That's an extraordinarily rosy view of the future.

I'm old enough to remember the dot-com crash, specifically the years afterwards. In 2002-2003, the unemployment rate of software engineers was something like 40%. In fact, the only reason it wasn't higher was because of the number of people who had permanently left the field to become plumbers (or other trades).

I think this is going to be worse. In the dot-com crash, what really happened is that non-businesses got funded and it basically the capital markets ceased to function to a large degree. That's not what's happening now. Yes, huge amounts of money are going into AI companies but the change is more structural.

Other industries have gone through this. In the 1980s a bunch of industries were intentionally destroyed or offshored in areas that have never recovered. This has continuing social, economic and political impacts. I think people are being naive here thinking this can't or won't happen in tech.

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misswaterfairy 5 hours ago | parent [-]

> I think people are being naive here thinking this can't or won't happen in tech.

What would this future look like? Software developer salaries burrowing into the ground?

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adam_arthur 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

There's quite a large cushion for software salaries to decline before permanent structural unemployment were to set in.

It's not really feasible for "normal" businesses to hire developers at current salaries.

Tech companies will probably shrink in headcount, but all the non-tech kind of businesses can increase developer headcount.

Current Tech salaries are far above other fields while requiring (used to) significantly less training or time investment to get into.

Phase 1 is more likely that software comp will normalize with other professions, and more hiring will happen at the fringes rather than being concentrated in a few big companies.

	▲	bluefirebrand 38 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> There's quite a large cushion for software salaries to decline before permanent structural unemployment were to set in Maybe in some markets but in many places around the world software salaries already weren't that high. Or at least not really much higher than other white collar professions

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teliosix 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

That isn't going to happen. To me what is going on is that no one really reads anything positive so there is all the incentives to write as hyperbolic + negative as possible to try to rise through the noise.

The reality is this all the standard lump of labor fallacy. I am not a software engineer but it is obvious to me at some point I will be using claude code or whatever to automate tasks. I won't be taking software engineering jobs, I will be using code to do what is done manually today that you wouldn't bother paying a software engineer to handle.

Today's software engineers will just be higher up the stack from me the same way they are today.

In 20 years, many of us will be working in sectors of the economy that don't exist today.

The idea we get something as powerful as AI and it doesn't create new businesses and sectors is just stupid.

Imagine telling someone in 1997 they are going to be getting deliveries from Amazon all the time in the mail. What kind of idiot would believe this? I don't even read that many books!

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jmyeet 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

There will be a handful of people who make stratospheric compensation, a bit like we have now.

Everyone else will have extreme job uncertainty, getting laid off multiple times, losing compensation as a result (ie equity vesting) with compensation that at first stagnates and then starts to slowly decline in real terms.

A lot of the big tech companies will likely spend less effort on non-core activities. Think of all the things Google does. Anything that's purely internal will be gutted staffing-wise because it's the safest testbed for shifting the engineer-AI balance on teams before rolling it out further.

If you listen to non-tech people now you hear tales of applying for hundreds of jobs and getting no response. That will become more normal. What's worse is that AI seems to be to blame here. Companies all use the same AI ATS systems and I've seen allegations that candidate scoring gets cached for upwards of a year. So if the system happens to give you a bad score, literally nobody will see your application because you'll get filtered out before any human sees you.

I was watching a VC give a talk from some conference in France and the general sentiment is that no companies are being funded with teams greater than 5. Why? AI. So don't think you can startup your way out of this slump unless you're somebody who has the connections and CV to get funded anyway, in which case you might well have some of those stratospheric options anyway, at least for now.