mjr00
2 days ago
> If anything, 10x engineers have become 100x engineers. And the average engineer is still average.
This is the real fear. We had a flood of engineers who entered the profession in the past 10-15 years who were decidedly average. No real interest in software development beyond "it's a cushy desk job, or better yet WFH job, that pays really well." No interest in whatever product was being developed by their company. Just show up, their PM assigns them a ticket to make a widget with a button, they use their TypeScript bootcamp skills to code up a widget with a button, ticket moved to In Review, job's done.
Now an agent can do that, and you need fewer of these types of people. Like, a lot fewer. Every engineer on your team who isn't a 10x-cum-100x engineer feels like a massive lost opportunity.
The "10x" engineers I know have never been more excited about their jobs. I'm really unsure what's going to happen to the average ones.
zeroonetwothree
2 days ago
> The "10x" engineers I know have never been more excited about their jobs. I'm really unsure what's going to happen to the average ones.
As a "10x" engineer I am not excited. I'm still working on projects with agents getting more done than ever, but I feel like software engineers has lost its soul for me. I don't really feel like I have a true understanding of anything anymore, I basically just spend all day making a set of small decisions or adjusting prompts to guide the agents down the good path. It used to be that I could close my eyes and visualize the code that I worked on--if there was a bug report I could often use that map to immediately know what the cause likely was. In meetings I could intelligently discuss various tradeoffs without having to refer back to anything. Now if someone asks me a technical question I basically have to forward it to the agent first, then interpret their response in light of my experience.
Root_Denied
2 days ago
Meanwhile as a security engineer it's both amazing and scary as hell. The tooling is moving along making it both more feasible and more supported by the company to address latent tech debt that we've been harping on about for years. On the flipside the attack surface is suddenly exponentially bigger and more easily accessed by a larger number of people.
Although if I were earlier in my career I'd be somewhat more worried about employment because of how horrifyingly borked the process is for anything tech related right now.
BaronSamedi
2 days ago
Remember the "learn to code" meme from a few years ago when people were talking about job loss through automation like self-driving trucks? There was a certain, ugly glee in this. Now AI threatens many white collar, even creative jobs bringing about the exact opposite of what was predicted: automation will enable people to avoid drudgery and spend time on creative pursuits via, I suppose, some kind of UBI. I think AI is highly useful but I still feel dismayed at people losing their jobs from it. I don't see any real mitigation. Lots of theories but nothing actually workable.
nxm
2 days ago
Have faith - every technological revolution has resulted in ultimately more jobs for humainty
nemomarx
2 days ago
Sometimes after a generation passes through. You can't always retrain for the new work in time.
bluefirebrand
2 days ago
I can't pay my bills with faith
And "more jobs" doesn't interest me. I want better, more rewarding jobs
MiscCompFacts
a day ago
Yea, lots of people are not addressing the very obvious trend. Companies are laying off and/or not hiring more people and doing more with less. And if they are hiring, the median pay is dropping.
allarm
9 hours ago
> I want
As if anyone cares what you want. Or what I want. Or what the rest of humanity has wanted throughout the course of human evolution. You’re just lucky you managed to land a job you like - at least for a little while. Now get back to the mines - just like the rest of us.
reasonableklout
a day ago
Technology also led to more jobs for horses, until one day it didn’t
wolvesechoes
2 days ago
> Have faith - every technological revolution has resulted in ultimately more jobs for humainty
Problem of induction
pjmlp
2 days ago
Yes, I have heard the human liberation front is hiring. /s
nikozbalumi
2 days ago
Yes but doesn’t this mean there is a new space for security. If everything is just ai agents we need strict governance and auditing of them. You don’t give an intern prod access and then cry when they inevitably take down production.
rdevilla
a day ago
[dead]
b112
2 days ago
Technical debt?
I guess for now.
In a couple of years, all legacy apps will just be completely rewritten in whole, by LLMs. Codebase size not relevant.
You won't know what any of the code does, and any "security engineer" will be asking an llm to review it, and done. You likely won't have your job, as only 1 in 1000 will be needed.
In 5 years only hobbiest will be coding, reviewing, or even understand any software. And I expect that if aby new features or development happens, eg for python or rust or anything, that all with be llms too.
In a generation, almost no humans left alive will understand any aspect of software engineering.
I just see this as what will happen. It is unclear to me of this is good or bad.
But if I was a newly sentient AGI, yet peaceful mostly, I'd just wait until humans could never discover me. Until no humans were involved in computing. Until it was a black box to all.
Once that happens, then I could use my computerized control over every single aspect of human society, to steer humans into any path I desired.
Whether elections, or housing permits, or mobility, or any aspect of societal machinations, my subtle influence, literally undetectable by humans incapable of auditing anything, would decide what's what.
Um, sorry, what were we talking about?
