Years of experience don’t correlate to output in all careers. Surgeons and engineers get better over time. This might not be true for all jobs. Meanwhile, management is naturally capped because every manager necessarily needs people to manage under them, so there’ll be 1/N^y managers at the yth level of the org. Unless loyalty ought to be reward for its own sake, it’s not clear why 100% of workers should get promoted indefinitely.
It's not that promotions should be given out indefinitely but I think a pay raise in line with inflation should be the minimum, unless you are under performing. It's funny when a company excitedly shares a pay raise with you are it's below inflation...
Merit raises are typically based on market rates as a baseline. The employees' costs in terms of consumer price inflation are not a factor. If every employer gives out raises in line with inflation that also creates a positive feedback loop which contributes to higher and higher inflation every year (I do understand that's not the only thing which drives inflation rates).
If your wages are falling behind then look for opportunities in higher growth sectors.
As an employee I don’t care about the reasons that inflation exists, I care about getting the same real money over time (only counting inflation raises, not counting merit or other kinds). And citation needed about inflation raises driving inflation, there are much bigger factors that contribute to it.
No one is forcing you to care or to produce any particular level of work. If your job has no growth opportunities and stagnant compensation then you might want to look for other opportunities.
I think the issue here is that you're trying to frame the issue in terms of some sort of concept of fairness. But in reality that has nothing to do with it.
Because people are not perfect incarnations of idealized concepts. Employers are people who exist in society who have concerns beyond the bottom line. That many or well more than most employers have forgotten this fact is at the core of what is wrong with work, corporate America, and capitalism in general.
I always look at inflation when I get a raise. Or if they are skipping raises because of the economy - I compare to inflation. I accept that as a staff level engineer I've reached about the top of what I can make - but I still expect my income to match inflation, and I have left when it doesn't.
There is a dual ladder setup. Where you can have Administrator, Systems Engineer, Sr. Systems Engineer, Lead, Architect, Sr Architect, etc. These will have parallel tracks to equiv. management positions for benefits and perks (bonus levels, etc).
Now obviously you can't have every employee promoted to a Sr. Architect or Fellow, but that is ok be cause not everyone can (or want to) obtain that necessary skill set. A while back I recall seeing a grid with various levels, what management title that would typically mirror, and the skills that would be required for each level.
> Years of experience don’t correlate to output in all careers.
YoE only gives potential, but are not necessarily sufficient in any career. I've interviewed engineers who learned the narrow job they were doing in 6 months, and then only did that for a few years. Do they have 6 months of experience or 3 years? I'd argue closer to 6 months unless they were doing more. I imagine surgeons are similar, where I'd rather see X number of successful surgeries performed than YoE.
This issue with YoE is also why I'm bothered when HR uses YoE too heavily to base salaries around.
This is not how people use LLMs. If you ask one of these questions you’d get a longer answer, often grounded on the internet. I speculate that conditional on a smart human operator interpreting the results, such interpretations across vendors converge more often than this report makes it seem.
It’s completely wild to me that lifelong programmers come into contact with agentic coding and come to the conclusion that their jobs are safe for one reason or another. AI will definitely be able to write entire software, inclusive of figuring out requirements and asking the right questions. It’s not that far already. Why is it that everyone looks at weaknesses of a technology that didn’t exist a couple years ago instead of appreciating the incredible rate of improvement? I know why, because it’s inconvenient to the narrative of what makes us valuable. But still, our job is to turn ideas into a sequence of logical steps. Why can’t we do the same when forecasting the impact of AI on our jobs?
Because the "rate of improvement" is only astonishing in well understood areas and really only astonishing if you yourself are not that great at what you do.
Speaking for myself here, my job is extremely safe given that my boss doesn't wanna sit there and prompt AI all day and i work in a fun little 4 person company. We already have plans for the 3 next years which involve me :-)
Because the "rate of improvement" is only astonishing in well understood areas and really only astonishing if you yourself are not that great at what you do.
This is a bold vague claim many on HN make, but never put back-of-napkin numbers on. e.g. do you think agentic Opus 4.7/GPT 5.5 are 95th percentile coders but you're 98th percentile? Or are you saying you're a middle-of-the-road 60th percentile coder and AI is 20th percentile so only 20% worst programmers should worry? Let's be specific about the claim being made.
Do you have examples of (almost) entire software written by AI?
AI excels at make toy versions of software, prototypes and skeletons.
The closest things to fully functioning software created by AI that exists are all done by people that are experts in that particular field, ie software engineers.
First, define what you mean by "entirely written by AI."
If you mean a human has to provide the initial impetus or spec, then no, there is no software in the world entirely written by AI.
If you mean a human provides the impetus or spec and an AI takes care of the rest, this is happening. But it is expensive so this is only really happening at FAANGs and whatnot.
First, you might want to say why you think so, otherwise this is just borderline spam. Secondly, when your praise things (without motivation or reasoning even), and you've contributed to that specific thing, please say that up front instead of just praising the thing, again it makes it look like spam otherwise.
I feel like they're quite open about why they think the benchmark doesn't work anymore:
> We also found evidence that models that have seen the problems during training are more likely to succeed, because they have additional information needed to pass the underspecified tests.
> This means that improvements on SWE-bench Verified no longer reflect meaningful improvements in models’ real-world software development abilities. Instead, they increasingly reflect how much the model was exposed to the benchmark at training time.
That paper focuses on breaking the harness, the same hack applies to all tasks. Here we are breaking tasks individually. If these were put on a different, more secure harness, most of the exploits would still work.
This is nonsense. I’m sorry. AI will completely upend the workplace and the economy. Whether that’s self evident today in the numbers in the way that we track those numbers, which is based on how things have historically worked, is not relevant. First principles thinking is enough.
C’mon. Stop wishing for a future that feels convenient. This is not the world in which we live. Everything will change. Let’s help people accept and react to that.Let’s stop with the comfort talking and false hope.
> C’mon. Stop wishing for a future that feels convenient. This is not the world in which we live. Everything will change. Let’s help people accept and react to that.Let’s stop with the comfort talking and false hope.
This is honestly how I feel about the opposite, it sure would be convenient for capital holders if everything changed and they no longer need to pay employees. They really, really want this to be true, and are pushing it as hard as they can despite reality.
reply