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0 pointssomenameforme11mo ago0 comments

People aren't paid by value brought to companies, they're paid by the scarcity of their skill. Your analog is actually perfect for this. There's a reason saying you want to be a professional singer is generally something only a child would say. It's about as reliable a career as winning the lottery, simply because everybody can sing, lots of them quite decently. And so singer, as a career, mostly isn't a thing - it's a hobby with some distant hope of going Oliver Anthony at some point.

Software development has a huge barrier to entry which keeps the labor pool relatively small, which keeps wages relatively high. There's going to be a way larger pool of people capable of 'prompt engineering' which is going to send wages proportionally way down.

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dakiol11mo ago

> There's going to be a way larger pool of people capable of 'prompt engineering' which is going to send wages proportionally way down.

My wife knows how to prompt chatgpt, but she wouldn't be able to create an app just by putting together what the llm throws at her. Same could be said about my junior engineer colleague; he knows way more than my wife, sure, but he doesn't know what he doesn't know, and it would take a lot of resources and effort for him to put together a distributed system just by following what an llm throws at him.

So, I see the pool of potential prompters just as the pool of potential software engineers: some are good, some are bad, there will be scarcity of the good ones (as in any other profession), and so wages don't necessarily have to go down.

somenameformeOP11mo ago

Of course, but again the issue is the number of people. Software development, as it currently is, has huge barriers to entry. Working in code is something that many people simply cannot do, and of those that can - a huge chunk will find it intolerable as an occupation. 'Prompt engineering' will have far smaller barriers to entry which will, even all other things being equal, significantly increase the labor pool.

sokoloff11mo ago

…unless the value created via prompt engineering is high enough to cause companies to rationally demand even more prompt engineers.

The size of the pie is nowhere near fixed, IMO. There are many things which would be valuable to program/automate, but are simply unaffordable to address with traditional software engineering at the current cost per unit of functionality.

If AI can create a significant increase in productivity, I can see a path to AI-powered programming being just as valuable as (and a lot less tedious than) today.

somenameformeOP11mo ago

Again it's not about value, but solely supply vs demand. If there was somehow only one person who could do janitorial work in a city, that'd be one rich janitor.

For a more realistic example - the software side at many companies essentially is the company. They bring products all the way from inception to launch. Yet they tend to get paid less, often much less, than the legal side. The reason is simply that the labor pool for lawyers is much smaller than for software engineers.

If there's not significant barriers to entry for prompt engineering, wages will naturally be low.

sokoloff11mo ago

Demand incorporates/expresses value (fairly obviously).

somenameformeOP11mo ago

Only if one uses circular logic when defining it, which is I find the MBA style definition of value to be mostly meaningless and also misleading, because people interpret it as they want. By contrast directly speaking of supply/demand encompasses everything quite well and eliminates any circular logic, let alone the need for such.

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dakiol11mo ago

> There's going to be a way larger pool of people capable of 'prompt engineering' which is going to send wages proportionally way down.

somenameformeOP11mo ago

sokoloff11mo ago

…unless the value created via prompt engineering is high enough to cause companies to rationally demand even more prompt engineers.

If AI can create a significant increase in productivity, I can see a path to AI-powered programming being just as valuable as (and a lot less tedious than) today.

somenameformeOP11mo ago

Again it's not about value, but solely supply vs demand. If there was somehow only one person who could do janitorial work in a city, that'd be one rich janitor.

If there's not significant barriers to entry for prompt engineering, wages will naturally be low.

sokoloff11mo ago

Demand incorporates/expresses value (fairly obviously).

somenameformeOP11mo ago

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