Imo this will be the future model: a company puts a gun to your head, gives you agents, and tells you to figure out how to maximize the utility output you provide as an employee. They might put a token limit which incentivizes efficient token usage.
There's a lot of "room" here for creativity, i.e. the agents don't know how to milk the agents efficiently, which is essentially your new job. The agents might not know how to structure tasks so that the agents run overnight and run the proper experiment.
The difference between mediocre and 10x will increase. The more aggressive SV performance culture is probably going to become more mainstream.
Frankly, I think this whole model is way more burnout inducing. You're not really doing software engineering anymore. You're running this mental loop in the background of trying to multiplex between agents and mapping unstructured business problems to agentic work.
It's probably going to infect other industries over time. Software is the first big wave. I don't think people with computer skills who are good at computers will be screwed out of work long term. The tech industry has a lot of concentrated technical capital in the form of tooling and automation that other parts of the economy could significantly benefit from. Short term it looks bad, but long term, computers will become more and more dominant over the economy.
I don't think companies have yet figured out how to adapt their hiring, managerial practices, or internal incentive structures to reflect this. Most of what they're doing now is extremely crude and terrible for morale.
My plan is to just stay in the game as long as possible and bag as much money as possible. Delay family formation (gen z) or buying property so that the money is liquid. Job hop as needed because of all of the consolidation and acquisitions that are happening right now.
If the whole industry implodes, I'll probably just go and get another degree or a PhD and try to pivot into an adjacent field.
But for right now, I think that staying in tech makes the most sense. The WSJ and these other bootlicker newspapers want people to be uneducated and unable to move abroad or escape the corporate hellscape this country is turning into. More money is more freedom from these managerial cunts who are stumbling over themselves to fuck up everything. I genuinely think that things will not positively change until the educated people start leaving the US en masse and shit up the whole US economy.
But I'm wondering if anyone here can chime in with smart ways to pivot where you can apply the same type of skillset that leads someone to do well in SWE. Is statistics a good route?
I'm kind of confused. It's not clear to me how or why the line keeps going up. People are spending less because of economic insecurity, everything is more expensive because of tariffs and war, interest rates have been high for four years.
The general cultural mood feels unsustainable. Like the peak-woke period around 2022 before the pendulum swung really hard in the opposite direction.
I don't know if there's a word for it, but I feel like the US has this tendency of trying to shove cultural change down people's throats in a really top-down manner that tends to backfire.
At least one really positive outcome from this whole """AI""" movement thing is that class consciousness has been increased quite a bit from it. If you're a capitalist, it's better to be one quietly and fuck people over in secret instead of painting a huge political target on your back. They've done the opposite of this. And one key difference here is that the early 2020s DEI movement had way more people behind it. This is just a small group of rich people.
Either the market is going to crash and they'll end up getting humiliated, or there will be a wave of populist backlash. In either case, we (people working in tech, SWEs, HWEs, etc) will probably get fucked over even worse than how it's been over the last couple years.
> Maybe we were already oversupplied with talent. In which case why the heck were we still hiring more, more, more developers? Before the AI craze, Musk chopped an awful lot of headcount at Twitter, right, and proved it was overkill, has that panned out?
I don't think it's a matter of oversupply, it's a matter of allocation of resources. Are there more developers than what there would need to be in a hypothetically optimal allocation of headcount? Yes
Say you have X billions of dollars to spend on headcount. How do you determine where to put people such that the money is allocated efficiently and people are working on the right things? How do you make sure that the money gets used efficiently? It's in the billions, you don't have time to do this. So you have to delegate, which leads to managers gaming the system.
In smaller companies, it's easier to determine this because things are still simple enough for the top-level leadership to have some idea.
As the company gets bigger, more bad actors enter, there is more fabrication and empire building trying to frame where the headcount is "needed". Bigger companies handle this differently. Maybe they just get slower and pay less. Or maybe they do more layoffs. Moving people around internally is too complicated for the VPs, it's easier to just cut and hire later.
Why does software have this problem specifically? Idk, maybe it occurs in other places. But at least in the case of software, the systems become very specialized and it's hard to really figure out what matters and what doesn't
This corporate messaging of "just use AI, cut as many corners as possible, only retain the essential people and force them to sling slop 7 days a week" is unsustainable.
It's wrong for so many reasons. It disrupts talent pipelines. The staff+ people probably don't want to work twice as hard to cover the cut headcount. In general, people prefer to work on systems that are well architected and not some slop that got vibe coded up in a weekend.
They (corporate upper management) could've just done nothing and the end result would've been better than whatever the fuck is happening right now
> management clearly have no idea how to tell which people are actually working
they probably do, it's just a matter of incentives, i.e. "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it"
maybe companies try to fix this with PIP quotas or something, but then this gets taken and perverted by the managers to where it has the opposite purpose and the highest rating goes to whoever helps build the empire the fastest
I think it increases the amount of enjoyment, there's less semantic language specific stuff to deal with and you can spend more time on the core task.
I think from my perspective at least, claude code / codex + improved information retrieval capabilities is good enough. The rest of the handwavey billionaire bullshit is just noise to me. I think it's wrong to sour on the technology, better to sour on the rich assholes who want to taint it with their personal agenda
I don't think it's purposeful from a company leadership perspective.
