Milky Eggs » Weblog Archive » Programmer salaries within the age of LLMs
Programmer salaries in the age of LLMs
What occurs to the distribution of programmer salaries within the age of LLMs? I argue they may separate bimodally, very like what occurred to attorneys’ salaries within the Nineties as a result of rise of the Web.
Dan Luu has previously written about attorneys’ salaries. I’ll paste some graphs from his article. First, attorneys in 1991:
Subsequent, attorneys in 2000:
What occurred? Effectively, for those who’re an elite lawyer within the fashionable age, you in all probability command a big group of lower-tier attorneys, low-cost paralegals, and so forth, who’re superb at utilizing the Web to lookup case legislation and draft your opinions and so forth. In distinction, for those who’re an elite lawyer within the 12 months 1990, it’s way more priceless for you particularly to have an encyclopedic information of all of the related case legislation, and it’s a lot tougher so that you can delegate modular items of labor off to much less competent folks.
Certainly Cowen makes an identical level about attorneys in Who gains and loses from the new AI? the place he writes:
The returns to factual information are falling, persevering with a pattern that began with databases, search engines like google and yahoo and Wikipedia. It’s now not so worthwhile to be a lawyer who is aware of a considerable amount of accrued case legislation. As an alternative, the talents of synthesis and persuasion are extra important for achievement.
I declare that the pattern which AI/ML continues for attorneys is one which it begins for programmers. Identical to how a associate at Cravath seemingly sketches an overview of how they need to strategy a selected case and swarms of largely replaceable attorneys fill within the particulars, we’re maybe converging to a future the place a FAANG L7 can simply sketch out architectural particulars and the programmer equal of paralegals will merely question the most recent LLM and clear up the output. Be aware that querying LLMs and making the outputted code conform to specs might be so much simpler than writing the code your self ー and different LLMs can even enable you to repair up the code and combine the completely different modules collectively!
Extra usually, the farther such applied sciences advance, the extra present technical professions will bear a form of “paralegalization” and bifurcation of the expertise distribution.
Considerably-above-average programmers (together with myself) had a good run of it, however it might be over for us earlier than too lengthy.