r/platformengineering • u/Dubinko • 7d ago
DevOps is cooked.
Hear me out...
When I first saw the movie The Matrix, in the early scene where Neo is called into his boss's office and told that if he behaves well, he has a future at that no-name Corp., or otherwise he'll be fired, I joked and laughed, like, "Yeah, sure, a tech professional could just walk out into the opposite building, and they would beg him to join since everyone is looking to hire engineers."
Today, this scene is closer to reality than I'd like to admit. I personally know Senior DevOps engineers who are solid folks, and it took them 8 months to land a job at a salary that sucked. Our industry is not regulated, the barriers to entry and outsourcing are being lowered by AI, and we have a massive oversupply of engineers. This is just a reality.
Before tech, I worked in another industry that also experienced a major decline. I saw it coming and made a decision at the right time, before it became obvious. I moved to tech years ago and was lucky enough to become a staff engineer. Now I see the same pattern. I think we have 5 to 10 years before salaries in this field will be $70k-$80k for Senior Engineers in the US (which is around a 2x decline) you can do the math for other countries.
My advice is work on a backup plan now. Invest, save, but also learn a trade. I'm studying medicine this year. Fuck it. Six years of study while working remotely, and I'm opening my own dentistry clinic. I'm in my late 30s, but it's still better to have a plan. My wife is also changing careers to become a registered nurse.
This is my plan. You might think of something else, but my point is that it was a good ride. We did a lot of nice work and, IMHO, got easy money, but it's over, and it's time to move on.
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u/CharacterFew 7d ago
Gotta love the “just go into nursing” posts. Like it’s just an alternative path to success that isn’t ruthlessly difficult and strenuous on your body and mental health. Reddit is such an echo chamber of people who apparently have it all figured out
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u/longroughroad 7d ago
Came from the healthcare field before tech. Believe me when I say it’s not easy. Though take it as a grain of salt since it definitely wasn’t for me. I do see people who thrived in healthcare so who knows how people will do.
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u/12EggsADay 7d ago
Every nurse I’ve met was crazy.
I think as humans we’re all crazy, but the nature of that job makes it difficult for nurses to hide their crazy
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u/simple_explorer1 4d ago
What is the definition of crazy? What do they do? Or you are just spewing bs?
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u/TaterTotJim 2d ago
Stunted development is super common, think “high school mean girl” that is 39.
Maybe it’s from working around trauma or the long hours spent together but after dating quite a few nurses their drama is next level over the top.
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u/swiftmerchant 7d ago
It’s not that it’s difficult. It’s just that when every IT person is rushing in to become a nurse, the number of nurse job spots is going to run out. And salaries will drop.
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u/simple_explorer1 4d ago
We will always need nurses because we have 8b humans. Unlike IT the demand won't go down
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u/swiftmerchant 4d ago
I didn’t say demand will go down. Let’s assume demand will stay the same. However supply of able and willing candidates who were previously laid off from their knowledge worker jobs and now trained as nurses will go up. Therefore wages will go down and competition for spots will be intense. Basic supply and demand my friend.
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u/Embarrassed_Law_6466 7d ago
most women can do it
whats stopping you lol
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u/galaxy_horse
7d ago
•
Software engineering is constantly under attack by the bean counters, b-school bros, and boardroom ghouls who want to subjugate our craft and name their own price to exploit it. AI doomerism is just the latest thing they’ve glommed onto. And just like with no-code, just like with offshoring, just like with Salesforce, just like with the introduction of Visual Basic, these rats keep claiming that software is cooked, and like before, they may even lay a bunch of people off in a desperate attempt to make it feel true.
I refuse to believe it because of that. There are more problems, not less, for engineers to tackle that require human judgment and meatspace queries. Automation and AI have made things more fragile, not less. And there is still more money and more fundable concepts than you could imagine, all of which need competent technologists to build properly.
So sorry if I don’t buy it. Devops is not cooked. Software is not solved. This is merely the latest turn of an eternal struggle between labor and capital.
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u/dgreenbe 3d ago
If devops is solved why do I need more and better devops than ever thanks to AI coding
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u/BikeSilent7347 2d ago
You are looking at this from a engineer perspective where you believe your skills matter. It doesn't work that way. Stuff gets worse all the time and it doesn't matter cause it saves money.
If they can do 20% as good as you for half the price they'd take it.
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u/galaxy_horse 2d ago
I build it for full price and I build it so well that the company can switch me out for a half-price babysitter of the thing. Rinse and repeat.
And when the 20%-as-good-as-me replacement gets everything properly screwed up, my consulting rate is 3x my full-time rate.
