In fact, I expect to be shortage of programmers even if none of those would happen (and they will), solely because the need will increase as we automatize even more things with AI. The people qualified to do those jobs we partially replace will not suddenly turn into devs.
So we will play divas for a long time. And good for us. Not going to complain that we have such a good situation.
But the fact so many people are surprised by being fired is hilarious. They lived in the illusion they were so special. Like this is perfectly normal to have so many privileges as we have.
We are just very, very lucky. I know doctors that work twice my week to save human life, doing so in terrible conditions and sleep deprived, for half of my salary.
Time to appreciate that.
Did you see GPT-4 demo yesterday?
Seems to me that after a LLM has been trained to the level of GPT-3.5, we programmers not only are not needed, but most of what we can do can be automated.
So how exactly are programmers are needed to automate things with AI? What am I missing?
Maybe LLM's get to the point where they really help dev productivity, and we wind up needing less devs overall, but that hasn't happened in the past when easy to use frameworks like rails made it super easy to spin up a twitter clone. In fact, employment exploded.
TLDR: Devs won't be out of a job until we run out of things to automate. Sometime around the heat death of the universe or we're being crushed by skynet.
Fifth Gen project, prolog etc. - Didn't change much
Expert systems were the rage for medicine back in the 90s? Don't see doctors out of work..
IBM Watson passed the bar in UK and was hired as a 'lawyer' - Don't see lawyers going away...
The hype circles keep circling ... Yeah, chatGPT is neat - but its still got a long way to go...
Edit: oh - and lets not forget, we were all supposed to be programming in ADA now. It was going to 'take over' the world, first in DoD... then spreading to general usage. Can't remember the last time I saw an ADA job ?
I've been working 40 years in Tech..
Saw the Wall St. ups/downs in the 90s - NYC was feast/famine back then
Saw the Y2K 'end of the world' ... We're still here
Saw the 'dot com' bust ... Tech/Internet didn't die
Saw the 2008 crash ... We're still here
and thats just what I can remember at 2 am :-) I fully expect us to be here after this current stuff blows over. And I expect there to be a bigger shortage of programmers due to retirement, changing careers, etc.
edit: fix formating