What young workers are doing to AI-proof themselves

Post by jazzpush2 » Mon, Mar 23, 2026, 4:26 AM UTC

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #124

time0ut wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 really wish this entire romanticism of the good old days when people only got into computer science because they breathed ate and dreamed about computers would die. It was never reality - I graduated in 1996 and have worked at 10 jobs everything from lifestyle companies, to startups, to boring old enterprise to BigTech and now consulting companies. To a tee everyone has treated it like a job and not some religious…

Post by Animats » Mon, Mar 23, 2026, 4:28 AM UTC

yojo wrote: post #46

margorczynski wrote: post #33

The "go into trades" thing has two major flaws: 1) The supply of work will skyrocket when everyone will flock there for work 2) Demand will plummet as the white collar people who bought these services will loose their jobs and income And of course if robotics will get solved to an acceptable degree most of those jobs will also get mostly automated.

Having spent a couple years rehabbing a 100 year old house, I’m convinced the trades will be the last thing to go. When the building you’re working on has been ship-of-Theseus’d by 3 generations of home owners, everything is out of distribution. When a robot can reliably do this work, I think it can reliably do any human job that requires physical ability and judgement.

Post by closewith » Mon, Mar 23, 2026, 4:39 AM UTC

porknubbins wrote: post #110

bilbo0s wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Social safety nets and such are probably set up by the time the robots come for the last jobs. What makes you think "Social safety nets" will be the solution the élites land on? If we were to wargame out different scenarios, we'd likely find there are a lot of potential solutions to the problem of large masses of people who are not useful to the cause of productivity in your society. Giving non-élites a social safe…

If elites do not provide a social safety net why would the masses respect their elite status and resource endowments anyway? Unless you are suggesting billionaires build private armies in some sort of neo feudalism, there are no elites who are not dependant on the existing social structure.

Post by closewith » Mon, Mar 23, 2026, 4:44 AM UTC

jasondigitized wrote: post #86

magic_hamster wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Documentation rarely reflects how anything is actually done, referred to by good business analysts as 'shadow functions'.

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Mar 23, 2026, 4:53 AM UTC

eucyclos wrote: post #97

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…

>What should kids be aiming for according to you? If it's my kid? Starting their own Enterprise. Between 'good enough' knowledge work getting cheaper and the bureaucracy that made entrepreneurship less attractive over the last decades being either trimmed or automatable, we may be looking at a golden age of new business formation. There's an old saying, "genius is one percent inspiration and ninety nine percent persp…