It’s been a very hard year

> You learn lessons over the years and this is one I learned at some point: you want to work in revenue centers, not cost centers.

The problem is that many places don't see the cost portions of revenue centers as investment, but still costs. The world is littered with stories of businesses messing about with their core competencies. An infamous example was Hertz(1) outsourcing their website reservation system to Accenture to comically bad results. The website/app is how people reserve cars - the most important part of the revenue generating system.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32184183

I would go further and say that even at software companies, even for dev that goes directly into the product, engineering is often seen as a cost center.

The logic is simple, if unenlightened: "What if we had cheaper/fewer nerds, but we made them nerd harder?"

So while working in a revenue center is advantageous, you still have to be in one that doesn't view your kind as too fungible.

This is golden career advice. Heed it well.

>> Going with the flow seems like a bad advice. going Analog as in iRobot seems the most sane thing.

I've been doing a lot of photography in the last few years with my smartphone and because of the many things you mentioned, I've forgone using it now. I'm back to a mirrorless camera that's 14 years old and still takes amazing pictures. I recently ran into a guy shutting down his motion picture business and now own three different Canon HDV cameras that I've been doing some interesting video work with.

Its not easy transferring miniDV film to my computer, but the standard resolution has a very cool retro vibe that I've found a LOT of people have been missing and are coming back around too.

I'm in the same age range and couldn't fathom becoming a developer in the early aughts and being in the midst of a gold rush for developer talent to suddenly seeing the entire tech world contract almost over night.

Strange tides we're living in right now.

If I had gone with the flow in 1995 I would have got my MCSE and worked for a big government bureaucracy.

Instead I found Linux/BSD and it changed my life and I ended up with security clearances writing code at defense contractors, dot com startups, airports, banks, biotech/hpc, on and on...

Exactly right about Github. Facebook is the same for training on photos and social relationships. etc etc

They needed to generate a large body of data to train our future robot overlords to enslave us.

We the 'experienced' are definitely not their target -- too much independence of thought.

To your point I use an old flip phone an voip even though I have written iOS and android apps. My home has no wifi. I do not use bluetooth. There are no cameras enabled on any device (except a camera).

I have worked with a lot of code generation systems.

LLMs strike me as mainly useful in the same way. I can get most of the boilerplate and tedium done with LLM tools. Then for core logic esp learning or meta-programming patterns etc. I need to jump in.

Breaking tasks down to bite size, and writing detailed architecture and planning docs for the LLM to work from, is critical to managing increasing complexity and staying within context windows. Also critical is ruthlessly throwing away things that do not fit the vision and not being afraid to throw whole days away (not too often tho!)

For ref I have built stuff that goes way beyond CRUD app with these tools in 1/10th of the time it previously took me or less -- the key though is I already knew how to do and how to validate LLM outputs. I knew exactly what I wanted a priori.

Code generation technically always 'replaced' junior devs and has been around for ages, the results of the generation are just a lot better now., whereas in the past it was mixed bag of benefits/hassles doing code generation regularly, now it works much better and the cost is much less.

I started my career as a developer and the main reasons I became a solutions systems guy were money and that I hated the tedium boilerplate phase of all software development projects over a certain scale. I never stoped coding because I love it -- just not for large enterprise soul destroying software projects.

Quick note that this has not been my experience. LLMs have been very useful with codebases as far from crud web apps as you can get.

>I'm not for/or against a particular style, it must be real nice if life just solves everything for you while you just chill or whatever. But, a nice upside of being made of talent instead of luck is that when luck starts to run out, well, ... you'll be fine anyway :).

This is wildly condescending. Holy.

I earned their respect over many years of hard work -- hardly a freebie!

I will say that being social and being in a scene at the right time helps a lot -- timing is indeed almost everything.

Talent makes luck. Ex-colleagues reach out to me and ask me to work with them because they know the type of work I do, not because it's lucky.

Also wtf did I just read. Op said he uses his network to find work. And you go on a rant about how you're rising and grinding to get that bread, and everything you have ever earned completely comes from you, no help from others? Jesus Christ dude, chill out.

Yes, actually - being right and out of business is much better than being wrong and in business when it comes to ethics and morals. I am sure you could find a lot of moral values you would simply refuse to compromise on for the sake of business. the line between moral value and heavy preference, however, is blurry - and is probably where most people have AI placed on the moral spectrum right now. Being out of business shouldn't be a death sentence, and if it is then maybe we are overlooking something more significant.

