this post was submitted on 25 Jan 2024
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Every day there’s more big job cuts at tech and games companies. I’ve not seen anything explaining why they all seam to be at once like this. Is it coincidence or is there something driving all the job cuts?

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[–] MajorHavoc 20 points 9 months ago (2 children)

What you're missing is that 95% of programming projects fail, and it's never because the programmer didn't code fast enough.

Speed-up isn't why I have a team instead of being a solo act.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 9 months ago (1 children)

There's also the pure reality that, yeah, it's easier today to get a project off the ground than ever before, and AI is good at that, but you know what AI is absolute shit at? Modifying ludicrously cumbersome, undocumented, brutally hacked together legacy code and addressing technical debt - the two most common tasks of most actual software engineers.

[–] MajorHavoc 8 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

True.

Good thing most companies aren't stuck with ludicrously cumbersome, undocumented, brutally hacked together legacy code bases. /s

I can't even type that with a straight face.

the two most common tasks of most actual software engineers.

So true.

[–] [email protected] -5 points 9 months ago (1 children)
  1. Working with GPT actually helped me write better code, because it's more familiar with good patterns in unfamiliar languages and frameworks and can write idiomatically. It got me out of one-language-centric habits I hadn't known I had.

  2. Yes, it's 100% true that the person driving the AI needs to have good design sense of what they want the final system to look like, and still work well with their team. You can fuck it up faster if you can code faster, absolutely that's true.

  3. What you said, I know that. Do the people that run these companies know that?

[–] MajorHavoc 1 points 9 months ago

What you said, I know that. Do the people that run these companies know that?

Yeah. Exactly. They did the same to various degrees when web frameworks first hit the scene, and numerous other advancements before and after.

But as you said, the new tech genuinely does make us both faster and better.

It just doesn't fix the crap parts of the job that the CEOs always hope it will. (As someone else pointed out, it specifically doesn't magic wand away decades of technical debt, haha.)