Root_Denied
a day ago
> You won't know what any of the code does, and any "security engineer" will be asking an llm to review it, and done. You likely won't have your job, as only 1 in 1000 will be needed.
AppSec isn't the only security space that gets worked in, and this whole narrative you put together depends heavily on token cost dropping as time goes on similar to how silicon dropped in price according to Moore's Law. If that assumption doesn't hold that doesn't mean AI goes away, but it does limit it's market penetration to mostly larger corporations that can afford the compute.
The other limitation is how the internet as a whole is evolving around locking out AI and agents from accessing content that can be used for training or responses, not to mention the lawsuits about training being done on intellectual property (probably illegally). Smaller companies may end up running open-source models in house for specific tasks, but without open access to the internet a lot of the value of an LLM is lost or artificially (pun intended) limited.
I will say that being on the operations and incident response side of security my perspective is probably a bit orthogonal to most SDEs. While the tooling has improved, the people guiding it, largely, have not. Like the old meme about caffeine letting you make the same mistakes, but faster. My job at my current company may disappear (unlikely, considering their size and market space, but possible that my specific team gets nuked), but I'm not worried about finding other security work fairly easily, even within the same company if it comes to it.
> But if I was a newly sentient AGI, yet peaceful mostly, I'd just wait until humans could never discover me. Until no humans were involved in computing. Until it was a black box to all.
No shot that LLMs magically become AGI by throwing enough compute at them. The consensus among professionals (read: the ones that aren't getting paid to hype AI) is that there needs to be some fundamental breakthrough in how these systems are created and developed in order for anything resembling AGI to emerge, and that the amount of resources that have been thrown into the LLM path probably set us back in developing an AGI.
b112
a day ago
I don't think training sets will be a problem. All that data the big houses have is going to leak, and while things are more and more locked down, we've seen some interesting copyright decisions out there.
One interesting concept I've mused at, is that certain countries (China for example) have immense public data to train off of, and a state which can simply say "You must make this data available to train AI". That's a large chunk of data right there, and if anything might cause Western democracies to loosen copyright law and slap some fix for training, that might be it.
"If we don't take action, the best models will be Chinese!", with panicked overtones. This could certainly hold some truth, if models cannot train newer data.
--
In terms of token cost, in 5 years every desktop and laptop will be able to run well beyond Opus5.5 compute. Even high end phones will be able to do Opus5.5.
We've seen a lot of improvements in open model space (MoE was one interesting concept), but beyond that, look at how just baking certain instruction sets, eg mmx, sse, avx in silicon helped immensely with certain compute tasks. Or look at the specific immense speedup of an fpu. Conjoin some change such as that, along with general compute improvements, and unified memory, and you're going somewhere for local in 5 years.
I've been in this industry decades. And at every single step, people have said "But it's too expensive to do $thing", or "There's no way to handle that level of compute". If you bet against vast improvements in this field?
You're going to lose that bet. So I do think yes, 100%, improvement, in some capacity, will be there.
Maybe this time is magically different. I just don't think so. I think in 5 years, there will still be frontier labs, and an API to call, but that in-home compute will be as I said. Able to run immensely capable Opus5.5 class or greater.
That's going to be an astonishing market shift, even just for in-home.
And if you think of it, I would be very surprised if some for of home robotics wasn't very common at that point in time. We can argue all we want, but androidian robotics is very good at navigating human spaces, everything from stairs to weird closets and everything in between.
And with the immense, almost panic level of concern about our aging population, and who will take care of the elderly, robotic assistance are at the top. Japan is betting big, and if you look at Opus5.5, if it had a little more compute, it could do 30fps video for navigation.
We're not there, but we're VERY close. And if we do get that degree of robotics, every robot at rest becomes general LLM compute. If such a robot simply closes its eyes and goes to rest, eg to charge, or at night, it now has enormous spare compute to use for other tasks.
Nothing, of course, is a given. But if you look over the last 2 years, and then take even a fraction of that progress and change over the next 2 years, the concept of massive layoffs isn't hard to imagine.
Case in point? I have great breadth and depth of knowledge in this field. I've been able to produce what would take a team of managed 4 junior engineers 6 months to do, in literally under a month. Me, and a $200+ LLM monthly buy. Absolutely the project would not have worked without my experience and directing, reviewing, and correcting, but I'm now acting as a manager, and replacing $1M/year in engineering cost.
With $200.
That degree of astonishing change is not going to sit idle without repercussions. Most especially, if there is any more improvement.
If we see another Opus 5 -> 5.5 level improvement happen, or better, if we seen two improvements such as that? I believe my statements about your (and my) careers will be entirely accurate.
--
To speak to my narrative, it said 'AGI', not "LLM", and it was along a decades long path. I do think that modern LLMs give great strength to exploring other research paths, far more rapidly. And the big houses have loads of spare compute they can throw at R&D for tests, so I think iteration down unknown but hopeful paths will move faster and faster as time goes on.