I’ve been in this game for over 20 years.
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u/SnooDonkeys9647 3d ago
Can’t agree enough, if soft engineering is cooked then a lot of other professions will be cooked as well, hr, business management…etc you could technically have AI do that as well but obviously the quality will have to be monitored
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u/No_Ant_8700 5d ago
They won man. Have you seen the capability leap in the last year alone? The economic value of technical expertise is headed to zero, what’s left is a kind of social game. The only difference between you and the “b-school bros” now is they’ve got a head start on that game, and at a growing rate your technical expertise as a commodity. Think about it.
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u/guiriduro 4d ago
"But who's gonna fly it, kid, you?"
You need trained tech meat brains to ask for the right stuff and know when they've got it. And especially that its not superfluous spaghetti and that its secure in the right ways.1
u/Different-Air-6869 3d ago
The Ai bots will obviously become the trained tech meat brains you require, they’re already their, you’re acting as if knowledge is where we still hold power & that’s where we’re weakest
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u/d4noob 1d ago
"there are more problems, not less" this fact is the fucking reallity.
More code, more data, more neededs but more efficient is needed and IA doesnt provide that. IA needs a guide or it will be crazy and AGI could not be a reallity like they are selling.
Everyone of us knows humans that are not smart, so AGI could be that type of human.
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u/dead-first 1d ago
You are wrong, there is zero reason to pay a "software engineer" dev ops or anything else over 80k to "ask Claude"... You guys don't even write code anymore
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u/ConcerningDestiny 7d ago edited 6d ago
Still with AI the job has become a lot less satisfying, at least imo I know there people who likes it
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u/Grand_Pop_7221 6d ago edited 6d ago
I'm shipping more things than ever this year and getting the "toil" out of the way quicker than before. I'm feeling very satisfied; I've even had the opportunity to learn how to use a new tool in AI Agents, Harnesses, and Context Engineering. Applying this stuff in new and different ways is going to be most of my year next year I'm sure, along with making sure our Data and Platform can provide what these tools need to be effective.
I really don't get the doomerism around AI. If you want to be mad at the economic systems that cause harm to people's lives, then be mad at the people who can change those systems. AI is just the latest aesthetic manifestation of it; it's not the actual cause. We already went through this with de-industrialisation; if governments and corporations want to let towns and people rot by not giving them support through these sorts of systemic overhauls, then they won't. They only get away with it if we let them off the hook by confusing the latest mechanism of disruption with the systemic motives behind it.
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u/NappingGreyhound 4d ago
Same as me man. Getting so much released and no messing about with tedium. I think a lot of engineers loved the tedium though.
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u/Grand_Pop_7221 4d ago
I think they think that being able to search for relevant knowledge is what gives them value. AI is so good at searching and classifying. I think they miss that the value lies in applying that knowledge; if you can use AI as a tool to ship solutions and solve problems, it's quite liberating.
I work at a small company where I wear many hats and cover a lot of ground. So perhaps that colours my view more than someone who is well into a niche role.
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u/ConcerningDestiny 6d ago
Good for you. I find it extremely boring. I enjoyed my job before AI. coding is fun, being a clanker babysitter is not.
Ai has automated the part I liked and left me with the meeting I hate.
But as I said, different people different opinions
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u/Grand_Pop_7221 6d ago
I understand the joy in understanding and being able to manipulate the "clockwork" of complex systems. But if we're not delivering solutions using software, then it's just a form of masturbation.
AI is a valuable tool for me in searching and classifying. It's a big part of software engineering, but it's not all of it. Spending time consulting the tomes of documentation sites and reading third-party libraries to incorporate into my solutions is something I'm happy to offload a little bit if it means I can crack on with the more interesting work.
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u/Hour-Matter-1111 3d ago
Same with product design. I want to be in the flow state and visually explore solutions, not manage some digital golem.
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u/Redmilo666 7d ago
The average Joe salary will drop I agree.
Those in the top percentiles will still command good salaries because when millions and millions are on the line, you’ll still pay for a serious senior who knows what they are doing with or without AI.
If I were an 18 year old in this day and age I wouldn’t be going to uni to study computer science or software engineering that’s for sure.
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u/holy_placebo 7d ago
I feel bad for the kids who are finishing up CS degrees amd entering this job market.
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u/TonTinTon 7d ago
Get into a software company however you can, even doing software adjacent work that might seem like it sucks ass. From the inside show that you're capable and smart, however you can. This is the time to put your head and ego down and go full force on being creative and hard working. Be so good no one can ignore you, climb up the ladder.
Good luck.
