r/webdev • u/Proud-Confidence7290 • Nov 26 '23

Question Will AI decrease demand and salaries?

Hello everyone.

I am new to web development and it goes well so far.

I'm bit scared of AI development. Let's say you needed 10 developers for a project before ChatGPT and now you need 8.

With the development of AI, we will need even less.

Why do people think AI won't decrease demand and salaries of web developers? It's logic for me, what am I missing?

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84

u/CheapChallenge Nov 26 '23

No. It will increase expectations about velocity though, as it should when new tools become available.

8

u/ImportantDoubt6434 Nov 26 '23

The pay expectations increase as well then

18

u/kbder Nov 26 '23

Oh, you must be new here

20

u/Ariakkas10 Nov 26 '23

Yeah! You tell em!

15

u/ImportantDoubt6434 Nov 26 '23

Literally any worker: “You should get paid more”

Devs: 😡no I’m a capitalist billionaire I need a pay-cut

Like, what the hell?

2

u/[deleted] Nov 26 '23

Then they all come out of the wood to cry like little snowflakes "boohoo the market is hard I cannot find a job since the layoff, I couldn't do shit because I didn't unionised boohoo "

2

u/ImportantDoubt6434 Nov 26 '23

Unionize, don’t train scabs, and don’t expect corporate bastards to play nice.

Put their ass on grass when they fuck around, let everyone know the dirty corporate laundry.

-6

u/[deleted] Nov 26 '23

[removed] — view removed comment

2

u/[deleted] Nov 26 '23

You're not wrong, but I think how you came at em made em want you t be wrong.

Productivity influences salary somewhat, but boy, what a trip it is to audit a company and see how owners divide up the loot. If the company is making a profit, the owner is trying to keep as much as he can get away with, and salaries are definitely NOT affected by productivity increase

0

u/[deleted] Nov 26 '23

[deleted]

1

u/Ariakkas10 Nov 26 '23

Literally no one hires 1 dev over another because they are faster.

Literally no one rewards(promotion/pay raise) faster devs. You’ll get punished for being slow, but going faster doesn’t get you anything, and can be detrimental to your team.

All you’re talking about is being able to keep pace. Not exceeding pace. If you’re as productive as everyone else, that’s good enough.

And guess what, if everyone goes faster, everyone is NOT going to get a pay raise. Take a look at aggregate salaries over the last couple of decades compared to productivity gains over the same period.

Lastly, labor is most definitely not a measure of productivity. That’s absurd. For one thing, it’s not a measure of anything. It’s an exchange. Second, a measure of productivity would be unique to the field in discussion, in ours it would be something like tickets closed or features deployed.

-1

u/ImportantDoubt6434 Nov 26 '23

I get paid per contract and am self employed with employees so I guess that makes you an infant

1

u/[deleted] Nov 26 '23

There is a strong argument to be made that increased velocity means less employees are needed to achieve the same task. We have already seen this at my work, where we cancelled the need for a new DevOps engineer and a new Technical Writer, because of existing ChatGPT and CoPilot features making the current DevOps engineers and Developers able to do more in the same time. The net result is less humans employed. Those humans are still well paid though. :)

3

u/mshiltonj Nov 26 '23

If there a huge labor supply for a smaller amount of jobs for humans, wages will decrease.

3

u/[deleted] Nov 26 '23

That's never been true, however; notice how productivity has skyrocketed over the past 30 years, but so have jobs.

Companies will just use the additional productivity to do more.

If your job canceled open jobs, it had nothing at all to do with ChatGPT. They were going to do that anyway and used ChatGPT as cover.

0

u/[deleted] Nov 26 '23

DevOps engineers were confident they could now cover the work that was going to go to a new engineer. There was no cover, they can just now work twice as quickly on new scripts, new deployment pipelines, and spend far less time troubleshooting issues than they used to via Stack Overflow etc.. What previously took a day to work out, now takes an hour, so they no longer need the help.

I agree with the rest of what you said tho. But AI did make the new jobs no longer needed.

3

u/[deleted] Nov 26 '23

they can just now work twice as quickly on new scripts, new deployment pipelines, and spend far less time troubleshooting issues than they used to via Stack Overflow etc.

That's bullshit. Do people actually buy that where you work?

1

u/mattjspatola Nov 26 '23

Did they promptly start a legitimate candidate search with the DevOps engineers first identified the bandwidth issue? Did they drag their feet, trying to make the team accomplish the impossible (probably with unsustainable levels of uncompensated overtime) until this new solution was discovered?

I hope it was the former and not the latter, but I would be surprised.

-1

u/putz__ Nov 27 '23

The few horses that are left lead really nice lives, but their numbers are tiny compared to pre automobile. I'd learn ai troubleshooting if I were literally anyone, you'd just Google it like web dev and IT does already. Fuck, ask a non broken Ai to fix it. Now I need to read asimov...

1

u/mshiltonj Nov 26 '23

We'll see increased productivity and lower pay.