Comment by ozim
7 hours ago
Cannot agree.
Whole TFA doesn’t take into account reason why software development was actually so valuable.
Single specialist in any domain is not that valuable. You may charge $200 for hour of his time sure. But to grow company you now need N specialists.
What software was doing was not making specialist obsolete replacing a specialist by encoding his knowledge - well many tried to do so but failed even in 80’s “expert systems”.
What software was doing was making it possible to structure specialist work, make it possible for a single specialist to serve more customers at the same time, make it possible to hand over work in a structured way to junior specialists, making it easier for senior to take over edge cases and spot check work of those junior specialists.
This setup allows company to not being tied to number of specialists to grow, this setup allows company to charge less per customer but take over more of the market share.
Whole premise that now each specialist will waste time dabbling in AI software development is ludicrous, especially if each specialist would be building his own tooling somehow.
That sounds more like the extractive setup of corporations like IBM, where return/specialist must be maximized against the number of clients that can be juggled simultaneously.
Whereas in larger technology firms, yes that happens to some degree, but only with the highest level specialists such as PEs, fellows, etc.
They are already so wildly profitable and valuable by the simple nature of computing itself: it scales second only to money with regards to compounding effects. Once you have software someone can use, it scales near infinitely to more users, thus value is extracted from the work of a single specialist for all time. No need to complicate it with trying to abstract work juniors can do (and fail) and then have seniors correct. What would they be doing in non-extractive firms?