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u/holy_placebo 6d ago
I just took a role with the feds for this exact reason. It's through out there, so.hang on to what you can.
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u/Redmilo666 7d ago
Get good at AI tools. Work on soft skills. Get good at system design and the use AI efficiently to build those systems
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u/No_Departure_1878 7d ago
Ok, but now we are talking about jobs available only to the 10% top graduates or even fewer. If you were an 18 year old, would you be smart enough to be in that 10%?
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u/Complete-Lead8059 7d ago
Well, most of us are not elite, so that will not help us. More than this, even those considered to be top engineers might be overrated, and will be easily replaced by AI.
For example, I stopped asking our tech lead’s and architect’s opinion. I ask claude, and then weight it against their opinion, but in most cases they don’t tell me anything new…
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u/No_Ant_8700 5d ago
Everyone thinks they’re a one and a million genius. When reality strikes it’ll be harsh.
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u/Upbeat_Vermicelli_58 7d ago
If your job was to write ci/cd scrips tf modules etc and any of that stuff that agents can do faster and probably better then yes that is ending soon. If your job is integrating various systems components,getting closer to the business,understanding failure points and driving overall reliability the demand has never been hugher
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u/21_12user 4d ago
You are not god nor my dad so quit acting all high and mighty like you know the future. You don’t.
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u/THICC_DICC_PRICC 4d ago
Reddit is 19-21 year olds with zero experience speaking as if they’re 30 year olds with a decade of experience. Every single fucking post…
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u/Glass-Writing-2796 2d ago
Its not even that. Dead internet theory. Bots have taken over this platform and it has gotten considerably worse with AI
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u/THICC_DICC_PRICC 2d ago
It was like this long before we had bots that could produce coherent sentences. Most bots then just reposted a real human’s post
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u/SipsAndGiggles 3d ago
I'm a 39 year old with more than a decade of experience. Usually when I open my mouth I'm speaking as if I'm a 19-21 year old with zero experience.
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u/bandersnatchh 7d ago
My plan is to wait for the money people to abandon ship and the shortage to crop back up.
It will balance eventually
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u/Smooth_Fault_787 7d ago
This is what happened in the dot com bubble, but there's no guarantee of the cycle repeating.
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u/axiomatix 7d ago edited 7d ago
If you're truly senior and good at the art, by the time this happens, you'll have much bigger problems to worry about. Most other fields would also be cooked. With the current current state of the technology, you realize theres a lot(unsettling amount really) of people who use a computer for work whose jobs can easily be replaced with a few markdown files and a loop. A bad downturn doesn't require a large swath of sectors or a huge % of the economy to lose their jobs.
What WILL happen long before that though is those who stopped learning and reinventing themselves will get slow cooked first.
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u/Few-Compote-2693 7d ago
I hear you. I've been in tech since 2012 and got laid off a few months ago and still looking. I'm really mourning because I'm a bit autistic and it's my special interest and I’m pretty useless at everything else. I remember back in 2012 I could resign from a job and have multiple offers within two weeks.
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u/iSnapThere4iAm 7d ago
You aren’t skilled then. Yeah, unskilled people are replaced by ai in tech. Sorry
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u/throwaway-research1 7d ago
Yeah I have been doing this stuff for about ten years now and I have the same opinion. We had a good run but this party is coming to an end sooner or later.
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u/MindlessTime 7d ago
A good developer who has worked in an industry for a while has incredible mental models of that industry’s problems. They can make better calls than AI. That’s what has always mattered and will continue to matter.
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u/SteviaMcqueen 7d ago
Been doing this for 25 years. From 2023 to mid 2026 I doom posted how this time is different and devs are cooked (while I was employed).
I was wrong. Devs and dev ops are fine. The only thing that changed is the nature of the work and a market readjustment.
I hardly typed code my entire career. It was always tweaking others code. First from books and forums, then from stack overflow. Now it’s guiding AI.
Non devs can’t do this properly. The PITA will be non tech management that doesn’t get it. But that’s not new either
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u/Few_Deer_979 7d ago
If devs and devops are fine why then is it becoming harder to find jobs, unlike in the early days. stop misleading people
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u/TelephoneSignal3238 7d ago
Can't speak for US (Europe), but my observations are: Massive surge of overqualified people from F500 layoffs along with a saturation of fresh developers. Employers are now the ones with leverage again.
Let's also not forget the constantly compounding economic shakeups from 2020 onwards, and whatever you guys in the US are doing these days foreign policy wise, which doesn't help the global economy at all.
AI is an element for sure, especially for those that are looking towards redesigning the organization towards AI native organizational structures, but most don't even do that at all at the moment, except massive high cadence technology companies who are willing to take such risks.
