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Tech's Dumbest Mistake: Why Firing Programmers for AI Will Destroy Everything
(defragzone.substack.com)
this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2025
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Technology
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Sure but they’re not going to fire all of them. They’re going to fire 90% then make 10% put out the fires and patch the leaks while working twice as many hours for less pay.
The company will gradually get worse and worse until bankrupt or sold and the c-suite bails with their golden parachutes.
This is a bad analogy.
It would be more akin to firing your fire departments, because you installed automatic hoses in front of everyone’s homes. When a fire starts, the hoses will squirt water towards the fire, but sometimes it’ll miss, sometimes it’ll squirt backwards, sometimes it’ll squirt the neighbour’s house, and sometimes it’ll squirt the fire.
I don't know. I look at it like firing all your construction contractors after built out all your stores in a city. You might need some construction trades to maintain your stores and your might need to relocate a store every once in a while, but you don't need the same construction staff on had as you did with the initial build out.
Software engineer here. You’re completely wrong. The amount of work it takes to maintain and extend functionality to existing software is even bigger than the original cost of building it.
Get some time understanding how software teams work and you’ll understand. There’s a reason C Suites are hoping AI generated code can replace developers. They can’t hire enough of them.
Is there really a need to extend functionality like there was 10 years ago?
Yes. That’s at least half of the work I do on a daily basis. How else do companies in the same market compete with each other if they cannot add on to functionality and remain static? That’s a quick way to lose market share to your competition.
We're at a point of effective monopoly and vastly increased costs of creating competition.
The spigot of free money has been turned off, so most projects today need to have a planned out ROI, which is why enshitification has become such a big thing recently. Improvement for competition sake is out the door unless the incumbent is weak or a jump is needed as the existing revenue stream is collapsing.
What are you going on about?
I don’t work in a space with a monopoly.
My employer doesn’t have free money. They compete in a huge market and earn money while doing so.
Not every company has the business model you described. The world would not run if that was the case.
Yeah, but a lot of the discussion has been about those companies given how well they pay and how dominant they are in the industry.
In my experience, you actually need more people to maintain and extend existing software compared to the initial build out.
Usually because of scalability concerns, increasing complexity of the system and technical debt coming due.
Most extension today is enshitification. We've also seen major platforms scale to the size of Earth.
If you're only going to maintain and don't have a plan on adding features outside of duct taping AI to the software, what use is it maintaining a dev team at the size you needed it to be when creating new code?
While true, that is a weak analogy. Software rots and needs constant attention of competent people or shit stacks.
I'm not saying you can fire everyone, but the maintenance team doesn't need to be the size of the development team if the goal is to only maintain features.
It works for a while. Keep a few seniors and everything will be fine. Then you want new features and that's when shit hits the fan. Want me to add a few buttons? 1 month because I have to study all the random shit that was generated last week.
Twitter and Tumblr are operating on skeleton crews but are able to make changes.
Craigslist is still around even though it hasn't changed much since the '90's.
There is an entire industry of companies that buy old MMO'S and maintain them at a low cost for a few remaining players.
Southwest Airlines still runs ticketing on a Windows 95 server.
I think you'll see more companies accept managed decline as a business strategy.
It's funny you use southwest as an example in this. I flew with them for the first time this year and it was easily the worst technical experience from an IT perspective that I have ever had. Sure I got from point A to point B, but everything involved with buying the ticket, getting through security, tracking my flight, boarding time, etc was worse than every other flight I've been on. The app was awful and basic features like delay notifications or pulling up the digital ticket made an already expensive as hell experience way more stressful. Windows 95 isn't keeping up
But no one is flying Southwest for a best in class experience. It doesn't have to be a great system to use, just a system that does the bare minimum.
Twitter, Tumblr, Craigslist: those web sites are feature complete and require low maintenance.
Southwest Airlines: good for them, but if the servers have issues, they will lose billions while trying frantically to find the retired guy who maintained that monster.