I strongly agree with you.

Reminds me of something I read that claimed when drum machines came out, the music industry thought it was the end of drummers. Until people realized that drummers tended to be the best people at programming cool beats on the drum machine.

Every single technological advancement meant to make technology more accessible and eliminate expertise has instead only redefined what expertise means. And the overall trend has been a lot more work opportunities created, not less.

I had a front row seat to the technological changes in the music industry. I opened a recording studio when you had to "edit" using a razor blade and tape to cut tape together. I remember my first time doing digital editing on a Macintosh IIfx. What happened to drummers is that technology advanced to the point where studio magic could make decent drummers sound great. But it's still cheaper and faster (and arguably better) to get a great session drummer who doesn't need it. Those pros are still in high demand.

Yeah, but less drummers are being hired than before drum machines came out. What you describe sounds like work has become more concentrated into fewer hands. Perhaps this will happen with software as well.

What happened is what typically happens: Concentration of expertise. The lower expertise jobs (just mechanically play what someone else wrote/arranged) went away and there was increased demand for higher expertise (be an actual expert in beats _and_ drum machines).

So the winners were those that adapted earlier and the losers were those that didn't/couldn't adapt.

This translates to: If you're mindlessly doing the same thing over and over again, then it's a low value prop and is at risk. But if you're solving actual problems that require thought/expertise then the value prop is high and probably going to get higher.

But there's also the subtext that if you find yourself at the lower-skill portion of your particular industry, then you should probably have a contingency plan to avoid being automated out of a job, such as retiring, learning more, or switching to an adjacent field.

Exactly, and AI only means that this adage now applies to programming as well.

but this was true anyways -- the lower your skill, the more competition you have. At the lowest skill levels, you better damn well have a contingency plan, because any slight downward shift in market demand is sword coming straight for your neck.

I think you have another thing coming. Think about what really got abstracted away. The super hard parts like scaling and infrastructure (aws), the rendering engines in React, all the networking stuff that’s hidden in your server (dare you to deal with tcp packets), that’s the stuff that goes away.

We can automate the mundane but that’s usually the stuff that requires creativity, so the automated stuff becomes uninteresting in that realm. People will seek crafted experiences.

It would be funny if after the AI automates away "all the boring stuff" we're left with the godawful job of writing tests to make sure the AI got it right.

I think it'll be much more likely that the AI writes the tests (the boring stuff) for the buggy code I write.

I can see the AI suggesting and fixing syntax in the tests. Determining their semantics, not without true AGI.

I'm not sure that all of that has really gone away.

It's just concentrated into the hands of a very few super specialists, it's much harder to get to their level but their work is much much more important.

True, and if the specialists retire, there may be some parts that no one understands properly anymore.

See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSRHeXYDLko / Preventing the Collapse of Civilization / Jonathan Blow

Better yet -- the jobs of those specialists got better, and the people who would have done similar work did not end up unemployed, they just do some other kind of programming.

Do you have any actual data for that? Last I saw, most bands are still using live drummers and studio recordings for small to mid-sized bands are still actual drummers as well - unless it's a mostly studio band trying to save cost.

I think the analog to programming is a bit more direct in this sense; most companies aren't going to go with something like Copilot unless it's supplemental or they're on an entirely shoestring budget; it'll be the bigger companies wanting to squeeze out that extra 10% productivity that are betting hard on this - same with where larger bands would do this to have an extremely clean studio track for an album.

Source? I would actually expect there to be around the same amount of drummers, but more people making music.

Based on these very unreliable sources, the number of drummers in the US may have increased from ~1 million in 2006 to ~2.5 million in 2018. That's during a time when the population increases from 298 million to 327 million.

So, during this period, a ~10% increase in population saw a 250% increase in drummers.

It does not appear that the drum kit killed the drummer.

Big caveats about what these surveys defined as "drummer" and that this doesn't reflect professional drummer gigs, just the number of drummers.

[1] https://m.facebook.com/Bumwrapdrums/posts/how-many-drummers-...

[2] https://www.quora.com/How-many-people-play-drums-in-the-US

Are we in a drummer bubble?

If you could get by with a drum machine, did you really need a real drummer in the first place? Maybe a lot of drummers were used for lack of any automated alternative in the early days?

By the same line of thinking, If you can get by with AI generated code did you really require a seasoned, experienced developer in the first place? If your product/company/service can get by with copy pasta to run your CRUD app (which has been happening for some time now sans the AI aspect) did you ever really need a high end dev?

I think its like anything else, 80% is easy and 20% is not easy. AI will handle the 80% with increasing effectiveness but the 20% will remain the domain of humans for the foreseeable future.

Worth considering maybe.