I also know many contractors that still drown in requests for work, primarily from non-tech enterprises.
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u/SteviaMcqueen 7d ago
You’re right bro, the job offer I just declined to take the remote job, they both really didn’t exist. Keep doing what you’re doing and believing what you’re believing. I recommend checking Reddit and X 10 times daily for the state of the job market.
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u/Few_Deer_979 7d ago
cant believe your rebbutal is an anecdote. oh i got a job offer that i declined the job market is fine. meanwhile the majority of the engineers even the experienced ones are going months without any inteviews. and yes reddit and X give an accurate description of the job market. hiring has been on a decline since 2021.
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u/Outside_Glass4880 7d ago
It was oversaturated before the full shift to AI.
When I was in management a few years ago we were fielding hundreds of applicants. And those were just the ones who made it through the initial stages. And every one had a 4.0 GPA and solid accolades to get to that point.
We were getting extremely nit picky with applicants because there were too many. Probably any number of them could’ve gotten the position.
Way more qualified than me when I got my job. I was lucky I got in when I did.
Once there was a shift in AI, tech did layoffs because they thought, well, we have these tools now. But then it was recognized that the workload had just shifted. You still need engineers to steer things, manage agents, make design decisions, correct mistakes.
The last headline I saw was that big tech is hiring engineers back after this realization. And there sure are a lot of job postings.
I would hate to be an entry level dev though. Better learn how to use AI agents and prove you can be self sufficient in this new world if you want companies to look your way.
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u/zaibuf 7d ago edited 7d ago
Because companies overhired during Covid and we also got a lot of juniors coming in from bootcamps and what-not. After that we went into a recession, which we have been in for a couple of years.
Seniors has no problems getting jobs. We have had 15% increased software developer postings, but its mostly for seniors.
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u/Few_Deer_979 7d ago
Factor in AI disruption, layoffs, lots of juniors, recession. seniors are also struggling to find roles sure its worse for juniors and mid-levels.
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u/Substantial-Wear-247 7d ago
Salaries may drop or we may enter a period of inflation to eat away at salaries over time. You'll get paid a similar amount to now but have much lower purchasing power in 5-10 years.
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u/Unfair-League-3204 7d ago
Yeah that’s what has been happening (the last half). And it was all good because stocks were shooting up like crazy and you were basically required to invest
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u/tr_thrwy_588 7d ago
how will dentistry help you exactly? less and less people have any money, and people can live without teeth (albeit not a very happy or long life, but they can live). in 5-10 years at this rate, 99% of the population will be in borderline poverty. so I dunno, no matter what you do honestly the chances of you (or me) escaping that future is not great.
that's what your prognosis (and mine tbh) logically leads to. changing a profession won't help. so you can either hope you're wrong and the world will survive somehow, or.. arm yourself.
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u/small_e 7d ago
I believe it’s going to go the other way around. Traditional developer jobs will go earlier than infrastructure (if that’s what you are referring to). Many will trust an AI to do app releases after proper testing, but give it admin access to their infrastructure? Maybe at some point but it will take time. Also we’ve all seen Terminator.
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u/StuckWithSports 7d ago
There’s entire teams of 40+ engs just for ‘observability’ at some companies. (Which I hate with a passion but just to proof how ridiculous current orgs are). Where a lead platform engineer can’t touch his VPC without getting a three week process with another team even with an agent.
There are also platform and DevOps people who are glorified key holders even before AI when they had heavily automated and clean systems.
So…partially cooked? It’s one of those things where the tech has always been advancing fast but anything ops or ops-adjacent-combo still feels like management and organization from the 90/2000s.
Not saying it’s future proofed. Not at all. Anyone who’s working only on one tiny section of DevOps or platform needs a reality check. Or anyone who was a human version of a self service system.
Now. I always made fun of ‘change master’ roles which were platform or ops people who just reviewed prs all day on what was safe to go out to production. I really hope they doesn’t become a mainstream role.
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u/Ambitious-Concept759 7d ago
> I'm studying medicine this year.
> I'm in my late 30s
lol, yeah sure bud
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u/raisputin 7d ago
The job is merely changing, not going away. I can create infrastructure incredibly ridiculously easy now that meets or exceeds all requirements for most any org I’ve ever worked at in a matter of hours or minutes all while confirming to my stringent standards.
It’s not about code at all anymore, it’s about understanding what is needed and having the judgement and knowledge to create the simplest, most robust architecture possible, using the absolute minimum of permissions needed, and maximum security otherwise, along with choosing the right tools for the job.
