My hunch is that in the long run its going to be net negative in software. A lot of companies exists as of today cause a lot of people were able to just focus on building without constantly worrying about the fear of lay off. With the concept of job security based on talent and effort being dismantled, everyone would always be in a constant look out mode now.
> A lot of companies exists as of today cause a lot of people were able to just focus on building without constantly worrying about the fear of lay off.
Depends on the company, plenty have been run on a culture of fear for decades.
It's already a net negative, not just for software, but overall for humanity. The supposed productivity gains are a lie, it's causing people to be confident in information which is false, it's enabling people to treat each other like jerks in even more ways than before. AI is genuinely one of the worst things the tech industry has ever created.
You write with such confidence like this is an objective opinion, and yet one I completely disagree with. Confident in information which is false? What.. ChatGPT 3.5?
I'm trying to gather the paperwork to apply for citizenship in another country. I gave Opus 5.5 everything I've assembled so far (PDFs, PNGs of birth/death certificates, etc.) and asked it for next steps and it:
* Got the answer wrong, because it neglected to search for or take into account a new law passed a few years ago.
* Missed obvious things in the provided documents, such as names and dates.
* Gave contradictory information, e.g. telling me that one step might not be ready for a year, but that I should get some things done now because they expire six months after they're released. It neglected to make the connection that if I can't start something for a year, then it would be pointless to start getting paperwork ready for that thing right now if the paperwork expires in 6 months.
I use AI coding tools a lot. I thought this would be a slam dunk for agents in 2026 and it was worse than useless.
This reads like a comment from 2025. LLMs are solving novel math problems and they successfully emulated a PS5, this week lol. You really need to update your priors. It's amazing how many people refuse to do this and make a fool of themselves in public
One doesn't invalidate the other. Yes LLMs have been very successful at solving math problems when guided by mathematicians who know what they're doing. The same is true for emulating a PS5 or (insert cool new project of the week developed with LLM).
On the other hand, when I use LLMs, I regularly see them confidently claim information confidently that is false. So, I'd say productivity gains are true but there's also a cost of wrong information being used to make decisions due to AI.
> On the other hand, when I use LLMs, I regularly see them confidently claim information confidently that is false
When talk to people, I regularly see them confidently claim information that is false as well.
This is not the point where LLMs become useless. LLMs become useless when we understand that we are social creatures and that many times the road is more important than the destination. Also, when you provide instant-travel to all the destinations, the destinations lose their value as well.
I think a lot of the problems or gains attributed to AI are just reflections of the humans that use them.
I dont care if you used AI to produce something. If you share it with me, I assume you are responsible for it. You own it, whether you agree or not.
> it's causing people to be confident in information which is false, it's enabling people to treat each other like jerks in even more ways than before
What is the direction of causality here? Does AI make people jerks, or they were already or prone to be jerks?
The same applies to innovations or breakthroughs made by people who use AI in their work.
> LLMs are solving novel math problems and successfully emulated a PS5
Did the AI independently accomplish those things, or did highly competent people accomplish them using AI as a tool?
What would happen if you give someone with no mathematical or programming background the same frontier models that OpenAI used for their mathematical proofs [1]. Would they produce the same discoveries?
I think of humans as constants. They can bring positive, or negative value to the table. The AI is the multiplier.
Take software engineering. If you let someone who doesnt care about code quality (their constant is negative since any code they write will introduce a tech debt) push code to your repo using AI, it will destroy your project. But let an engineer with strong fundamentals and high standards use AI to push code to your repo, they can improve the project much faster than they could without AI.
I guess my comment was done a bit too quickly and comes across as muddled. I mostly agree with you, in the hand of competent people AI is a very powerful tool. I'm a bit of a misanthrope and I think that incompetent, stupid and malicious people vastly outnumber competent, well-intentioned people. This leads me to feel rather pessimistic about the impact of AI because it is a multiplier when the human constant is often less than great.
In a lot of big companies, you had a small majority of people who were incompetent but mostly harmless because their lack of competence prevented them from causing too many issues and another group of people who were competent and productive. Nowadays, with AI those incompetent people can be maximally effective at causing issues due to their incompetence.
The same happens with opensource projects who are now flooded with mostly useless PRs and bug reports from incompetent people directing LLMs to do so. etc...
So yes individually AI makes people productive but I'm not sure if that is true at the scale of a company nor do I think it's necessarily true with opensource projects.
I agree the population distribution is skewed towards negative and average is less than 0. And when those people use AI it gets even worse because they are preventing themselves to become competent by relying on AI and skipping fundamentals.
Unfortunately the things we can control regarding other people are limited... So I think least we can do is to either surround ourselves with competent people or if not possible, ignore the AI and hold people accountable based on their final output. I often see people try to defend themselves by just blaming AI when their final output is bad but when its good its their work. But its not an AI problem, its the people problem sadly. I wish the problem was AI btw, it would be much easier to fix.
I disagree with the premise that you need to know what you’re doing to solve problems or create something new with LLMs (unfortunately).
I wouldn’t say that Dans recent work in maths was necessarily that of an expert. More of a fan of Lean than anything and he did a breakthrough in a relatively short time period.
It seems to me it’s about enough money, knowledge, and effort to want to achieve a thing. Which is good, but can and is being weaponized in terrible ways against us.
> This reads like a comment from 2025. LLMs are solving novel math problems and they successfully emulated a PS5, this week lol.
It's curious seeing "math" and "productivity" in the same sentence when the market assigns much less economic value to math than to other endeavors. The entire annual US federal budget for mathematics a mere ~$100M on average.
> The entire annual US federal budget for mathematics a mere ~$100M on average.
I'm not sure how that's a relevant benchmark, considering that the federal budget represents the spending of a single specific political institution whose primary focus isn't related to math per se.
Given the extent to which the market at large is bidding up the prices of devices whose entire function is to do math very rapidly, I don't think the overall premise holds.
LLMs are solving outstanding maths problems by trying a load of stuff until something works, which is exactly what they do in software. If you want a system built out of square blocks jammed into round holes they'll make you one in no time, but if you're working in an area where non-functional requirements actually matter (there are lots) the slopnami is a living nightmare.
And humans don't iterate? Its a matter of time before there is nothing a human can do better than an AI in programming or math, let alone other fields.
Did I say they don't? What I implied is that humans have other ways of thinking than trying stuff until something sticks, not that they never do that.
How do you think mathematicians came up with those open problems and conjectures - trying stuff until they came up with one that passed their "interesting conjecture" check? What was that check? Can you code it in Lean? Can ChatGPT? Have you seen an LLM come up with one?
> Its a matter of time...
No it isn't, and by saying that I've given as much reason to think I'm right as you have.
I moved the opposite direction. Few months back, I was absolutely sure that the days of me being a software engineer are numbered. The programming I used to love and fun was gone. But, as I got to work more with Agents, factory & the infrastructure surrounding it, I'm more optimistic about the kinds of problems we could tackle with this, that wasn't possible/cost-effective before. We've only barely scratched the surface with what AI could be leveraged in the real world.
> Agents, factory & the infrastructure surrounding it
Can you be more specific about what isn't just a growing pain/maturity problem that will eventually be baked into the default products once the unit costs come down?
I can one-shot full video production that takes almost an hour on claude right now and it'll run ffmpeg for a good chunk of that. I don't see how the delegation + infra isn't a solved problem a couple years from now.
Why do you think there will be a human in the loop on any of these tasks, and why do you think that you will be that human?
I've watched the robots become better/faster software developers than I ever was over the last year. I've got a lifetime of esoteric knowledge that's completely obsolete now. I can ask robots to do things, but so can any other random person.
What, exactly, do you think we are going to be prompting these things to do? And why would anybody pay us to do that, rather than just prompt them directly?
The difficulty with building software has mostly never been the code itself, but how to tease out what to actually build and how to connect system components together in a sane way that meets business requirements.
It is indeed neat that LLMs with fancy agent harnesses can write code very well at this point, but that doesn’t mean the average person can think through problems in the way that is required to build software that operates at meaningful scale with complex trade-offs and architecture decisions to be made. In my experience with others in other fields, that is not a common skill, and I really don’t see how an LLM is going to solve that.
For this reason, I do not see software engineering going anywhere, but I do believe it is possible/likely there will be negative changes in hiring and wages.
If your views changed that quickly, then I don't know what to say. Your priors definitely need adjusting, and perhaps consider the way you evaluate the future.
It was pretty clear even 2 years ago. Now it's happening right on schedule.
Interesting. Since GPT4 came out I strongly believed LLMs would replace human programming. By November 2025 when opus 4.5 came out I thought it was pretty established already and most people agreed with that premise.
I think the experience of the gpt4/gemini2/claude2-3 era of models was widely variable depending on the use case and how much reference material there was on the internet. I'm told it was very good at producing react code for example, but my experience was it often failed to handle Rust or Kotlin type checking and failed pretty often (in less immediately detectable ways) on PHP. So looking at the trajectory from the initial copilot (could auto compete fast inverse square root and method level problems that you could also just google), to GPT4 (which from my experience, still couldn't code) and hearing that the training data by that point was "most of the internet" it wasn't that clear to me that it would reach the point it has today.
Obviously the models themselves have trended bigger since which has helped and also just the tooling and harnesses around it and the models being trained for that use case has achieved a lot since that q4 2025 window which is about the first time it became functional for me.
The training data back then was sooooo bad. You'd open something at random in Common Crawl and it was truly unbelievable that models (like llama) were able to output coherent stuff. The architecture was truly miraculous if it could train well with terabytes of garbage.
There was so much low hanging fruit back then in terms of training.
I think most people failed at extrapolating, seeing the trend and imagining what is possible. Maybe they didn’t want to. This is still the issue today. Some developers were overconfident about their understanding of how AI works, without really understanding deep learning at all. They assumed the limitations and shortcomings at the time were definitive. Tooling and harnesses were not a big invention at all. They were obvious from day one but took time to build and turn them into somewhat mature products we have today.
I think humans typing code is basically dead. But I also think typing code was always a minority of the work. System design, requirements, the big picture, that’s still engineer led.
LLMs can write code. What they can’t do is build systems based on vague desires from business people. Because nobody can, you need to distill and refine nebulous ideas into technical requirements and design. And that’s what engineers do.
I also think this is inherently a human endeavor. It’s about relationships and understanding. LLMs can’t accomplish this because they don’t have the political power or the ability to push back. And we probably don’t want them to have that power.
You just contradicted yourself. Good developers know what impact they have that is not replaceable by AI. If you don't see that for yourself you're probably simply not a good engineer.
So, I struggle a bit with this comparison… it’s CLOSE to what I’ve been feeling, but with grief the “loss” seems more abrupt. This feels like fluctuating between stages.
For example I just saw a 2.5KLOC PR that was rubber stamped by someone else that should have been a 50LOC script, and that brought me back to somewhere between anger and depression.
Our dead loved ones never resurrect and bring down prod, or something.
> Our dead loved ones never resurrect and bring down prod, or something.
The hype rollercoaster is unique for sure.
If people did resurrect, I can just imagine the hype people coming back and saying "We're so back baby!", at which point I'd probably just try and bury them again...
Spot on, modulo grief is a spiral: we revisit each of these phases in order over and over as different aspects and experiences within the overall loss reveal themselves.
> Acceptance (people who are focused on the problems that get worse as AI gets better - social disruption, x-risk, government/corporate control)
You can consider all of these problems in the other stages as well, even if you still doubt the impact on your own field. Most devs in the stage of acceptance, however, will be increasingly preoccupied with how to keep paying their bills instead of such lofty questions.
