> And yeah, I get it. We programmers are currently living through the devaluation of our craft, in a way and rate we never anticipated possible.

I'm a programmer, been coding professionally for 10 something years, and coding for myself longer than that.

What are they talking about? What is this "devaluation"? I'm getting paid more than ever for a job I feel like I almost shouldn't get paid for (I'm just having fun), and programmers should be some of the most worry-free individuals on this planet, the job is easy, well-paid, not a lot of health drawbacks if you have a proper setup and relatively easy to find a new job when you need it (granted, the US seems to struggle with that specific point as of late, yet it remains true in the rest of the world).

And now, we're having a huge explosion of tools for developers, to build software that has to be maintained by developers, made by developers for developers.

If anything, it seems like Balmers plea of "Developers, developers, developers" has came true, and if there will be one profession left in 100 year when AI does everything for us (if the vibers are to be believed), then that'd probably be software developers and machine learning experts.

What exactly is being de-valuated for a profession that seems to be continuously growing and been doing so for at least 20 years?

The "devaluation" they mention is just the correction against the absurd ZIRP bump, that lured would-be doctors and lawyers into tech jobs at FAANG and FAANG-alike firms with the promise of upper middle class lifestyles for trivially weaving together API calls and jockeying JIRA tickets. You didn't have to spend years more in grad school, you didn't have to be a diligent engineer. You just had to had to have a knack for standardized tests (Leetcode) and the time to grid some prep.

The compensation and hiring for that kind of inexpert work were completely out of sync with anything sustainable but held up for almost a decade because money was cheap. Now, money is held much more tightly and we stumbled into a tech that can cheaply regurgitate a lot of so the trivial inexpert work, meaning the bottom fell out of these untenable, overpaid jobs.

You and I may not be effected, having charted a different path through the industry and built some kind of professional career foundation, but these kids who were (irresponsibly) promised an easy upper middle class life are still real people with real life plans, who are now finding themselves in a deeply disappointing and disorienting situation. They didn't believe the correction would come, let alone so suddenly, and now they don't know how they're supposed to get themselves back on track for the luxury lifestyle they thought they legitimately earned.

You sound exactly like that turkey from Nassim Taleb's books that came to the conclusion that the purpose of human beings is to make turkeys very happy with lots of food and breeding opportunities. And the turkey's thesis gets validated perfectly every day he wakes up to a delicious fatty meal.

Until Thanksgiving.

> What exactly is being de-valuated for a profession

You're probably fine as a more senior dev...for now.

But if I was a junior I'd be very worried about the longevity I can expect as a dev. It's already easier for many/most cases to assign work to a LLM vs handholding a human through it.

Plus as an industry we've been exploiting our employer's lack of information to extract large salaries to produce largely poor quality outputs imo. And as that ignorance moat gets smaller, this becomes harder to pull off.

> And now, we're having a huge explosion of tools for developers, to build software that has to be maintained by developers, made by developers for developers.

What do you think they're building all those datacenters for? Why do you think so much money is pouring into AI companies?

It's not to help make developers more efficient with code assistants.

Traditional computation will be replaced with bots in every aspect of software. The goal is to devalue our labor and replace it with computation performed by machines owned by the wealthy, who can lease this out.

If you can't see this coming you lack both imagination and historical perspective.

Five years ago Claude Code would have been essentially unimaginable. Consider this.

So sure, enjoy your job churning out buggy whips while you can, but you better have a plan B for when the automobiles truly arrive.

> programmers should be some of the most worry-free individuals on this planet, the job is easy, well-paid, not a lot of health drawbacks if you have a proper setup and relatively easy to find a new job when you need it

Not in where I live though. Competition is fierce, both in industry and academia, for most posts being saturated and most employees face "HR optimization" in their late 30s. Not to mention working over time, and its physical consequences.

> What exactly is being de-valuated for a profession that seems to be continuously growing

A lot of newly skilled job applicants can't find anything in the job market right now.

100% my experience as well.

Negativity spreads so much more quickly than positivity online, and I feel as though too many people live in self reinforcing negative comment sections and blog posts than in the real world, which gives them a distorted view.

My opinion is that LLMs are doing nothing but accelerating what's possible with the craft, not eliminating it. If anything, this makes a single developer MORE valuable, because they can now do more with less.

The job of a programmer is, and has always been, 50% making our job obsolete (through various forms of automation) and 50% ensuring our job security (through various forms of abstraction).

> I'm getting paid more than ever for a job I feel like I almost shouldn't get paid for (I'm just having fun)

In my Big Tech job, I sometimes forget that some people can really enjoy what they do. It seems like you're in a fortunate position of both high pay and high enjoyment. Congratulations! Out of curiosity, what do you work on?

It's absolutely not easy to find a new job in France, and more generally in Europe

> programmers should be some of the most worry-free individuals on this planet, the job is easy, well-paid, not a lot of health drawbacks...

I don't know what kind of work you do but this depends a lot on what kind of projects you work on

I didn't enter this profession because I love reviewing code though.

Software to date has been a [Jevons good](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox). Demand for software has been constrained by the cost efficiency and risk of software projects. Productivity improvements in software engineering have resulted in higher demand for software, not less, because each improvement in productivity unblocks more of the backlog of projects that weren't cost effective before.

