What young workers are doing to AI-proof themselves

One of the reasons that I’m slightly less worried about a climate apocalypse is that there isn’t an equivalent group of people that sees the “inevitability” and concludes that it must be a moral good for the planet to warm 5 degrees. I’d argue that multiple degrees of warming is more inevitable than paperclips, but there’s a serious global effort to mitigate and avoid it anyway!

Just had it happen to a friend: needed a plumber, impossible to find anything reliable (no one in town knows of a reliable plumber; it's a rare find). All Google Maps results contained lots of paid 5-star reviews (ratings with a full, typo-less phrase, praising the company in very generic terms, and the only review for that profile), so he had to pick one of them anyway.

Guy shows up, doesn't present a quote before doing the work (mandatory for >150€), does a mess but fixes the issue in less than 30 minutes, bills 200€, or 250€ if you want a receipt. No paperwork whatsoever, and in a position to physically harm you or do damage to your home if you refuse. And that's a "good" one. Locksmiths that charge 500€ or more for 10-minute jobs are a dozen a legion.

Then, these same people start buying cheap houses here and there, and in 20 years they'll be worth so much money that they'll become rich landlords and live on rent alone.

Several friends during PhD were renting cheap apartments whose owners were truck drivers, electricians, etc.

The point is, concentration of wealth and never-ending property values going up is only going to make becoming renter a better and better deal. And every profession that caters to renters is going to get some share of that money.

I mean I might think oil prices will go up but still choose not to buy oil stocks for moral reasons.

"So soon as the handling of this tool becomes the work of a machine, then, with the use-value, the exchange-value too, of the workman’s labour-power vanishes; the workman becomes unsaleable, like paper money thrown out of currency by legal enactment. That portion of the working-class, thus by machinery rendered superfluous, i.e., no longer immediately necessary for the self-expansion of capital, either goes to the wall in the unequal contest of the old handicrafts and manufactures with machinery, or else floods all the more easily accessible branches of industry, swamps the labour-market, and sinks the price of labour-power below its value."[0]

[0]: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch15.htm

Restated, I’m not saying we’re hiring more or less because of LLM AI productivity changes. I’m rejecting the idea we need less people for all the previous reasons stated and my own two cents that we’re yet to see the reduced work hours Keynesian economics predicted as output per hour increased. We humans just keep working the same hours even if that hour is massively more productive.

This last point is well studied and not my own original thought. I’m just poorly regurgitating college level Macro Economics.

My own point I’ll add here is we’re not seeing companies bragging about their two day work weeks.

My personal experience with layoffs is that it’s all been financial engineering and the lack of nearly free financing that we had in the 2010s, again in the Pandemic, CapEx tax changes last year, and/or over hiring similar to but not nearly as massive as Google and Facebook. I worked for a European company that hired a dozen Americans to become more “US Tech Company” like and eventually let us all go two years ago once the fun money ran out when rates increased. They did a little bit of the AI babbling but realistically they couldn’t get the financing to keep it all rolling.

The companies reducing to one developer for a product are likely not doing this because of LLM AI work but likely will survive better because of it.

To your point, I’m actually living it and it’s nothing to do with AI. One of my teams was cut to 25% of its size a year ago and the whole QA team let go. Roughly this was an EBITA play. Basically the only way we get anything done is by doing what I mentioned in my earlier post where the front end dev uses LLMs to build a prototype backend they can use to support their front end expertise and the back end dev does the same for the front end. Eventually they meet in the middle and I can juggle some of the KTLO myself. Is this fun? Absolutely not. If we had the headcount back we’d be able to meet the ‘25-26 roadmap but instead we’re doing 40% of it.