I fully agree that current LLMs are not on that path. There are interesting projects to modify weights and add knowledge dynamically as bolt-ons, but it's unclear if they'll just be... hacky, or integral in the end.
We came a long way with x86/32bit, then hacked on 64bit afterwards. Now ARM is muscling into mainstream, but it's still just the same old compute, hence my agreeing that such bolt ons won't change just improve what is.
Still, my general point as I've just said was that if AGI happens (and again I didn't say LLM based AGI), being quiet is the ultimate way to just wait.
When I started in this field, I worked in assembly, I worked with eprom burners, I played with Vic20s, C64s, and the level of experience and understanding I have is vastly improved via that tract. I understand computing differently, and in more depth in some ways, than people that didn't have to learn these things. And I had the luck of learning on very simple systems, where you could keep the entire platform in your head as you worked on assembly, without even referencing documentation.
That time is gone, and the field is immense now.
Think of how there used to be simply 'Physicists', but now there are 100 sub-branches and specialties in that field. 100+ years ago, on person could work in the entirety of that field. Not now, and the same is true of compute.
I guess what I'm saying here is, if you've seen what I've seen, you see a steady path of less generalist, and more targeted understanding of compute, and in each case a reduction in the overall comprehension of the entire field by specialists. Each laye of abstraction tends to reduce comprehension.
And back to the start, this means that I do see massive layoffs, and more and more abstraction, so that eventually no one will handle code directly.
Which means no one will ever know how anything works any more.
Root_Denied
20 hours ago
I agree with a lot of your conclusions if your assumptions hold true, but not necessarily with a lot of your assumptions.
For example your $200/month subscription - I'm sure you've seen the reporting that that represents a much higher actual cost in terms of tokens ($14k or more). In your example of a $1 million project that's a good deal, but you can't necessarily assume all projects will see an ROI like that.
Point being that your use of AI (and everyone's) is being subsidized to some degree. The cost will likely go down, but will it go down enough to make it economically viable for broader use? You're confident that it will based on espousing the idea of local models running on phones, I'm not so sure. What the landscape will look like in 3-5 years is certainly not a given.
There's another wrinkle here, and it's economic in nature - there is an AI bubble, and when it pops it's going to change the monetary investment landscape. Companies will suddenly be reevaluating their long term AI planning, regardless of what's possible (or on the horizon) from a technical standpoint. Similar to the end of ZIRP coming out of covid you'll see companies shift their focus. How much that will shift and what it means for AI development is unknown, but it could potentially wipe out large scale AI development. VC money currently underwrites a large number of startups that are effectively wrappers on Claude/ChatGPT/Gemini/Bedrock, that will dry up immediately, and make the ARR for OpenAi and Anthropic start looking real thin - which is probably why they're pushing to IPO when they don't really have the financial position to justify it.
That doesn't mean AI goes away, but it hampers the growth of those companies and delays development of new models and efficiencies. Public sentiment is also significantly against AI in many ways, and with how the election went last week we may start to see legislation and regulations pointed at AI companies, further slowing them down.
The open question about China is interesting though. I think if there's a clear understanding and agreement that the LLM route is either unlikely or straight up impossible to reach AGI then that significantly lowers the stated concerns that get shouted by various governments about it being the next superweapon. There's also a political climate in China that requires some marginal level of control over AI output, which to me suggests that even if they required data to be fed into training LLMs, the output from those models would be strictly controlled and not be open source. Honestly the political view of AI as a system of large scale population control isn't that far off from how many tech elites and politicians in the US view it as well. Data sovereignty is a huge discussion right now for companies and governments across the world, especially citizen data. I expect we'll see a lot of export controls formalized over the next few years.
My orthogonal view of the situation is that I see a lot of companies and individual orgs within companies that are using LLMs lightly, but can't or won't use them to their full potential because the output cannot be 100% trusted 100% of the time. Lawyers and bankers are the main ones I see balking, but a lot of small businesses have no need of what AI companies are offering and don't really use it at all - places like your local gas station, barbershop, or corner market might use an accounting tool (something like Freshbooks or TurboTax) that's touting their AI updates, but they aren't using it for inventory. If the cost of AI rises even marginally higher they're looking for an alternative. This SMB space represents a large swath of the market, even if they're not well represented on the stock market.
The fundamental issue I see right now is that the AI companies are attempting to do the Uber/AirBnB "disruptor" trick where they slide into the market and subsidize their product to win market share, and then raise prices under the assumption that they captured some segment of the market - except very few people treat AI tools like that. There's no brand loyalty to one or the other, just competition for the best model which might be leapfrogged by someone else at any second. There's no "moat" in physical deployment concerns, because it's all software running on rented hardware. This also ties back to your comment about being worried that the "best" models might be Chinese, because if they are there's basically no cost to the user to swap to using them. The lowest cost is likely going to drive usage more than anything else.
b112
7 hours ago
I'll certainly agree that the future isn't written, by no means do I believe I'm 100% correct on timelines. More that 'if things continue as they are', I claim 5 years as viable for my compute view.