The counter argument comes from photography. 20 years ago digital photography didn't exist and if you were a photographer it was a lot easier to make a living.

Nowadays everyone can make professional looking photos so the demand for photographers has shrunk, as the supply has increased.

Drummers do tend to be good drum programmers, but I believe they're a small fraction of the pool of pros. The drum machine made percussion feasible for lots of people living in dense housing for whom real drums were out of the question. (Also drummers tend to dislike using drum machines, because the real thing is more expressive.)

AI will be similar -- it will not just give more tools to people already in a given field (programming, writing, whatever), but also bring new people in, and also create new fields. (I personally can't wait for the gardening of AI art to catch on. It'll be so weird[1].)

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MwtVkPKx3RA

Those drum machines didn't use machine learning though.

Exactly. I'm currently reading The Mythical Man-Month. 90% of what the book discusses in term of programming work that actually has to be done is completely irrelevant today. Still the software industry is bigger then ever. In the book it is also mentioned that programmers spend about 50% of their time on non-programming tasks. In my experience this is also true today. So no matter the tools we've got, the profession stayed the same since the early 70s.

What are notable books nowadays? It seems all the books I can cite are from 2005-2010 (Clean Code, JCIP, even the Lean Startup or Tribal Leadership…) but did the market for legendary books vanish in favor of Youtube tutorials? I’m running out of materials I can give to my interns to gobble knowledge into them in bulk.

[prioritization] Effective engineer - lau

[systems] Designing data intensive applications - kleppman

[programming] SICP - sussman & abelson

Last one is an old scheme book. No other book (that I read) can even hold a candle to this one, in terms of actually developing my thought process around abstraction & composition of ideas in code. Things that library authors often need to deal with.

For example in react - what are the right concepts to that are powerful enough to represent a dynamic website & how should they compose together.

I have the same question when it comes to a modern version of the Mythical Man Month. I know some computer history, so I can understand most examples. But still it would be great to have a comparable modern book.

The amount of "programming time" I spend actually writing code is also quite low compared to the amount of time I spend figuring out what needs to be done, the best way for it to be done, how it fits together with other things, the best way to present or make it available to the user, etc. Ie most of my time is still spent on figuring out and refining requirements, architecture and interfaces.

Same, the actual solution is pretty darn easy once I know what needs to be done.

Tools like email, instant messenger, and online calendars made secretaries much more productive which increased demand for the skills. Wait...

Replacement of programmers will follow these lines. New tools, like copilot (haven't tried, but will soon), new languages, libraries, better IDEs, stack overflows, Google, etc will make programming easier and more productive. One programmer will do the work that ten did. That a hundred did. You'll learn to become an effective programmer from a bootcamp (already possible - I know someone who went from bootcamp to Google), then from a few tutorials will.

Just like the secretary's role in the office was replaced by everyone managing their own calendars and communications the programmer will be replaced by one or two tremendously productive folks and your average business person being able to generate enough code to get the job done.

Secretaries became admin assistants who are much more productive and valuable since they switched their job to things like helping with the content of written communications, preparing presentations, and managing relationships. I saw my mother go through this transition and it wasn't really rough (though she's a smart and hard-working person).

> Secretaries became admin assistants

That doesn't mean anything. The last 20 years have seen an absurd chase of more and more stupidity in job titles to make people feel they are "executive assistants" instead of secretaries, "vice presidents" instead of whatever managerial role, etc, etc.

but secretaries are still a thing, they are just usually shared by a whole team / department these days

I had a corporate gig as a coder reporting to at most three economists at any one time. I spent at least two hours of every day getting them to explain what they wanted, explaining the implications of what they were asking for, explaining the results of the code to them, etc. So even if I didn't need to code at all my efficiency would have expanded by at most a factor of 4.

The future as I see it is that coding will become a relatively trivial skill. The economists would each know how to code and that would remove you from the equation. They would implement whatever thing they were trying to do themselves.

This would scale to support any number of economists. This would also be a simpler model and that simplicity might lead to a better product. In your model, the economists must explain to you, then you must write the code. That adds a layer where errors could happen - you misunderstand the economists or they explain poorly or you forget or whatever. If the economists could implement things themselves - less room for "telephone" type errors. This would also allow the economists to prototype, experiment, and iterate faster.

That game of telephone is certainly an enormous pain point, and I can imagine a future where I'm out of a job -- but it's extremely hard for me to see them learning to code.

And if what the economists needed to do could be programmed trivially with the help of AI then their job is probably also replaceable by AI.

That would be harder. I shuffled data into a new form; they wrote papers. All I had to understand was what they wanted, and how to get there; they had to understand enough of the world to argue that a given natural experiment showed drug X was an effective treatment for condition Y.

