Ground truth:
An old system ready for “retirement” still needs maintenance because its fielded in high value roles. A couple of guys about 70 years old, one of which suffered damage to his executive and short term memory function, and the other just re-entering into the system he helped build >30 years ago, just out performed a substantial team of younger guys* by about a factor of 10.
Part of this is due to experience but the other part is a very recent discontinuity in LLM code assistance that made even $30/month coding assistance a superpower.
Here’s the real market gap:
Brownfield (ie: old systems that must be modified and no one likes doing that kind of work – especially not our young Desi betters who have better things to do like be given a Greenfield mandate by centralized pots of gold like Musk) software has enormous value in production and Brownfield organizations are still thinking that they’re being cutting edge by introducing the stuff from Satya et al.
I’m not in a very good position to monetize this myself because our older Desi betters are occupying the positions in Brownfield projects that determine who gets money.
* I should probably clarify that even the younger guys in Brownfield organizations aren’t prepared to be dragged kicking and screaming into an order of magnitude productivity gain – especially not given they are frequently under the command of the aforementioned elders among our Desi betters who may not be prepared to do anything but “Buy IBM” as the old adage went.
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The hypersonic shockwave reflections off a brownfield development bring up an interesting monetization potentials:
- Fixed price software contracts negotiated under brownfield software cost assumptions.
- Growing from #1 to a startup company bringing brownfield software departments to graduate from mere “Agile” to “AIgile” software development.
#2 is an interesting confluence of a rather overloaed term “Agile” that really originated with Joe Justice (a genuine genius) in the WikiSpeed project to create and manufacture a 100mpg “roadster” maintaining compliance with Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards. (Which is why Musk gig-hired him as a consultant recently – which didn’t last a very long time for some reason.)
The advantage of #1 is there is a lot of low-hanging fruit that is going to get harvested very quickly as #2 demand emerges from #1.
I know fixed price contracts are rather difficult to negotiate due to the work going into acceptance criteria as well as specs, but most of that difficulty is due to the fact that the contractee has to spend a lot of resources up front without even a guarantee that the contract will be signed.
A lot of young-to-middle aged white men were admitted to the fringes of the software development profession early on only to be pressured into government dependence by the Desi invasion powered by DEI and unbridled ethnic nepotism. The pressure on them to silently turn away from “the economy” and indeed from “society” is immense. This is a latent resource that may be brought to bear if their white-maleness can be hidden, from the World Reserve Currency trickledown brownfield culture, behind an impersonal corporate facade that delivers product by riding the hypersonic shockwave. Those who can act as middlemen between that culture and such crypto-“economic man” corporate facades can make an enormous amount of money. There’s a LOT to go around here.
Who are they?
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Another way to make boatloads of money riding the shockwave:
Remember the junk bond leveraged buyouts of the 1980s that fired boatloads of people for profit?
The legitimate business function of those buyouts was the separate concerns of delivery of social goods from the profit motive. We’re now seeing that in spades with the de-employment of the software profession’s often importation of H-1bs “seeking a better rent” by elbowing out of the way the relatively unsophisticated Western rent-seekers. Many of the upper caste H-1bs are now in executive positions if not stock holding positions that are at the top of the “food chain” so to speak. So they’ll be tempted to go along with the purge of their lower caste minions that are basically there to eat the lunch of the white men that were relegated to the junk heap by the “improved breed” of rent seekers.
But when I say “tempted” I am also saying they have a conflict of ethnic interest which does not exist in those that have been thrown under the bus. To the extent that the bus-thrown were not utterly crushed they may be VERY motivated to aid in the purging of the lower caste Desis from brownfield corporate feeding toughs. Of course, this still leaves the young people who recently graduated in CS that are shell-shocked by what happened to them. They might still be useful in this ruthless capitalistic house cleaning given the current state of coding assistants despite the recent advances. For example, quite a bit of my interaction with these things are still of the “common sense” variety that could be carried out by an intelligent inexperienced young person trained in the basics of software engineering.
Bottom line:
The separation* of concerns between delivery of social goods and capitalism’s utility function could be accomplished by a non-profit corporation that dedicated its enormous internal-profits to the cause of public education regarding macrosocial dynamics so people aren’t flying completely blind in the clear air turbuence hypersonic shock waves.
* This may sound not like separation at all but rather unification but the point is to make clear the nature of ethics in power politics. One is, of necessity, required to engage in “unethical” behavior when in “the real world” so what is an ethical person to do? Typically this takes the form of philanthropic donations by wealthy individuals because, after all, they are in a much better position to decide how to deliver social goods than some faceless bureaucrat in the public sector making “needs assessment”. So the idea is that a bunch of people will engage in absolutely ruthless greed as permitted by law and then turn around and use that wealth to correct the incentives underwhich they operated to be more humane. Unfortunately, what actually happens in the vast majority of cases: Set up NGOs to hire the entourage to hand out the wealth to whatever parasites are best at reality distortion. End result? Ford Foundation executives joke about Ford spinning in his grave. Channeling the money into an objective criterion for award that can’t be easily subverted is the way to resolve this “human in the loop” wireheading problem.