The Dumbest Move in Tech Right Now: Laying Off Developers Because of AI
AI-assisted coding doesn’t mean fewer developers—it means more ambitious, higher-quality products
I hope the devs that inevitably get contacted to return demand ridiculous raises.
According to another meme i saw here recently, it seems likely they'll pivot from shooting themselves in the foot by firing their devs in favor of AI, to shooting themselves in the foot by contracting devs from poor countries to clean up the mess the AI left behind.
That said, i hope the fired devs get better jobs somewhere they're appreciated 🙌
I wonder a bit in how far the opposite is the plan. Like Klarna recently firing support staff for AI and then wanting to hire them back, but as gig workers.
A company laying off thousands of engineers wont be nice for the stock. Saying you're doing it because you'll replace them with awesome AI might even pump the stock and is an easy excuse.
if you can the hire them back cheaper later because the job market is shit because many devs lost their job, even better.
It just reminds of this case from the 30s where a factory owner replaced skilled workers that wanted to unionize with machines and unskilled workers. The quality was worse and they produced less in a given time, and the machines were scrapped 3 years later. But it stopped unionization dead in its tracks and skilled workers got lower salaries afterward, so it all worked out even though the machines were strictly worse.
A company laying off thousands of engineers wont be nice for the stock.
Have you seen the markets recently? They don't even care about quarterly profits anymore because that's too slow. So if you fire half your workforce the stock price will go up because all of the reoccurring savings!
The entire article is based on the flawed premise, that "AI" would improve the performance of developers. From my daily observation the only people increasing their throughput with "AI" are inexperienced and/or bad developers. So, create terrible code faster with "AI". Suggestions by copilot are >95% garbage (even for trivial stuff) just slowing me down in writing proper code (obviously I disabled it precisely for that reason). And I spend more time on PRs to filter out the "AI" garbage inserted by juniors and idiots. "AI" is killing the productivity of the best developers even if they don't use it themselves, decreases code quality leading to more bugs (more time wasted) and reducing maintainability (more time wasted). At this point I assume ignorance and incompetence of everybody talking about benefits of "AI" for software development. Oh, you have 15 years of experience in the field and "AI" has improved your workflow? You sucked at what you've been doing for 15 years and "AI" increases the damage you are doing which later has to be fixed by people who are more competent.
I agree Copilot is trash and everything it generates is garbage. I have no clue how anyone uses it with any effectiveness. But I've had luck with Claude 3.7 in some aspects of code.
Still seems to falter heavily with anything CSS though.
What's nice is, say I have to create 10 data processing scripts that are somewhat similar but not exactly similar, I can create one and then hand the task to AI to iterate on and verify for the other 9 while I work on something else. It's a major time saver in that regard.
I still don't think it replaces a developer, but for senior-level and above, when deployed wisely, I think it can reduce tediousness.
No, that should be a parameterized script (/unit test/function/what ever, just picking up your example). If you have a repeating pattern with slight changes "AI" can generate more of that (to some degree), but it cannot fix the code duplication. Every line of code written is a line of code that has to be maintained.
It's actually one of the things copilot gets advertised for: see how great copilot can generate more of these repetitive unit tests? Yah, great, write more garbage faster. People need to know about test theories (parameterized tests) and think about what they're doing.
So you copy your script 10 times with minor changes (or let copilot & co do it) and notice there's some flaw in the script you started with; now you have to change 11 scripts - great.
I am waiting for time when whole internet infrastructure that was built in the last few decades starts to fail, because of fired developers and AI is certainly not going to prevent that, lol.
When DNS software for the root servers get "improved" by AI
I applaud the idea, but I don't think this will happen. People want things cheap and fast. Not quality. They'll on average prefer anything AI can give them for free and today, over improving the situation. That's just how things work in real life...
I actually wrote something on this back in February. The TL;DR being that given that so many companies manage to build impressive businesses on garbage software, that maybe professional devs like myself were thinking about it all wrong. Maybe garbage is "good enough".
It wasn't until months later that I posed this question to a former project manager and he offered the best explanation I've heard so far. Garbage is indeed good enough... until it isn't. Then you've got to spend 10 times more money to unfuck the mess. So either you pay a little more now, or a lot more later. Either way, building it properly has a higher return in the end.
Well said. It's also related to why people have the old saying: you should buy proper boots and spend some money on them. Also related to Sam Vimes theory of socioeconomic unfairness.
And it's tricky to get it right. A cheap job is often the more expensive one and vice versa. Also in programming.
I recently saw some Youtube video from someone who said he was an artist, doing video work, advertisements etc. And he loves his job and doing a good job. And he can't earn money with that any more, since someone else will do it on his iPhone, do the post-processing in two hours on some modern video editor and chage a tenth of the price (or so). So there isn't a big market for a freelancer with a $10,000 camera spending lots of hours on color-grading and getting details perfect...
I mean I totally get that. In the old days this wasn't a thing. Now it is and you don't need quality, you need some Insta reel twice a week for your company to stay relevant and quality doesn't matter with those. I feel this itself isn't the problem. But it's going to become a big issue once there aren't many experts, professionals and artists left. Because occasionally people need something robust or nice and with substance to it.
People get manipulated to a point where they think they buy quality but actually buy shit.
I don't think so. Most people I've seen are pretty aware whether they buy some domestic quality product that'll last, or a cheap chinesium one. I've also seen people replace human logos, texts with AI, and they previously would have commissioned that to a human. It's not like they confuse the AI with a human. It's just that it's so convenient. And they don't really need it to be perfect or art or anything. It'll do for instagram and people aren't really paying attention in other areas, so it's good enough...
I think people get manipulated into thinking they need a lot of stuff, everything needs to fit into the attention economy and they loose track of the bigger picture. So the entire quality vs quantity is shifted. But I think a decent chunk of people is still aware of what quality would look like.