That was the point, I think.

>Tools like email, instant messenger, and online calendars made secretaries much more productive which increased demand for the skills. Wait...

There are more "secretaries" than ever, and they get to do far more productive things than delivering phone messages.

It may reduce the demand for the rank-and-file grunts, though.

Why would an architect bother with sending some work overseas if tools like this would enable them to crank out the code faster than it would take to do a code review?

I think the thought process is from the perspective of the employer, if you assume these two statements are true:

1) AI tools increase developer productivity, allowing projects to get completed faster; and

2) AI tools offset a nonzero amount of skill prerequisites, allowing developers to write "better" code, regardless of their skill level

With those in mind, it seems reasonable to conclude that the price to e.g. build an app or website will decrease, because it'll require either fewer man-hours 'til completion and/or less skill from the hired developers doing said work.

You do make a good point that "building an app" or "building a website" will likely shift in meaning to something more complex, wherein we get "better" outputs for the same amount of work/price though.

Now replace “AI” in your 1 & 2 points with “Github” (and the trend of open-sourcing libraries, making them available for all). All you said still works, and it did not harm programmer jobs in any way (quite the opposite).

And actually, I really don't see AI in the next decade making more of a difference than what Github did (making thousands of man-hour of works available for free). Around 2040 or 2050, maybe. But not soon, AI is still really far.

>that the price to e.g. build an app or website will decrease

Yes, and this in turn increases demand as more people/companies/etc.. can afford it.

If there are diminishing returns to expanding a given piece of software, an employer could end up making a better product, but not that much better, and employing fewer resources (esp. people) to do so.

And even that could still be fine for programmers, as other firms will be enticed into buying the creation of software -- firms that didn't want to build software when programming was less efficient/more expensive.

Decreasing the price of programming work doesn't necessarily mean decreasing the wages of programmers, any more than decreasing the price of food implies decreasing the wages of farmers.

But on the other hand, it also can mean that.

here's the difference: the farmers are large industrial companies that lobby the government for subsidies, such that they can continue to produce food that can, by law, never be eaten.

programmers, on the other hand, are wage laborers, individually selling their labor to employers who profit by paying them less.

industry is sitting on the opposite side of the equation here. I wonder what will replace "learn to code". whatever it is, the irony will be almost as rich as the businesses that profit from all this.

It's hard to use history to predict the implications of weird new technologies. But history is clear on at least two happy facts. Technology generates new jobs -- no technology has led to widespread unemployment. (True general AI could be different; niche "AI" like this probably won't be.) Technology raises standards of living generally, and making a specific sector of the economy more productive increases the wealth accrued to that sector (although it can change who is in it too).

There are exceptions -- fancy weapons don't widely raise standards of living -- but the trends are strong.

what does unemployment have to do with it? if you're 22 and paying off loans and suddenly find yourself unable to work as much but a barista, continued employment isn't exactly a perk. meanwhile, the benefits of the increased productivity brought by new technology do accrue somewhere - it's just not with workers. the trends on that are also quite clear. productivity growth has been high over the past 40 years but real wages have at best been stagnant. and on the wheel turns, finding souls to grind beneath it's weight, anew.

On your second point I agree -- the distribution within a sector matters, and most of them at the moment are disturbingly top-heavy.

On the first though, we have little reason to think tech will systematically diminish the roles people can fill. In the broad, the opposite has tended to happen throughout history -- although the narrow exceptions, like factory workers losing their jobs to robots, are real, and deserve more of a response than almost every government in the world has provided. For political stability, let alone justice.

For every programmer who can think and reason about what they are doing, there are at least 10 who just went to a bootcamp and are not afraid to copy and paste random stuff they do not understand and cannot explain.

Initially, they will appear more productive with CoPilot. Businesses will decide they do not need anybody other than those who want to work with CoPilot. This will lead to adverse selection on the quality of programmers that interact with CoPilot ... especially those who cannot judge the quality of the suggested code.

That can lead to various outcomes, but it is difficult to envision them being uniformly good.

>Tools like this allow programmers to become more productive, which increases demand for the skills.

Well like everything in life I guess it depends? The only iron rule I can always safely assume is supply and demand.

But for programming especially on the web, it seems everyone has a tendency of making things more difficult than it should be, that inherent system complexity isn't going to be solved by ML.

So in terms of squeezing out absolute efficiency from system cost, I think we have a very very long way to go.

This is just shortening the time it takes developers to Google it, search through StackOverflow and then cut and paste and modify the code they are looking for. It will definitely speed up development time. Sounds like a nice quality of life improvement for developers. I don't think it will cause the price of work to decrease, if anything a developer utilizing copilot efficiently should be paid more.

You don't know my mother-in-law.