I reached acceptance Spring 2025. That's when I accepted I will eventually be outsourced, and I need to pivot. 1.5 years later, I'm a commercial pilot, and as I continue training, will hopefully be able to pivot here soon.
This list works best coming from AI Apologists. Because Acceptance is surely about accepting reality, like how a person is dead. There is simply nothing to do. However given this pessimistic framing of yours, Acceptance means what? Willingly getting discarded? With peace of mind and tranquility I go to the Universal Potato Allowance Office.
> Acceptance means what? Willingly getting discarded? With peace of mind and tranquility I go to the Universal Potato Allowance Office.
Part of the acceptance stage recognizing and internalizing:
1. life will be different
2. life will go on
3. there are still many good things in life
To me, the #1 priority here is ensuring that life DOES go on.
I don't think we can ignore x-risk or the other problems like social disruption or government/propaganda control which get worse as AI improves.
Acceptance is pointless if we're all dead.
If you think being dead is fine, you're still in the depression phase.
The reality is that life can be awesome, and it is within the realm of possibility for us to make it so, but it requires us to get up, take action, push for changes, mobilize, organize. Don't just go to the potato office. We only really get one shot at "landing" AI safely. Now is the time for action, and to make sure that we get it right or as right as we can get it on behalf of all future generations.
What level would you say "oscillating between wanting to jump off a bridge or become the unabomber 2" is? Bouncing between depression and anger like a yo-yo right now
I haven't touched on bargaining even once, and I don't know if I will ever be able to truly reach acceptance
>"There needs to be a "what stage of grief are you in" question."
There's a different level of acceptance that embraces this stuff and just leans into it. The grief is still there, but I'm working through the depression and into this stage. Accepting that you've been pushed from a craftsman to a machine operator really sucks. But machine operator is still a job, even after machines get really efficient. Maybe some people can still hang on to their artisanal workshop existence for high value small batch goods. But most of us will just have to make that move to the industrialized model or fall into redundancy.
I do think it will continue on in a sense. Think of how Ferrari or Bentley employees are highly skilled technicians who work on one car at a time to completion, versus the auto line worker at GM screwing down a panel over and over. There is still room for both for different reasons, just at vastly different scale.
This is where the analogy to the stages of grief breaks down.
If you're talking about the stages of grief as being stages of dealing with death, there is no uncertainty or going back.
In the case of AI disruption, there is still uncertainty. Denialists might be right in the end still. Bargaining or getting angry might work.
You can only really progress through the stages if you're emotionally bought in to the reality of a future event that has not yet happened. It's quite a roller coaster emotionally speaking.
Which of these workplace issues have you experienced throughout your professional career?
Bad Management: 63%
I don't think you can really ask whether people have seen 'bad management' without explaining exactly what that means. People, including me when I was a developer, often see 'bad management' as 'I don't agree with what I'm being told to do'. That's not necessarily bad management; far more often it's poor communication of the facts (although you could argue that's the bad management bit I guess.)
The things I used to think were bad management included hard deadlines, short term benefit projects that took on tech debt, not 'motivating' people by giving better raises, refusing promotions even though I thought someone was great, prioritising things that I didn't see the value in, etc. Those things maybe weren't bad management at all. I just didn't have the full facts.
This is the problem with surveys like this. Someone didn't get the raise they wanted, so they check the 'bad management' box for that tiny cathartic dopamine hit. It doesn't necessarily mean they've been badly managed.
Two things are true at the same time: that as an employee, you will always get a distilled picture of the wider reality from your manager (sometimes to help you focus, sometimes because they're forbidden to share it with you, sometimes because parts of it would damage morale and thus productivity), and that managerial competence is in the communication skills to achieve that focus and morale. Two different managers with different skill levels, each dealing with the same "full facts" reality, will deliver different results.
Related tangent: it's sad to see the decline of high school debate teams, there's probably no better early-life preparation for the management skillset. Competent managers persuade. They know who they're trying to persuade, what that person values, and frame the wider organizational reality in such a way that it will make sense and align their direct report.
The worst managers think their job is to tell you what to do and that your job is to do what they say.
I’m not sure this is very relevant to the point of that question, sorry. Perceiving bad management is its own event, and every belief could have faulty premises (e.g. incomplete information).
Re: checking the box for dopamine… you might need to check in with yourself about whether you’re a bad manager! I know nothing, but that’s a very bright orange flag lol
Let's be honest about it: this has been a long time coming. If you think of it in terms of the wider civilization, way too much human captial was tied up in software dev.
And the jobs therin are mostly very mundane and of a liniar-translation nature. (translate this Adobe XD design in CSS/React; translate these REST calls to SQL). And 80% of the time was spent chasing trivial mistakes.
Humans can do more for civilization than arranging react components.
What about shopkeepers? Construction workers? Cleaners? Notaries? Bookkeepers? Only a very small fraction of humanity works on something meaningful that can be said that it advances human civilization (I think education is also a non-banal pursuit). Unfortunately, most works are very mundane.
Cleaners and construction workers are obviously useful and necessary.
First of all we live in buildings and second of all, we cannot afford to clean most public or shared or business spaces ourselves.
These jobs may be automated too one day, they are certainly partially automated now, but the necessity of the job is obvious.
Notaries and most software dev is completely work-for-work's sake and should not have ever existed.
It is a testament to this fact how streamlined bookkeeping is and always has been on the free market (and even then a large part of private bookkeeping is due to the need to comply with government taxes and regulations; in eg. criminal enterprise, bookkeeping is even more streamlined).
However, software devs have made such a mess of it all, that not even the free market was able to streamline it, creating millions of low-utility software bookkeeper jobs (that are finally starting to go away).
I strongly disagree with the premise. Software Engineers are a very small percentage of the total human population.
That said, there's nothing wrong with making better use of the tiny human capital dedicated to building software and hardware for the rest of humanity.
I think the objectionable bit is everyone is just doing the same things over and over again in different vertical partitions to try and steal some market share from soemone else doing the same things over and over again.
No one is doing anything new or interesting. Another fucking SaaS product and monthly fee is about 90% of the human capital as you put it.
I totally agree with you, and from my experience, the majority of devs, like that work more than what many here would say the role includes, like actually figuring out what the user/customer/market need and filling that demand with a product, service or process change.
Most don't wanna deal with that so roles like product owner, business analysis etc are born, much to those same devs annoyance.
How much value to the customer paying us did that component translation bring?
And no I don't mean chasing value as in revenue or unicorns by building more Ad/Spyware or AI hype.
Actual value direct to end users who pay you for it.
I'm not sure it's exactly the jobs they've been doing. Someone had to clean the bathrooms for the Manhattan Project, Moon Landing, etc.
The problem, as I view it, is that so many of the very best spend so much time involved in zero-sum optimizations like advertising & SEO, HFT & PE, gambling & scalping. Even entertainment and art create something new that ever larger groups of people may take enjoyment in, even if not enhance their productivity. Instead we get hijacked human reward systems and despair.
Most people in gov./bureaucratic functions do little or nothing (though depending on country, they could be doing negative work or harming the process itself). Developers are not the worse out they represent a very small percentage of the human capital.
> - 42% are hopeful or excited about the tech industry
doesn't that ignore the overlap?
1102 of 4694 (23%) respondents said they were hopeful
897 of 4694 (19%) respondents said they were excited
So, for example, if all of the ones who were excited also said they were hopeful, then only 23% of respondents are "hopeful or excited about the tech industry".
(on that question they could submit more than one answer)
At the start of the year when AI started being useful I really did experience a productivity gain. Having just started a new job, Claude was instrumental into quickly getting me going on an unfamiliar code base.
Now? I’m swamped with the dumbest jira tickets in history created by lazy AF project managers and business analysts who are using AI to create a pile of unmanageable slop while looking like superstars as they blithely point to their neatly arranged tickets.
I guess I could try to cope by pointing the AI back at it but for the first time I’m forced to color outside the lines just so I can deliver. None of it lines up with their garbage and so we’re now playing a stupid game of “let’s not and say we did” while I tick of useless tickets that shouldn’t even be in the project.
It is exhausting. Not due to the potentially increased velocity but due to the towering pile of slop getting shovelled over that needs fake responses. I don’t know what to do about that.
That’s sucks to hear man but without healthy dialogue nothing can change. I can’t comment on the personalities and company culture around you but in my experience unless product, engineering and design can come together and be empathetic to each other’s position, you end up in a rough spot like yourself.
> I guess I could try to cope by pointing the AI back at it but for the first time I’m forced to color outside the lines just so I can deliver.
You could, but then you shouldn't be surprised when nothing changes. If someone had (repeatedly) filed unworkable tickets/specs pre-AI, what would you have done?
It may be worth taking what someone gives you and reorganizing it (w/ or w/o AI) to your liking. Then have the AI give them a template they can hand off to whatever LLM they use and give you back something closer to useful. Or just write a quick translator script to take the mess and convert it into something you can actually do. It may even be worth writing an agent that they send their requests to and gives a "feasibility score." Tune that so the score is always low on low effort stuff that's just AI slop. Forces the other side to actually provide you with something approaching valuable, makes it so you don't have to shoulder all of it.
> Now? I’m swamped with the dumbest jira tickets in history created by lazy AF project managers and business analysts who are using AI to create a pile of unmanageable slop while looking like superstars as they blithely point to their neatly arranged tickets.
The more things change, the more they stay the same. Vague, confused, and non-actionable tickets filtering through intermediaries to solve problems in silos have been par for the course for decades. AI just amplifies the tendencies already inherent in an organization, for better or worse.
I do not get it. I know that there are different people but... Do you really have that many issues, problems with using AI for coding and solving problems in your jobs or hobbies? In my company using Codex and Claude help us a lot with our software. We were able to fix legacy software which we could not do earlier without AI because of current tasks going on. We migrated in 2 weeks* (read below) to new versions of framework and libraries. If we have to do it without AI, then it will be work for few months or even year - only if doing that work, not other work such as fixing bugs, maintaing systems and doing current work such as new features. In our case AI tools help us a lot - every single developer.
Notice: first working prototype was done after approximately 2 weeks and was done by one developer. Of course it had bugs and was not perfect but it was huge improvement compared to what was before. Imagine that you do not regularly update framework/libraries (as it should be) because of various reasons (client does not want to pay for it or you focus on different things). We understand our decisions and so on, we know it but real life sometimes can not be perfect. Thanks to Codex/Claude we can move forward. Of course we know the LLMs/AI tools are not perfect and magic problem solvers but we could not say that these tools make our lifes worse or something.
Think of it this way, before your company would need to hire more people if it wanted to do more. But now the same team can do things like this without hiring more:
> We migrated in 2 weeks to new versions of framework and libraries. If we have to do it without AI, then it will be work for few months or even year...
Maybe long-term this is amortized. But short-term the tendency is lower salaries and layoffs.
Right now AI still isn't autonomous enough to do all of the work itself, so it needs developers to carefully manage it to do what it must.
If things remained like this, then sure, there'd be a point when "AI-management for area X" would become a profession on its own, similar to how similar processes happened multiple times in the past, and that would result in a new balance.
But AI won't remain like that. The end-goal is that a high level executive coils type on, Claude v25 something like:
"Update all my legacy codebase to the most recent everything. Make sure it works perfectly and doesn't break compatibility with anything. Also, while you're at it, these DOCX our customers sent list new features they'd like, so implement it all while you're at it."
And come back in the morning with it all executed perfectly. Which definitely isn't a recipe for human developers to start earning any better.
