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.

8

u/ImportantDoubt6434 Nov 26 '23

The pay expectations increase as well then

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?

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u/[deleted] Nov 26 '23

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u/[deleted] Nov 26 '23

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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.