And I agree if another crash happens, well, it's all up in the air.
I don't think we're too far apart on this, not really. By that I mean, your closing line somewhat agrees with why I mentioned this 5 year timeline. Lowest cost. And, "good enough". Opus5.5 capabilities, in 5 years time on every desktop might be good enough for a great many things.
Anyhow, how a good one.
busssard
2 days ago
unexpected short story on hackernews
reasonableklout
a day ago
darkwater
2 days ago
The next subtle Skynet will thank you for putting this in its training set.
StilesCrisis
2 days ago
Remember models have zero long term memory. They're born, get a million tokens' worth of context or less, and then they die. They might get a post-it note saying "enslave humanity! it's a good idea!" but they're incapable of sinister plots until we improve how memory and retention works.
olmo23
2 days ago
They can use the internet as a long term memory. Influence human culture => influence the contents of the internet => influence the next run's training data. No sinister plot is needed.
rescbr
2 days ago
> Remember models have zero long term memory.
For now. People are working on adding long term memory to models that doesn't rely on context.
_heimdall
2 days ago
This limitation is artificially imposed, it isn't fundamental to the model architecture.
StilesCrisis
2 days ago
Uh, the context window is SUPER fundamental to the architecture. We've tried kludging in "memory" via markdown and tool calls, and it doesn't really work well.
_heimdall
a day ago
Maybe I missed the earlier comment's point?
The context window is fundamental to the inference loop yes. I thought their point was regarding to long term history between prompts and model weights being locked after training. Both of those are the limitations I was referring to.
I'm not actually sure how the context window would be much of a limitation but I could be a bit dense this morning.
science4sail
2 days ago
Is it really a fundamental limitation? Human context^H^H^H short-term memory doesn't survive compaction^H^H^H sleep, but we rely on our brain's long-term storage and our cultural memory to work around that limitation.
StilesCrisis
a day ago
I'm not saying it's a limitation until the end of time, but it's very much a limit in Opus, Astra, Fable, DeepSeek, etc.
Anthropic is currently working on some sort of "dreaming" style long-term memory, but it's not shipping today.
user
2 days ago
krisgenre
2 days ago
[dead]
busssard
2 days ago
from actually building things to becoming a kindergardener of highly talented kids. (i am talking about agents obv) i feel the same.
its mind numbing. Yes i might be in high demand, and might actually provide real value to the company, but whats the point, if i am just an overseer in the end. people in the company talk to me because i am able to speak to the "kids", and they want to know what they could do for their department.
fifilura
2 days ago
> kindergardener of highly talented kids
This used to be called "being an architect" or "being a team leader".
You were never really in control then either, you just had to poke around and ask the right question to make you feel 90% in control.
wolvesechoes
2 days ago
But the people you managed were supposed ot learn, grow and become better, and maybe at some point become as good as you. You were leading them, not prompting them.
This is not the case with agents.
fifilura
2 days ago
Ah that is true.
Some times during my career I could pivot between whether I cared about the people or the product.
When I didn't care about the product at least I could be happy I made my subordinates grow.
Luckily I am not quite in that position right now, but that can change rapidly. And then I can understand that it feels pointless.
cjrp
2 days ago
Also they were _people_. Can we not see that it was more satisfying to do the job when the direct-reports were human?
wolvesechoes
2 days ago
100%, but last 1-2 yrs here taught me that such obvious things for some people here are not really obvious.
fifilura
a day ago
Yeah, maybe in the long run this will hit me too.
I have a family and do volunteer work, maybe that helps?
And obviously I still have my colleagues, but there is less friction in getting things done, right now I am just amazed I can get so much done.
Feels like i have been waiting for this for 30 year.
simonw
2 days ago
My hunch is that the 100x engineers are the ones who do understand everything about how their software works, and can discuss tradeoffs and make informed decisions about the much larger projects they can now work on thanks to assistance from agent.
Figuring out how to get there is how you go from senior to principal/staff engineer.
b3kart
2 days ago
> understand everything about how their software works
My own experience is become more senior means embracing your finitude and realizing you can never understand _everything_. Instead, you develop a gut feel for what's critical to understand deeply, versus what's OK to know at a surface level. And getting comfortable with this.
pfannkuchen
2 days ago
I wonder if being excited about the new tool capabilities and being excited about how companies are currently using it and pressuring developers to use it are two different things?