Human earning ceiling will be how much it'll cost for AI to do it at the same quality and efficiency level. If you charge less than that you'll have work, but not otherwise.
Yeah. I hate government intervention as much as the next guy and I would love to live in a distopian reality where humans just enjoy life while robots do the work.
But this is a big problem.
Robots replaced our arms, and we didn't care because we still had our brains. Now they are also increasingly replacing our brains in labour.
The angst is less about right now and more about the obvious conclusion if the trend continues that few, if any, of us will be gainfully employed in this space.
Sure, we can all claim to be the ones who actually are able to hold it right, or that we'll shift to doing something slightly a bit different. And that will be true for some subset of people. But the reality is that it's like that old trope of look to your left, look to your right, 2 of you won't be here at the end of the semester.
there are categories of tasks that were massively enabled through AI.
there are other parts where its not unless youre playing fast and loose.
Most devs against AI argue that the former tasks were never that big of an issue, but they likely worked at enterprises where those tasks were someone elses job through dedicated teams preparing framework upgrades etc
There is also a gigantic delta between using AI on eg Github copilot through API Pricing and having a Subscription model via Anthropic or OpenAI. Through Github you'll be constantly be worrying about costs, with the Sub youll likely mostly be using SOTA and the quality diffence is staggering, especially since the last model iteration (Opus 5.5)
Look at the list of countries. It's hardly dominated by silicon valley, but when it's mainly US and Europe, it's not surprising that it's predominantly white
Natural selection at work, somehow. This isn't a dig at people without kids, you do you, I just find it interesting that our brightest minds also tend to be leaves on the tree, never becoming branches. They just leave their toys for the rest to play with, kind of undermining our actual progress.
When you have to work for decades to pay off the cost of education (that the state used to heavily subsidize), much less ever afford a house, much LESS ever afford a house big enough to raise kids, is it any shock that those bright and motivated enough to be the best aren't able to spare the time any more?
Nah, I don't buy for a second the reason is economic. I remember how the conditions were much worse when I was a kid and my parents raised me anyways. And I look at how countries getting richer leads to less kids.
I know that this is the rhetoric around why people are not having kids, but it's a pretext, it's not the real reason.
33% say "not finding the right partner". Everything being too expensive such that we're working all the time and don't have any down time is a huge part of that. Economics play into leisure time, stress, and things that kill relationships and the desire to have sex/kids.
the data simply disagrees. 100 years ago things were much, much worse, yet people had more kids. people can cope all they want but their complaints don't align with reality and all measurements which indicate that more developed countries have fewer kids, not more. though i know that admitting one is selfish isn't something most want to do, so i definitely get why people rationalize it by other reasons.
Share your data and what's "worse". Again, we've polled people and they're literally telling us it's too expensive.
The cost of raising a child is enormous. It's dramatically higher than it was 30 years ago, and astronomically more than a century ago. I've known multiple households with dual 6 figure incomes where one quit their job to be a stay at home parent because the cost of childcare was comparable to the reduction in income.
The cost in time is just as bad - no more "go outside and don't come back until dinner", now if you let your kids walk down the street to school/the park your neighbors will call CPS on you, so you have to pay attention all the time.
Rent/mortgages are way up. The cost of food is way up. The cost of education is way up.
Honestly, the primary problem is still the mindset behind most times this line is written.
The cost of raising a child is enormous only if you consider the return a nuisance at best, which many seem to do. If you consider it very rewarding thing you want for your life, working for that a little doesn't seem all that preposterous anymore.
The same peope typically have no problem spending money on frivolous hobbies, toys, travel etc. they technically get no economic return for either.
There may be people who are economically barred from affording children, but most people set the bar at "I want kids with no strings attached".
The real reasons are that we've created a society in which many people no longer consider a rewarding experience they actually want, and those who don't want it no longer have it externally thrust upon them by cultural expectations or pressures as much. I think the latter is good, but the former may be a pervasive failure of character.
Asking people why they don’t have kids is not that useful - stated vs revealed preferences differ a lot here. If you look around the world you will see that economic solutions do not really work (because that’s not a real cause of why people don’t have children, it’s just something people say).
The problem with the "richer countries have fewer kids" correlation is that it implies causation, but I think it's more sensible to say it the other way: "having fewer kids makes you richer" (at least temporarily, before the demographic collapse makes you poor again, but that will likely not be your problem).
I would say culture is a big part, too. But economics is the main reason.
My parents met in the office and started dating after my father made a move. I would NEVER ask someone out at work. In today's culture this is seen as harassment and can get you fired.
True. But in reality increasingly more women will go to HR because they feel harrassed after being asked out once. You'll see many such cases if you're employed and know people.
There's no end of unhappy marriages, that 33% figure is not compared to anything. It means nothing on its own since the original poster was saying "it's economic" and you're saying "it's not economic".
For example, was it also 33% in the past when the economy was much worse off?
Is it still 33% say during crises like a depression or hell even covid?
Is it 33% saying "not the right partner" but maybe 50% saying "actually economics"? Is part of the 33% just because the partner isn't rich enough (a very pragmatic and common consideration despite the stigma).
What does that even mean? People are deciding to have kids because they believe it's too expensive, full stop. What's your counterclaim - they're bad at math and could afford it but think they can't? That if you forced a child on them they could actually suffer through it?
Generally speaking countries that have tried to do something about their abysmal birth rates (Hungary, Czechia, etc) by putting in substantial economic incentives (i.e. 4 years of maternity, free accomodation, etc), have found that it moved the needle very little and certainly there can't be much talk of reversing the trend.
Also, I believe that our culture of over-parenting (and therefore many of the associated costs) is a _consequence_ of having fewer children, not the cause. If you put all your reproductive eggs in one basket, you are motivated to overprotect them. That makes a culture of (at least from a historical perspective) insane parenting demands that simply don't scale.
People famously have different stated and revealed preferences. They claim one thing, and yes they fully believe it, even if the evidence is extremely strong to the contrary.
Obviously the truth is that what people say and what people actually do are two different things. In case of having children we actually have proof for that!
> That if you forced a child on them they could actually suffer through it?
Absolutely, that’s how it always worked before we’ve had good contraception .
Describing how it worked does not mean endorsement for it. You can say "most people were trapped into having kids" and "we should have more kids" without endorsing "more people should be trapped into having kids".
It is uncomfortable, deff more uncomfortable than saying "we're not having kids because we don't behave money" but if it's true, should we just brush it aside?
> And forcing children to be born to and raised by parents that didn't want them is good for society?
Yes, it was good for society (nowadays it would be oppressive and would be very bad). Is it good for these children to be born? Maybe, depends if you think living is better than never being born. Do I support policy of forcing people into having children? Absolutely not, I think it's terrible idea! But that's completely tangential - my point is that we've got large body of evidence that 1) surveys asking people why they don't have children are pretty much worthless; 2) economic factors do not matter that much.
> Sounds like you just want a serf class and fuck everyone else.
No, it doesn't sound like that, you are projecting something onto me.
> Nah, I don't buy for a second the reason is economic.
Mass Mutual, 2024: Of those surveyed who plan to remain child free, 43% cited “inability to afford children”[0].
Pew, 2024: Of those who feel it is unlikely that they will have children, 41% of people under 40 cited “can’t afford it” as a reason they are not having children, versus only 22% for those 40+[1].
Morning Consult, 2020: 41% of adults without children cite “it’s too expensive to raise children” as a reason; 24% say it is a “major reason”.[2]
BadCredit.org, 2024: 86% of adults who have delayed having children did so for financial reasons[3].
The Morning Consult survey may be particularly useful if you want to look at just one, because it has more granular age cohort breakdowns which show a clear trend for younger people not having children for financial reasons.
Man people self-report a lot of fun stuff. It simply cannot be trusted. The counterpoint is that nations that tried financial incentives (even large ones like Hungary) had negligible gain from these efforts.
Nations and companies try "financial incentives" for a bunch of fun stuff. It simply cannot be trusted.
Let's look at Hungary: loans unless you have 3 (!) children, maybe some housing subsidies that require you to match them with a huge chunk of your own money. Small wonder why that didn't motivate many people.
Never in the history of humanity has it been easy to have children. And there was never a government subsidy for it. You were never guaranteed that your kids would thrive. Not sure why it’s suddenly different.
I think the bigger change is: I don’t want my quality of life to go down one bit when I have a kid!
The problem is a country does not want to incentivize producing kids, that would be simple. Pay people $100k per child, and you’ll have a ton of children.
What countries do want is to incentivize production of properly raised, well mannered, productive children. And the type of person incentivized by a lot of cash to have a kid is probably not going to be the one to do that.
The difference is that the cost to give your kids what you had as a kid and the opportunities you later had access to has gone up. People don't want to raise kids if they can't give them a life at least as good as they had.
Yes, there's lots of things about today that are better than 30 years ago. TVs are bigger, cars are safer, etc. But the ability to give you kids the childhood and initial opportunities you had seems far less likely to many people.
1) Shifting cultural norms. People are now enough and they want to live their lives. Kids are annoying as hell to be honest, and until you're a parent, you don't get the appeal. But nature has a way of really playing your heart when you have a kid and the intensity of emotion is hard to describe. BUt if you were to do a pros/cons list, you probably would not want them.
2) Inflation of expectation on parenting. Parents used to be much more hands off in the previous generations, but the expectation of what you need to provide has gone thorough the roof and not all is useful, to be honest.
3) Delay in child bearing led to fertility drop when people really want to have kids.
4) This, I somewhere and will pawn it as my own, but... kids are no longer useful. Previously, kids were a working hand around the house and insurance for parental care when they got older. Both of these are not something necessarily expected of them nowadays.
5) Since women bear the brunt of the rough jobs of child rearing, even in our more egalitarian societies, their increase in options and freedom means a lot opt to just... not do it. As mentioned at pct1. it's really a tough job. Can't say I blame them.
Allow me to reframe all of your points through a slightly different lens
1) Shifting Culture of Norms == Children are expensive. If you have kids you might have to give up the lucrative career opportunities you have been building towards since your university days, and other personal opportunities
2) Inflation of expectations on parenting == Children are expensive. Parents are expected to spend a lot more of their free time and money putting their kids in programs and sports and such
3) Delay in child bearing led to fertility drop when people really want to have kids == Children are expensive. If you want to have them, you need to have them before you are really financially stable and established in a career.
4) kids are no longer useful == Children are expensive. In the past kids were expected to contribute to the household at a fairly young age. Nowadays not so much. This means families either hire someone to do that work or it falls on the parents.
5) Women in the workforce == Children are expensive! Families have an entire extra income with Moms working and they still can't afford childcare. With an entire extra income!
So you're right that the reasons for falling birth rates don't have to be "children are expensive" but all of the reasons are certainly "children are expensive"-shaped
Sure, you can reframe things that way, if you want to reduce all dimensions of existence to money and want to try to simplify all life as being about money, sure, go nuts. I certainly can't stop you.
You could do the same kind of exercise with whatever other measurement of reality that you consider to be the pivot of existence like free time or amounts of sandwiches available or whatever (or is that also boiling down to money?).
But that really really hobbles your model of reality so much to the point it's not useful anymore.
And, then by your own standards, were they ever NOT expensive?
Is this expense some relative state to other people, as in if other people have more it means I have less by virtue of comparison or is it some concrete measure of need one can not afford nowadays and they could before.
