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What young workers are doing to AI-proof themselves

wsj.com

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Re: What young workers are doing to AI-proof themselves

#11

Post by time0ut »

striped_hash wrote: post #4

I don’t think kids should be insulating from AI. The examples in this article suggest for example that some people are dropping out of college and going into trade schools. I get that society needs electricians and construction workers and new software graduates are finding it difficult to get jobs. But having had a moderately successful career building software, I tend to think there is a lot of scope for the $40 tr…

Optimistically, I hope it filters out the people who were only interested in it for the money.

When I was in school, decades ago now, very few people went into CS compared to other majors. Everyone I knew going into it did it because they loved it. I would have done it regardless of the career opportunities because I want to build stuff.

Interviewing candidates over the years since then, my experience has been there are still very few of those passionate nerds and a lot of people who did it for other reasons, like the money or similar. There is nothing inherently wrong with this. I don’t fault people for it.

Maybe if we get very lucky, it will go back to a relatively few passionate people building stuff because it is cool?

Re: What young workers are doing to AI-proof themselves

#12

Post by [deleted] »

Ifkaluva wrote: post #3
ramesh31 wrote: post #2

I'll say invest totally in domain knowledge now. The value of knowing how to invert a binary tree from memory has dropped to approximately zero. Web development as we knew it for the past 20 years is completely dead as an entry level trade. The power is shifting to people with useful knowledge and expertise that isn't about twiddling bits.

What do you mean by “domain knowledge”? And how is it a competitive advantage?

[deleted]

Re: What young workers are doing to AI-proof themselves

#13

Post by kurthr »

Ifkaluva wrote: post #3
ramesh31 wrote: post #2

I'll say invest totally in domain knowledge now. The value of knowing how to invert a binary tree from memory has dropped to approximately zero. Web development as we knew it for the past 20 years is completely dead as an entry level trade. The power is shifting to people with useful knowledge and expertise that isn't about twiddling bits.

What do you mean by “domain knowledge”? And how is it a competitive advantage?

Can't speak to the OP, but lots of technical work (and frankly many trades are also technical) doesn't lend itself to text based documentation and teaching. Software, translation, non/fiction writing (like marketing and sales) all do. I think LLMs will take a significant part of those businesses, because I don't believe there is a Devon's Paradox for code -Tractors- Agents.

At the same time medicine, hardware design, good industrial, and specific domain knowledge (problems you solve in assembly or control loops) that are fundamentally proprietary and aren't well documented will continue to have value even when LLMs make solving the problems around them easier. Those might have increased leverage, at least for this round of LLMs. Now, maybe they succeed in World Models, but that is not today.

Really, I don't know what "kids these days" are going to do. I couldn't have predicted the influencer boom 15 years ago, but I also think there are geopolitical risks that are probably bigger than that shift, and "synergized" with the push to AI Everything, it doesn't look like a good time to be a learning/working human.

Re: What young workers are doing to AI-proof themselves

#14

Post by magic_hamster »

crop_rotation wrote: post #5
Ifkaluva wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean by “domain knowledge”? And how is it a competitive advantage?

Domain knowledge as in non public aspects of the work you/ your workplace does. The AI tools are very good at whatever is public but very clueless about proprietary domains .Let's say you make CRUD apps about some confidential domain. Now the CRUD skills might be commodity but the confidential domain is even more important.

As long as there's internal documentation, which virtually every serious shop has, it can be processed and combined with AI. There are startups selling this product already. I've seen first hand some very narrowly focused domain knowledge becoming more accessible when you can ask the chatbot and the thing is right. It works.

Come to think of it, domain knowledge should be an LLMs strong suit as long as you can provide the right documentation, which is working pretty well already.

Right now the main issue I see with AI is that it doesn't do well with scaling. It's great for building demos and examples but you have to fix its code for real production work. But for how long?

Re: What young workers are doing to AI-proof themselves

#15

Post by follie »

kokanee wrote: post #9
crop_rotation wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Domain knowledge as in non public aspects of the work you/ your workplace does. The AI tools are very good at whatever is public but very clueless about proprietary domains .Let's say you make CRUD apps about some confidential domain. Now the CRUD skills might be commodity but the confidential domain is even more important.

But everyone at the company has that private domain knowledge. The only thing you're bringing to the table that anyone in any other role doesn't offer is the commoditized skill set.

Right, and you'll not keep everything out of materials like AI generated meeting notes for every repeat of every process so the company doesn't really need many experts in its existing operations.

Re: What young workers are doing to AI-proof themselves

#17

Post by drivebyhooting »

time0ut wrote: post #11
striped_hash wrote: post #4

I don’t think kids should be insulating from AI. The examples in this article suggest for example that some people are dropping out of college and going into trade schools. I get that society needs electricians and construction workers and new software graduates are finding it difficult to get jobs. But having had a moderately successful career building software, I tend to think there is a lot of scope for the $40 tr…

Optimistically, I hope it filters out the people who were only interested in it for the money. When I was in school, decades ago now, very few people went into CS compared to other majors. Everyone I knew going into it did it because they loved it. I would have done it regardless of the career opportunities because I want to build stuff. Interviewing candidates over the years since then, my experience has been there…

I only went into SWE for the money.

I initially pursued my real passion which was math and physics and got a cold water bucket to the face only after grad school.

Re: What young workers are doing to AI-proof themselves

#18

Post by Imustaskforhelp »

I am not quite sure with the controversy at archive.ph/(today) but If this may help anybody, I have used single-file to download from archive.ph and uploaded it to github

https://serjaimelannister.github.io/wsj-article/

and I have also uploaded the github link on archive.org for persistence/archival purposes.

https://web.archive.org/web/20260322213950/https://serjaimel...

I hope that this might help some people and I have another friendly suggestion to please donate to archive.org :-)

Re: What young workers are doing to AI-proof themselves

#19

Post by Loughla »

stephen_cagle wrote: post #8

I'm somewhat skeptical of this "enter the trades" movement. Actually, I am more skeptical of that statement than I am of LLM's replacing white collar work in general. I think parts of coding are being replaced quickly because they are the parts that don't require discernment. Trades likely contain just as many automatable and just as many discernment parts as white collar work. At this moment in history, the automata…

The difference is the physical aspect of the trades. The design for wiring can be (and already has been) automated, but you physically need an electrician on site to pull the wires. So I can see a hollowing out of the engineers, but not the actual electricians.

That being said, the absolute focus on trades from the fed right now just reeks of the wild pendulum swing. It used to be 'go to college to get a good job' then we had too many college grads. In ten years we'll have a glut of people trained in the trades with no prospects.

It just keeps swinging back and forth and somehow Joe Regularworker keeps losing.

Re: What young workers are doing to AI-proof themselves

#20

Post by generic92034 »

magic_hamster wrote: post #14
crop_rotation wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Domain knowledge as in non public aspects of the work you/ your workplace does. The AI tools are very good at whatever is public but very clueless about proprietary domains .Let's say you make CRUD apps about some confidential domain. Now the CRUD skills might be commodity but the confidential domain is even more important.

As long as there's internal documentation, which virtually every serious shop has, it can be processed and combined with AI. There are startups selling this product already. I've seen first hand some very narrowly focused domain knowledge becoming more accessible when you can ask the chatbot and the thing is right . It works. Come to think of it, domain knowledge should be an LLMs strong suit as long as you can provi…

In ERP software there are MLOCs without any technical documentation. And nobody would spend a dime to create one. So, the deep expert knowledge on how business processes are supposed to work (in full detail) and how they are implemented is mostly in the heads of a couple of people.
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