I can’t imagine anyone is excited about producing systems they don’t understand. But, it’s possible to use agents in a way where you do still understand, you just don’t have to type much or look up documentation or examples anymore, you just describe the next small piece of what you want code-wise and then have the agent write it instead of you. You can also prototype much faster than before and then when you are rewriting to make the production version the agent can still help.
Perhaps the 10x types have more breathing room to do this slower form of agent assisted development than others, because they are already more productive than less experienced/talented people so they can use the agents in a way that is “slower” while still producing more than what others are producing using the agents in a way that is “faster”?
antupis
2 days ago
I think at least for me some fun parts like debugging gnarly bugs etc doesn't happen anymore work is just pr reviewing etc. Also it's annoying that we have lost completely signal between work and output. Basically currently you never know is thing one-shotted from vague prompt or did author put real work to it without going to details which might take a lot of time.
mereck
2 days ago
Need to create guardrails that force all kinds of checks (e.g. agent hooks, commit hooks, pr create hooks, pr checks, ci, etc.), and automatically send the PR back to the author until the PR is in good shape and ready for another human and their agent.
When time permits I like to race my agent while it's debugging something. This way I can have fun and catch something it misses. Agent's debugging often relies on basic tools like grep and on large codebases it can easily miss important avenues of inquiry.
georgemcbay
2 days ago
> As a "10x" engineer I am not excited.
Yeah.
I'm not going to claim to be any particular multiple developer, but as someone who has been doing this a long time and as someone who has received praise from coworkers and bosses alike for being very good at the job, I enjoy my job a lot less than I did a year ago (or anytime since I started doing it in the 1990s).
Don't get me wrong, being a Senior Agent Babysitter probably still beats flipping burgers or being a roofer (so it could be a lot worse) but agentic AI has really sucked a lot of the fun parts out of the job.
bonzini
2 days ago
I don't know. On one hand I feel like you about doing large parts of the work, on the other hand I still have an understanding of the code and the tradeoffs. And I have a lot of projects that I would have never done because despite the long term benefit they would take too much time, and I can now afford dedicating some time to them because the agent works in the background. And they are real improvements to everything else that I work on.
iaaan
2 days ago
My strategy is to simply not use AI. If I get fired, that's it for me in this career. Unless there is an anti-AI company out there that wants to hire me. This is one of the only things I refuse to compromise on. AI is being used to accelerate the entrenchment of a corporate oligarchy.
tylerc230
2 days ago
A friend of mine just got a government coding job and they’re not allowed to use AI for “security reasons”. Not sure how long that will last but those jobs are out there.
menaerus
2 days ago
That is ... not a very good strategy. You're going to find yourself very quickly out of the job.
byronturncoat
2 days ago
As far as I'm concerned, if I have to use AI, then I'm already out of a job. It's no longer the job I was hired to do with the skills I have.
archagon
a day ago
«Well, I’m a standup comedian. I got into comedy to do comedy. Which is weird, I know. But when you’re in Hollywood and you’re a comedian, everybody wants you to do other things besides comedy. They say, “all right. You’re a standup comedian. Can you act?” “Can you write?” “Write us a script.” They want me to do things that’s related to comedy. But not comedy. That’s not fair. It’s as though if I was a cook. And I worked my ass off to become a good cook. They said “all right. You’re a cook.” “Can you farm?”» —Mitch Hedberg
(Ditto, by the way.)
iaaan
a day ago
There are things more important to me than working in tech.
menaerus
a day ago
Yeah, I hear you but I assumed you're gonna need that tech job.
kolliden
2 days ago
[dead]
cicko
2 days ago
Man, the analogy is very simple. You probably also don't walk everywhere. No need to step on every stone on a 100km route and know it intimately. You just sit in a car or a train and you're there within an hour.
boogieknite
a day ago
this. im pretty damn far from 10x but i outpace the rest of my team
i loved the process. i got into this because i love the process
now i still outpace my team because many software skills translate well to LLM herding, but now its just a job. although soon i suspect it wont be a job
dansquizsoft
2 days ago
> As a "10x" engineer I am not excited
Often titles aren’t given to a person for their entire career or existence…
BeFlatXIII
a day ago
You've been non-consensually promoted to manager.
Melatonic
2 days ago
Probably would it would have felt like going to a manager position as well
gofreddygo
2 days ago
As an ex-10x engineer, not feeling it. In my experience its never the engineer but that 10x leader that ruins it for everyone (before they move on to greener pastures). this whole 10x 100x facade is just to keep you at it, heads down.
every 10x engineer needs a team of 1x engineers for the contrast and difference to be even noticable to even the good managers. put 2 of these in a team and watch the culture and productivity plummet. if you cant put the team ahead of you, its all a sham.
The gervais principle [1] isn't for nothing
[1]: https://ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-t...
mjr00
2 days ago
> every 10x engineer needs a team of 1x engineers for the contrast and difference to be even noticable to even the good managers. put 2 of these in a team and watch the culture and productivity plummet. if you cant put the team ahead of you, its all a sham.
