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/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.

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u/jkpetrov Nov 26 '23

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

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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.

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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

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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.