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Jobs and Software Is Fucked

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Re: Jobs and Software Is Fucked

#181

Post by gafferongames »

bayarearefugee wrote: post #93
echelon wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You will not have a job in software in the future if you refuse to use AI. I fully stand behind that prediction. edit: despite the downvotes, I'll double down: most of today's software jobs will disappear. Your job , if it is in software, will disappear. It might transform into something new, if you're lucky. Or it might just go away entirely.

For the vast majority of people who currently have a job in software... you will not have a job in software in the future whether you use AI or not. The tide is coming for almost all of us.

> For the vast majority of people who currently have a job in software... you will not have a job in software in the future whether you use AI or not. The tide is coming for almost all of us.

I'll agree with you as soon as all video games are in the metaverse and run natively on the blockchain.

Re: Jobs and Software Is Fucked

#182

Post by gafferongames »

swedishuser wrote: post #84

OP's opinion about AI coding is pretty obvious in this blog post. Maybe some of that sips out during interviews which certainly will spook the employer.

In the game industry this is actually a positive thing. If you think that AI can write code better than you can, I'm not going to disagree with you, but maybe you should try getting better or more specialized at what you do, because I can ask the AI simple questions about my field and it's completely wrong 3-4 prompts in.

Using this technology to build anything remotely serious, OR EVEN GAMES, is wildly stupid.

Re: Jobs and Software Is Fucked

#183

Post by coldpie »

Ralo wrote: post #85

After 5+ years of actively trying to get into the field (pre AI), I left. I threw my degree in the toilet, I closed my linkedin, and I went to go work in the trades as a diesel mechanic. Greatest choice I've ever made. The pay is great, the work is steady, the coworkers are relaxed and not trying to one up each other. I'm now being paid to go to school, and get raises every year until I'm fully ticketed (way more tha…

I'm looking to leave working in tech. The local public transit bus agency is always hiring mechanics. Going to a technical school for a diesel mechanic training and working there is high up on my list of things to explore. Thanks for the positive reinforcement.

Re: Jobs and Software Is Fucked

#184

Post by ChicagoDave »

Exoristos wrote: post #72
ChicagoDave wrote: post #58

There are a number of reasons I’d site for the current job market tightness: - political: there’s an enormous amount of uncertainty here. All businesses make plans and uncertainty puts them all on pause. - economic: related to political, but we’re teetering on a very bad recession. Watch where national oil reserves go. - AI: I throw this in with every new technology that comes out. There is always a period of chaos b…

* cite > There is always a period of chaos before normalization. In this case, it's the normalization period that has people terrified.

Understandable. Look at the possible directions:

- GenAI becomes a foundational requirement for tech and non tech sectors. If you’ve refused to engage, you’ve self-selected out of any of those sectors.

- GenAI usage shifts down to just the tech sector, but in an integrated fashion where current engineering practices are still desired. Everyone survives, but pay scales are adjusted down by a not-insignificant amount.

- GenAI bubbles badly, OpenAI and Anthropic merge with Google/Microsoft/Oracle/IBM/???. Tokens become extremely expensive and no one is leaning into agentic integration. Everyone thrives.

Re: Jobs and Software Is Fucked

#185

Post by IshKebab »

Ralo wrote: post #144
benterris wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you have qualifications / an interest in this field before switching? What drawn you to this occupation in the first place? Just being curious

I'm a car guy, and a computer guy. I wanted a nice car, so instead of racking up mega debt on a $70,000 mustang I bought an old classic car and learned everything. After 5 years I fully restored it on the cheap (less than $10k) and now I've pivoted my career to that.

I'm unconvinced that car mechanic pay is anywhere near programming but either way I'd say you have a pretty select and valuable skill set if you know cars and computers, given how computerised modern cars are.

Re: Jobs and Software Is Fucked

#186

Post by annzabelle »

It might also be foolish, but I'm mid-pivot to becoming an Actuary. They credential through a very transparent exam system, and interviews are relatively cursory, assuming you've passed the appropriate exams on the right timeline. I've got a math degree, and my software experience is all in the data engineering space, which seems to be in demand.

I got laid off from a large company last summer, and took some time off to travel. Now I've got a chill, low paid dev job in a resort town in New Zealand, but my sense is that dev work is not going to be the thing for me long term. This job will pay my bills while I pivot, but they're not going to sponsor me to extend my visa, so I'm on a bit of a timer. The market back in the US seems like an ongoing mess and I don't want to get back into it.

Re: Jobs and Software Is Fucked

#187

Post by IshKebab »

tern wrote: post #7

Curious about the perspective from anyone who has a skill set / reputation where finding jobs is easy right now. I imagine people in ML or who've found a good way to demonstrate prowess with agentic systems may be highly in demand right now(?)

Silicon design/verification. In really high demand at the moment, I guess because of the death of Moore's Law - now it is much more worthwhile making custom chips.

Re: Jobs and Software Is Fucked

#188

Post by drdaeman »

coldtea wrote: post #169
drdaeman wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why pay a pixel artist if AI can generate 100's of unique little people pixels in seconds Because someone who knows something about pixels needs to make a judgement. It is rare to see a machine-generated artifact (picture, video, text or code) that's good on the first try. And not always a non-specialist can see the issue. Same thing why we still need human software engineers, even though a machine can generate cod…

> Because someone who knows something about pixels needs to make a judgement. It is rare to see a machine-generated artifact (picture, video, text or code) that's good on the first try. Not if nobody cares for the end product that finely. And even if it was true, one person can make the judgement, while automation erasing 5 others that would have worked in both the judgement and the graphics wrok.

> Not if nobody cares for the end product that finely.

Yes. But a non-negligible number of people do care. If nobody would've cared, we wouldn't have this drama.

> one person can make the judgement, while automation erasing 5 others that would have worked in both the judgement and the graphics wrok.

Yes. In other words, new tools had increased people's performance for mechanical work - individual units of that can be arguably done faster than before. So hypothetically one person can do a work of five. Note of that erases those people and their skills. The real underlying issue is that demand for it doesn't catch up because world's coincidentally fucked (through a series of unrelated issues, such as a quite few global conflicts) and economies aren't exactly thriving outside of a few niches du jour.

I strongly suspect that if we would've had a flourishing economies around the world, the demand would ramp up and artists (and engineers, and writers, and everyone else whose performance could've been positively affected by new tools) would be in greater position than ever before.

Re: Jobs and Software Is Fucked

#190

Post by an0malous »

commandlinefan wrote: post #79
FloorEgg wrote: post #29

During the pandemic money printing things got very weird. It created a lot of leverage and bullshit companies and bullshit dev work which led to artificial demand for software developers. We are still in the post-pandemic hangover. If you look up M2 money supply on St Louis fed - that chart has more influence on the job market in the US than anything. The macro whiplash compounds this problem for people like OP in a…

Nobody likes to hear it, but this is the only explanation that makes sense. We had an unprecedented economic shock, and we're dealing with an unprecedented economic fallout. The only question is how much longer it will last.

The timeline also matches up exactly, the Fed started raising rates in Q1-Q3 2022 and you can see the largest spike of layoffs happened Q1-Q3 2022:

https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/interest-rate

https://layoffs.fyi/

ChatGPT wasn’t released until the end of 2022, and it wasn’t until the next spring where it really started to take off. Spring 2023 is when ChatGPT started to gain traction as a direct to consumer app and it wasn’t until later in the year when startups started building on top of it.

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