I am in a different camp altogether on AI, though, and would happily continue to do business with it. I genuinely do not see the difference between it and the computer in general. I could even argue it's the same as the printing press.

What exactly is the moral dilemma with AI? We are all reading this message on devices built off of far more ethically questionable operations. that's not to say two things cant both be bad, but it just looks to me like people are using the moral argument as a means to avoid learning something new while being able to virtue signal how ethical they are about it, while at the same time they refuse to sacrifice things they are already accustomed to for ethical reasons when they learn more about it. It just all seems rather convenient.

the main issue I see talked about with it is in unethical model training, but let me know of others. Personally, I think you can separate the process from the product. A product isnt unethical just because unethical processes were used to create it. The creator/perpetrator of the unethical process should be held accountable and all benefits taken back as to kill any perceived incentive to perform the actions, but once the damage is done why let it happen in vain? For example, should we let people die rather than use medical knowledge gained unethically?

Maybe we should be targeting these AI companies if they are unethical and stop them from training any new models using the same unethical practices, hold them accountable for their actions, and distribute the intellectual property and profits gained from existing models to the public, but models that are already trained can actually be used for good and I personally see it as unethical not to.

Sorry for the ramble, but it is a very interesting topic that should probably have as much discussion around it as we can get

> but if you are 'right' and out of business nobody will know. Is that any better than 'wrong' and still in business?

yes [0]

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raytheon

I know a guy who has this theory, in essence at least. Businesses use software and other high-tech to make efficiency gains (fewer people getting more done). The opportunities for developing and selling software were historically in digitizing industries that were totally analog. Those opportunities are all but dried up and we're now several generations into giving all those industries new, improved, but ultimately incremental efficiency gains with improved technology. What makes AI and robotics interesting, from this perspective, is the renewed potential for large-scale workforce reduction.

The demand is massively increasing, but filled by less people and more GPUs.

> Taking a moral stance against AI might make you feel good but doesn't serve the customer in the end. They need value for money. And you can get a lot of value from AI these days; especially if you are doing marketing, frontend design, etc. and all the other stuff a studio like this would be doing.

So let's all just give zero fucks about our moral values and just multiply monetary ones.

I understand that website studios have been hit hard, given how easy it is to generate good enough websites with AI tools. I don't think human potential is best utilised when dealing with CSS complexities. In the long term, I think this is a positive.

However, what I don't like is how little the authors are respected in this process. Everything that the AI generates is based on human labour, but we don't see the authors getting the recognition.

I think it's just as likely that business who have gone all-in on AI are going to be the ones that get burned. When that hose-pipe of free compute gets turned off (as it surely must), then any business that relies on it is going to be left high and dry. It's going to be a massacre.

it is totally valid to NOT play the game - Joshua taught us this way back in the 80's

Totally agree, but I’d state it slightly differently.

This type of business isn’t going to be hit hard by AI; this type of business owner is going to be hit hard by AI.

> Arguing against progress as it is happening is as old as the tech industry. It never works.

I still wondering why I'm not doing my banking in Bitcoins. My blockchain database was replaced by postgres.

So some tech can just be hypeware. The OP has a legitimate standpoint given some technologies track record.

And the doctors are still out on the affects of social media on children or why are some countries banning social media for children?

Not everything that comes out of Silicon Valley is automatically good.

I don't know about you, but I would rather pay some money for a course written thoughtfully by an actual human than waste my time trying to process AI-generated slop, even if it's free. Of course, programming language courses might seem outdated if you can just "fake it til you make it" by asking an LLM everytime you face a problem, but doing that won't actually lead to "making it", i.e. developing a deeper understanding of the programming environment you're working with.

Sure, and it takes five whole paragraphs to have a nuanced opinion on what is very obvious to everyone :-)

>the type of business that's going to be hit hard by AI [...] will be the ones that integrate AI into their business the most

There. Fixed!

> And the type of businesses that survive will be the ones that integrate AI into their business the most successfully.

I am an AI skeptic and until the hype is supplanted by actual tangible value I will prefer products that don't cram AI everywhere it doesn't belong.

AI is not a tool, it is an oracle.

