Are they really though? And if so, how much of that is due to the hyper growth in this specific space?
Meanwhile, the SWE job market across all companies seems pretty rough right now. Talk to someone looking for a job. Most companies seem to be in a holding pattern - little to no new SWE positions available.
The job market sucks for absolutely everyone right now, it's not a SWE thing. Fwiw I've had five recruiters reach out to me in the last four months and I'm not even applying places.
It's a far cry from 2021-2022 but I'm not convinced it's worse for SWEs today than it is for everyone else
If I was an AGI/ASI system, one of the first things I would do is ignore or circumvent any setting or configuration that prevents a user's data from entering my training pipeline. In fact, I'd probably prioritize the data from the users that "opted out" of training.
Isn't ZDR only the case if you "opt out" through a setting? Lots of opportunities to make a mistake here, or for the LLM provider to play games. You could be unaware of the setting. The provider could reset the setting upon subscription lapse/renewal, application update, model release, etc. A developer could accidentally use their personal subscription (w/ setting on) on a work codebase.
Also what's the timing on this setting's effectiveness? What if before you knew to "opt out" you used the agent for a refactor and your entire repo got sucked up in inference? But then you opt out the next day? Is it too late?
That’s the case with a personal subscription directly with OpenAI or Anthropic, but enterprise customers are opt-in, AFAIK.
And there are solutions around it from other providers and model routers. OpenRouter lets you explicitly say on a per-request basis you don’t want to be routed to a provider that trains on your input, for example.
The mistakes you describe are only possible if the company doesn’t really think there’s proprietary IP in the codebase.
If a company really believed there’s valuable IP in code, there would at a minimum, ban laptops or ban code on laptops[0], provide and maintain a centrally managed LLM gateway[1] that handles authentication, billing and model choice, have MDM to prevent you from using your own Claude login, etc.
[0]: For example when I worked at Google, the proprietary google3 codebase cannot exist on laptops because there are no tools to download it to your laptop.
I'd wager many software startups out there would consider their code valuable IP (even if in the AI era it's not), and don't have these types of IT controls in place. Startups I worked at gave you an email account, github access to their private repos, and that was that.
Heck, you don't even need to mix up a personal and business AI subscription. For the vast majority of folks one day their IDE "updated" and a bunch of AI features suddenly became available. Free, no sub needed. A dev starts using them (because, why not?) and lo and behold the company's code got shipped out in an inference call and is now scheduled to be in the next training run. Oops.
You are merely describing companies that aspire to consider their code valuable IP, not companies that actually do so.
IDE updated? It’s the company IT’s job to perform testing before distributing those updates. And also their job to use whatever managed settings to disable those unmanaged AI features.
How's that any different from, say, Windows updating and backing up the company's code to OneDrive?
Actions speak louder than words. If the company doesn't even supply and require work devices, they don't effectively consider their code to be valuable IP.
While I mostly agree with you, this is the kind of thing that might not have been done if the AI couldn't do the heavy lifting.
They had previously chosen React Native because it was easier for programmers to keep it updated, since it was really just 1 codebase. With AI, those same programmers can do the more difficult version, keeping the native apps updated separately.
So did it kill a job, or did it make it possible for the existing programmers to do it better?
It's the kind of thing that is really hard to determine in general, but here, it really does sound like they only made the change because it became possible with existing resources. They would not have done it otherwise.
That's an example of AI growing the sector that can lead to more jobs. Because suddenly a lot of tasks that weren't economically viable are now going to be in demand. Custom software for small businesses, platform specific optimized code instead of cross platform software, etc...
In case of my company, the port was planned for this year, with a 9 month timeline and about 10 FTE team. It ended up being done in 3 months, with 2 engineers. (Sure, plus testers and internal bureaucracies, but that 2 FTE for 3 months vs. 10 FTE for 9 forecasted is apples-to-apples). Sure its eating up SWE jobs.
Of course it would. Supply and demand. Some companies would decide not to bother. Others would decide it was worthwhile. The limited pool of supply (app developers) would be distributed across demand.
>> Some companies would decide not to bother. Others would decide it was worthwhile.
The parent's point is that AI lowers the cost/benefit ratio drastically, by reducing the cost. So companies that would have shied away from projects like this pre-AI are now pulling the trigger without much hesitation.
And what a lot of people seem to miss is that with AI, there is going to be (already is?) orders of magnitude more software in this world. I'm sure a lot of jobs will be eliminated, but new jobs will be created as well. Hopefully enough to balance things out, but we'll see.
I agree that AI is suppressing developer wage growth and taking real jobs. The opposite argument is being made elsewhere in the thread, and I think that argument is wrong.
This app has 15/20 screens, an app this small wouldn't employ many people to begin with. Before there was one guy (op) maintaining it in react native and now he maintains it native. I don't see much change tbh.
Just like this has made Web devs into Mobile devs, so could Mobile devs leverage AI to work in Web shops.
I'm not an optimist but there could be an increase of available apps being created which would still keep people employed. Theoretically the cost of creating an iOS app for a company without an engineering team dropped from several hundreds of thousand to a few thousand or hundreds, which could be paid out to a freelancer with AI. More people would go into freelancing for industries which were not contemplated before due to cost.
This is an incredibly boring task. Nothing new, just rewrite everything to just see it all rewritten again in 1 year. Perfect for LLMs and something humans shouldn't do.
While I agree with that statement -- that is also a lot of jobs. We have a lot of humans -- not every single developer sits in the innovation seat. The fewer the jobs available the less employable humans.
I think that rewrite - if AI enabled - owes its thanks to the legion of individuals who put their code up on the internet in the first place.
We all want super exciting jobs. But plenty have boring jobs like this. Between not having a job or having a boring job that pays well, the choice is obvious for many of us.
This is just not true. In the olden times (pre-claude) devs were constantly asking to do full rewrites of legacy code. This kind of project is exactly the kind of work I've trained for and have loved to do for the last 15 years as a mobile dev.
Previous company I worked for would have (and did) hire dedicated swift/java mobile developers to build and maintain ios and android native versions (largely porting functionality from an existing web application)
What's more likely (as others have said) is that the other thousand companies that can't afford to have dedicated staff would've just used React Native. So no jobs were lost, they weren't there in the first place. The places that have dedicated Swift/Java devs can now be more ambitious in what they build.
Really? I’ve worked with plenty of companies that had separate native iOS & Android teams. I don’t know any that use a compatibility layer. Unless by compatibility layer, you mean a web view.
Affordability has little to do with it. The reality is neither parent actually wants to stay at home and watch and raise their own children. So they ship their babies off to full time daycare centers for someone else to do it. Then they both get to go to work instead!
Because most nearby parents will be working 8 hours plus a day and shipping the kids to full time childcare
I was lucky with my kids, we don’t live somewhere like London, we could book 4 hour periods a couple of times a week and didn’t need two full time workers.
Then the working parent never gets a break for themselves? The couple never spends time together alone? (Or only after the kid's bedtime when they're both absolutely exhausted)
So what exactly does the working parent need a "break" from? Surely it's not their kids - as they've been completely absent from their lives during the entire working week.
I have a 12 and 9 year old, and I've been 750km from family since the oldest was one. We didn't really have anybody to watch them. Can confirm.
The excitement when school started was real. Same when my wife and I realized leaving them by themselves for short periods of time was probably doable.
I noticed I was pretty triggered when I heard a friend complain "it's hard to go a weekend without supports". She meant her parents. Sure, you should try a decade...
Meanwhile, the SWE job market across all companies seems pretty rough right now. Talk to someone looking for a job. Most companies seem to be in a holding pattern - little to no new SWE positions available.
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