alt Hacker NewsCounterpoint -- capital owners see SWEs as their asset, and owners do not like to see their assets go away (with intellectual property in their heads). So they nurture and give a lot of freedom to their SWEs.
I've seen both ways, and don't share the "capital owners BAD" sentiment. The first thing to join a company is to see whether they assign Eng department to Costs or to Assets mentally.
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If the intellectual property can be captured inside an LLM that is cheaper, tireless, compliant, not demanding, does not require HR, and will not jump to a competitor for higher pay, why would capital owners look at SWEs as assets?
You could say LLMs can't "keep intellectual property in their heads", but even today they don't need to. They just need to capture everything in a bunch of artifacts -- code, docs, spreadsheets, etc. -- which is already possible. The same things we do but to a limited extent because we're human. LLMs, being tireless, can do so with much more meticulous detail. Whatever an LLM cannot do can be done by a fraction of the workforce.
Yes, enlightened companies used to value their engineers, but the calculus has shifted. Look around -- layoffs, RTO mandates, AI mandates, offshoring, under-leveling, record levels of burnout -- even before AI has been widely adopted! The tech industry overall is been telling us what their stance is with their actions louder than any amount of perks or "we are all family" ever could.
It's not "because capital owners BAD", it's just "because Capitalism."
Our primary edge at this point is creativity and innovation that creates new intellectual property. I think that will be safe for a while, but that requires a pretty high level of skill and experience, which excludes a majority of the workforce. This is where I suspect a lot of pain will be felt.
> The first thing to join a company is to see whether they assign Eng department to Costs or to Assets mentally.
Workers are costs. Always have been. If you don't own them, they're not assets.
"SWEs are assets" is HR propaganda so you think you're valued.
> Counterpoint -- capital owners see SWEs as their asset, and owners do not like to see their assets go away (with intellectual property in their heads).
The same is true for other knowledge workers, not just programmers. That doesn't mean that if corporate owners and managers had a magic wand that could replicate the worker on demand they wouldn't use it and toss the knowledge worker aside. They would do so happily, especially if it saved them money.
The reason that programmers (few are actually engineers, no reason to bullshit we're among friends and can be honest) have been treated so well is that they were hard to replace. If that barrier gets lifted, or is perceived to have been lifted, they'll get rid of the programmers in a heartbeat.