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Jobs and Software Is Fucked
191–200 of 333 posts
Re: Jobs and Software Is Fucked
#192I really hope this thread is wrong. In 5 years, the Junior pipeline will be completely dry. Seniors will be retiring. Companies will be floundering. We'll see a great correction where we need workers again. Programmers/SE/etc... will be needed again. Always were needed, but at least managers will realize it again.
The companies seem to truly believe they will just have a handful of devs at that point manning large pools of AI agents. I doubt it though!
Re: Jobs and Software Is Fucked
#193Earlier quoted context omitted.
* 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.…
The problem with scenario one is it's still cope: "if you didn't develop the skills to use GenAI then you'll be left behind".
But that's not the promise of GenAI models. The skill floor is constantly lowering and your advanced workflow is rendered obsolete monthly.
Re: Jobs and Software Is Fucked
#194Earlier quoted context omitted.
The author is coming from the games industry. As an arts based industry, AI is EXTREMELY divisive. The author really will lose friends over even so much as touching AI in certain ways, because the artists that built the games industry were already badly abused, and now, they're being squeezed out entirely. For business developers, AI is somewhat less existentially terrifying, as it can be seen to be really empowering…
What gets me is that LLM writing has an inhuman voice. Of course we know the tells. Not only this, but that. You're exactly right! — The woman and man AI voice endemic to YouTube and ilk is also tremendously off putting. M5Stack has a bunch of these videos, and it devalues what they're doing. And then... Transformer "art". It is some of the worst drek I've seen. I smell it a mile away. It's easily seen by slop englis…
> And then... Transformer "art". It is some of the worst drek I've seen. I smell it a mile away.
Hating that every third or fourth ad now is AI-generated. So much worse than what entry-level graphic designers can put out while putting them out of work.
Re: Jobs and Software Is Fucked
#195It's not like the job market was that much better before AI infested every single corner of the market, but it supercharged all of the worst aspects of everything. I've seen people supposedly smarter than I advocate for just giving in, conceding to AI coding as it's the future. But doing so means tossing out my friends who make art or the people who work their asses off to properly test and review code or the writers…
Yes, sadly the most principled will have to contend with the world passing them by when it turns out those principles are dead weight to capital momentum. You could have made the same point during the dawn of the industrial revolution: that purchasing any product of a machine would be betraying your friends who have spent years honing their craft, but either way, people will still opt for the machine because it's 10x…
Both the people that claim they won't use LLMs and the people that claim they don't even need to look at the code anymore are deluding themselves.
Re: Jobs and Software Is Fucked
#196[dead]
Re: Jobs and Software Is Fucked
#197OP'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.
I'm not used to seeing informed takes on the games industry on Hacker news, but then I looked up to see your name. Love your stuff, your website was mind opening when I was in college.
Re: Jobs and Software Is Fucked
#198Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
It depends? It's certainly not gonna be more than you'd make as a SWE/SDE at a big tech company. But for semi diesel specifically you can probably clear $100k+/yr, so you might be making more than some entry level programming jobs that don't pay as well.
It's kinda like law. A mechanic doesn't make more than someone in the right side of the bimodal lawyer pay where 3Ls with the right clerkship or internship walking into a biglaw job paying whatever that is now ($200k?). But a mechanic might make more than the other tranche of lawyers fighting for the rest of the scraps who don't yet (and may never) have a good practice set up.
Re: Jobs and Software Is Fucked
#199Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
>So hypothetically one person can do a work of five. Note of that erases those people and their skills.
It just doesn't magically take them out of the universe or turns them into unskilled persons.
But it does magically erases those people with those skills as needed employees.
>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.
Why would that demand have to "catch up"? Just because we can do something faster or automate parts of it doesn't guarantee demand will go up, even in a good economy. No shortage of jobs that vanished forever in a similar even, despite the economy going otherwise up. Even more so now, where it's fucked up anyway, of course.
Re: Jobs and Software Is Fucked
#200If you don't have a full time job for a year, why don't you start a software business on your own? It's hard to succeed, but, successful or now, you will have something to show people and something that you are passionate to talk about. It will give you a new way to connect to people, and quite likely will help you to get hired. And who knows, maybe you will succeed.
100% this. Interviewing isn't something that can compound. Striking out from company after company doesn't leave behind a trail of real work and real lessons. Starting a business is tough but it really does teach skills that are hard to find any other way (about sales, recruiting, management, etc). After a certain point, it's wiser to give up on getting hired, and just hire yourself and build something.