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One way to look at this is that there's a part of the labor market that competes purely on price-in this case, basically by being the poorest place rich enough to afford fast Internet-and this category is the most vulnerable to technological disruption.
I predict that in the next 10 years software development will survive, but it will become like any other white-collar professional work. No more $200,000 salaries, unlimited vacation, or incredible employee bargaining power.
elevators are the rare part of the economy where Europeans have embraced market dynamism while Americans choose overregulation and labor market rigidity.
Like right now we're endowed with labor that can turn into uh that can turn into income. When that is no longer the case and we are now at the mercy of the of the elected official for like basic needs, right? So that to me feels like a power sharing arrangement that's really dangerous.
They just recently released a report, and I think like you really have to squint to see anything happening. Like basically, if you want to take kind of like uh an an approach across the entire economy and looking at even looking at like software engineering, like the most exposed sort of sectors, there's just like not really anything going on. There might be a little bit of a signal about like junior developers getting jobs less than before, and that but that's like a less than before rather than a level shift.
rather than thinking about individual forecasts like what me and Phil are going to do, rather looking at kind of like basically generating prediction markets, where you get aggregate forecasts, where you get like kind of wisdom of the crowd effects. And kind of the reason that I think this is because we have been famously terrible at forecasting.
In a sense, we're all turning into project managers, right? And and we can have an army of junior programmers called agents that will just spit out reams of code, but someone's got to have the big picture and review all of that. And so, increasingly our craft is going from one of writing the code to one of of reviewing the code and and building the architecture of the code and overseeing the work, if if you will.
Yeah, AI is an amplifier. And if uh if you're young and learning quickly, AI is going to amplify that or can amplify that. So, I I personally think this is this is the golden age of the junior programmer.
As we move from, you know, hey, [clears throat] these companies are selling tokens where they provide the entire uh reasoning chain and all that to uh selling automated, you know, white collar work, right? Automated software engineer, send them the request, they give you the result back and there's a bunch of thinking on the back end that they don't show you. The ability to distill out of American models into Chinese models will be harder.
Everybody thinks our schools are in crisis all the time because they’re being forced to do something they were never meant to do, which is to make everyone college-ready, and they’re being forced to do that because we have seen jobs that provide a living wage without a college diploma evaporate.
I- I can relate that if you very deeply identify that you are a programmer, that it's scary and that it's threatening because what you like and what you're really good at is now being done by a soulless or not entity. But I don't think you're just a programmer. That's a very limiting view of your craft. You are, you are still a builder.
Long lead times and soft costs, fueled by the world-leading US wages for "white collar" work, are the root cause of poor performance in low-volume production because there are few units to spread the soft costs over.
This is a topic that I warned about very publicly in 2025 , where I predicted that AI could displace half of all entry-level white collar jobs in the next 1–5 years, even as it accelerates economic growth and scientific progress.
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