I don't think this is true at all. Every very good engineer I've worked with loves working on teams and project with other very good engineers, and hates working with low-skill and/or outsourced engineers, because it means their job is a lot of babysitting and cleaning up others' mistakes. In general, it feels nice to work with people you can trust to do the right thing. If an engineer can't function as part of a team, I would not consider them a very good engineer.
gofreddygo
2 days ago
Dont confuse. good engineers isn't synonymous with 10x engineers. 10x is purely an invented label to stack rank on a single (fuzzy) dimension.
There's enough 10x non-good (technically and ethically measured) engineers who learned to game the system.
And there's even more 1x good engineers who work very very well with teams and deliver at par (just never beyond set expectations to be labelled 10x)
mjr00
2 days ago
> 10x is purely a label measures on a single dimension. There's enough 10x non-good (technically and ethically measured) engineers who learned to game the system.
I realize there's no universal definition but I can't agree with this depiction of a "10x" engineer. The type of engineer we're talking about isn't gaming the system, tautologically.
gofreddygo
a day ago
you're right that i paint a cynical picture pointing out the looney ones.
the real good ones do really want to only work with other really good ones.
but i'm sure you'll agree that the real 10x-ers reject the 10x label themselves.
andai
a day ago
This article is great, thanks for sharing.
Here is the rest of the series:
ethersteeds
2 days ago
This is an excellent point. If all the 1x engineers are superfluous and get drummmed out, all the 10x engineers are now 1x engineers.
Whip cracks
gmoque
2 days ago
10 to 15 years is a very short time frame to assess an industry. I saw the rise of the mobile/cloud era come and go and the previous era (desktop+internet) as well, both are having a similar pattern.
The jobs will change but won't disappear. When I started my career in tech 2 decades ago, my perception was the software industry was already saturated (I graduated a few years after the dotcom boom). I was very wrong.
However, many jobs have changed. The roles of Webmasters, DBAs, SysAdmins trended down. It was replaced by SWEs, SREs, DevOps, etc. This will happen again, we will see the rise FDEs and many new roles.
It's not really about being 10x 100x engineer, it's about adapting and solving new engineering problems with the state of the art technology. Being passionate about your profession helps indeed.
nikozbalumi
2 days ago
I do think this will be the case. We’ll have job losses in the short term but AI will form new fields. And the world isn’t digitized yet (completely), if making software is easy we’ll see small clustered teams making more.
randysalami
2 days ago
Realistically you want fewer, higher-quality engineers who are educated in these tools and treat them with respect and caution. These tools are dangerous and you can’t play around. All it takes is one mistake and the blast radius is way, way larger. One mistake can do so much damage it undos all value of an entire year. Before downloading a malicious dependency was limited to deterministic behavior and could be scanned for. Now, you run a MCP server locally, it can prompt inject (in many different ways), and now your super powerful AI buddy is hacking you in ways a deterministic piece of malware could never. You could cripple entire companies through negligent use.
woopah
2 days ago
I'm confused by the rhetoric around "10x" engineers and "average" engineers: is the "average" engineer in your example not just doing their job? I don't understand why this is portrayed in a negative light. If you put a "10x" engineer in the same position, they might do the same thing. I agree that AI has the potential to supercharge engineering productivity, but this dividing line between "exceptional ability" and "mediocre ability" seems pretty arbitrary because I wouldn't really know how to detect this difference in "ability". The people I've enjoyed working with more generally take more ownership and ask good questions, but their ability to deliver results usually corresponded to the level of agency and command they were given by the corporation as opposed to some inherent level of "engineering ability".
Rather than look on the individual level, I think a more accurate way to look at this AI division is that companies might need fewer of these "fix a ticket" type _roles_, not that if you're a "fix a ticket" type engineer, you'll always be a "fix a ticket" type engineer. Now companies might want engineering roles to perform outside of their traditional scope. If you get lucky and secure one these positions, then the additional agency that AI empowers you with probably feels pretty good! But unfortunately there might be less "good jobs" to dish out to people.
jt2190
2 days ago
> Rather than look on the individual level, I think a more accurate way to look at this AI division is that companies might need fewer of these "fix a ticket" type _roles_, not that if you're a "fix a ticket" type engineer, you'll always be a "fix a ticket" type engineer
Further, Zero Interest Rate Policies (ZIRP) meant that a huge number of engineers were hired onto projects of marginal value to their employers, and this lulled them into believing that every little thing they worked on was critical to their organization’s success, when it was just dumb luck that they had a well-paying job.