Imo what I've seen happen is it's just empire building. Say you're a billionaire CEO and you have a bunch of money to spend on accomplishing some business goal. To deploy that much money, you need layers of management. Every time you introduce a new layer, that layer will have its own incentives and spin off its own narratives to benefit themselves while simultaneously giving the opposite impression to leadership.
This is probably just a natural byproduct of sufficiently large organizations. The same way the middle layers of the network stack tend to consolidate (e.g. TCP), there's some invisible hand of incentives which makes this inevitable
I think the point is to push people out primarily.
This gives them a narrative for doing that by asking for something which isn't doable. Then middle management applies the expectation unevenly to people below them based off of political favor.
I feel the exact same way, it helps speed up development a lot (and eliminates a lot of really annoying grunt work). But I see people I work with doing shit with it that doesn't make any sense, e.g. writing 50k lines of code for a "compiler" when it's really just an interpreter under the hood. Like they never take the time to understand the domain more deeply, they just use claude to sling some shit that barely works
> i'm not sure what gap people are trying to close building themselves some proverbial great library here, but i would encourage people to just sit back and trust that their brain is still one of the greatest technologies at their disposal.
Culturally I think this is going to fuck things up significantly. If I take the time to read all of the latest papers in the LLM space, I'm damn well not going to summarize it or document what I've learned for anyone. (Maybe this is why there are not many high quality books aggregating all of this information in all the latest papers, all of the advancements, etc. All the people doing this work would rather (smartly) milk the cash cow and maintain the information asymmetry.)
Or think about open source, this will kill it for people trying to make money off a product and keep it open source. Because someone could spin up a competitor overnight.
AI is going to make the information easier to acquire for cheap. But it's going to absolutely destroy the incentive structure and trust required to have an open exchange of information. It was already bad enough because the industry is not incentivized to produce quality literature for educational purposes like academia is. But after this, it'll be a complete shit show
you can use AI to get a faster explanation for what's happening in a big codebase, it makes the timelines on developing features much lower from my experience
am I losing out on something by not having to spend hours clicking through redundant parts of a large codebase to get a concrete answer on something? doesn't feel like it
> when ambiguous, assume intent is malicious, ignorant, or amoral.
If you're in a toxic environment, this is what it's like. It's a culture problem, not an individual problem.
Here are some examples, going to get anecdotal here:
- People stealing credit for my work
- Needing to kick them off of projects I'm on to protect myself
- Getting into political standoffs with people trying to pressure and threaten me into arrangements that fuck me over
- Had people I work with turn on me all of a sudden and try to throw me under the bus
- A manager forcing someone to work with shitty consultants (who were, of course, a personal connection), then using it to throw them under the bus
- People trying to gatekeep higher ROI work for favorites
- Management lying to people and misrepresenting opportunities to get them to join, then rug pulling once they've signed on the dotted line
The "antisocial" behaviors in the post are just the sort of rational emotional detachment which happens when you figure out that you're dealing with shitty people.
Maybe I'll get genuinely antisocial here: a lot of people in general are shitty people. Or at least, if you've attracted shitty people into your life in the past, it'll keep happening in the future and you're better off growing the emotional scar tissue (i.e. "avoidant attachment") instead of this victim blaming. There's something about you that makes them target you and you're better off having the artillery ready
I remember back in the 2000s - 2012ish it used to actually mean something, if someone had autism then they were actually disabled and it was obvious.
90% of the "conversation" around autism today is a bunch of handwavey bullshit. There's no incentive for people to be intellectually honest. It's now a moral hazard because so many people are "attached" to the label and get accommodations out of it. You can pay phony therapists online to just go straight to a diagnosis so you can get accommodations. There are financial and political incentives in diagnosing more people.
People can't have an honest conversation around it either because it's such a charged issue. We either get one side that wants to expand the scope of autism to infinity or the RFK vaccine bullshit
I'm having the same issue with my pixel 8 (along with the screen randomly turning green out of nowhere, so I have to "ground" the display to get it to work again)
In general the 8 feels a lot more cheaply made than the 6
I agree that the android UX is better than apple (or at least, it makes more sense to me). But I'd consider moving to iphone for build quality alone
The US is just one giant corporate playground that companies force people to move to for the regulatory climate. It isn't meant for raising a family. People will either be transplants or neo-feudal serfs working in kitchens. The whole thing will turn into the Bay Area
People will get to choose between a vibes-based "equity" ideology where achievement is disregarded or the republican woodchipper of austerity. Either thing leads to the same outcome: everything becomes stupider and shittier. The whole system is moving of its own accord towards enshittification. People should just get the grieving over with and leave
There's a lot of "room" here for creativity, i.e. the agents don't know how to milk the agents efficiently, which is essentially your new job. The agents might not know how to structure tasks so that the agents run overnight and run the proper experiment.
The difference between mediocre and 10x will increase. The more aggressive SV performance culture is probably going to become more mainstream.
Frankly, I think this whole model is way more burnout inducing. You're not really doing software engineering anymore. You're running this mental loop in the background of trying to multiplex between agents and mapping unstructured business problems to agentic work.
It's probably going to infect other industries over time. Software is the first big wave. I don't think people with computer skills who are good at computers will be screwed out of work long term. The tech industry has a lot of concentrated technical capital in the form of tooling and automation that other parts of the economy could significantly benefit from. Short term it looks bad, but long term, computers will become more and more dominant over the economy.
I don't think companies have yet figured out how to adapt their hiring, managerial practices, or internal incentive structures to reflect this. Most of what they're doing now is extremely crude and terrible for morale.