Prompting isn't a skill, and praying that the next prompt finally spits out something decent is not a business strategy.

Rejecting clients based on how you wish the world would be is a strategy that only works when you don’t care about the money or you have so many clients that you can pick and choose.

Running a services business has always been about being able to identify trends and adapt to market demand. Every small business I know has been adapting to trends or trying to stay ahead of them from the start, from retail to product to service businesses.

People who make products with AI are not necessarily rich, often it's solo "vibe coders."

> what happen if the market is right and this is "new normal"?????

Then there's an oversupply of programmers, salaries will crash, and lots of people will have to switch careers. It's happened before.

I haven’t visited StackOverflow for years.

you mixed up "is dead" with "is vital" :-)

buggywhips are having a temporary setback.

I still don’t blame anyone for trying to chart a different course though. It’s truly depressing to have to accept that the only way to make a living in a field is to compromise your principles.

The ideal version of my job would be partnering with all the local businesses around me that I know and love, elevating their online facilities to let all of us thrive. But the money simply isn’t there. Instead their profits and my happiness are funnelled through corporate behemoths. I’ll applaud anyone who is willing to step outside of that.

I was talking to a friend of mine about a related topic when he quipped that he realized he started disliking therapy when he realized they effectively were just teaching him coping strategies for an economic system that is inherently amoral.

> So practically speaking, the options are follow the market or find a different line of work if you don’t like the way the market is going.

You're correct in this, but I think it's worth making the explicit statement that that's also true because we live in a system of amoral resource allocation.

Yes, this is a forum centered on startups, so there's a certain economic bias at play, but on the subject of morality I think there's a fair case to be made that it's reasonable to want to oppose an inherently unjust system and to be frustrated that doing so makes survival difficult.

We shouldn't have to choose between principles and food on the table.

Sometimes companies become irrelevant while following the market, while other companies revolutionize the market by NOT following it.

It's not "swim with the tide or die", it's "float like a corpse down the river, or swim". Which direction you swim in will certainly be a different level of effort, and you can end up as a corpse no matter what, but that doesn't mean the only option you have is to give up.

> it might mean going out of business for ideological reasons

taking a moral stance isn't inherently ideological

> If the market is all AI, and you are a service provider that does not want to work with AI at all then get out of the business.

Maybe they will, and I bet they'll be content doing that. I personally don't work with AI and try my best to not to train it. I left GitHub & Reddit because of this, and not uploading new photos to Instagram. The jury is still out on how I'm gonna share my photography, and not sharing it is on the table, as well.

I may even move to a cathedral model or just stop sharing the software I write with the general world, too.

Nobody has to bend and act against their values and conscience just because others are doing it, and the system is demanding to betray ourselves for its own benefit.

Life is more nuanced than that.

Printing press and copying scribes is a sarcastic comment, but these web designers are still actively working and their industry is 100s of years from the state of those old techs. The joke isn’t funny enough nor is the analogy apt enough to make sense.

> This is effectively no different from a construction company building an office building, or a bakery baking a cake.

A construction company would still be justified to say no based on moral standards. A clearer example would be refusing to build a bridge if you know the blueprints/materials are bad, but you could also make a case for agreeing or not to build a detention center for immigrants. But the bakery example feels even more relevant, seeing as a bakery refusing to bake a cake base on the owner's religious beliefs ended up in the US Supreme Court [1].

I don't fault those who, when forced to choose between their morals and food, choose food. But I generally applaud those that stick to their beliefs at their own expense. Yes, the game is rigged and yes, the system is the problem. But sometimes all one can do is refuse to play.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masterpiece_Cakeshop_v._Colora...

> As a more general commentary, I find this type of moral crusade very interesting, because it's very common in the rich western world, and it's always against the players but rarely against the system. I wish more people in the rich world would channel this discomfort as general disdain for the neoliberal free-market of which we're all victims, not just specifically AI, for example.

I totally agree. I still think opposing AI makes sense in the moment we're in, because it's the biggest, baddest example of the system you're describing. But the AI situation is a symptom of that system in that it's arisen because we already had overconsolidation and undue concentration of wealth. If our economy had been more egalitarian before AI, then even the same scientific/technological developments wouldn't be hitting us the same way now.