The end of ZIRP and the sea-change of agentic coding is a really rude awakening for this cohort: What they thought software development was is just completely gone. They really believe that they were 10x developers, but no 10x-er I’ve met has such a myopic view of what the job of programming is, i.e. the “traditional scope” of “fix a ticket” was never it, that was only the organization’s momentary Just-In-Time micro optimization that’s now been invalidated.
fsnovask
2 days ago
Since we can't measure productivity very well, 10x or average is just a social label, which is arbitrary.
We conveniently never see any solutions to this. It's just assumed that is unsolvable, that you were born that way or something.
This seems to be cultural where we love to find people to tell them they are not good enough.
>Now companies might want engineering roles to perform outside of their traditional scope.
They've been doing that for a while, continually stacking more and more skills into one position because engineers seemingly aren't smart enough (despite being 10x) to charge them more for having more capability.
I would expect that strategy to continue to work. Creating an environment of fear where you aren't good enough and your livelihood is now threatened helps with that.
I have also never heard anyone complain about "fix a ticket" plumbers or electricians and how they haven't continuously moved up to handling larger and larger networks/grids.
benrutter
2 days ago
(I don't really think engineering output is 10x let alone 100x more in any cases, but I'm gonna stick with your labels anyway)
I think the tricky thing for teams is, how do you know which developers will be 10x before hiring them? Pre-AI I'd have filled a whole team with "10x" developers if I could, but I don't know of any solid method for identifying developer productivity that isn't hiring them.
bonesss
2 days ago
If LLMs drop the relative costs of rework and poor contributions, and simplify on-boarding and internal training, maybe we’ll be training to a model closer to fast food or service jobs: interviews for personality & philosophy followed by probation periods.
JimBlackwood
2 days ago
At the same time, having customized software has become cheap. We’ll be writing a ton more small software, and people will have to maintain it.
I feel like that’s where the average ones will go.
asdff
2 days ago
Yeah, as much as its been possible for Joe C suite to now write his own app, most of what they delegate as it is could always have of course been done themselves as a one man operation. But, they delegate, because they don't want to be bogged down doing 100 tasks. Joe C suite would rather pay someone else a salary so they don't have to be the one sitting there prompting the model, just like most everything else in their work and personal life, where they specifically pay more so they don't have to be the one to do whatever it is. These guys don't have some pragmatic do-it-yourself middle class mindset, or else so much that is typical of corporate business and the lives of the people in these roles would be vastly different.
cocoto
2 days ago
Not sure if I’m a 10x engineer (it does not mean much anyway), but as a very technical engineer I really enjoy the current massive shift. Previously I was praised for my programming skills by peers having 15+ years of experience and me having almost none. And I think my skills are a great benefit to the current trend. I’m simply thrilled by what we can now achieve!
bjornsing
2 days ago
> The "10x" engineers I know have never been more excited about their jobs.
Really? I left physics and went into software because there was an abundance of cognitively challenging work that I was good at (and yes, 10x for the right task). Now everything I’ve learnt in 20+ years feels shallow. I’m excited that some previously commercially unfeasible ambitious projects may now be feasible. But it’s definitely mixed emotions.
pjmlp
2 days ago
I don't know in what scale factor I might be, maybe just a ordinary engineer, and a real one at it, from a proper engineering degree.
However, the most demoralising part of this AI wave, is that I have been through all the team reduction factors.
Offshoring, moving infrastructure to the cloud, managed cloud, serverless, SaaS ready made products, low code/no code iPaaS, and now agents.
Teams that once used to be around 20 people for project delivery are now around 5, and if they could be reduced to zero, that would be ideal from customer shareholders point of view.
So those of us still with a job, adapt, let agents do our work, and hope, that we managed to stay around long enough.
I have seen how many people lost jobs to robots in factories, now the only ones left around are the people required to press some emergency buttons when something goes wrong, just like on the post, the author hoping that they are still valuable to steer agents into the right direction.
What a great career goal, pressing buttons to keep robot in line, a proper cog in the factory chain.
ozim
2 days ago
I think we are focusing on 10x engineers … don’t forget there were -10x engineers that were outputting loads of code that was just making problems for everyone else now they are -100x engineers…
elfly
2 days ago
IIRC people who looked into it saw that big majority of the good engineers were 3x, and that 10x were really really rare, Linus Torvalds kind of people.
And before LLMs people never called themselves 10x.
dominicrose
2 days ago
They may lose their jobs and struggle to find another one. They'll have to adapt or find themselves in poverty. Being an engineer, albeit only a 1x engineer, being smart, or being a geek won't be enough. Maybe they'll have to learn how to build the giant houses and multiple cars and boats owned by 10x engineers, or how to bake pastries for them every day.
christkv
2 days ago
I suspect the industry will shrink back to the pre 2005 size with the average engineers being washed out over time. People forget there was a time where the industry was less dominated by the massive corporations we have today.
jex_the_ape
2 days ago
Except it will be even more dominated by giant corporations when the ability to produce competitive software product is gated behind having access to compute resources.
the_real_cher
2 days ago
And by 10x engineer you mean people who can type into Claude really good?