No, my point is that you're conflating "expensive" with money
Yeah a lot of my points are about money. But it's also free time, responsibility, etc
For example my parents used to drop me off for a friends birthday party and then go away. There would be adults there who they trusted to look out for me, and they could use that time for themselves for a bit to do whatever
Nowadays parents literally stay the entire time. That's a pretty large chunk of time that my parents had to themselves and parents nowadays do not. I don't know what other term than "expensive" to describe that, but it doesn't have anything to do with money
“Children are time-consuming” is probably more precisely communicative than “children are expensive” for the aspects where you want to focus specifically on time.
It's more of time and emotional effort. Come back exhausted from work, imagine having to take care of 3 kids. Insane. Sure if you get a babysitter etc. maybe it helps.
I still think the both parents working thing was maybe good for gender equality but you gotta say the capitalists loved it and probably creamed themselves imagining double the labor pool. But now you see the price of it. How can it be possible for both parents to work and still somehow have kids?
Apparently there was this study where they looked at a few european countries where women joining the labour pool lagged but the drop in natality did not and they found a weird correlate in that their cost of childcare went up due to the dissapearance of....nuns.
No more super cheap teachers and kindergarten i guess.
If you work in software in the US, you really have no financial excuse not to have kids. I own a house, have a kid and exist on almost a single income in the SF Bay Area. And I don’t work at a company you know about. I make about median wage for the area and had no parental help for college or my home.
If you don’t want to have kids for any other reason, that’s valid. It’s a ton of work and requires insane resilience. But money is certainly not it, not for SWE.
I'm not in a relationship so kids are not exactly on the radar, but it feels like the current progress being made is incredibly backwards, and I wouldn't wanna bring a kid to live in this godforsaken world.
We have the lowest infant mortality, best medical care in human history, few people starve in Western countries. What exactly makes it worse than, say, the 1800s? I will go out on a limb and guess that you spend a lot of time scrolling negative social media. Am I right? That invention is truly the most godforsaken thing in society at this time.
I probably spend more time reading the news than social media, and basically every day there's news about government debt, huge unemployment (10.1%), price of everything is going up, massive layoffs, climate disasters, AI hacking into things, students using AI to cheat, wars happening next door, possible hybrid warfare, megacorporations ignoring the law, governments wanting to track your every movement, and so on. Most people I worked with at my company got laid off and the rest are just terminals for Claude, and any notion of job security is out of the window.
> while Japan shows the highest immigration levels among respondents, this is almost certainly due to the survey failing to reach the native Japanese population more than to any real demographic trend.
So we are admitting that the result is useless?
> despite being known as “a nation of immigrants”, only 17% of respondents from the U.S. have immigrant roots, versus 22% overall.
What was he expecting? 100%? From what I can find, US first born immigrant % is about 16%, so basically within the massive margins of error this thing has, this is a non result.
I don't think this thing is designed to elicit anything useful except vibes & giving the author a platform to pontificate.
Author here, I appreciate the feedback but I feel like there's a falacy here. If we asked respondents if they liked ice cream, and it turned out 95% of survey respondents hate it, would you say the rest of the data is not valid because the survey is clearly not representative of the general population?
The fact that the survey may not be representative on things like immigration or its Japanese audience has no relation to the data's validity on completely unrelated questions such as developer's outlook on AI.
I'm saying it's a fallacy is you use sampling bias on one factor to discredit another unrelated factor.
If you pick a sample to test a new painkiller, you should include an equal amount of men and women, old and young people, people of different ethnic backgrounds, etc. to have a balanced sample.
On the other hand, you do not need to have equal shares of people whose favorite color is blue, red, green, etc. because that clearly has no relation with how people would react to medicine.
From looking at their data it looks like decades of failing up is reaching a breaking point. I can look back in my career and I have had some stellar leaders, some of which had never tried to write code a day in their life.
I have also had just as many terrible managers. At the last job I worked with somebody who thought they were my manager. They weren't and did not even have the same employer. They were my peer. Nonetheless they withheld client communications until my own employer was forced to fire me. Their employer fired them shortly after. Could it have been the fraud, the dereliction of duty, the toxic leadership? Who knows, there are just so many to choose from.
How did we get here? Well, in the corporate non-software company world there is clearly an 80/20 rule at play. 80% of the developers provide 20% of the total development value. Most of my career has been in non-software company web businesses like Travelocity and Expedia. I have also spent time in finance, where that company employed more developers that most large companies have total headcount. Most of these people were some form of JavaScript framework in the browser and Java outside the browser doing the backend web things.
Most of these people really sucked at what they do. They weren't terrible people, some few were, they just weren't properly mentored and worked in an environment where failure and coloring books was more of the expectation than the exception. To be more clear, in case the analogy was ambiguous, most developers are intentional over paid commodities to be hired and fired as rapidly as they could be found.
After a couple decades of this madness this is the baseline culture of user-face web software. Essentially: drop out of high school, go to a 6 week boot camp, put text on screen with React for $140k per year. Or, plan B, pay way too much for a computer science bachelor's degree and start at 20% higher compensation. Not surprisingly there is a lot of insecurity there (I saw it screaming from the shadows at every job). Say anything about it and the resentment comes alive in all its wonderful forms. Less surprisingly, over time those people get promoted into management where neglecting skill development becomes the standard for the next wave of new hires, as if to say: "STFU, go back to your coloring books". It really comes full circle when people then use their inability to innovate as a badge of honor to justify their continued employment.
I lost my job at the beginning of summer and since then, I've applied to maybe 3 jobs. I've had the feeling for years that whichever next job comes along, it'll probably be the last. So far I've been wrong, but now there's this feeling that even if I landed a new one, it's going to just be kowtowing to another super AI pilled narcissistic CTO pushing arbitrary product and arbitrary hot tech to solve it. Even if writing the code wasn't the last thing I was clinging to, the best it would go towards is... just bullshit. That may be burnout speaking, but I've received at least one invitation to apply to something like this, requiring that I be "all in on ai", and I just can't summon the energy to grind through another inane 5 step interview process to basically spend my days making throwaway crap while someone watches how many tokens I'm using. It's hard to reason about what the outcome I'd hope for is, and for now I'd rather just pay from savings to not bother.
That said, I have no idea what else to do. Going back to school and attempting a degree program seems like kind of a crapshoot even if I could convince myself I'd succeed. All of that is very depressing, but on the other hand I'm actually quite happy to have spent all summer basically doing whatever the hell I want; wasn't that the promise of AI anyway?
I thought I was fine when the first couple times I tried to get a job, I got one within the month. Both ended for various reasons, and now this year I've been trying to get one since February, and not a single offer. Not one. Plus the who wants to be hired posts are way more active this year, blowing up to 600+ comments instead of the 200-300 or so of just yesteryear. I feel like my career's ended before it even started. I spent my whole life believing that programming would be my ticket, knowing it's what I wanted to do in life, and now that's gone. I don't even know what else to do.
> This was the first Devographics survey to ask about developers' mental state, and the results hint at some worrying changes in what it feels like to be a software developer, too.
I mean.. if it was the first time asking... why do you draw the conclusion that these are changes?
For reference, in my Spanish home town, a large consulting firm is hiring devs right out of college for a little under 20K euros a year. The apartment I grew up in, in said home town, would sell for about 400K euros, and an old one bedroom apartment from the 70s might go for 200K.
So insufficient wages? Yep. It pays more than working at a bar, but not by that much. Anyone graduating CS that can at least go to the bigger cities, or better yet, has the language skills to move further away, just does.
Ironically companies here in Switzerland (and everywhere in the west) outsource jobs to cheaper places like Portugal or Spain so they can pay the same low wage. So I might have to kove to Spain to work for a swiss company and get paid the low wage.
I can't understate how many jobs get outsourced like that. I got very lucky to get a job here, but my employer doesn't have any junior/mid software positions in my country anymore. Not even internally. And it's a swiss software company.
the españa vaciada continues due to wage stagnation :(
i hope salaries improve, but i'm not optimistic for new grads short term. i'm hoping big companies will learn their lesson that not hiring newer engineers is a mistake. no one will be around to supervise the ai agents if a talent pipeline is not built. there's too much short term thinking in today's gold rush
"Gold rush"? Do you even work? We are in an economic recession. Switzerland had an all time high of companies going bankrupt last year. I talk with PMs a lot. Our clients have no money to order new services from us, so we have to downsize and outsource.
My hunch is that in the long run its going to be net negative in software. A lot of companies exists as of today cause a lot of people were able to just focus on building without constantly worrying about the fear of lay off. With the concept of job security based on talent and effort being dismantled, everyone would always be in a constant look out mode now.
> A lot of companies exists as of today cause a lot of people were able to just focus on building without constantly worrying about the fear of lay off.
Depends on the company, plenty have been run on a culture of fear for decades.
Do not anthropomorphize Larry Ellison!
That's not really true though. There were still massive issues with outsourcing and 2 or 3 recessions
It's already a net negative, not just for software, but overall for humanity. The supposed productivity gains are a lie, it's causing people to be confident in information which is false, it's enabling people to treat each other like jerks in even more ways than before. AI is genuinely one of the worst things the tech industry has ever created.
You write with such confidence like this is an objective opinion, and yet one I completely disagree with. Confident in information which is false? What.. ChatGPT 3.5?
I'm trying to gather the paperwork to apply for citizenship in another country. I gave Opus 5.5 everything I've assembled so far (PDFs, PNGs of birth/death certificates, etc.) and asked it for next steps and it:
* Got the answer wrong, because it neglected to search for or take into account a new law passed a few years ago.
* Missed obvious things in the provided documents, such as names and dates.
* Gave contradictory information, e.g. telling me that one step might not be ready for a year, but that I should get some things done now because they expire six months after they're released. It neglected to make the connection that if I can't start something for a year, then it would be pointless to start getting paperwork ready for that thing right now if the paperwork expires in 6 months.
I use AI coding tools a lot. I thought this would be a slam dunk for agents in 2026 and it was worse than useless.
I mean, this is anecdata, but I've had to combat multiple hallucinations from Opus 5.5 _today_ about what a codebase I hand-wrote just last year does.
> The supposed productivity gains are a lie
This reads like a comment from 2025. LLMs are solving novel math problems and they successfully emulated a PS5, this week lol. You really need to update your priors. It's amazing how many people refuse to do this and make a fool of themselves in public
One doesn't invalidate the other. Yes LLMs have been very successful at solving math problems when guided by mathematicians who know what they're doing. The same is true for emulating a PS5 or (insert cool new project of the week developed with LLM).
On the other hand, when I use LLMs, I regularly see them confidently claim information confidently that is false. So, I'd say productivity gains are true but there's also a cost of wrong information being used to make decisions due to AI.
> On the other hand, when I use LLMs, I regularly see them confidently claim information confidently that is false
When talk to people, I regularly see them confidently claim information that is false as well.
This is not the point where LLMs become useless. LLMs become useless when we understand that we are social creatures and that many times the road is more important than the destination. Also, when you provide instant-travel to all the destinations, the destinations lose their value as well.
> Also, when you provide instant-travel to all the destinations, the destinations lose their value as well.
As any seasoned gamer can confirm. Sometimes there's something lost in that convenience
I think a lot of the problems or gains attributed to AI are just reflections of the humans that use them.
I dont care if you used AI to produce something. If you share it with me, I assume you are responsible for it. You own it, whether you agree or not.
> it's causing people to be confident in information which is false, it's enabling people to treat each other like jerks in even more ways than before
What is the direction of causality here? Does AI make people jerks, or they were already or prone to be jerks?
The same applies to innovations or breakthroughs made by people who use AI in their work.
> LLMs are solving novel math problems and successfully emulated a PS5
Did the AI independently accomplish those things, or did highly competent people accomplish them using AI as a tool?
