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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u/CheapChallenge Nov 26 '23

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

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.

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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...