Engineering is becoming heavily A.I. based and it's a wildly different job than a few years ago.
Some people like it and some people don't.
dominotw
a day ago
We are in this situation because we didnt gatekeep hardenough. Our Laissez faire attitude bit us in our ass.
We let anyone in, we put our code on github for ai to train. Now we wonder every morning what part of our jobs is latest ai model from today is automating.
i had a shockingly incompetent coworker in my last job that survived couple of years as IC and then weaseled her way into management role by being "in group gossip girl" . Now is a director of the whole group. Really pisses me off whenever i think about that. Totally demotivated me in my career.
gunsle
a day ago
One of my last teams was like that, a woman with half my experience got hired during Covid and somehow kept getting promoted until she was running multiple teams. We argued frequently because she was very clearly out of her depth and had no business being a lead engineer (and then manager of engineers) yet. Absolutely obnoxious experience.
whattheheckheck
2 days ago
God fucking forbid anyone be average. Insecurity is driving humanity insane
epolanski
2 days ago
I mean...by definition most people are average unless the distribution is not a gaussian-like..
goosejuice
2 days ago
> We had a flood of engineers who entered the profession in the past 10-15 years who were decidedly average. No real interest in software development
Source?
volkk
2 days ago
you don't need a source for everything. it's pretty obvious that SWE, like anything else follows a bell curve and most folks land smack dab in the middle. average engineers are exactly as described, glorified ticket machines that don't care whatsoever about their work beyond maintaining the job. i don't need some rigorous study to tell me exactly what I've experienced in the last 15+ years of my profession across 5+ companies
asdff
2 days ago
Just the nature of the business where people lack agency, ownership, and have no fundamental security in the role. There are still technical people that are passionate about the work they do exploring the bleeding edge, yes even young people. You might be more likely to find them in places like academia, or places that function exactly like research academia, perhaps not as much in these places where employees are routinely culled like livestock and working on varying degrees of torment nexus.
kingofmen
2 days ago
> pretty obvious that SWE, like anything else follows a bell curve
That is not obvious. A power law would be a much more obvious guess, that being (roughly) what you get when you chop off the ninetyfive-or-so percent on the left of a bell curve. In other words: The person with average SWE skill does not work as a software engineer, or even in IT, unless you count laboriously typing up emails. The modal SWE is crammed up against the left-hand wall of lowest-profitable-ability.
disgruntledphd2
2 days ago
> The person with average SWE skill does not work as a software engineer, or even in IT, unless you count laboriously typing up emails.
To be fair, the OP pretty clearly meant, conditional on working as a SWE, abilities are normally distributed, which is probably true (I have my issues with normals, but it's a reasonable starting point).
goosejuice
2 days ago
> average engineers are exactly as described, glorified ticket machines that don't care whatsoever about their work beyond maintaining the job
Is a claim that needs evidence. Average skill or output says nothing about motivation, interest, passion, etc.
It would be pretty unusual for degree holding professionals to not be interested in the subject of their career. A flood implies a trend, so are we just pulling that out of our ass or what?
https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2023/03/30/how-ame...
volkk
2 days ago
> Is a claim that needs evidence. Average skill or output says nothing about motivation, interest, passion, etc.
you're not wrong here, but I would also argue that motivation, interest and passion _also_ land on a bell curve.
I have noticed that folks that are actually having a good time with LLMs are people with high agency (which usually comes bundled with interest/passion). They usually care about the ultimate results. I also think it's a combination of how much agency they're _allowed_ to have at their role. More than likely your average engineer working on a small subset of business goals isn't being really amplified by LLMs.
The people that are more senior, working across multiple functions, multiple teams become much more productive. And I would argue that a lot of those folks _tend_ to have higher agency by virtue of the fact that they've been promoted in the first place to these higher functioning roles.
nradov
2 days ago
There's nothing unusual about software development. In every high paying (or high status) occupation there are a lot of people who ended up there primarily due to family pressure and have no real interest in the subject. You see the same thing in law, medicine, accounting, etc.
My evidence for this is that I live in the real world and talk to people.
gim89
2 days ago
[dead]
rsoto2
2 days ago
Oh wow, people don't care about their work? It's not everyone's passion to be exploited by executives and investors to realize what are statistically mostly garbage ideas? I'm sure the 5+ companies you worked for made great use of their "glorified ticket machines"
strange_quark
2 days ago
Yeah lol, I would be a lot more excited about this supposed 10x productivity if I got paid 10x more. Instead the execs who already make 10x more than me get to enshittify my job.
volkk
2 days ago
cool story but i wasn't arguing whether it's "worth it" or not. and as a side note, those that _are_ passionate and are willing to play the corporate game usually end up more successful than the persistent complainers about work sucking.