What would happen if you give someone with no mathematical or programming background the same frontier models that OpenAI used for their mathematical proofs [1]. Would they produce the same discoveries?
I think of humans as constants. They can bring positive, or negative value to the table. The AI is the multiplier.
Take software engineering. If you let someone who doesnt care about code quality (their constant is negative since any code they write will introduce a tech debt) push code to your repo using AI, it will destroy your project. But let an engineer with strong fundamentals and high standards use AI to push code to your repo, they can improve the project much faster than they could without AI.
[1] https://github.com/openai/math/
I guess my comment was done a bit too quickly and comes across as muddled. I mostly agree with you, in the hand of competent people AI is a very powerful tool. I'm a bit of a misanthrope and I think that incompetent, stupid and malicious people vastly outnumber competent, well-intentioned people. This leads me to feel rather pessimistic about the impact of AI because it is a multiplier when the human constant is often less than great.
In a lot of big companies, you had a small majority of people who were incompetent but mostly harmless because their lack of competence prevented them from causing too many issues and another group of people who were competent and productive. Nowadays, with AI those incompetent people can be maximally effective at causing issues due to their incompetence.
The same happens with opensource projects who are now flooded with mostly useless PRs and bug reports from incompetent people directing LLMs to do so. etc...
So yes individually AI makes people productive but I'm not sure if that is true at the scale of a company nor do I think it's necessarily true with opensource projects.
I agree the population distribution is skewed towards negative and average is less than 0. And when those people use AI it gets even worse because they are preventing themselves to become competent by relying on AI and skipping fundamentals.
Unfortunately the things we can control regarding other people are limited... So I think least we can do is to either surround ourselves with competent people or if not possible, ignore the AI and hold people accountable based on their final output. I often see people try to defend themselves by just blaming AI when their final output is bad but when its good its their work. But its not an AI problem, its the people problem sadly. I wish the problem was AI btw, it would be much easier to fix.
I disagree with the premise that you need to know what you’re doing to solve problems or create something new with LLMs (unfortunately).
I wouldn’t say that Dans recent work in maths was necessarily that of an expert. More of a fan of Lean than anything and he did a breakthrough in a relatively short time period.
https://overreacted.io/how-i-vibed-a-proof-of-conways-conjec...
It seems to me it’s about enough money, knowledge, and effort to want to achieve a thing. Which is good, but can and is being weaponized in terrible ways against us.
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> This reads like a comment from 2025. LLMs are solving novel math problems and they successfully emulated a PS5, this week lol.
It's curious seeing "math" and "productivity" in the same sentence when the market assigns much less economic value to math than to other endeavors. The entire annual US federal budget for mathematics a mere ~$100M on average.
> The entire annual US federal budget for mathematics a mere ~$100M on average.
I'm not sure how that's a relevant benchmark, considering that the federal budget represents the spending of a single specific political institution whose primary focus isn't related to math per se.
Given the extent to which the market at large is bidding up the prices of devices whose entire function is to do math very rapidly, I don't think the overall premise holds.
LLMs are solving outstanding maths problems by trying a load of stuff until something works, which is exactly what they do in software. If you want a system built out of square blocks jammed into round holes they'll make you one in no time, but if you're working in an area where non-functional requirements actually matter (there are lots) the slopnami is a living nightmare.
And humans don't iterate? Its a matter of time before there is nothing a human can do better than an AI in programming or math, let alone other fields.
Did I say they don't? What I implied is that humans have other ways of thinking than trying stuff until something sticks, not that they never do that.
How do you think mathematicians came up with those open problems and conjectures - trying stuff until they came up with one that passed their "interesting conjecture" check? What was that check? Can you code it in Lean? Can ChatGPT? Have you seen an LLM come up with one?
> Its a matter of time...
No it isn't, and by saying that I've given as much reason to think I'm right as you have.
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novel math problems?
> Within the next 5 years, how likely do you think it is that you will have to change careers due to reasons beyond your control?
When I filled this out myself in July, I was "somewhat unlikely"
If you ask me again now, only a few months later, I'm probably leaning towards "Somewhat likely".
Insane how fast this space is moving.
I moved the opposite direction. Few months back, I was absolutely sure that the days of me being a software engineer are numbered. The programming I used to love and fun was gone. But, as I got to work more with Agents, factory & the infrastructure surrounding it, I'm more optimistic about the kinds of problems we could tackle with this, that wasn't possible/cost-effective before. We've only barely scratched the surface with what AI could be leveraged in the real world.
> Agents, factory & the infrastructure surrounding it
Can you be more specific about what isn't just a growing pain/maturity problem that will eventually be baked into the default products once the unit costs come down?
I can one-shot full video production that takes almost an hour on claude right now and it'll run ffmpeg for a good chunk of that. I don't see how the delegation + infra isn't a solved problem a couple years from now.
Why do you think there will be a human in the loop on any of these tasks, and why do you think that you will be that human?
I've watched the robots become better/faster software developers than I ever was over the last year. I've got a lifetime of esoteric knowledge that's completely obsolete now. I can ask robots to do things, but so can any other random person.
What, exactly, do you think we are going to be prompting these things to do? And why would anybody pay us to do that, rather than just prompt them directly?
The difficulty with building software has mostly never been the code itself, but how to tease out what to actually build and how to connect system components together in a sane way that meets business requirements.
It is indeed neat that LLMs with fancy agent harnesses can write code very well at this point, but that doesn’t mean the average person can think through problems in the way that is required to build software that operates at meaningful scale with complex trade-offs and architecture decisions to be made. In my experience with others in other fields, that is not a common skill, and I really don’t see how an LLM is going to solve that.
For this reason, I do not see software engineering going anywhere, but I do believe it is possible/likely there will be negative changes in hiring and wages.
If your views changed that quickly, then I don't know what to say. Your priors definitely need adjusting, and perhaps consider the way you evaluate the future.
It was pretty clear even 2 years ago. Now it's happening right on schedule.
Interesting. Since GPT4 came out I strongly believed LLMs would replace human programming. By November 2025 when opus 4.5 came out I thought it was pretty established already and most people agreed with that premise.
By human programming I mean humans typing code.
I think the experience of the gpt4/gemini2/claude2-3 era of models was widely variable depending on the use case and how much reference material there was on the internet. I'm told it was very good at producing react code for example, but my experience was it often failed to handle Rust or Kotlin type checking and failed pretty often (in less immediately detectable ways) on PHP. So looking at the trajectory from the initial copilot (could auto compete fast inverse square root and method level problems that you could also just google), to GPT4 (which from my experience, still couldn't code) and hearing that the training data by that point was "most of the internet" it wasn't that clear to me that it would reach the point it has today.
Obviously the models themselves have trended bigger since which has helped and also just the tooling and harnesses around it and the models being trained for that use case has achieved a lot since that q4 2025 window which is about the first time it became functional for me.
The training data back then was sooooo bad. You'd open something at random in Common Crawl and it was truly unbelievable that models (like llama) were able to output coherent stuff. The architecture was truly miraculous if it could train well with terabytes of garbage.
There was so much low hanging fruit back then in terms of training.
I think most people failed at extrapolating, seeing the trend and imagining what is possible. Maybe they didn’t want to. This is still the issue today. Some developers were overconfident about their understanding of how AI works, without really understanding deep learning at all. They assumed the limitations and shortcomings at the time were definitive. Tooling and harnesses were not a big invention at all. They were obvious from day one but took time to build and turn them into somewhat mature products we have today.
I think humans typing code is basically dead. But I also think typing code was always a minority of the work. System design, requirements, the big picture, that’s still engineer led.
LLMs can write code. What they can’t do is build systems based on vague desires from business people. Because nobody can, you need to distill and refine nebulous ideas into technical requirements and design. And that’s what engineers do.
I also think this is inherently a human endeavor. It’s about relationships and understanding. LLMs can’t accomplish this because they don’t have the political power or the ability to push back. And we probably don’t want them to have that power.
if you're still thinking like that, better switch your career now
If you genuinely think thit, it's probably better you switch careers to something you're actually good at.
It has less to do with skill than it does with luck now. AI has greatly evened the playing field between the less-skilled and the more-skilled.
You just contradicted yourself. Good developers know what impact they have that is not replaceable by AI. If you don't see that for yourself you're probably simply not a good engineer.
There needs to be a "what stage of grief are you in" question.
• Denial
• Anger
• Bargaining
• Depression
• Acceptance
Here is what I see(and common thought patterns)
• Denial (models will never be able to replace the majority of important work)
• Anger (angry at data centers, energy use, IP theft)
• Bargaining (people thinking that their personalized agentic dev setup or self-hosting is gonna somehow leave them with meaningful work long-term)
• Depression (people who are being honest about what it will mean to day-to-day lives of many workers in the industry over the next decade)
• Acceptance (people who are focused on the problems that get worse as AI gets better - social disruption, x-risk, government/corporate control)
So, I struggle a bit with this comparison… it’s CLOSE to what I’ve been feeling, but with grief the “loss” seems more abrupt. This feels like fluctuating between stages.
For example I just saw a 2.5KLOC PR that was rubber stamped by someone else that should have been a 50LOC script, and that brought me back to somewhere between anger and depression.
Our dead loved ones never resurrect and bring down prod, or something.
> Our dead loved ones never resurrect and bring down prod, or something.
The hype rollercoaster is unique for sure.
If people did resurrect, I can just imagine the hype people coming back and saying "We're so back baby!", at which point I'd probably just try and bury them again...
Spot on, modulo grief is a spiral: we revisit each of these phases in order over and over as different aspects and experiences within the overall loss reveal themselves.
> Acceptance (people who are focused on the problems that get worse as AI gets better - social disruption, x-risk, government/corporate control)
You can consider all of these problems in the other stages as well, even if you still doubt the impact on your own field. Most devs in the stage of acceptance, however, will be increasingly preoccupied with how to keep paying their bills instead of such lofty questions.
Regular people are best kept focused on their own issues. I have bills to pay. My children. This is just about me.
The old refrain that regular people don’t have time for politics. (So let the psychos with money and means arrange everything for you.)
I reached acceptance Spring 2025. That's when I accepted I will eventually be outsourced, and I need to pivot. 1.5 years later, I'm a commercial pilot, and as I continue training, will hopefully be able to pivot here soon.
How is it possible to go zero to commercial pilot in 1.5 years!?
Self-flying planes
This list works best coming from AI Apologists. Because Acceptance is surely about accepting reality, like how a person is dead. There is simply nothing to do. However given this pessimistic framing of yours, Acceptance means what? Willingly getting discarded? With peace of mind and tranquility I go to the Universal Potato Allowance Office.
> Acceptance means what? Willingly getting discarded? With peace of mind and tranquility I go to the Universal Potato Allowance Office.
Part of the acceptance stage recognizing and internalizing:
1. life will be different
2. life will go on
3. there are still many good things in life
To me, the #1 priority here is ensuring that life DOES go on.
I don't think we can ignore x-risk or the other problems like social disruption or government/propaganda control which get worse as AI improves.
Acceptance is pointless if we're all dead.
If you think being dead is fine, you're still in the depression phase.
The reality is that life can be awesome, and it is within the realm of possibility for us to make it so, but it requires us to get up, take action, push for changes, mobilize, organize. Don't just go to the potato office. We only really get one shot at "landing" AI safely. Now is the time for action, and to make sure that we get it right or as right as we can get it on behalf of all future generations.
Yes it's part of an inevitability framework.
