There's no reason to hide it anymore. A CEO can go on CNBC and openly admit "Yes, we are excited about AI because if it works we won't have to pay so many middle class white collar workers anymore" and there are many average people who will ideologically defend it, as if they'll somehow be immune.
Any time you dare to mention AI is going to replace software devs here, loads of people come out of the woodwork saying there’s zero evidence and it’s all just the end of ZIRP or whatever.
Well I know for a fact that my company’s art spending is way down, and while we haven’t fired any software engineer we also haven’t added any. I’m very conservative about the AI hype but I can’t deny a 20%-30% boost at the moment so I’m not gonna hire a junior to do the boring 25% for me, who incidentally would be more annoying to steer the way I want. And it wouldn’t surprise me if a slightly more capable model actually makes us slash headcount or at least never need a junior again, same way artists are going. It’s also likely that solopreneurs won’t need to hire in the first place, or will be able to run very lean teams a lot more easily. Many of us will be replaced sooner or later, no idea when, but burying head in the sand doesn’t help much.
Software development jobs will be some of the first to go.
If you think about what we do, it's very manual. We're the assembly line workers of the office. We manualy, painstakingly, put the product together out of primitive pieces.
