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I quit my FAANG job because it'll be automated by the end of the year (2025)

jagilley.github.io

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Re: I quit my FAANG job because it'll be automated by the end of the year (2025)

#21

Am I the only one that thinks that being "agent wrangler" actually makes building things more fun? To me, the interesting parts in building is taking a real problem, mapping it to a set of "things" that need to be built, decompose them into treatable chunks, and defining how they should interact. This is where intelligence comes in. if agents want to take the rest, please do! I can focus on making better products.

No, I love it. It has made programming fun again and lets me focus on the creative parts. Really satisfying.

Re: I quit my FAANG job because it'll be automated by the end of the year (2025)

#22

Am I the only one that thinks that being "agent wrangler" actually makes building things more fun? To me, the interesting parts in building is taking a real problem, mapping it to a set of "things" that need to be built, decompose them into treatable chunks, and defining how they should interact. This is where intelligence comes in. if agents want to take the rest, please do! I can focus on making better products.

You and literally everyone else. If ideas are "a dime a dozen", and the hard part (aka building the implementation) is trivially solved by LLMs then it won't be you competing against a handful of similar businesses, it'll be you against TEN THOUSAND . The ultimate end result of lowering the barrier to entry down to zero is that making money on bespoke software will be about as commercially viable as making money writ…

Sounds like a win for humanity to me.

Writing software was always that, automating yours or (more likely) someone else's job away.

Re: I quit my FAANG job because it'll be automated by the end of the year (2025)

#23

About four years of total industry experience, split across two very different work domains, in what sounds like one organization. I can't make an honest guess about whether their actual job will be "automated" or otherwise made redundant in the next year, as they suggest. Maybe they're right that they've been doing easily automatable work for these few years. But I can question whether they have nearly enough insigh…

>Maybe they're right that they've been doing easily automatable work for these few years.

It makes sense if this is the case, he might have even anticipated being hit by the next wave of layoffs and quitted early

Re: I quit my FAANG job because it'll be automated by the end of the year (2025)

#24
post #2

Narrator: that is not why Jasper really quit Apple. Especially at Apple, no one will automate his job "by the end of the year", or in the foreseeable future.

turning this into an episode of Arrested Development is apropos on how over the top this whole AI/LLM hype train has become

Re: I quit my FAANG job because it'll be automated by the end of the year (2025)

#27
Oh no. This author appears to have imagined some kool aid to drink.

No one's job is actively going away. What's happening is job-role compression - no longer are there "pure coder" roles. You can think of it the same way as there's no longer an IT team in the depths of the company - nowadays the company has many SaaS products strung together with APIs, and the office manager is part-time IT as one of their many roles. They do point-and-click to perform onboarding/offboarding etc. - in the same morning they might onboard a new employee, then go restock the kitchen.

In software the roughly-equivalent outcome is a decrease in deeply technical work (and especially a decrease to produce CRUD apps). But no change in the human-to-human work to uncover what actually needs to be built. So you're no longer a "programmer" or even "software engineer", you're now a "full stack product manager".

It's a continuation of a trend where less "sit-and-type" is needed to get to value. Think of how simple kubernetes and similar infra makes it to implement horizontally scalable, stateless web apps. As the "sit-and-type" ratio changes, the value you can generate by being good at deciding what to build increases!

As always, if you want a durable job, hone 2 skillsets: get good at talking to people about what they need, while simultaneously keeping up with trends such as LLMs so you can keep on guiding the computer to produce what is needed.

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