alt Hacker NewsHonestly, I think the initial surge wasn't down to Jevons Paradox, but simply the general ignorance of those needing secretarial staff. They were incapable of using any "machinery" themselves and saw having staff as a status symbol: "I can afford to pay extra people, it shows others I'm rich, that means my business is doing well, and I don't have to scrape the barrel by doing everything myself"...
Today is slightly different; we aren't in a period of general growth but in one of deep crisis. So, while not everyone is doing badly (as always), many really do need to cut costs by any means. Just as back then, they are generally as thick as two short planks, so they think they can axe functions they don't like, typically technical roles with specialists who aren't "low-level workers" and who might tell the manager of the day, "you're asking for nonsense, it can't be done"; the manager then discovers through failure that they actually couldn't do it, that marketing played them like a fiddle, and the real potential of the service they bought is far lower, the reality is different from what the salesman described. But it happens, and the manager just hops from one job to the next; they just need something for their CV that acts as self-promotion. The company went bust? "Well, I left just before that for that very reason, because I realised there was no future there", omitting any responsibility.
What I can say as a sysadmin today is that I'm seeing:
- a new collapse in code quality, the likes of which hasn't been seen, so they say, since 2008 (they say, because I was a 22's CE student, so I saw very little in person)
- a massive increase in software without design, without a concrete idea, thrown together on the fly following a whim where the details are missing, and often the actual purpose needed to turn a fleeting late-night idea into a concrete project is missing too.
This, along with other dynamics, makes me see nothing good ahead, not specifically for those working in IT, but for society in general. And it's not because of the "LLM effect", but because of decidedly human decision-making.
Overall I liked the article because I think the secretary analogy is closer than any of the industrial revolution comparisons that are more common, but you do make some really good points about the nature of the work and how conditions are different today.
In terms of lowering quality, I don't think this is anything new. Volume of code and depth of stacks has been growing pretty much in parallel with Moore's law, and this has degraded code quality. AI is accelerating this, and creating a new kind of slop since LLMs are sloppy in a different way than humans, but directionally I see it as part of the same trend.
However despite lowering quality, and increasing messiness, capabilities and user expectations have steadily increased. After a quarter century in this industry, I am blown away by the capabilities of modern computing, and the polish level of the best apps. The median bar for successful software is higher than its ever been. And to achieve this we've had to navigate steadily increasing complexity (much of it incidental), and that is where senior software folks shine.
So yeah, I think your observations are prescient and I agree with a lot of your, but I wouldn't characterize it as "nothing good ahead". I see it as a mixed bag, like all "progress", it just needs time to bake and get our arms around the impact. Currently the rate of change and hype is far out-pacing our ability to reason about it, perhaps that's the single biggest difference in the smart-phone, internet-enabled era of humanity.