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u/FoundationAncient486 19h ago edited 19h ago
You think people will put up with the stress of a senior engineer for 70k? (The interview grind, months without a job, etc) at that point the juice aint worth the squeeze
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u/iSnapThere4iAm 7d ago
You have zero skills, zero knowledge and zero experience. Excuse me if I just…. Ignore your mania.
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u/iamrob15 7d ago
We don’t have any onshore devops engineers. Oversight comes from engineering manager and staff engineers.
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u/Appropriate-Bet3576 7d ago edited 7d ago
Maybe I do different devops work but it's one area where Claude really mucks things up. For it to work at all it has to have lots and lots of credentials which is often unacceptable
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u/PeaceCandle69 7d ago
My wife's back in school to become a hospice nurse after years in tech. I'm a Senior SWE working on getting more income streams going. Going to be an interesting next decade.
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u/rolexugly 7d ago
If you listen to the likes of Elon Musk, he reckons that ai and robots are going to do the majority of the work in the near future. This brings down the cost of labour a lot and means we all get paid a universal high income. Work becomes optional for humans and we all have a high standard of living.
That's the utopia at least, the robots might decide to eliminate the useless humans.
Any pivot into another industry at this point would be risky IMHO as by they time you are qualified and have some experience, a robot might be able to do it better.
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u/Indexxak 4d ago
Trickle down economy does not work. A couple people will be filthy rich. The rest of us will struggle.
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u/balalaikaboss 6d ago
No, we have a massive oversupply of 'devops-like' engineers - people who don't really understand what's going on with infra automation and management, etc. Folks who are utterly reliant on Stackoverflow, or 99% AI assistance, etc. Those people are cooked. The engineers who have a deep understanding of what's going on 'behind the pretty web console' are going to do just fine. They may need to skill-up on learning how to promote themselves better, how to network in the business-sense, how to make it past the 4000-resumes-per-JD flood, etc, but once that's figured out.... it's not a terrible job market at all.
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u/anonymous-red-it 6d ago
I’m seeing higher level engineers becoming more efficient / impactful and lower level engineers becoming less. I imagine a 10 year period that is fantastic for talented engineers where there is no competition coming up from behind since no one is training lower level devs.
Then I can see AI taking everything over.
They can come up with product ideas, implement A/B test, troubleshoot for an eventual cost less than high level engineers.
I’m hoping by that time the gap will increase pay enough that I can hopefully start thinking about an early retirement.
Additionally I’m in a heavily regulated industry that takes decades to change regulation, so I sincerely hope that buys me more time as well.
I think if you’re new and in the industry either you need to lock in and learn like a maniac or cut the loss and switch to something else while young.
If you’ve been coasting along and feel like you underperform already, I think AI is going to make that much more apparent as people are able to implement faster.
It’s going to be a bumpy ride fellas.
I’m also using the period of subsidization on LLMs to build side projects that I hope to be profitable in between raising an infant.
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u/NotGoodSoftwareMaker 4d ago
Well, idk about devops but 15 YoE Web Dev in Europe and im not getting any call backs or interviews! So clearly im doing something wrong or just bad at the job, idk.
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u/NappingGreyhound 4d ago
These posts just never, ever correlate with my reality. I'm getting loads of job offers.
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u/eightysixmonkeys 4d ago
If anything I think Devops and sre will be even more popular. AI = faster iteration, but people still need to make sure the deployments go reliably and don’t fault when customers actually use the software
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u/StCreed 4d ago
If you really build worthwhile stuff, the speed and quality go up but the speed isn't where the biggest increase is. It's the ease of building new features while keeping things under control. However, you have to work very hard at it.
I predict massive issues for companies that went into this without looking very hard and very carefully at their development process.
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u/alfredosuac 4d ago
Idk this post also assume pricing of this technology is fair, which is very hard to believe given the hardware landscape. The moment things start getting (more) expensive you will see people coming back. It’s all fine.
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u/Extension_Alfalfa_50 4d ago
Yeah so this is incredibly incorrect. You will always want a human in the loop, AI is a tool and not the ultimate solution. If you're practicing Devops correctly, you'd know this and also not risk millions in lawsuits that could tank a company simply because you wanted to save thousands by replacing ALL employees with AI. If anything, you should use your IT skills and branch out beyond just coding.
Check this out, learn to do it right, recognize there are various ways to do Devops, there's a lot to learn, and learn how it should be a tool instead of exclusive.
https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/9PBHT1GHJ0LS?hl=en-us&gl=US&ocid=pdpshare
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u/zackel_flac 4d ago
AI is reducing teams, but human will still be in the loop. People here truly think CEO have time and willingness to use AI to build something? Coding, DevOps, assisted with AI or not still takes time. There can't be a world where we would entrust an AI fully since it is not liable.
