The industry doesn’t really owe people opportunities. Even if you think it should, that’s not how companies are going to behave.
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That is an incredibly short sighted view. By acting this way, the industry is essentially selling its future for short term gains. A systemic reduction in the number of people capable of maintaining systems directly correlates with an inevitable collapse in overall software quality.
The perspectives of market advocates often stop at this short sighted level. In reality, their modeling is incredibly simplistic. I will not elaborate at length on their poor modeling here. The short sighted local optimization that only chases the margin of the next quarter is the exact enemy we must guard against the most. (Of course, given the nature of HN, this specific part of the comment will likely be attacked.)
It is not a matter of companies not owing anything; rather, companies are actively committing self sabotage.
Is it truly right to eat tomorrow's seed corn today?
The essence of the software industry is not the 'generation' of code, but the 'maintenance' of it throughout its life cycle. Why is Linux continually maintained, and why is Windows continually maintained? The core of this industry is fundamentally tied to the entire life cycle of a product.
You might be able to fix code with AI. However, under the current LLM structure, can it actually modify projects spanning hundreds of thousands or millions of lines? It cannot. The skill required to partition those architectures is still entirely left to humans. And the ability to define those boundaries is born strictly from experience.
Labeling certain individuals as useless or inadequate inherently destroys the resilience and buffer of the collective as a whole.
Why do humans embrace and care for the vulnerable when society has the capacity to do so? Why do we strive to preserve diversity? It is because, depending on the context, those very traits might prove to be more advantageous. Every human possesses distinct skills, and their unique temperament and proficiency simply manifest depending on the situation they face.
PP is (probably) a market maximalist. Many rationalists end up there. Strangely, there are market maximalists who try to answer all your questions..
E.g. Buterin, Weyl, Friedman. How we started talking in the first place, remember? It was rather regrettable that we stopped asking each other questions..
In place of that, I'd like to see you, jdw64, try to debate with these high-ranked people (in their own community, anyway) :)
To everyone: How can market reward advantageous situation-dependent temperaments in the long term, is I think my question. That sounds like climate (or weather) manipulation, but somehow I sense both theory and practise are much simpler.
In fact, I think I can even eliminate jdw64's ingredient of "temperament".., framing the issue of conflicting temperanents as one between "generalists" & "specialists". Note that you can (probably) use "Marxist theory" to defeat PP without calling it that.
(I think this is more complex than the debate between "wise" and "clever"?? The gap is itself interesting)
This last one, even all of YC would be interested in, I'd argue. In VC lingo, that'd be "T-shape". see also the thread "Felix & I [& D]". That's either like a person who is like both Jobs and Wozniak, depending on situation, or a Wozniak (/Jony Ive) who has the ability to become Jobs, thus sidestepping the situation-dependence-dependence.
Side-quest one is to redefine both "making a billion dollars" and "writing good prompts" as specialities, so that markets as they are imagined now don't necessarily reward these
Side-quest two is make the chameleon skill teachable (or at the very least into an _identity_ ;)