Lol. Even among those less stupid, most didn’t hire junior developers for the last three years, to hedge their bets.
Well, it’s three years later, AI didn’t solve shit, and we are facing an entire missing cohort of senior developers.
We’ve seen this before - back when web frameworks “made all of us obsolete” back in 2003.-
Here’s what comes next:
Everyone who needs a senior developer gets to start bidding up the prices of the missing senior developers. Since there simply aren’t enough to go around, the “find out” phase will be punctuated.
Losing bidders get to pay 4x rates for 1/3 the output from consulting companies.
Cheers!
Source: I was made obsolete by web frameworks so hard that I entered a delusion where working with web frameworks just let us produce bigger buggier websites even faster - and where the demand for web developers skyrocketed and I made some seriously respectable money while helping train up junior developers to help address the severe shortage.
Not sure what web framework “made you obsolete” in 2003. I don’t even think jQuery existed then let alone anything you could accurately call a framework
Edit: just looked it up, first jQuery release was 2006 so I’m not sure what you’re smoking but I want some
People genuinely thought ColdFusion would allow untrained businessmen to make complex websites with no coding, only markup. It could generously be described as a “web framework”, and it was released in 1995.
Wow. I forget that there are babies on the Internet, now.
There were back-end web frameworks as early as the 1990s. The Internet started long before JavaScript existed.
God I feel old, now. Fuck. Lol.
Yeah, I didn’t do backend stuff for a while so maybe I somehow missed those being called frameworks. Sounds like they were though. And it’s nice of you to say I’m young lol
Yeah, I didn’t do backend stuff for a while so maybe I somehow missed those being called frameworks.
Oh sure. And yeah, the term tends to be used for front end now.
And it’s nice of you to say I’m young lol
Lol. You’re welcome!
I kinda wish it included the dates on these. Not having them makes me a bit dubious
The screenshotted tweet was from dec 20th. The linkedin post from dec 9th. You can see them in the link to his linkedin post in another comment.
Can you imagine the absolute misery of working for someone like this.
A person who thinks developers are all useless, and has total contempt for any skills that aren’t “business” stuff.
A person who thinks tech is easy and you can “just” do this and “just” do that and everything will be done, always telling you “this is so easy I could do it myself” while any contribution they make only makes things worse, and if there’s any kind of hold-up it’s because you’re either “lazy” or “incompetent”
No thanks.
Haha yeah… imagine… right.
I wish the best for you, and hope you find yourself a better boss soon.
Thanks, but the reason I don’t have to imagine is because that job is a memory.
The good ending
I never understood it, but business owners seem to have utter contempt for the people who actually make their money. I’m not talking about support staff, I mean the people that if they stay home, dollars aren’t getting printed for everyone else. In private EMS, the billing staff would constantly get parties and catering and gift cards and shit, while the crews actually running the calls and writing the billable reports got third-hand furniture, moldy stations, ambulances held together with a fucking wish, and constant bellyaching about how paying the crews minimum wage was costing the company too much money. I’m starting to notice the same pattern pop up between the dev team and the product team as my software company scales.
It’s quite easy to understand, even though it’s bullshit.
When the sales department has a good month and makes loads of sales, the business too has a good month. The activity of those individuals directly correlates to revenue on a month by month basis, so management are naturally going to be incentivised to give the sales team perks and bonuses as motivation.
In a given month the IT/dev department doesn’t “generate” any money at all, they only cost. We know they generate value in other ways of course, because the product the sales team sell is surely built and operated by the dev team, but because the relationship is indirect management don’t care to reward you.
Reward sales with nice perks -> Revenue goes up
Reward devs with nice perks -> Revenue doesn’t change
So of course management doesn’t see the benefit in giving more money to tech, because it doesn’t seem like you get anything back.
Of course, the reality is that investment in tech will make the product and the business better and more profitable, but it takes months or years to see the impact of changes, and management has a short attention span.
Yeah, maintenance is undervalued.
> Things are going well
“What are we paying you for?”
> Things are breaking
"What are we paying you for?
The best part is when some dufus goes “I’ve got a great idea and the grit to see it through. I just need to hire a tech person to do it for me”.
Woah that’s crazy how did you add the Kill Bill siren sound to your comment?
Can you imagine the absolute misery of working for someone like this.
Oh yeah. I remember it well. Ugh. It’s why I’m such a loud mouth here sometimes - if I can save one team from that guy, all my soap box shouting will have been worth it.
IRL Joffrey
My boss irl
I found the screenshot order confusing at first, and it’s not OPs fault since the original article got the screenshots backwards too
From the article:
Synopsis Wes Winder, a Canadian software developer, is facing backlash after his controversial decision to replace his development team with Al backfired. Once a trending topic on Reddit and a source of widespread ridicule, Winder is now in an awkward position as he turns to Linkedln in search of web developers to hire.
Oh thank goodness I am not the only one. Just the way I, an American, read things, and my cynicism about people trying to replace devs with AI says top (trying to hire real devs) goes first and bottom (fired everyone) second; title and the fact this was posted in Programmer Humor implies it’s bottom first and top second.
I think the confusion makes it better since he had to create a fake account to correct this misunderstanding.
I just got to say this website is a nightmare. At least 4 popups overlays just opening the article. The remove ads button just leaves the article and offer you to pay to remove ads. There is also delayed popups appearing while you read the article…
Are they speedrunning obsolence by making sure nobody read their articles online?
Most news sites nowadays are absolute cancer on mobile with 20% of screen being the actual content. Is pay of the reason why nobody actually reads articles and go straight to the comments
oof that site is pretty bad even with ublock origin. It also hijacks copy/paste so you can’t copy/paste the article to spare others, and any attempt to bypass that gets passed along to extracting the paid article below it rather than giving you the actual text of the article. Oh and it pops up to sign in with google, pops up with a discounted subscription offer, and pops up other animated elements on every edge of the screen (which actually link to real site content!) further making it difficult to just read the damn article
Good news is it literally doesn’t provide any information other than quoting his tweet about laying off his entire dev team and then his linked post from a few weeks later he was looking for devs (and the article quotes random people on reddit to fill it out of course)
This idiot even created a fake account to reply to the comments.
AI is just one of the many technologies that only exists to pollute the earth and maintain the illusion of scarcity within the labour pool. the added benefit of a bunch of new faces to circulate the same hoarded wealth helps too.
In the near future: Journalists use AI to turn 1 or 2 sentences into a full article. Meanwhile, readers use AI to summarize long articles into 1 or 2 sentences.
Ai is nice for code snippets that you don’t have to look up any more. I switch between C and Python regularly and some days, coming back from a month of Python, I just need some reminders on how brackets work.