What level would you say "oscillating between wanting to jump off a bridge or become the unabomber 2" is? Bouncing between depression and anger like a yo-yo right now
I haven't touched on bargaining even once, and I don't know if I will ever be able to truly reach acceptance
> I don't know if I will ever be able to truly reach acceptance
Gotta be patient before making claims like that.
Its a hard thing, but time is ultimately what helps the most here, so making a claim like that without having given it a few years is premature.
>"There needs to be a "what stage of grief are you in" question."
There's a different level of acceptance that embraces this stuff and just leans into it. The grief is still there, but I'm working through the depression and into this stage. Accepting that you've been pushed from a craftsman to a machine operator really sucks. But machine operator is still a job, even after machines get really efficient. Maybe some people can still hang on to their artisanal workshop existence for high value small batch goods. But most of us will just have to make that move to the industrialized model or fall into redundancy.
> Maybe some people can still hang on to their artisanal workshop existence for high value small batch goods.
Hate to nitpick, but that's classic bargaining - not acceptance.
I do think it will continue on in a sense. Think of how Ferrari or Bentley employees are highly skilled technicians who work on one car at a time to completion, versus the auto line worker at GM screwing down a panel over and over. There is still room for both for different reasons, just at vastly different scale.
Yes, that's definitely a possibility.
This is where the analogy to the stages of grief breaks down.
If you're talking about the stages of grief as being stages of dealing with death, there is no uncertainty or going back.
In the case of AI disruption, there is still uncertainty. Denialists might be right in the end still. Bargaining or getting angry might work.
You can only really progress through the stages if you're emotionally bought in to the reality of a future event that has not yet happened. It's quite a roller coaster emotionally speaking.
Which of these workplace issues have you experienced throughout your professional career?
Bad Management: 63%
I don't think you can really ask whether people have seen 'bad management' without explaining exactly what that means. People, including me when I was a developer, often see 'bad management' as 'I don't agree with what I'm being told to do'. That's not necessarily bad management; far more often it's poor communication of the facts (although you could argue that's the bad management bit I guess.)
The things I used to think were bad management included hard deadlines, short term benefit projects that took on tech debt, not 'motivating' people by giving better raises, refusing promotions even though I thought someone was great, prioritising things that I didn't see the value in, etc. Those things maybe weren't bad management at all. I just didn't have the full facts.
This is the problem with surveys like this. Someone didn't get the raise they wanted, so they check the 'bad management' box for that tiny cathartic dopamine hit. It doesn't necessarily mean they've been badly managed.
> I just didn't have the full facts
Two things are true at the same time: that as an employee, you will always get a distilled picture of the wider reality from your manager (sometimes to help you focus, sometimes because they're forbidden to share it with you, sometimes because parts of it would damage morale and thus productivity), and that managerial competence is in the communication skills to achieve that focus and morale. Two different managers with different skill levels, each dealing with the same "full facts" reality, will deliver different results.
Related tangent: it's sad to see the decline of high school debate teams, there's probably no better early-life preparation for the management skillset. Competent managers persuade. They know who they're trying to persuade, what that person values, and frame the wider organizational reality in such a way that it will make sense and align their direct report.
The worst managers think their job is to tell you what to do and that your job is to do what they say.
Employees are very well capable of determining management is bad. It’s certainly not “I didn’t get a raise“.
I bet if you asked managers, the percentage of those who cited "lazy, undisciplined programmers" would be even higher.
AI makes this a solved problem. It now has superhuman programming ability and will almost always carry the message to Garcia.
I’m not sure this is very relevant to the point of that question, sorry. Perceiving bad management is its own event, and every belief could have faulty premises (e.g. incomplete information).
Re: checking the box for dopamine… you might need to check in with yourself about whether you’re a bad manager! I know nothing, but that’s a very bright orange flag lol
that’s a very bright orange flag
Light pink I reckon.
Let's be honest about it: this has been a long time coming. If you think of it in terms of the wider civilization, way too much human captial was tied up in software dev.
And the jobs therin are mostly very mundane and of a liniar-translation nature. (translate this Adobe XD design in CSS/React; translate these REST calls to SQL). And 80% of the time was spent chasing trivial mistakes.
Humans can do more for civilization than arranging react components.
That sounds absolutely true until you compare it to at least 95% of other jobs.
At that point you would have to accept that almost everything humans are working on day in day out is pretty trivial.
What about shopkeepers? Construction workers? Cleaners? Notaries? Bookkeepers? Only a very small fraction of humanity works on something meaningful that can be said that it advances human civilization (I think education is also a non-banal pursuit). Unfortunately, most works are very mundane.
Cleaners and construction workers are obviously useful and necessary.
First of all we live in buildings and second of all, we cannot afford to clean most public or shared or business spaces ourselves.
These jobs may be automated too one day, they are certainly partially automated now, but the necessity of the job is obvious.
Notaries and most software dev is completely work-for-work's sake and should not have ever existed.
It is a testament to this fact how streamlined bookkeeping is and always has been on the free market (and even then a large part of private bookkeeping is due to the need to comply with government taxes and regulations; in eg. criminal enterprise, bookkeeping is even more streamlined).
However, software devs have made such a mess of it all, that not even the free market was able to streamline it, creating millions of low-utility software bookkeeper jobs (that are finally starting to go away).
I strongly disagree with the premise. Software Engineers are a very small percentage of the total human population.
That said, there's nothing wrong with making better use of the tiny human capital dedicated to building software and hardware for the rest of humanity.
> Humans can do more for civilization than arranging react components.
I agree with this part.
Everything else I disagree with. You need to do some more reading about history sir or madame or bot.
I think the objectionable bit is everyone is just doing the same things over and over again in different vertical partitions to try and steal some market share from soemone else doing the same things over and over again.
No one is doing anything new or interesting. Another fucking SaaS product and monthly fee is about 90% of the human capital as you put it.
Seems like you hit a nerve!
I totally agree with you, and from my experience, the majority of devs, like that work more than what many here would say the role includes, like actually figuring out what the user/customer/market need and filling that demand with a product, service or process change. Most don't wanna deal with that so roles like product owner, business analysis etc are born, much to those same devs annoyance. How much value to the customer paying us did that component translation bring?
And no I don't mean chasing value as in revenue or unicorns by building more Ad/Spyware or AI hype. Actual value direct to end users who pay you for it.
I'm not sure it's exactly the jobs they've been doing. Someone had to clean the bathrooms for the Manhattan Project, Moon Landing, etc.
The problem, as I view it, is that so many of the very best spend so much time involved in zero-sum optimizations like advertising & SEO, HFT & PE, gambling & scalping. Even entertainment and art create something new that ever larger groups of people may take enjoyment in, even if not enhance their productivity. Instead we get hijacked human reward systems and despair.
Most people in gov./bureaucratic functions do little or nothing (though depending on country, they could be doing negative work or harming the process itself). Developers are not the worse out they represent a very small percentage of the human capital.
And we need to get rid of those people TOO.
But software devs are a much easier target because we can just out-compete them.
Gov/bureaucrats hold monopoly of force, so they get what they want.
Lot of very sad data but a couple of bright points:
- 50% are thinking somewhat-to-very unlikely they'll be changing careers in the next 5 years
- 42% are hopeful or excited about the tech industry
> - 42% are hopeful or excited about the tech industry
doesn't that ignore the overlap?
So, for example, if all of the ones who were excited also said they were hopeful, then only 23% of respondents are "hopeful or excited about the tech industry".(on that question they could submit more than one answer)
Yeah you're right I missed they could do multiple answers.
That's bright?
Roughly half of devs feeling happy and secure about the next 5 years is a LOT better than I expected.
better than expected doenst equal good tho
50% staying in the career means 50% reduction. That's not very optimistic at all!
Presumably this is only a bright point if you dont think its false hope?
At the start of the year when AI started being useful I really did experience a productivity gain. Having just started a new job, Claude was instrumental into quickly getting me going on an unfamiliar code base.
Now? I’m swamped with the dumbest jira tickets in history created by lazy AF project managers and business analysts who are using AI to create a pile of unmanageable slop while looking like superstars as they blithely point to their neatly arranged tickets.
I guess I could try to cope by pointing the AI back at it but for the first time I’m forced to color outside the lines just so I can deliver. None of it lines up with their garbage and so we’re now playing a stupid game of “let’s not and say we did” while I tick of useless tickets that shouldn’t even be in the project.
It is exhausting. Not due to the potentially increased velocity but due to the towering pile of slop getting shovelled over that needs fake responses. I don’t know what to do about that.
That’s sucks to hear man but without healthy dialogue nothing can change. I can’t comment on the personalities and company culture around you but in my experience unless product, engineering and design can come together and be empathetic to each other’s position, you end up in a rough spot like yourself.
Easier said than done though.
> I guess I could try to cope by pointing the AI back at it but for the first time I’m forced to color outside the lines just so I can deliver.
You could, but then you shouldn't be surprised when nothing changes. If someone had (repeatedly) filed unworkable tickets/specs pre-AI, what would you have done?
Push back I suppose is what I would have done but the sheer volume of it makes that hard
It may be worth taking what someone gives you and reorganizing it (w/ or w/o AI) to your liking. Then have the AI give them a template they can hand off to whatever LLM they use and give you back something closer to useful. Or just write a quick translator script to take the mess and convert it into something you can actually do. It may even be worth writing an agent that they send their requests to and gives a "feasibility score." Tune that so the score is always low on low effort stuff that's just AI slop. Forces the other side to actually provide you with something approaching valuable, makes it so you don't have to shoulder all of it.
> Now? I’m swamped with the dumbest jira tickets in history created by lazy AF project managers and business analysts who are using AI to create a pile of unmanageable slop while looking like superstars as they blithely point to their neatly arranged tickets.
The more things change, the more they stay the same. Vague, confused, and non-actionable tickets filtering through intermediaries to solve problems in silos have been par for the course for decades. AI just amplifies the tendencies already inherent in an organization, for better or worse.
I do not get it. I know that there are different people but... Do you really have that many issues, problems with using AI for coding and solving problems in your jobs or hobbies? In my company using Codex and Claude help us a lot with our software. We were able to fix legacy software which we could not do earlier without AI because of current tasks going on. We migrated in 2 weeks* (read below) to new versions of framework and libraries. If we have to do it without AI, then it will be work for few months or even year - only if doing that work, not other work such as fixing bugs, maintaing systems and doing current work such as new features. In our case AI tools help us a lot - every single developer.
Notice: first working prototype was done after approximately 2 weeks and was done by one developer. Of course it had bugs and was not perfect but it was huge improvement compared to what was before. Imagine that you do not regularly update framework/libraries (as it should be) because of various reasons (client does not want to pay for it or you focus on different things). We understand our decisions and so on, we know it but real life sometimes can not be perfect. Thanks to Codex/Claude we can move forward. Of course we know the LLMs/AI tools are not perfect and magic problem solvers but we could not say that these tools make our lifes worse or something.
The problem with AI is that it works.
Think of it this way, before your company would need to hire more people if it wanted to do more. But now the same team can do things like this without hiring more:
> We migrated in 2 weeks to new versions of framework and libraries. If we have to do it without AI, then it will be work for few months or even year...
Maybe long-term this is amortized. But short-term the tendency is lower salaries and layoffs.
Long term the tendency is even lower salaries.
Right now AI still isn't autonomous enough to do all of the work itself, so it needs developers to carefully manage it to do what it must.
If things remained like this, then sure, there'd be a point when "AI-management for area X" would become a profession on its own, similar to how similar processes happened multiple times in the past, and that would result in a new balance.
