931–940 of 1001 posts
Because most of us are middle aged with mortgages, kids etc. Not old enough to retire and live off of savings or 401ks, not young enough to start all over again.
I think we shouldn't be depressed, but work on ideas and concepts of how this could be changed into something good. I see a lot of people hyping AI and condemning it, but very few seem to be interested in working on what our future should look like.
That involves policy, and people here are still squeamish to talk about the dreaded P word, despite it controlling every aspect of society.
LLMs are not going to put large numbers of software developers out of work. It may have some influence on copywriters, artists and musicians, but to which extent is unknown at the moment. Most workers lament having to give up their cozy desk jobs and having to do work which currently can't be automated, like health care and service jobs like plumbers and roof repair men, construction etc.
Am I the only one that loves my career more than ever? The one that has seen his productivity explode? Ideas to products in minutes instead of months? Building my own coding agents that help me being even more productive? This is the year I have been the happiest in my 40 year long career as programmer and I feel much more excited for the years ahead of us.
I am finally able to deliver on years of backlog ideas thanks to the GPUs I racked up in my garage. Having a blast. Everyone I know fully dependent on corpotch seems pretty sad though. I frequently suggest that they stop. It has not worked.
Are you offering to make up for their lack of a job yourself? If no, I'm not surprised people don't just upend their lives for... nothing?
Especially in the days where getting any job after quitting is a massive ask. It's rough out there.
Just as a reminder this subject of AI replacing developers come up all the time but it has not happened yet. People want to focus on AI but the same problem has always been there for 2-4 decades. Software, as a profession, has no credentials, no common elevation path, no common training criteria. You just show up and everyone is super insecure. AI just provides a name to identify that insecurity. Nothing else has cha…
That's the worst part. The idea of it replacing people is impacting people. Even though it is not ready yet.
>Software, as a profession, has no credentials, no common elevation path, no common training criteria.
I don't think that affects much when every field except healtcare and maybe education are down. This isn't about credentials or qualifications. Nor even getting work done. It's a circus today.
>Nothing else has changed.
The last 10 years changed pretty much everything.
Because the free ride and the day-care rest and vest ZIRP tech life style is over. In 2012 - 2023, this lifestyle used to be at Google, and Facebook and everyone outside wanted to join. In 2023 - present The day care lifestyle is at NVIDIA, OpenAI and Anthropic and everyone outside wants to join (they are too late) after getting laid off. It's that simple. There will be a new day care somewhere but it if you are look…
Are all safe and stable jobs "day cares" in this lens? This issue isn't limtied to tech these days.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It doesn't have to be _that_ extreme, Many of us just wanted vaguely what the promise of a good job was supposed to offer. A decent wage, the ability to afford a home one day, support our families etc. Maybe not everyone but up until about 2022 I had great job security and loved my work. I knew I was extremely lucky. I didn't have a crazy silicon valley salary but I was doing pretty well on any kind of global scale.…
>what the promise of a good job was supposed to offe So did the people at car factories, at steel mills, at any number of places that no longer have that either. Your last sentence is correct, we're just coming down to the reality that everyone else is suffering. But hey, tech unions are socialism, we'll pull ourselves up by our bootstraps at any moment now.
On topic: the bigger issue here is that I don't really see the angle of "we'll just retrain and adapt". All white collar work is in danger, and most blue collar work is also on the decline in numbers for other reasons. Are we all going to be nurses for boomers at this rate? Or doordashers and youtubers? I don't see the "next frontier" here and people thinking they they will "be their own manager" are blind to how large an impact this will be.
Addressing the question in the title, "What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers", look at what happened to printers. That was a good skilled trade for centuries. Then it just went away. Phototypesetting took the high volume end. Desktop publishing took the low end. Computer-controlled presses took press operators. And then the newspaper business died. I've heard homeless former printers…
Surprised no one has made the extremely obvious observation that it took literal centuries for printing technology to eliminate the trade of printers, which could not have possibly have employed more than 0.01% of people at its peak. Compared to the potential obsolescence of 40% to 60% of the US workforce over the course of 10 - 20 years? You can argue about whether the obsolescence is real or not, but if it is , the…
The result was “seizing the means of production”
I think the part that's hard to absorb is that software engineering was a brutal path. You had to restructure your entire identity, ego, personality, social relationships around that career choice. People didn't expect their career to last forever, but they thought it was a ticket out to gain autonomy. Back in 2010-ish, many developers thought that, in the future, they'd all be running their own systems and servicing…
Almost like all western civilization is architected to ensure the benefit of a few at the expense of the many by design doesn't it? If not by design than by emergent consequence of how it executes.
2024 was my "fool me twice" moment. It won't happen thrice without some proper resistance; I'll make sure of that next time.