← Back to context

Comment by rowbin

6 hours ago

I agree, his takes should not be dismissed lightly. I'm not sure about "demand is fixed" though. I feel like software demand has been declared saturated at least a few times.

I have been making software professionally for 25 years and in all that time i have never run into the problem that we have run out of things to do.

  • Exactly, if we look at what projects are on-going now, look at Startups, they are practically solving all the same thing and most of them will be dead soon, we need to finally reach the era where tools to "zeroshot" anything becomes widespread to create new problems, but even by then, we will have an oversupply of tech workers, many will have to convert to a different field, many will not want to be paid based on callcenter type of work which is prompt-as-much-as-you-can, understandably.

    It's quite hard to predict what will happen, but in a few years, I bet the unemployment rate of tech workers will be really high, we can just look at how many jobs are currently already replaceable but the owner of it is just lagging in the implementation of automation, it's probably already the large majority of tech jobs.

> I feel like software demand has been declared saturated at least a few times.

It's never been declared saturated, with one exception in the six months following the dot-com crash.

I've been in the industry since the mid-90s. I have not seen automation with the potential to automate away everything for the average office worker.

"fixed" is definitely incorrect but there's probably a ceiling on how fast the demand can grow, just because other bottlenecks will take over at some point.

Agreed. The limitations of human context window and communication bandwidth restrict the complexity of large-scale software.

LLM will have an extremely large context window and extremely high communication bandwidth in the future. Therefore, even more complex large-scale software will emerge.