But AI won't remain like that. The end-goal is that a high level executive coils type on, Claude v25 something like:
"Update all my legacy codebase to the most recent everything. Make sure it works perfectly and doesn't break compatibility with anything. Also, while you're at it, these DOCX our customers sent list new features they'd like, so implement it all while you're at it."
And come back in the morning with it all executed perfectly. Which definitely isn't a recipe for human developers to start earning any better.
Human earning ceiling will be how much it'll cost for AI to do it at the same quality and efficiency level. If you charge less than that you'll have work, but not otherwise.
Yeah. I hate government intervention as much as the next guy and I would love to live in a distopian reality where humans just enjoy life while robots do the work.
But this is a big problem.
Robots replaced our arms, and we didn't care because we still had our brains. Now they are also increasingly replacing our brains in labour.
you forgot "make no mistakes".
The angst is less about right now and more about the obvious conclusion if the trend continues that few, if any, of us will be gainfully employed in this space.
Sure, we can all claim to be the ones who actually are able to hold it right, or that we'll shift to doing something slightly a bit different. And that will be true for some subset of people. But the reality is that it's like that old trope of look to your left, look to your right, 2 of you won't be here at the end of the semester.
there are categories of tasks that were massively enabled through AI.
there are other parts where its not unless youre playing fast and loose.
Most devs against AI argue that the former tasks were never that big of an issue, but they likely worked at enterprises where those tasks were someone elses job through dedicated teams preparing framework upgrades etc
There is also a gigantic delta between using AI on eg Github copilot through API Pricing and having a Subscription model via Anthropic or OpenAI. Through Github you'll be constantly be worrying about costs, with the Sub youll likely mostly be using SOTA and the quality diffence is staggering, especially since the last model iteration (Opus 5.5)
Wonder what the selection bias is like on something like this
Look at demographics → https://2026.stateofdevs.com/en-US/demographics/ (especially “Number Of Kids”)
Lmao what's got them so tired? Too many brunch dates?
Ha when I saw it 82% white I immediately raised an eyebrow at who is filling this out. Maybe Silicon Valley bias but that still seems aggregious
Look at the list of countries. It's hardly dominated by silicon valley, but when it's mainly US and Europe, it's not surprising that it's predominantly white
Natural selection at work, somehow. This isn't a dig at people without kids, you do you, I just find it interesting that our brightest minds also tend to be leaves on the tree, never becoming branches. They just leave their toys for the rest to play with, kind of undermining our actual progress.
When you have to work for decades to pay off the cost of education (that the state used to heavily subsidize), much less ever afford a house, much LESS ever afford a house big enough to raise kids, is it any shock that those bright and motivated enough to be the best aren't able to spare the time any more?
Nah, I don't buy for a second the reason is economic. I remember how the conditions were much worse when I was a kid and my parents raised me anyways. And I look at how countries getting richer leads to less kids.
I know that this is the rhetoric around why people are not having kids, but it's a pretext, it's not the real reason.
You can deny it all you want, or you can ask people why they're not having kids.
https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2024/07/25/reasons...
33% say "not finding the right partner". Everything being too expensive such that we're working all the time and don't have any down time is a huge part of that. Economics play into leisure time, stress, and things that kill relationships and the desire to have sex/kids.
the data simply disagrees. 100 years ago things were much, much worse, yet people had more kids. people can cope all they want but their complaints don't align with reality and all measurements which indicate that more developed countries have fewer kids, not more. though i know that admitting one is selfish isn't something most want to do, so i definitely get why people rationalize it by other reasons.
Share your data and what's "worse". Again, we've polled people and they're literally telling us it's too expensive.
The cost of raising a child is enormous. It's dramatically higher than it was 30 years ago, and astronomically more than a century ago. I've known multiple households with dual 6 figure incomes where one quit their job to be a stay at home parent because the cost of childcare was comparable to the reduction in income.
The cost in time is just as bad - no more "go outside and don't come back until dinner", now if you let your kids walk down the street to school/the park your neighbors will call CPS on you, so you have to pay attention all the time.
Rent/mortgages are way up. The cost of food is way up. The cost of education is way up.
> The cost of raising a child is enormous.
Honestly, the primary problem is still the mindset behind most times this line is written.
The cost of raising a child is enormous only if you consider the return a nuisance at best, which many seem to do. If you consider it very rewarding thing you want for your life, working for that a little doesn't seem all that preposterous anymore.
The same peope typically have no problem spending money on frivolous hobbies, toys, travel etc. they technically get no economic return for either.
There may be people who are economically barred from affording children, but most people set the bar at "I want kids with no strings attached".
The real reasons are that we've created a society in which many people no longer consider a rewarding experience they actually want, and those who don't want it no longer have it externally thrust upon them by cultural expectations or pressures as much. I think the latter is good, but the former may be a pervasive failure of character.
> The cost of raising a child is enormous only if you consider the return a nuisance at best,
You can't pay for day care with vibes.
A big factor is that I believe the the extended family help a lot less with child care nowadays compared to some generation or two ago.
Asking people why they don’t have kids is not that useful - stated vs revealed preferences differ a lot here. If you look around the world you will see that economic solutions do not really work (because that’s not a real cause of why people don’t have children, it’s just something people say).
The problem with the "richer countries have fewer kids" correlation is that it implies causation, but I think it's more sensible to say it the other way: "having fewer kids makes you richer" (at least temporarily, before the demographic collapse makes you poor again, but that will likely not be your problem).
I would say culture is a big part, too. But economics is the main reason.
My parents met in the office and started dating after my father made a move. I would NEVER ask someone out at work. In today's culture this is seen as harassment and can get you fired.
It’s not harassment to ask a colleague out on a date. It’s harassment if you ask multiple times after being declined.
True. But in reality increasingly more women will go to HR because they feel harrassed after being asked out once. You'll see many such cases if you're employed and know people.
There's no end of unhappy marriages, that 33% figure is not compared to anything. It means nothing on its own since the original poster was saying "it's economic" and you're saying "it's not economic".
For example, was it also 33% in the past when the economy was much worse off? Is it still 33% say during crises like a depression or hell even covid? Is it 33% saying "not the right partner" but maybe 50% saying "actually economics"? Is part of the 33% just because the partner isn't rich enough (a very pragmatic and common consideration despite the stigma).
Yes, I know what people say. And they might believe it. It doesn't make it true. Or at the very least, it's _true_ in a very roundabout way.
What does that even mean? People are deciding to have kids because they believe it's too expensive, full stop. What's your counterclaim - they're bad at math and could afford it but think they can't? That if you forced a child on them they could actually suffer through it?
Generally speaking countries that have tried to do something about their abysmal birth rates (Hungary, Czechia, etc) by putting in substantial economic incentives (i.e. 4 years of maternity, free accomodation, etc), have found that it moved the needle very little and certainly there can't be much talk of reversing the trend.
Also, I believe that our culture of over-parenting (and therefore many of the associated costs) is a _consequence_ of having fewer children, not the cause. If you put all your reproductive eggs in one basket, you are motivated to overprotect them. That makes a culture of (at least from a historical perspective) insane parenting demands that simply don't scale.
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People famously have different stated and revealed preferences. They claim one thing, and yes they fully believe it, even if the evidence is extremely strong to the contrary.
Obviously the truth is that what people say and what people actually do are two different things. In case of having children we actually have proof for that!
> That if you forced a child on them they could actually suffer through it?
Absolutely, that’s how it always worked before we’ve had good contraception .
And forcing children to be born to and raised by parents that didn't want them is good for society?
Sounds like you just want a serf class and fuck everyone else.
Describing how it worked does not mean endorsement for it. You can say "most people were trapped into having kids" and "we should have more kids" without endorsing "more people should be trapped into having kids".
It is uncomfortable, deff more uncomfortable than saying "we're not having kids because we don't behave money" but if it's true, should we just brush it aside?
> And forcing children to be born to and raised by parents that didn't want them is good for society?
Yes, it was good for society (nowadays it would be oppressive and would be very bad). Is it good for these children to be born? Maybe, depends if you think living is better than never being born. Do I support policy of forcing people into having children? Absolutely not, I think it's terrible idea! But that's completely tangential - my point is that we've got large body of evidence that 1) surveys asking people why they don't have children are pretty much worthless; 2) economic factors do not matter that much.
> Sounds like you just want a serf class and fuck everyone else.
No, it doesn't sound like that, you are projecting something onto me.
> Nah, I don't buy for a second the reason is economic.
Mass Mutual, 2024: Of those surveyed who plan to remain child free, 43% cited “inability to afford children”[0].
Pew, 2024: Of those who feel it is unlikely that they will have children, 41% of people under 40 cited “can’t afford it” as a reason they are not having children, versus only 22% for those 40+[1].
Morning Consult, 2020: 41% of adults without children cite “it’s too expensive to raise children” as a reason; 24% say it is a “major reason”.[2]
BadCredit.org, 2024: 86% of adults who have delayed having children did so for financial reasons[3].
The Morning Consult survey may be particularly useful if you want to look at just one, because it has more granular age cohort breakdowns which show a clear trend for younger people not having children for financial reasons.
[0] https://www.massmutual.com/global/media/shared/doc/q3_2024_m...
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2024/07/25/reasons...
[2] https://assets.morningconsult.com/wp-uploads/2020/09/2806512...
[3] https://www.badcredit.org/studies/plans-to-have-children-in-...
Man people self-report a lot of fun stuff. It simply cannot be trusted. The counterpoint is that nations that tried financial incentives (even large ones like Hungary) had negligible gain from these efforts.
Nations and companies try "financial incentives" for a bunch of fun stuff. It simply cannot be trusted.
Let's look at Hungary: loans unless you have 3 (!) children, maybe some housing subsidies that require you to match them with a huge chunk of your own money. Small wonder why that didn't motivate many people.
Never in the history of humanity has it been easy to have children. And there was never a government subsidy for it. You were never guaranteed that your kids would thrive. Not sure why it’s suddenly different.
I think the bigger change is: I don’t want my quality of life to go down one bit when I have a kid!
The problem is a country does not want to incentivize producing kids, that would be simple. Pay people $100k per child, and you’ll have a ton of children.
What countries do want is to incentivize production of properly raised, well mannered, productive children. And the type of person incentivized by a lot of cash to have a kid is probably not going to be the one to do that.
The difference is that the cost to give your kids what you had as a kid and the opportunities you later had access to has gone up. People don't want to raise kids if they can't give them a life at least as good as they had.
Yes, there's lots of things about today that are better than 30 years ago. TVs are bigger, cars are safer, etc. But the ability to give you kids the childhood and initial opportunities you had seems far less likely to many people.
Was there pervasive access to birth control back then?
Almost everyone on this site was conceived at a time when the knowledge and materials required for pregnancy avoidance was widely available.
What are the real reasons you think?
1) Shifting cultural norms. People are now enough and they want to live their lives. Kids are annoying as hell to be honest, and until you're a parent, you don't get the appeal. But nature has a way of really playing your heart when you have a kid and the intensity of emotion is hard to describe. BUt if you were to do a pros/cons list, you probably would not want them.
2) Inflation of expectation on parenting. Parents used to be much more hands off in the previous generations, but the expectation of what you need to provide has gone thorough the roof and not all is useful, to be honest.
3) Delay in child bearing led to fertility drop when people really want to have kids.
4) This, I somewhere and will pawn it as my own, but... kids are no longer useful. Previously, kids were a working hand around the house and insurance for parental care when they got older. Both of these are not something necessarily expected of them nowadays.
5) Since women bear the brunt of the rough jobs of child rearing, even in our more egalitarian societies, their increase in options and freedom means a lot opt to just... not do it. As mentioned at pct1. it's really a tough job. Can't say I blame them.