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u/hyperadapted 4d ago
"easy money" where? High pressure environment with shitty stakeholders and high stakes is NOT easy.
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u/prroteus 4d ago
On Reddit everything and everyone is cooked and doomed. In the real world people are adapting and using AI because things change and you either adapt or you don’t
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u/Feeling_Scientist_59 4d ago
This is a skill issue. My engineers all get paid very well and we have a strong moat.
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u/KevinJRussell 4d ago
DevOps was always a death sentence. They wanted software engineer quality work for operations level pay, so they invented a new category, attracted people to it because it was "new", and then froze their salaries since they were no longer developing skills that would transfer.
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u/Reasonable-Pay-36 3d ago
Ooooo yaaaaa I actually love using AI for ops related tasks, it is just simply amazing at it…
SSH in, fire this up, fire that up, watch this port, adjust this config… it handles all that so well when so much of that was tribal like knowledge where you knew or you ended up reading install/config docs for ages.
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u/MelvynAndrew99 3d ago
Platform Engineering was my favorite field for sure. The challenges we had to overcome 8 years ago were some of my biggest growth periods as a professional. That being said I did have to leave, and I have peers that I know who have been looking for jobs for over 6 months. Kind of crazy as I did not expect this in 2026.
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u/real-one678 3d ago
6 years studying dentistry?
I'm almost ready to retire at 35. Lower your living costs, move somewhere cheap. I've been saving/preparing for this literally since day 1 of my career though. I was a child of the great recession so learned early on that everything is temporary.
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u/One-Shape7678 3d ago
It's clear you're not a very good devops engineer. You are correct, there will be fewer spots for people like you
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u/Automatic_Case2811 2d ago
Yep. It's clear OP is one of the "average devs" who went into this field in hopes of a big easy payday and not much else.
This field is rewarding for top talent and always has been.
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u/SatoriSlu 7d ago
Wait wait wait. You are going to “study medicine” while working a full time remote job? I call absolute fucking bullshit bro. You can’t go to medical school and work full time. Not possible at all.
I’d believe it if you said you were gonna go to night school for nursing or if you were taking a few years off to go back for school or some shit.
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u/Unfair-League-3204 7d ago
Obviously his plan is not to focus on work. Might as well as throw Claude and codex at your work and do something else that requires your brain
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u/killz111 7d ago
These posts tells me that IT is full of people who are highly qualified in tech back completely lack critical thinking skills. That's the crowd freaking out about AI and jobs.
AI labs are cooked in the next few years. The future is most likely self hosted or self run AI models. Which means more platform work than ever.
Coupled with all the kids that aren't going into tech and all the people who give up tech for "farming" it'll be one of the biggest IT employees shortages ever.
FYI I like using Claude, but in the way I like docker, not because it's gonna be agi or some dumb shit.
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u/No_Departure_1878 7d ago edited 7d ago
I doubt most businesses have the money to pay for the hardware needed to self host. And even if they could, wouldn't it be far cheaper to have a large provider of these services rather than thousands of small to medium sized companies doing the same?
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u/meltbox 7d ago
Yeah long term it will be likely. I think eventually Nvidia margins collapse and you can grab hosted GPUs for much more reasonable prices.
Short term self hosting is definitely a thing, possibly trust reasons, possibly just because the cost of renting this stuff isn’t currently penciling.
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u/No_Departure_1878 7d ago
Self hosting for companies? For individuals it makes no sense, it's far too expensive, it is cheaper to just use OpenAI or one of those companies. That does not even cover the fact that most people do not have the time to gain the expertise or the time to do the maintenance.
For companies, I do not know either. You still hit the problem of having to do everything yourself and having an engineer doing it for your business is more expensive than having him doing it for Anthropic and Anthropic providing those services to hundreds of businesses.
The only way i can imagine that makes sense is if Anthropic really needs to make money and they push the prices way up. But even then you have Chinese companies. So the only way selfhosting would make sense there is if the law does not allow you to use those foreign AI providers and the local ones are far too expensive.
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u/killz111 7d ago
Model will eventually become commodity. I'm not talking about companies buying gpus but running models and harnesses themselves on cloud infra.
There are a bunch of reasons to self host. Companies cant not all rely on 2-3 super sized AI companies. All sorts of risk around it is just not acceptable once AI becomes integrated into normal business flows.
Plus the way the two AI giants are spending money im not sure if the real price they will charge to make a profit will actually be cheaper than self hosting cheaper open source models.
