Hacker News

points by malfist 2 days ago | 0 comments

> In the past ~18 months the majority of all human software development has been wiped out

What the hell does this even mean? Literally half of the code in operation I the world is still COBOL. The fuck is this nonsense wiped out

[–] adventured 2 days ago

It means in corporations across the globe, the majority of code is no longer being written by humans. That is over and it will only keep dwindling by the quarter.

[–] malfist 2 days ago

Writing lines of code by hand is all of human software development? Pretty sure in all of those companies its still software engineers writing the code, even if they're using LLMs to do it.

Unless you're making the claim that software engineers aren't involved or that only writing code is software development.

[–] asadotzler 2 days ago

Nonsense. Nearly every software house in the world has just as many or nearly as many programmers as they did 7 years ago when GPT-2 was "too dangerous to release." You live in a very tiny bubble if you think most businesses are building software without humans. Total horse shit.

[–] adventured 2 days ago

Microsoft is laying off 60,000 people. That's just the early pin prick of the layoff gusher that is incoming.

One million software developers will lose their jobs in the US over the next ten years.

The big firing waves will begin when valuations decline as the initial AI boom slows. That has started already, although it's early. Companies like CoreWeave will basically collapse. Investors will demand & reward the layoffs, efficiency push, the end of rah rah times will prompt the inflection on employment in tech. And it'll never be like it was ever again.

[–] malfist 2 days ago

Microsoft isn't laying off 60,000 people. They offered voluntary separation agreements, but nobody was laid off.

For 1 million software engineers in the US to lose their job you'd have to shrink the industry by 62.5% and nobody is doing that. We employ more software engineers this year than last year, which was higher than the year before which was higher than a year before. Get off the social media and look at real statistics and news.

This gleeful nihilism isn't health friend

[–] adventured 1 day ago

Those 60,000 people are being eliminated from tech jobs. That's a gigantic number. Microsoft is pruning. They'll do it the hard way if they have to with literal firings. They'd like to avoid that if they can, and they're in a position currently where they can afford to. Most companies are not going to be so gentle.

HN is in denial. Just watch what happens over the next ~36 months.

[–] malfist 1 day ago

I'm disengaging from this conversation since you seem unwilling to engage with facts. 60,000 software engineers are not being laid off at microsoft, full stop.

[–] watwut 1 day ago

> HN is in denial. Just watch what happens over the next ~36 months.

In all likelihood, massive worldwide recession due to combination of oil issues and debt-ai bubble popping. That will be combined with instability due to democracies cracking up, wars popping up faster and faster all the while the richest and most powerful people are increasingly desperate to destroy democracies before it is too late for them.

[–] vanuatu 2 days ago

seems like the opposite is occurring, job postings are climbing and so is comp

software is easier to build -> the world builds more software

But yes, the act of translating spec into code as a 'programmer' is gone for good.

[–] ngc248 1 day ago

All companies are trimming fat by reducing headcount and the cover for that is "AI"

[–] imtringued 2 days ago

Yes it means in corporations across the globe, the majority of code was no longer being written by humans long before the majority of code was no longer being written by humans.

Also remember, the majority of all human software development has been wiped out 18 months ago but the dwindling will keep going by the quarter until the majority of all human software development has been wiped out.

[–] p-e-w 2 days ago

> Literally half of the code in operation I the world is still COBOL.

There’s no way this is even remotely true. JavaScript alone is probably 90+%, considering it’s on almost every website.

[–] jcranmer 2 days ago

There is definitely an unanswered question as to what the metric, but no, JavaScript is not 90+% by any useful metric. Most code is not a website, and JavaScript penetration outside of the client-side code on a website and some GUI applications on various operating systems is almost nonexistent.

Remember that all of the code in operation includes code like the microcontroller in your mouse, the hundreds of chips in your car doing things like keeping the engine running or "window goes up when I push the button," the DVD menu (which is actually Java code), not to mention all of the staid systems responsible for things like writing your paycheck every other week.

[–] f1yght 2 days ago

Most of the web is php, so JavaScript isn’t even the primary language on the web.

[–] blacksmith_tb 2 days ago

To be fair, most of those Wordpress / LAMP etc. sites probably also do have at least some client-side js, so they'd count for both?