Allow me to reframe all of your points through a slightly different lens
1) Shifting Culture of Norms == Children are expensive. If you have kids you might have to give up the lucrative career opportunities you have been building towards since your university days, and other personal opportunities
2) Inflation of expectations on parenting == Children are expensive. Parents are expected to spend a lot more of their free time and money putting their kids in programs and sports and such
3) Delay in child bearing led to fertility drop when people really want to have kids == Children are expensive. If you want to have them, you need to have them before you are really financially stable and established in a career.
4) kids are no longer useful == Children are expensive. In the past kids were expected to contribute to the household at a fairly young age. Nowadays not so much. This means families either hire someone to do that work or it falls on the parents.
5) Women in the workforce == Children are expensive! Families have an entire extra income with Moms working and they still can't afford childcare. With an entire extra income!
So you're right that the reasons for falling birth rates don't have to be "children are expensive" but all of the reasons are certainly "children are expensive"-shaped
Sure, you can reframe things that way, if you want to reduce all dimensions of existence to money and want to try to simplify all life as being about money, sure, go nuts. I certainly can't stop you.
You could do the same kind of exercise with whatever other measurement of reality that you consider to be the pivot of existence like free time or amounts of sandwiches available or whatever (or is that also boiling down to money?).
But that really really hobbles your model of reality so much to the point it's not useful anymore.
And, then by your own standards, were they ever NOT expensive?
Is this expense some relative state to other people, as in if other people have more it means I have less by virtue of comparison or is it some concrete measure of need one can not afford nowadays and they could before.
No, my point is that you're conflating "expensive" with money
Yeah a lot of my points are about money. But it's also free time, responsibility, etc
For example my parents used to drop me off for a friends birthday party and then go away. There would be adults there who they trusted to look out for me, and they could use that time for themselves for a bit to do whatever
Nowadays parents literally stay the entire time. That's a pretty large chunk of time that my parents had to themselves and parents nowadays do not. I don't know what other term than "expensive" to describe that, but it doesn't have anything to do with money
“Children are time-consuming” is probably more precisely communicative than “children are expensive” for the aspects where you want to focus specifically on time.
Once you have enough money to fulfill your basic needs, time is currency.
Money can buy people to clean for you, do errands and paperwork for you, and more. Free time is the most precious resource.
...and kids consume an incredible amount of it, and crucially far more of it than they used to.
Sure; GP specifically said they didn’t know another way to say it in a way that didn’t have strong connotations with money for readers.
I tried to provide one.
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Any sane, forward-thinking society would realize that infinite growth isn't possible.
Really? Why so? I think the universe is plenty big and it's an issue of engineering to use all that space and harvest all that energy.
Okay Peter Thiel it's past your bedtime.
It's more of time and emotional effort. Come back exhausted from work, imagine having to take care of 3 kids. Insane. Sure if you get a babysitter etc. maybe it helps.
I still think the both parents working thing was maybe good for gender equality but you gotta say the capitalists loved it and probably creamed themselves imagining double the labor pool. But now you see the price of it. How can it be possible for both parents to work and still somehow have kids?
Apparently there was this study where they looked at a few european countries where women joining the labour pool lagged but the drop in natality did not and they found a weird correlate in that their cost of childcare went up due to the dissapearance of....nuns.
No more super cheap teachers and kindergarten i guess.
If you work in software in the US, you really have no financial excuse not to have kids. I own a house, have a kid and exist on almost a single income in the SF Bay Area. And I don’t work at a company you know about. I make about median wage for the area and had no parental help for college or my home.
If you don’t want to have kids for any other reason, that’s valid. It’s a ton of work and requires insane resilience. But money is certainly not it, not for SWE.
People are richer than ever, the world is safer than ever, yet we're entering a demographic trend mirroring that of medieval europe.
I'm not in a relationship so kids are not exactly on the radar, but it feels like the current progress being made is incredibly backwards, and I wouldn't wanna bring a kid to live in this godforsaken world.
We have the lowest infant mortality, best medical care in human history, few people starve in Western countries. What exactly makes it worse than, say, the 1800s? I will go out on a limb and guess that you spend a lot of time scrolling negative social media. Am I right? That invention is truly the most godforsaken thing in society at this time.
I probably spend more time reading the news than social media, and basically every day there's news about government debt, huge unemployment (10.1%), price of everything is going up, massive layoffs, climate disasters, AI hacking into things, students using AI to cheat, wars happening next door, possible hybrid warfare, megacorporations ignoring the law, governments wanting to track your every movement, and so on. Most people I worked with at my company got laid off and the rest are just terminals for Claude, and any notion of job security is out of the window.
I initially shrugged this off as "oh, well the respondents are probably all in their 20s", but then found that under Health and... nope!
Fascinating. I wonder if there is some other confounding factor here.
- 49, leaf on a tree.
Looks bad
> while Japan shows the highest immigration levels among respondents, this is almost certainly due to the survey failing to reach the native Japanese population more than to any real demographic trend.
So we are admitting that the result is useless?
> despite being known as “a nation of immigrants”, only 17% of respondents from the U.S. have immigrant roots, versus 22% overall.
What was he expecting? 100%? From what I can find, US first born immigrant % is about 16%, so basically within the massive margins of error this thing has, this is a non result.
I don't think this thing is designed to elicit anything useful except vibes & giving the author a platform to pontificate.
Author here, I appreciate the feedback but I feel like there's a falacy here. If we asked respondents if they liked ice cream, and it turned out 95% of survey respondents hate it, would you say the rest of the data is not valid because the survey is clearly not representative of the general population?
The fact that the survey may not be representative on things like immigration or its Japanese audience has no relation to the data's validity on completely unrelated questions such as developer's outlook on AI.
Are you saying that sampling bias is a fallacy?
I'm saying it's a fallacy is you use sampling bias on one factor to discredit another unrelated factor.
If you pick a sample to test a new painkiller, you should include an equal amount of men and women, old and young people, people of different ethnic backgrounds, etc. to have a balanced sample.
On the other hand, you do not need to have equal shares of people whose favorite color is blue, red, green, etc. because that clearly has no relation with how people would react to medicine.
I, for one, have grown exhausted of these surveys so haven't participated for a couple years now.
Related:
Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2026
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49978972
From looking at their data it looks like decades of failing up is reaching a breaking point. I can look back in my career and I have had some stellar leaders, some of which had never tried to write code a day in their life.
I have also had just as many terrible managers. At the last job I worked with somebody who thought they were my manager. They weren't and did not even have the same employer. They were my peer. Nonetheless they withheld client communications until my own employer was forced to fire me. Their employer fired them shortly after. Could it have been the fraud, the dereliction of duty, the toxic leadership? Who knows, there are just so many to choose from.
How did we get here? Well, in the corporate non-software company world there is clearly an 80/20 rule at play. 80% of the developers provide 20% of the total development value. Most of my career has been in non-software company web businesses like Travelocity and Expedia. I have also spent time in finance, where that company employed more developers that most large companies have total headcount. Most of these people were some form of JavaScript framework in the browser and Java outside the browser doing the backend web things.
Most of these people really sucked at what they do. They weren't terrible people, some few were, they just weren't properly mentored and worked in an environment where failure and coloring books was more of the expectation than the exception. To be more clear, in case the analogy was ambiguous, most developers are intentional over paid commodities to be hired and fired as rapidly as they could be found.
After a couple decades of this madness this is the baseline culture of user-face web software. Essentially: drop out of high school, go to a 6 week boot camp, put text on screen with React for $140k per year. Or, plan B, pay way too much for a computer science bachelor's degree and start at 20% higher compensation. Not surprisingly there is a lot of insecurity there (I saw it screaming from the shadows at every job). Say anything about it and the resentment comes alive in all its wonderful forms. Less surprisingly, over time those people get promoted into management where neglecting skill development becomes the standard for the next wave of new hires, as if to say: "STFU, go back to your coloring books". It really comes full circle when people then use their inability to innovate as a badge of honor to justify their continued employment.
I lost my job at the beginning of summer and since then, I've applied to maybe 3 jobs. I've had the feeling for years that whichever next job comes along, it'll probably be the last. So far I've been wrong, but now there's this feeling that even if I landed a new one, it's going to just be kowtowing to another super AI pilled narcissistic CTO pushing arbitrary product and arbitrary hot tech to solve it. Even if writing the code wasn't the last thing I was clinging to, the best it would go towards is... just bullshit. That may be burnout speaking, but I've received at least one invitation to apply to something like this, requiring that I be "all in on ai", and I just can't summon the energy to grind through another inane 5 step interview process to basically spend my days making throwaway crap while someone watches how many tokens I'm using. It's hard to reason about what the outcome I'd hope for is, and for now I'd rather just pay from savings to not bother.
That said, I have no idea what else to do. Going back to school and attempting a degree program seems like kind of a crapshoot even if I could convince myself I'd succeed. All of that is very depressing, but on the other hand I'm actually quite happy to have spent all summer basically doing whatever the hell I want; wasn't that the promise of AI anyway?
Everybody is harking on AI, but can we please stop publishing prose in monospace?
I thought I was fine when the first couple times I tried to get a job, I got one within the month. Both ended for various reasons, and now this year I've been trying to get one since February, and not a single offer. Not one. Plus the who wants to be hired posts are way more active this year, blowing up to 600+ comments instead of the 200-300 or so of just yesteryear. I feel like my career's ended before it even started. I spent my whole life believing that programming would be my ticket, knowing it's what I wanted to do in life, and now that's gone. I don't even know what else to do.
That header alone made me exhausted.
lol
> This was the first Devographics survey to ask about developers' mental state, and the results hint at some worrying changes in what it feels like to be a software developer, too.
I mean.. if it was the first time asking... why do you draw the conclusion that these are changes?
Word of the decade is “vibes” man
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> Nearly half of this year's survey respondents had experienced job insecurity and insufficient wages.
Insufficient wages, really? I understand you might be underpaid compared to your peers, but do developer really suffer from "insufficient wages"?
edit: I assumed this was US centric. It isn't. I could see insufficient wages outside the US.
For reference, in my Spanish home town, a large consulting firm is hiring devs right out of college for a little under 20K euros a year. The apartment I grew up in, in said home town, would sell for about 400K euros, and an old one bedroom apartment from the 70s might go for 200K.
So insufficient wages? Yep. It pays more than working at a bar, but not by that much. Anyone graduating CS that can at least go to the bigger cities, or better yet, has the language skills to move further away, just does.
Ironically companies here in Switzerland (and everywhere in the west) outsource jobs to cheaper places like Portugal or Spain so they can pay the same low wage. So I might have to kove to Spain to work for a swiss company and get paid the low wage.
I can't understate how many jobs get outsourced like that. I got very lucky to get a job here, but my employer doesn't have any junior/mid software positions in my country anymore. Not even internally. And it's a swiss software company.
Trough increasing migration and outsourcing we'll all chase the lowest common denominator.
you may find this article interesting: https://elpais.com/tecnologia/2026-04-29/es-un-error-pensar-...
archive: https://archive.is/Ggfma
the españa vaciada continues due to wage stagnation :(
i hope salaries improve, but i'm not optimistic for new grads short term. i'm hoping big companies will learn their lesson that not hiring newer engineers is a mistake. no one will be around to supervise the ai agents if a talent pipeline is not built. there's too much short term thinking in today's gold rush
"Gold rush"? Do you even work? We are in an economic recession. Switzerland had an all time high of companies going bankrupt last year. I talk with PMs a lot. Our clients have no money to order new services from us, so we have to downsize and outsource.