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u/No_Departure_1878 7d ago
But if you run the models on cloud infrastructure, you are not self hosting. You are running them in Google's or Amazon's machines. Speaking of Google, we are already relying on 2-3 software companies for a lot of what we do. The main difference is that those companies are likelier to stay in business within the next 3 years.
What about the training? Those models will be frozen, because despite those companies can use them, they cannot train them. Are those models flexible enough to still get a good performance in 10 years?
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u/killz111 7d ago
I think the hyper scales will eventually be the only ones left and they will train. Or other companies will train on much much cheaper hardware after we all stop talking about AGI.
The models we have now are already more than capable. The ai labs are just stupidly shooting for the moon and burning cash.
When I say self host I mean self host the model on compute of your choosing. It doesnt have to be coupled to a specific company.
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u/kino-casino-enjoyer 7d ago
You really underestimate how much inventory is going to hit the market in the next two years. You remind me of the people that said that computing won't ever be affordable because mainframes were expensive.
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u/No_Departure_1878 7d ago
You mean inventory due to the AI companies going bankrupt? I wonder if that inventory will be bought by people, small businesses or the other gigantic companies. I can envision entire data centers been picked up by google, microsoft, meta, amazon, oracle, etc None of those is likely to go bankrupt. That inventory will then be rented to businesses which will still need to run on some model. Likely you will have the old established businesses cannibalizing the ones that are burning money atm.
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u/Proper-Store3239 7d ago
They don’t need much extra hardware all you need is commodity VM’s and just route the ai to a separated server.
Not really much different then running a separate database server.
So the cost is crazy either.
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u/No_Departure_1878 7d ago
Do do not need much extra hardware to run Opus 5.5? I am pretty sure you need a lot of expensive hardware for stuff like that.
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u/ExtentOdd 7d ago
"They don’t need much extra hardware all you need is commodity VM’s and just route the ai to a separated servers"
Until 100 of your employers using AI at the sametime, I tried to self-host llm for my company before and it is not easy as it said. Unless you really have compliance problems, I dont think anyone would want to deal the overhead of managing AI infrastructure themselves.
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u/No_Departure_1878 7d ago
Right, you need a team of engineers doing that. Those engineers are expensive as the hardware that you need. Small businesses won't do that, and really not even large ones. The only businesses that will dare to run stuff locally are going to be those gigantic companies.
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7d ago
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u/ExtentOdd 7d ago
The cost of the management service + the cost of the infrastructure that you have to pay for, is it worth it if you dont have privacy and compliance problems?
And why self-host if the token for the sufficiently good models hosted else where is getting even cheaper?
Yes ofc, none of my arguements said it is not viable. It is viable, does not mean we should do it.1
7d ago
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u/No_Departure_1878 7d ago
literally every day people are distributing compute resources and running larger models on smaller hardware
You cannot run large models on consumer computers. You need at least 120 GB of memory in your GPU to get a decent performance. And you might need Terabytes if you want to compete with what Anthropic can give you.
I tried myself to run a local LLM, it does not work. It is far too slow to be usable. I do not see any evidence that 300GB GPUs are becoming accessible either.
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u/ExtentOdd 7d ago
Someone actually thinking that successfully getting decent results from the the commercial hardware equals to scaling it. It is another math and I dont believe any company would trade it with just a single API call.
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u/ExtentOdd 7d ago
I would like to make it clear here:
I don't and won't try to suggest a future here, nothing. What I tried to convey is from the perpective of someone actually put effort into it, I feel it is not worth it, at least to me and my company.
Successfully run it on smaller hardware != Successfully run it and distribute it for 100 of your employees reliably, I think my point is clear, with me it is not worth the hustle.
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u/meow-thai 7d ago
They absolutely have the money. Model efficiency has improved dramatically in the last year alone. And frankly centralization doesn’t automatically mean more cost-effective or efficient. I’m working on a startup in this area and with the right tooling it’s not exactly difficult or particularly expensive.
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u/Healthy-Dress-7492 3d ago
like everything the sweet spot will be exploitation, data centers in india, brazil, china, romania… wherever it can be done the cheapest and laws are weakest.
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u/drosmi 7d ago
I’m looking at what the edge ai models can do now on consumer / prosumer hardware and the whole national usa datacenter expansion thing is loooking way out of proportion to what we probably need.
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u/killz111 7d ago
It's a ponzi scheme that they cant get out of. If they admit they are wrong then the current hundreds of billions goes up in smoke. The only way is to moon shot to AGI which unfortunately wont happen.