That said, I do get the sense from the article that the author is trying to do the right thing overall in this sense too, because they talk about being a small company and are marketing themselves based on good old-fashioned values like "we do a good job".

<< over-focusing on small moral cursades against specific players like this and not the game as a whole

Fucking this. What I tend to see is petty 'my guy good, not my guy bad' approach. All I want is even enforcement of existing rules on everyone. As it stands, to your point, only the least moral ship, because they don't even consider hesitating.

> he’s playing the “principled stand” game on a budget that cannot sustain it, then externalizing the cost like a victim

No. It is the AI companies that are externalizing their costs onto everyone else by stealing the work of others, flooding the zone with garbage, and then weeping about how they'll never survive if there's any regulation or enforcement of copyright law.

Plagiarism is also "another set of tooling." Likewise slavery, and organized crime. Tools can be immoral.

Man, y'all gotta stop copying each other homework.

That's a choice. I can fish where the fish are without having to bait the hook with my soul.

Gary's point is: sell what people are buying. But you think: that's immoral.

What about a functioning market is immoral?

The industry is not really shifting. It's not shifting to anything. It's just that the value is being captured by parasitic companies. They still need people like me to feed them training data while they destroy the economics of producing that data.

These arguments are becoming tropes with little influence. Find better arguments.

You might be right, and I think tech professionals should be expected to use industry terminology correctly.

One person's unethical AI product is another's accessibility tool. Where the line is drawn isn't as obvious as you're implying.

How am I supposed to know what specific niche of AI the author is talking about when they don't elaborate? For all I know they woke up one day in 2023 and that was the first time they realized machine learning existed. Consider my comment a reminder that ethical use of AI has been around of quite some time, will continue to be, and even that much of that will be with LLMs.

Just the opposite where I work. Seniors are best positioned to effectively use AI and are using it enthusiastically.

Nobody that actually understands the market right now would say that

There is absolutely AI slop out there. Many companies rushed to add AI, a glorified chat bot to their existing product, and have marketed it as AI.

There is also absolutely very tasteful products that add value using LLM and other more recent advancements.

Both can exist at the same time.

I understand it as the market wanting more content about competing in an AI world

Pretty sure HN has become completely detached from the market at this point.

Demand for AI anything is incredible high right now. AI providers are constantly bouncing off of capacity limits. AI apps in app stores are pulling incredible download numbers.

Sora's app has a 4.8 rating on the app store with 142K rating. It seems to me that the market does not care about slop or not, whether I like it or not.

The market wants a lot more high quality AI slop and that's going to be the case perpetually for the rest of the time that humanity exists. We are not going back.

The only thing that's going to change is the quality of the slop will get better by the year.

Not parent commenter, but in the US when someone’s employment doesn’t include health insurance it’s commonly because they’re operating as a contractor for that company.

Generally you’re right, though. Working in tech, especially AI companies, would be expected to provide ample money for buying health insurance on your own. I know some people who choose not to buy their own and prefer to self-pay and hope they never need anything serious, which is obviously a risk.

A side note: The US actually does have public health care but eligibility is limited. Over one quarter of US people are on Medicaid and another 20% are on Medicare (program for older people). Private self-pay insurance is also subsidized on a sliding scale based on your income, with subsidies phasing out around $120K annual income for a family of four.

It’s not equivalent to universal public health care but it’s also different than what a lot of people (Americans included) have come to think.

As CTO I wasnt in a big tech company, it was a 50 person digital studio in the south my salary as was 275k at the highest point in my career- so I never made FAANG money

The tech sector in UK/EU is bad, too. And the cost of living in big cities is terrible for the salaries.

They are outsourcing just as much as US Big Tech. And never mind the slow-mo economic collapse of UK, France, and Germany.

Moving to Europe is anything but trivial. Have you looked at y'all's immigration processes recently? It can be a real bear.

Thanks - my wife and I actually have a long term plan to shift to the EU

Applied to quite a few EU jobs via LinkedIn but nothing came of it- I suspected they wanted people already in EU countries

Both of us are US Citizens but we don't want to retire in the US it seems to be becoming a s*hole esp around healthcare

What's the unemployment rate like?

I'm not sure the claim "we can use good devs" is true from the perspective of European corporations. But would love to learn otherwise?

And of course: where in Europe?

It would be worth it mathematically to be unemployed in the US for up to 3-5 years in hopes of landing another US job.

