to AI that there are lot of vocal boosters.
Yeah, it makes sense that going from a decade or so where SWE was one of the best possible career paths if you have any aptitude to a period where tech cos were staffing up aggressively (I recall reading ~60% growth), there's gonna be a hangover.
The educational pipeline probably still has a few years of oversupply to work through, and all of the people laid off post covid still need to work.
Even in a world where AI being able to automate some of the key skills required for SWE has no negative impact on employment, we'd expect a few more years of rough job prospects.
Even 15 years ago or so when Guido was still there I recall being told "we aren't supposed to write any new services in Python. It starts easy, then things get messy and end up needing to be rewritten." I recall it mostly being perf and tooling support, but also lack of typing, which has changed since then, so maybe they've gotten more accepting.
Oh, that explains a thing.
A decade or so ago, I was a well regarded engineer at a FAANG who got an offer from a startup. I told my manager I was probably going to take it, as it sounded fun.
He and his lead tried to talk me into staying, showed me other departments I might find more fun.
Really, they could've offered me a trivial raise and I probably would've stayed, but I was too meek to ask for money, and they didn't bring up money at all.
That always struck me as very strange; I assumed it was either a mistake, or a "if they're going somewhere that is a pay cut, clearly it isn't money, and if you offer them money they'll leave in 6mo anyway". But, if they don't have that level to pull, that's a much simpler answer.
Thanks for Picol! I saw it as a young engineer, and found the simplicity inspiring. It inspired me to write Tcl interpreters as starter projects in the next languages I was picking up, and I learned a lot by trying to push performance , functionality, and correctness.
Your little project ended up inspiring cumulative months of joyful hacking.
Some of the problem in the conversation around this is that many people take "1x engineer" to mean "not particularly competent engineer" and some take it to mean "baseline, solid contributor who isn't exceptional", and the bar for what we regard as exceptional can differ drastically.
I've been on teams where everyone is pretty good and felt like I was a genius, I've been on teams with really remarkable people and felt unworthy.
Nobody knows or agrees what 'x' is or that it can even be reasonably measured, so all conversations about 'x' multipliers tend to be unproductive.
If you're very rich, not left leaning, and have a big platform, I imagine it's very easy for censorship/woke mobs to seem like the biggest problem.
Most of your needs/wants (in terms of food, shelter, safety) are met, you can mostly do what you want, but people online call you names and some of your posts might get taken down. It's one of the only problems you can feel, and it's obviously because the culture is wrong, because you feel it's empirically established that you are smart and good.
It's a little like people whose exclusive concern in the realm of sexual assault is false accusations; if you can't imagine being a victim or a perpetrator, false accusation is the only part you think can affect you, so naturally your priority is minimizing that risk. Skews your perspective a bit.
Quite true! Having been fairly instrumental in a few areas that I'd eventually moved on from, it was always interesting to see some of my trademark accomplishments become The Old Thing We're Trying To Replace (or even just The Big Thing We Have To Maintain); gave me a lot of empathy for prior contributors of code I ended up inheriting.
I tend to assume that the old thing seems dumb because of the constraints when it was written and changing requirements over time; if a tool made by one person in a few weeks seems hopelessly naive to the medium sized team investing a few quarters in replacing it a few years later, that seems to be a rousing success for the original author.
This seems generally true in my experience.
Another aspect of this, from personal experience: while it may be easy to move around in a large organization, you risk losing reputational capital. I had a habit of building reputation in some team/platform, then after I no longer found it engaging or there was enough turnover/focus shift, I'd ask to transition to a wildly different team for a new challenge.
It _is_ fun, but if you opt to start as an IC and work your way up, you're sorta letting the ratchet slip, and if you do it every couple years you may have broad experience, but your reputation (and likely level) will be well below where it could be.
Thus, unless you can ramp to expertise really quickly to leverage your skills developed elsewhere, I'd recommend (perhaps obviously) to try to move to peripheral teams where your skills and relationships transfer as much as possible.
Grover Norquist, prominent conservative voice and head of Americans For Tax Reform has talked about the danger of government provided filing services, namely that he believes it leads ultimately to increased taxes.
The idea is that if the govt is saying how much you made, how much you owe, and just giving you a place to click "OK", it's on the tax payer to do the math to disagree, and the govt has incentive to find you owe more. And, taxes are less visible and easier, so if taxes go up or policies change, all the americans just confirming and hitting "Pay" aren't going to notice or be mad.
Or, something like that.