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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31

u/Headpuncher Nov 26 '23

  1. already seen employers ban use of chatGPT / copilot because they are afraid their IP will be "stolen" by it. Legal are dealing with it as we write this.

  2. I've been using copilot anyway and it saves me a lot of boilerplate and typing, but it hasn't been error free, and I need to be quite specific in what i want from it. So, you need webdev knowledge to get anything out of it.

If employers had any brains, they would increase budgets to leverage faster development overall, Fire the soft skills waste-of-space roles who comprise 60% of a project's workforce and automate that.

15

u/jkpetrov Nov 26 '23

Lol soft skills roles talk to the clients. Good luck getting that invoice paid.

7

u/lordcameltoe Nov 26 '23

“Well-well look. I already told you: I deal with the god damn customers so the engineers don't have to. I have people skills; I am good at dealing with people. Can't you understand that? What the hell is wrong with you people?”

  • Office Space

-1

u/errrzarrr Nov 26 '23

I've seen that already, they suck at dealing with people

1

u/errrzarrr Nov 26 '23

Do they? where I work at they started using Scrum and hired a lot of them because their "soft skills" and client connection.

They don't talk to clients too much or bring devs actual useful information of clients needs and when they do they can't communicate it properly.

The client doesn't feel treated any better, work culture and environment haven't improved a single bit

3

u/jkpetrov Nov 26 '23

If that's the case, they deserve to be fired. Still the devs will not get the invoice paid, so new soft skills people need to be hired.

0

u/Headpuncher Nov 26 '23

Some are useful, many are just budget and time vampires, sucking the client dry.

And those people on the projects don't do the invoicing, that's handled by a whole other dept.

1

u/jkpetrov Nov 26 '23

They are making sure to understand and follow client specifications, and delivery of product according to the specifications is a prerequisite to bill the hours of development.

True, there are many slackers both in tech and business verticals, but that's not an excuse. There is a reason why certain products and projects need an analyst, owner, manager, service delivery person, and QA. The client is aware of this, they would not pay them if they didn't bring value

0

u/Headpuncher Nov 26 '23

They are making sure to understand and follow client specifications, and delivery of product according to the specifications

lol, you haven't met these charlatans, the specs are terrible, if they are complete at all. I've been doing this close to 20 years. No-one needs a full time Agile coach, full time timeline drawer, full time UX even is a joke, we're all using component libraries and should know enough about usability etc to get a simple data-driven site together, I certainly do.

2

u/[deleted] Nov 26 '23

This is the perfect answer. It’s a tool. A very good tool. It can help productivity if used correctly, and in my case, is a great learning tool.

But you need to understand what you want it to do. Sure, it could spit out the very basics with very basic and low knowledge input. But to actually take it to something decent and presentable, you need web skills to cater what you want it to do. And you’ll need those skills to fix issues with some of the output ot gives.

1

u/the33rdegree Nov 26 '23

AND they are not afraid of their IP stolen by Google???

1

u/Kyrthis Nov 26 '23

Don’t you mean microsoft

1

u/Headpuncher Nov 27 '23

i think they meant that without gpt or copilot i would be googleing the problems and possibly pasting code into search

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u/Kyrthis Nov 27 '23

People really paste code into search? How do they expect good results?