There's no law of nature that says this has to continue forever, but it's a trend that's been with us since the birth of the industry. You don't need to look at AI tools or methodoligies or whatever. We have code reuse! Productivity has obviously improved, it's just that there's also an arms race between software products in UI complexity, features, etc.

If you don't keep improving how efficiently you can ship value, your work will indeed be devalued. It could be that the economics shift such that pretty much all programming work gets paid less, it could be that if you're good and diligent you do even better than before. I don't know.

What I do know is that whichever way the economics shake out, it's morally neutral. It sounds like the author of this post leans into a labor theory of value, and if you buy into that, well...You end up with some pretty confused and contradictory ideas. They position software as a "craft" that's valuable in itself. It's nonsense. People have shit to do and things they want. It's up to us to make ourselves useful. This isn't performance art.

I came here to quote the same quote but with the opposite sentiment. If you look at the history of work, at least in the states, it’s a history of almost continual devaluation and automation. I’ve been assuming that my generation, entering the profession in the 2010s, will be the last where it’s a pathway to an upper middle class life. Just like the factory workers before us automation will come for those who do mostly repetitive tasks. Sure there will be well paid professional software devs in the future just as there are some well paid factory workers who mostly maintain machines. But the scale of the opportunity will be much smaller.

> What exactly is being de-valuated We are being second guessed by any sub organism with little brain, but opposable thumbs, at a rate much greater than before, because now the sub organism can simply ask the LLM to type their arguments for them. How many times have you received screenshots of an LLM output yesanding whatever bizarre request you already tried to explain and dismiss as not possible/feasible/unnecessary? the sub organism has delegated their thoughts to the LLM and i always find that extremely infuriating, because all i want to do is to shake that organism and cry "why don't you get it? think! THINK! THINK FOR YOURSELF FOR JUST A SECOND"

Also, i enjoy programming. Even typing boring shit as boilerplate because i keep my brain engaged. As much as i type i keep thinking, is this really necessary? and maybe figure out something leaner. LLMs want to deprive me of enjoyment of my work (research, learn) and of my brain. No thanks, no LLM for me. And i don't care whatever garbage it outputs, i'd much prefere if the garbage was your output, or you are useless.

The only use i have for LLMs and diffusion models is to entertain myself with stupid bullshit i come up with that i would find funny. I massively enjoy projects such as https://dumbassideas.com/

Note: Not taking into account the "classic" ML uses, my rant only going to LLMs and the LLM craze. A tool made by grifters, for grifters.

What is devalued is traditional labor-based ideology. The blog references Marx's theory of alienation. The Marxist labor theory of value, that the value of anything is determined by the labor that creates it, gives the working class moral authority over the owner class. When labor is reduced, the basis of socialist revolution is devalued, as the working class no longer can claim superior contributions to value creation.

If one doesn't subscribe to traditional Marxist ideology, this argument won't land the same way, but elements of these ideas have made their way into popular ideas of value.

> I'm getting paid more than ever for a job I feel like I almost shouldn't get paid for (I'm just having fun), and programmers should be some of the most worry-free individuals on this planet, the job is easy

Eh?

I'm happy for you (and envious), because that is not my experience. The job is hard. Agile's constant fortnightly deadlines, a complete lack of respect by the rest of the stakeholders for the work developers do (even more so now because "ai can do that"), changing requirements but an expectation to welcome changing requirements because that is agile, incredibly egotistical assholes that seem to gravitate to engineering manager roles, and a job market that's been dead for a few years now.

No doubt some will comment and say that if I think my job is hard I should compare it to a coal miner in the 1940's. True, but as Neil Young sang: "Though my problems are meaningless, that don't make them go away."

> the US seems to struggle with that specific point as of late, yet it remains true in the rest of the world

Are you sure about that?

>the job is easy

software engineering is easy? you live in bubble, try teaching programming to someone new to it and you'll realize how muuuuch effort it requires

> What is this "devaluation"?

The part where writing performance, readable, resilient, extensible, and pleasing code used to actually be a valued part of the craft? I feel like I'm being gaslit after decades of being lectured on how to be a better software developer, only to be told that my craft is pointless, the only thing of value is the output, and that I should be happy spending my day babysitting agents and reviewing AI code slop.

> What are they talking about? What is this "devaluation"? I'm getting paid more than ever for a job I feel like I almost shouldn't get paid for (I'm just having fun)

You do realise your position of luck is not normal, right? This is not how your average Techie 2025 is.

Your complete lack of empathy is going to be your undoing. Might want to check in on that.

There’s been over 1 million people laid off in tech in the past 4 years

https://www.trueup.io/layoffs

> What are they talking about? What is this "devaluation"?

I'm not paid enough to clean up shit after an AI. Behind an intern or junior? Sure, I enjoy that because I can tell them how shit works, where they went off the rails, and I can be sure they will not repeat that mistake and be better programmers afterwards.

But an AI? Oh good luck with that and good luck dealing with the "updates" that get forced upon you. Fuck all of that, I'm out.

You clearly haven't tried looking for a job in the last two years have you

Are we living on the same planet?

I'd love to live on the same planet you do.