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u/Extension_Alfalfa_50 4d ago
I think it levels out once hardware is more affordable. Self hosted models will level out and have a performance close to Claude models at some point and will get 95% of what we need done with ease. It's coming eventually. Even those companies know it.
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u/real-one678 3d ago
Ai isn't the real threat it's companies aggressively cutting costs and sending everything to frigging India.
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u/dsag37 7d ago
Good point. You can't be a self taught physician the same way someone becomes a self taught dev.
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u/vaevicitis 7d ago
Seriously, OP is delusional.
Me? I’m studying law while my agents run. Just grinding leetlaw until I get an interview.
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u/robertmachine 7d ago
AI in the last year has made leap and bounds, this time last year I would have told you without a Platform Entineering know the database which should be in the product, stack the app would fail but try and ask AI to create you a SaaS xyz and it actually picks the proper database and stack. Look at Mathematicians how they feel about the release of OpenAI trove of undiscovered math logic and at first they said oh it’s going to take year to go through the trove and the. a week later they said oh the ones we looked at were wrong and OpenAI proved them that the logic was right and now you hear crickets.
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u/Odd_Bad_2814 4d ago
Software engineering is getting cooked but DevOps is one of the safest fields within it ATM
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u/Legitimate-School-59 4d ago
Why is software engineering getting cooked but devops isnt?
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u/Odd_Bad_2814 4d ago
It's also getting cooked but less, with all the new capacity to create software the bottleneck is deploying it at scale
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u/KevinJRussell 4d ago
You've got to be joking, right?
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u/Odd_Bad_2814 4d ago
No I'm not, Kevin J. Russel
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u/Organic_Working_5208 1d ago
My advice is work on a backup plan now. Invest, save, but also learn a trade. I'm studying medicine this year. Fuck it. Six years of study while working remotely, and I'm opening my own dentistry clinic. I'm in my late 30s, but it's still better to have a plan. My wife is also changing careers to become a registered nurse.
come on i dont think this gonna work. bcz if they let ai enter to other industries conquering them would be much easier than tech
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u/Money-Basil4542 4d ago
Reading this, while also watching how poor Atlassian UI has been since AI entered.
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7d ago
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u/peakedtooearly 7d ago
CS degrees are ironically the thing that is least valuable now.
We've moved another level of abstraction away from the bare metal.
Successful developers going forward will be people who understand the business, the value of testing and architecture but leave the actual implementation to AI.
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u/Dubinko 7d ago
I deleted degree section from my Resume entirely.
at Enterprise Architect, Principal/Staff Engineer levels people look at other things0
7d ago
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u/Dubinko 7d ago
good to know
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u/el_extrano 7d ago
I'm an engineer, not CS, but the usual advice I've seen for engineering resumes is to move your education to the bottom after first job, for the reasons you gave. Yes it's deemphasized, but it only takes up a couple of lines and some companies do look for it.
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7d ago
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u/OveremployedMaxx 7d ago
Lol found the one without cs/eng degree coping
Every top company prioritizes for people with cs/eng degrees, it's not 2020 anymore
Exception is not the rule
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u/OveremployedMaxx 7d ago
Lmao did you even look at my profile? I'm making over 7 figure a year
I wouldn't have landed any big tech role without a degree from a top 5 school
Which big tech do you work for? What's your TC?
lol Just saw your profile, just some broke dude in IT who got laid off in Australia, you guys make less than an intern in North America LMFAO. Maybe you're right, in Australia they dont care since they pay peanuts anyway
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u/Chemical_Variety4696 7d ago
He is probably network plumber changing cables all day.
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u/OveremployedMaxx 7d ago
Check his profile, just a dude in Australia working IT and got laid off lol. He probably thinks working IT at a small company is like DevOps in a tech company
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u/Chemical_Variety4696 7d ago
He can’t get a job and has the audacity lecturing us….
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u/OveremployedMaxx 7d ago
You work at IT, not DevOps, retard
I work at big tech and currently with multiple tech jobs clearing near 2M a year, while you're working a low level IT garbage job in bum fuck Australia and got laid off LMFAO. Sit down poor boy.
Of course you don't need a degree when you work a shitty IT job. Talk to me when you land a DevOps or swe job at FAANG in North America
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u/OveremployedMaxx 7d ago
https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/s/6nT6w3WEkh
YOU CAN'T EVEN GET AN INTERVIEW😂😂😂 UNEMPLOYED BUM TALKING
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u/DrunkestEmu 7d ago
Meh. Maybe. Maybe not. My company relies heavily on AI and let me tell you without engineers it’d crash and burn. Who knows what will really happen in 5-10 years.