I think that's a great point. There is a place for outsourcing. Some projects and organizations are well suited for it. Some projects end up only using outsourcing at supplementing some parts of the work. Some can't do it for quality or compliance reasons.
I think we will see something similar with LLMs. There will be areas where it will deliver cheaper and faster. There will be areas where it will deliver nothing but disaster. It'll change the industry but not eat it alive. The folks talking about fully autonomous coding on the near horizon are dreaming.
I’ve seen a number of outsourcing project failures. The two things they all had in common were that the organizations in question were terrible at managing projects but they blamed the developers for management’s inability to plan or make decisions, and they were trying for unrealistic savings – it wasn’t enough to save 30-50% on salary, they wanted 90% even if that was below the market rate for those skills even in India.
The first one is definitely happening with the LLM bubble where companies really want to pretend that the hard part of the job isn’t understanding what to build and how to do so maintainability.
The second one is going to be more interesting: I expect LLMs to put downward pressure on wages in a lot of places but also for smarter companies to realize that nothing short of true AGI is going to replace the need for people who can actually understand what the customer needs. If I’m right, this will swing the pendulum back towards specialists again – the seagull guys who come in, declare that their favorite framework will solve everything, and leave are more vulnerable to being replaced by an LLM than someone who knows how to code but is also bringing actual business-relevant experience and judgement which an LLM can’t have.
> the seagull guys who come in, declare that their favorite framework will solve everything, and leave are more vulnerable to being replaced by an LLM than someone who knows how to code but is also bringing actual business-relevant experience and judgement which an LLM can’t have.
But that's just a continuous variant of the discrete-sounding claim that programming will get eaten by AI soon. After all, the "actual business-relevant experience and judgement which an LLM can’t have" is mostly not related to programming - and the better LLMs get at coding, the less value will the programming parts of the skillset have; take it to the limit, and it's just saying the managers and sales people will stay, while software developers will be gone.
I think that’s a question of how you define jobs. For example, I’ve worked with very few managers who could document their business processes in sufficient detail to build an app. Now, is the person who does a business analyst, architect, senior developer, etc.? Who sits down with the users, gets feedback, but understands the needs of multiple parties well enough to tell which points are traps, which should be developed in a different direction, etc.?
Basically, I’m saying people should stop expecting to get six figures for being able to run create-react-app and deploy a container. The analytical and social parts of the job are where I predict LLMs to make fewer inroads because they require non-generic understanding.
> I’m saying people should stop expecting to get six figures for being able to run create-react-app and deploy a container. The analytical and social parts of the job are where I predict LLMs to make fewer inroads because they require non-generic understanding.
That's a fair take. I do wonder though, how much will those "analytical and social parts of the job" be paying - I imagine you might no longer get six figures for that either, because high tech salaries are fueled by absurd growth of the industry, which manifests in a large part in software that's basically just {framework du jour + basic-level CRUD, that hasn't changed much in 30 years + branding}, and that kind of software I expect to get eaten by LLMs entirely.
Even with cookie-cutter app coders out of the way, the remaining software engineers might see the number of jobs implode, crashing salaries for some time, until (maybe) the growth restarts around new kinds of software, kinds that'll be in high demand and not something that can be made by a few "analytical/social" people herding LLMs. I'd normally say this won't happen, but rather that the software economy will slow down, stabilize, and get boring like everything else - but then, so much of software is driven purely by advertising, and advertising is a negative sum game, so surely they'll invent more bullshit jobs for us.
Yeah, I’m really not sure either with the general backdrop of looming American disinvestment and the entire world reconsidering reliance on American companies. I don’t think reversing the trend of consolidation is going to be enough to balance it out.
I think we will see something similar with LLMs. There will be areas where it will deliver cheaper and faster. There will be areas where it will deliver nothing but disaster. It'll change the industry but not eat it alive. The folks talking about fully autonomous coding on the near horizon are dreaming.