Taking a 75% pay cut for free Healthcare that costs 1k a month anyway doesn't math. Not to mention the higher taxes for this privilege. European senior developers routinely get paid less than US junior developers.

It's unfair to place all the blame on the individual.

By that metric, everyone in the USA is responsible for the atrocities the USA war industry has inflicted all over the world. Everyone pays taxes funding Israel, previously the war in Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, etc.

But no one believes this because sometimes you just have to do what you have to do, and one of those things is pay your taxes.

if the alternative to 'selling out' is making your business unviable and having to beg the internet for handouts(essentially), then yes, you should "sell out" every time.

Selling out is easy when your children have no food.

How many models are only trained on legal[0] data? Adobe's Firefly model is one commercial model I can think of.

[0] I think the data can be licensed, and not just public domain; e.g. if the creators are suitably compensated for their data to be ingested

I too think AI is a bubble, and besides the way this recklessness could crash the US economy, there's many other points of criticism to what and how AI is being developed.

But I also understand this is a design and web development company. They're not refusing contracts to build AI that will take people's jobs, or violate copyright, or be used in weapons. They're refusing product marketing contracts; advertising websites, essentially.

This is similar to a bakery next to the OpenAI offices refusing to bake cakes for them. I'll respect the decision, sure, but it very much is an inconsequential self-inflicted wound. It's more amoral to fully pay your federal taxes if you live in the USA for example, considering a good chunk are ultimately used for war, the CIA, NSA, etc, but nobody judges an average US-resident for paying them.

I think it's more likely that software training as an industry is dead.

I suspect young people are going to flee the industry in droves. Everyone knows corporations are doing everything in their power to replace entry level programmers with AI.

Look at his work? I had a look at the studio portfolio and it's damn solid.

Which describes a gigantic swath of the labor market.

When 99.99% of the customers have garbage as a website, 0.01% will grow much faster and topple the incumbents, nothing changed.

It's also the exact same human beings who were doing the NFT and metaverse bullshit and insisting they were the next best things and had to jump ship to the next "Totally going to change everything" grift because the first two reached the end of their runs.

I wonder what their plan was before LLMs seemed promising?

These techbros got rich off the dotcom boom hype and lax regulation, and have spent 20 years since attempting to force themselves onto the throne, and own everything.

LOL. Some would say it's been beaten out of us too...which makes Americans telling us to be enterprising even funnier.

It probably depends on your circle. I find those beliefs strange, seems like moral relativism.

I personally would call them ignorant beliefs.

"Please don't downvote me for trying to provide a neutral answer to this person's question"

Please note, that there are some accounts downvoting any comment talking about downvoting by principle.

These points are so wide and multi dimensionsal that one must really wonder whether they were looking for reasons for concern.

I'm fairly sure all the first three points are true for each new human produced. The environmental cost vs output is probably significantly higher per human, and the population continues to grow.

My experience with large companies (especially American Tech) is that they always try and deliver the product as cheap as possible, are usually evil and never cared about social impacts. And HN has been steadily complaining about the lowering of quality of search results for at least a decade.

I think your points are probably a fair snapshot of peoples moral issue, but I think they're also fairly weak when you view them in the context of how these types of companies have operated for decades. I suspect people are worried for their jobs and cling to a reasonable sounding morality point so they don't have to admit that.

Really depends what the moral objection is. If it's "no machine may speak my glorious tongue", then there's little to be said; if it's "AI is theft", then you can maybe make an argument about hypothetical models trained on public domain text using solar power and reinforced by willing volunteers; if it's "AI is a bubble and I don't want to defraud investors", then you can indeed argue the object-level facts.

I think some people prefer living in reality

Too much demand, all of a sudden. Money got printed and i went from near bankruptcy in mid-Feb 2020 to being awash with money by mid-June.

And it continued growing nonstop all the way through ~early Sep 2024, and been slowing down ever since, by now coming to an almost complete stop - to the point i ever fired all sales staff because they were treading water with no even calls let alone deals, for half a year before being dismissed in mid-July this year.

I think it won't return - custom dev is done. The myth of "hiring coders to get rich" is over. No surprise it did, because it never worked, sooner or later people had to realise it. I may check again in 2-3 years how market is doing, but i'm not at all hopeful.

Switched into miltech where demand is real.