Comment by tonyhart7

3 months ago

what happen if the market is right and this is "new normal"?????

same like StackOverflow down today and seems like not everyone cares anymore, back then it would totally cause breakdown because SO is vital

61 comments

tonyhart7

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lmm  3 months ago

> what happen if the market is right and this is "new normal"?????

Then there's an oversupply of programmers, salaries will crash, and lots of people will have to switch careers. It's happened before.

  • _DeadFred_  3 months ago

    Some people will lose their homes. Some marriages will fail from the stress. Some people will chose to exit life because of it all.

    It's happened before and there's no way we could have learned from that and improved things. It has to be just life changing, life ruining, career crippling. Absolutely no other way for a society to function than this.

    • jakelazaroff  3 months ago

      That's where the post-scarcity society AI will enable comes in! Surely the profits from this technology will allow these displaced programmers to still live comfortable lives, not just be hoarded by a tiny number of already rich and powerful people. /s

      1 reply →

  • gloosx  3 months ago

    It's not as simple as putting all programmers into one category. There can be oversupply of web developers but at the same time undersupply of COBOL developers. If you are a very good developer, you will always be in demand.

    • ben_w  3 months ago

      > If you are a very good developer, you will always be in demand.

      "Always", in the same way that five years ago we'd "never" have an AI that can do a code review.

      Don't get me wrong: I've watched a decade of promises that "self driving cars are coming real soon now honest", latest news about Tesla's is that it can't cope with leaves; I certainly *hope* that a decade from now will still be having much the same conversation about AI taking senior programmer jobs, but "always" is a long time.

      20 replies →

  • yungwarlock  3 months ago

    I'm young, please when was that and in what industry

    • habibur  3 months ago

      After the year 2000. dot com burst.

      An tech employee posted he looked for job for 6 months, found none and has joined a fast food shop flipping burgers.

      That turned tech workers switching to "flipping burgers" into a meme.

      2 replies →

    • forgetfreeman  3 months ago

      .com implosion, tech jobs of all kinds went from "we'll hire anyone who knows how to use a mouse" to the tech jobs section of the classifieds was omitted entirely for 20 months. There have been other bumps in the road since then but that was a real eye-opener.

      3 replies →

    • throwaway2037  3 months ago

      The defense industry in southern California used to be huge until the 1980s. Lots and lots of ex-defense industry people moved to other industries. Oil and gas has gone through huge economic cycles of massive investment and massive cut-backs.

indemnity  3 months ago

I haven’t visited StackOverflow for years.

  • throwaway2037  3 months ago

    I don't get these comments. I'm not here to shill for SO, but it is a damn good website, if only for the archive. Can't remember how to iterate over entries in JavaScript dictionary (object)? SO can tell you, usually much better than W3Schools can, which attracts so much scorn. (I love that site: So simple for the simple stuff!)

    When you search programming-related questions, what sites do you normally read? For me, it is hard to avoid SO because it appears in so many top results from Google. And I swear that Google AI just regugitates most of SO these days for simple questions.

    • wonderwonder  3 months ago

      I think that's OP's point though, Ai can do it better now. No searching, no looking. Just drop your question into Ai with your exact data or function and 10 seconds later you have a working solution. Stackoverflow is great but Ai is just better for most people.

      Instead of running a google query or searching in Stackoverflow you just need a chatGPT, Claude or your Ai of choice open in a browser. Copy and paste.

    • indemnity  3 months ago

      It's not a pejorative statement, I used to live in Stack Overflow.

      But the killer feature of an LLM is that it can synthesize something based on my exact ask, and does a great job of creating a PoC to prove something, and it's cheap from time investment point of view.

      And it doesn't downvote something as off-topic, or try to use my question as a teaching exercise and tell me I'm doing it wrong, even if I am ;)

  • ido  3 months ago

    Ive honestly never intentionally visited it (as in, went to the root page and started following links) - it was just where google sent me when searching answers to specific technical questions.