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I'm not worried about AI job loss

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Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#91

Post by irishcoffee »

contagiousflow wrote: post #38
stephenpontes wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree. I feel like most of the people sounding the alarm have been in the software-focused job hunting market for 6+ months. Those who downplay it are either business owners themselves or have been employed for 2+ years. I think a lot of software engineers who _haven't_ looked for jobs in the past few years don't quite realize what the current market feels like.

Alternatively: this is an America problem. I'm outside of America and I've been fielding more interviews than ever in the past 3 months. YMMV but the leading indicator of slowed down hiring can come from so many things. Including companies just waiting to see how much LLMs affect SWE positions.

Alternatively, it's a loud minority.

As an American I found a new job last year (Staff SW), and it was falling off a log easy, for a 26% pay bump.

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#92

Post by looneysquash »

Ordinary people aren't even ok now.

Lest we forget, software engineers aren't exactly ordinary people: they make quite a bit above the median wage.

AI taking our jobs is scary because it will turn us into "ordinary people". And ordinary people are not ok. They're barely surviving.

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#93

Post by gordonhart »

fragmede wrote: post #84
gordonhart wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's an example ticket that I'll probably work on next week: Live stream validation results as they come in The body doesn't give much other than the high-level motivation from the person who filed the ticket. In order to implement this, you need to have a lot of context, some of which can be discovered by grepping through the code base and some of which can't: - What is the validation system and how does it work t…

I mean, what is the validation system? Either it exists in code, and thus can be discovered if you point the AI at repo, or... what, it doesn't exist? For the UX, have it explore your existing repos and copy prior art from there and industry standards to come up with something workable. Web scale issues can be inferred by the rest of the codebase. If your terraform repo has one RDS server, vs a fleet of them, multi-r…

Honestly curious, have you seen agents succeed at this sort of long-trajectory wide breadth task, or is it theoretical? Because I haven't seen them come close (and not for lack of trying)

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#94

Post by louiereederson »

matt_heimer wrote: post #50
gordonhart wrote: post #23

Whenever I get worried about this I comb through our ticket tracker and see that ~0% of them can be implemented by AI as it exists today. Once somebody cracks the memory problem and ships an agent that progressively understands the business and the codebase, then I'll start worrying. But context limitation is fundamental to the technology in its current form and the value of SWEs is to turn the bigger picture into a…

It's not binary. Jobs will be lost because management will expect the fewer developers to accomplish more by leveraging AI.

Big tech might ahead of the rest of the economy in this experiment. Microsoft grew headcount by ~3% from June 2022 to June 2025 while revenue grew by >40%. This is admittedly weak anecdata but my subjective experience is their products seem to be crumbling (GitHub problems around the Azure migration for instance), and worse than they even were before. We'll see how they handle hiring over the next few years and if that reveals anything.

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#95

Post by justonepost1 »

ianbutler wrote: post #51
pfisch wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you ever concerned about the consequences of what you are making? No one really knows how this will play out and the odds of this leading to disaster are significant. I just don't understand people working on improving ai. It just isn't worth the risk.

Of course, I think about this at least once a week maybe more often. I think that the technology overall will be a great net benefit to humanity or I wouldn't touch it.

Genuine question: how?

I’m younger than most on this site. I see the next decades of my life being defined by a multi-generational dark age via a collapse in literacy (“you use a calculator right?”), median prosperity (the only truly functional distribution system we have figured out is labor), and loss of agency (kinda obvious). This outcome is now, as of 2026, essentially priced into the public markets and accepted as fact by most media outlets.

“It’s inevitable” is at least a hard point to argue with. “Well I’M so productive, I’m having the time of my life”, the dominant position in many online tech spaces, seems short-sighted at best.

I miss being a techno optimist, it’s much more fun. But it’s increasingly hard.

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#96

Post by 7777332215 »

ares623 wrote: post #26
trilogic wrote: post #20

You are not worrried for one of the 2 reasons: 1 You are not affected somehow (you got savings, connections, not living paycheck to paycheck, and have food on the table). 2 You prefer to persue no troubles in matters of complexity. Time will tell, is showing it already.

For 1, unless you already have an self-sustaining underground bunker or island, you will be affected. No matter how much savings and total compensation you have. If you went out to get grocery in the last week, it will affect you.

What shall I need the bunker for?

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#97

Post by Borg3 »

iberator wrote: post #41
ddtaylor wrote: post #9

Labor substitution is extremely difficult and almost everybody hand waves it away. Take even the most unskilled labor that people can think about such as flipping a burger at a restaurant like McDonald's. In reality that job is multiple different roles mixed into one that are constantly changing. Multiple companies have experimented with machines and robots to perform this task all with very limited success and none…

I lost my job as a software developer some time ago. Flipping burgers is WAY more demanding than I ever imagined. That's the danger of AI: It takes jobs faster than creating new ones PLUS for some fields (like software development) downshifting to just about anything else is brutal and sometimes simply not doable. Forget becoming manager at McDonald's or be even good at flipping burgers at the age of 40: you are comp…

Ugh.. sorry to hear :( I am myself unemployed right now. Its really hard to land a job in tech.. Luicky, I dont need to flip burgers for now...

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#98

Post by SirMaster »

827a wrote: post #73

The take that I am increasingly believing is that Software Engineers should broadly be worried, because while there will always be demand for people who can create software products, whatever the tools may be, the skills necessary to do it well are changing rapidly. Most Software Engineers are going to wake up one day and realize their skills aren't just irrelevant, but actively detrimental, to delivering value out o…

Is AI filling in for all those COBOL programmers they needed yet?

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#99

Post by ef2k »

The article frames the premise that "everything will be fine" around people with "regular jobs", which I assume means non knowledge work, but most of public concern is on cognitive tasks being automated.

It also argues that models have existed for years and we're yet to see significant job loss. That's true, but AI is only now crossing the threshold of being both capable and reliable enough to be automate common tasks.

It's better to prepare for the disruption than the sink or swim approach we're taking now in hopes that things will sort themselves out.

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#100

Post by cal_dent »

My view is that we spend a lot of time thinking that ai cant do x and y when the wider problem is the short to medium term redirection of capital to tech rather than labour.

Ai might not replace current work but it’s already replacing future hypothetical work. Now whether it can actually do that the job is besides the point in the short term. The way business models work is that if there’s an option to reduce your biggest cost (labour) you’d very much give it a go first. We might see a resurgence of labour if it turns out be all hype but for the short to medium term they’ll be a lot of disruption.

Think we’re already seeing that in employment data in the US, as new hiring and job creation slows. A lot of that will for sure be the current economic environment but I suspect (more so in tech focused industries) that will also be due to tech capex in place of headcount growth

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