SE is a good example - I get a lot of help from LLM tools and I think we're learning how to use them better across realistic SDLC processes as well, but we're not replacing lots of people at the moment. On the other hand I saw a business case from one of the big SI's (not my employer but in a deck that was shown by the SI in an discussion) that described the need to move their Indian software dev workforce from 350k FTE to 50K FTE over the next five years.
I think that the onshore impacts will be much lower or negligible, or possibly even positive, because so much work has been offshored already, and as is well worn in every discussion, Jevons paradox may drive up demand significantly (to be fair I believe this as wherever I have worked we've had 3x+ demand (with business cases) for development projects and had to arbitrarily cull 2x of it at the beginning of each year. So, just like the 30 people in India that are working on my project won't do anything useful unless we feed the work to them, the LLM's won't do anything useful either. And just like we have to send lots of work back to India because it's not right, the same is true of LLM's. The difference is that I won't spend 4 hrs on a friday afternoon on Teams discussing it.
But this is not surprising because we've had big impacts from tools like IDE's, VM's, and compilers which have driven seismic changes in our profession, I think that LLM's are just another one of those.
What I'm watching for is an impact in a non tech domain like healthcare or social care. These are important domains that are overwhelmed with demand and riddled with makework, yet so far LLM's have made very little impact. At least, I am not seeing health insurance rates being cut, hospital waiting lists fall or money and staff being redeployed from back office functions to front line functions.
I think that the onshore impacts will be much lower or negligible, or possibly even positive, because so much work has been offshored already, and as is well worn in every discussion, Jevons paradox may drive up demand significantly (to be fair I believe this as wherever I have worked we've had 3x+ demand (with business cases) for development projects and had to arbitrarily cull 2x of it at the beginning of each year. So, just like the 30 people in India that are working on my project won't do anything useful unless we feed the work to them, the LLM's won't do anything useful either. And just like we have to send lots of work back to India because it's not right, the same is true of LLM's. The difference is that I won't spend 4 hrs on a friday afternoon on Teams discussing it.
But this is not surprising because we've had big impacts from tools like IDE's, VM's, and compilers which have driven seismic changes in our profession, I think that LLM's are just another one of those.
What I'm watching for is an impact in a non tech domain like healthcare or social care. These are important domains that are overwhelmed with demand and riddled with makework, yet so far LLM's have made very little impact. At least, I am not seeing health insurance rates being cut, hospital waiting lists fall or money and staff being redeployed from back office functions to front line functions.
Why hasn't this started?