Is there evidence that overall software developer positions are declining relative to other jobs? It wouldn't surprise me if Jevons paradox applied here.

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georgeburdell a few seconds ago | parent | next [-]

Exactly. At least in my part of the world (hardware) we are hiring more software folks these days and fewer pure hardware

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zugi 31 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

> Jevons paradox

Thanks! I've heard numerous examples of this. E.g. paint rollers, and later paint sprayers, made painting so much more efficient and cheaper that people wanted their houses and apartments painted more often, ultimately increasing house painter employment. But I didn't realize the phenomenon had a name.

	▲	sublinear 9 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		The broader topic of marginal utility is worth looking into if this is interesting to you. The reason why AI induces more demand is more interesting than simply observing a correlation. At the root of the paradox is the dissatisfaction with AI as it raises the bar for human work. In that sense, AI functions like training wheels more than actually doing anything useful on its own. More people can ride the bike well as a result. This is the "law of diminishing marginal utility". In other words, LLMs are an NLP-powered google search 2.0. That sums up pretty well why AI hit a plateau a couple of years ago. There's only so much training data and humans become more efficient and creative once exposed to the exact information they were always looking for, but could never find in the past. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marginal_utility