You are hitting the nail on the head. We are not being hired to write code. We are being hired to solve problems. Code is simply the medium.

▲

wahnfrieden 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

I believe wage work has a significant factor in all this.

Most are not paid for results, they're paid for time at desk and regular responsibilities such as making commits, delivering status updates, code reviews, etc. - the daily activities of work are monitored more closely than the output. Most ESOP grant such little equity that working harder could never observably drive an increase in its value. Getting a project done faster just means another project to begin sooner.

Naturally workers will begin to prefer the motions of the work they find satisfying more than the result it has for the business's bottom line, from which they're alienated.

▲

hibikir a day ago | parent | next [-]

It gets worse than that: You can possibly get rewarded based on your manager's goals, or maybe your skip level's, but that doesn't necessarily have to line up all that well with more serious business goals. I am sure I am not the only one that had to help initiatives that I thought would be, at best, just wasteful to the business, or that we could get 80% of the value with 20% of the efforts. But it's ultimately about the person who writes the review.

This gets us to the rule number one of being successful at a job: Make sure your manager likes you. Get 8 layers of people whose priority is just to be sure their manager likes them, and what is getting done is very unlikely to have much to do with shareholder value, customer happiness, or anything like that.

▲

Sammi 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Naturally workers will begin to prefer the motions of the work they find satisfying more than the result it has for the business's bottom line, from which they're alienated.

Wow. I've read a lot of hacker news this past decade, but I've never seen this articulated so well before. You really lifted the veil for me here. I see this everywhere, people thinking the work is the point, but I haven't been able to crystallize my thoughts about it like you did just now.

	▲	thenewwazoo 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		Marx had a lot of good ideas, though you wouldn't know it by listening to capitalist-controlled institutions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_alienation

▲

order-matters 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I think it's related. The nature of the wage work likely also self-selects for people who simply enjoy coding and being removed from the bigger picture problems they are solving.

Im on the side of only enjoy coding to solve problems and i skipped software engineering and coding for work explicitly because i did not want to participate in that dynamic of being removed from the problems. instead i went into business analytics, and now that AI is gaining traction I am able to do more of what I love - improving processes and automation - without ever really needing to "pay dues" doing grunt work I never cared to be skilled at in the first place unless it was necessary.

▲

agumonkey 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

but do you solve the problem if you just slap a prompt and iterate while the LLM gathers diffs ?

▲

ben_w 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

Depends what the problem is.

Sometimes you can, sometimes you have to break the problem apart and get the LLM to do each bit separately, sometimes the LLM goes funny and you need to solve it yourself.

Customers don't want you wasting money doing by hand what can be automated, nor do they want you ripping them off by blindly handing over unchecked LLM output when it can't be automated.

▲

agumonkey 2 days ago | parent [-]

there are other ways: being scammed by lazy devs using AI to produce what devs normally do and not saving any money for the customer. i mentioned it in another thread, i heard first hand people say "i will never report how much time savings i get from gemini, at best i'll say 1 day a month"

▲

Dylan16807 a day ago | parent [-]

If you produce the same product, then you get to ask for the same pay. That's not a scam.

If enough people can make the product faster, then competition will drive the price down. But the ability to charge less is not at all an obligation to charge less.

▲

agumonkey a day ago | parent [-]

it's paradoxical, the llm is not helping consumers, it's not helping the experienced engineer, it's helping a new class of devs that just want the easy way out. and ultimately this wave will make the price go down to the point the skilled dev won't be able to sustain long term growth because learning more and more advanced will not be valued by the economy.. just a thought but i don't see a nice path ahead now

▲

Dylan16807 a day ago | parent [-]

Why is it not helping the experienced engineer? I don't fully understand your scenario.

If the experienced engineer is already faster than the LLM, their job is not at risk.

If the LLM is faster then the experienced engineer at making some kind of code product, then the experienced engineer can use it to save time. And in the short term they can spend even more time learning! Maybe it's a net negative because it helps the "new class of devs that just want the easy way out" more, but it's still helping the experienced engineer.

And if increased competition drops the price then the LLM's influence is helping customers.

	▲	agumonkey a day ago \| parent [-]
		you may have a point, i'm fuzzy in my perception right now but there are non linear factor imo, here's how i see things - a market needs a certain kind of product (feature set, complexity, performance) - good engineer could apply skills to deliver that - lazy engineers couldn't, but with llm they can, it gives them solutions without understanding much, which is irrelevant for them, they want to ship - i myself don't enjoy having code spilled out for me, and the time savings from llm won't bring much more joy (unlike the lazy engineer who is happy) - a llm might help me do more advanced things but the market might not care for it. say the average user wants a dashboard with a bunch of data points and a few actions. the llm answer will match that perfectly. I could ask the llm to produce a more complex dashboard with more customization, more feature.. but the user will not want it because it's beyond its needs so yeah it's a matter of ratio, it seems that lazy devs will get a 10x improvement while a skilled one will only get 1.5 and might be squeezed out of the market

▲

pdntspa 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

If the client is happy, the code is well-formed, and it solves their problem is a cost-effective manner, what is not to like?

	▲	agumonkey 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		cause the 'dev' didn't solve anything ultimately i wonder how long people will need devs at all if you can all prompt your wishes some will be kept to fix the occasional hallucination and that's it

▲

eclipxe 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Yes?