alt Hacker News> Good explanation for why hiring stopped. If AI is improving rapidly why hire engineers now that you might not need in 6-12 months?
I'm not so sure that's the reason. I mean, to believe LLMs replace engineers you first need to believe engineers spend the bulk of their time typing frantically churning out code in greenfield projects. That's not compatible with reality. Although LLMs excel at generating new code from scratch, that scenario is the exception. Introducing significant changes to existing projects still requires long iterations which ultimately end up consuming more development time than actually rolling out the changes yourself.
The truth if the matter is that we are not observing an economic boom. The US is either stagnant or in a recession, and LLMs are not their cause. In an economic downturn you don't see spikes in demand for skilled workers.
Hard agree with both points--this feels way closer to reality than most of what I've read.
On recession: cost of living is becoming crisis-level. I read recently that 67% of Americans are paycheck-to-paycheck. 150k/yr is 12k/month. If groceries go from 500 to 1000/month, a 150k wage-earner save less for retirement. For someone making 30-40k (basically minimum wage), it's a huge hit. Then consider it's the same story for cars, housing, medical care...it goes on and on. It doesn't look "recessionary" because GDP keeps going up. But we're getting so much less for it with every passing year.
I also agree that we need to consider what brownfield dev looks like. It's where the vast majority of my time has gone over 15+ years in software and I'm not convinced all the coordination / sequencing / thinking will be assisted with LLMs. Particularly because they aren't trained on large proprietary codebases.
What we might both be missing, is that for most people, writing the actual code is hard. LLMs help with that a lot. That's what a lot of junior/entry-level work, actually is (not as much planning/thinking as seniors do).