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How to Survive in the Tech industry in 2026
31–40 of 41 posts
Re: How to Survive in the Tech industry in 2026
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
> One major problem I see with the use of AI is that it will prevent people from building an understanding of . This will reduce people's ability to drive AI correctly, creating a circular problem. Very much the opposite. LLMs do a fantastic job of increasing accessibility of knowledge. They have wide exposure to content and is incredibly good at spotting patterns and suggesting both well established norms from the c…
We must be from _wildly_ different backgrounds.
It's possible we are from very similar backgrounds but bring wildly different perspectives. I'm always suspicious of statements of the form "X will prevent people from Y".
The amount of progress humans have made over 2000 years, especially the last 100, is just phenomenal. If anything, there's very little evidence that any X prevents people from Y. X certainly might not require people to Y anymore but I don't question what a motivated person can do just like I don't question what an unmotivated person can refuse to do.
It would help if you expanded on "it will prevent people from building an understanding of ", but could one interpretation of it be "AI will prevent people from building an understanding of good software design patterns" because AI allows people to just vibe code and pay no attention to design patterns at all?
Re: How to Survive in the Tech industry in 2026
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
Then you need to have generated electricity somehow. I've never used VRChat. Just one more thing you were wrong about. Not that it matters, you being wrong, seemingly, is something that occurs very frequently.
> Then you need to have generated electricity somehow. https://i.imgur.com/qv75o9j.png So where's your 12KW solar array?
An hypothetical solar array may generate energy.
Your Grok prompt for lewd anime waifus most certainly don't.
Re: How to Survive in the Tech industry in 2026
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
> One major problem I see with the use of AI is that it will prevent people from building an understanding of . I don’t really think this is a problem. AI is a tool, you still learn while using it. If you actually read, debug and maintain the produced code, which I consider a must for complex production systems, it’s not really that different compared to reading documentation and using Stack Overflow (i.e., coding th…
I’ll bite - I’ve been a dev at a new company for about a year and a half. I had mostly done front end work before this, so my SQL knowledge was almost nonexistent. I’m now working in the backend, and SQL is a major requirement. Writing what I would call “normal” queries. I’ve been reaching for AI to handle this, pretty much the whole time - because it’s faster than I am. I am picking up tidbits along the way. So I am…
Sounds pretty dire and/or super exploitive if a company can't spare a week for an individual employee to learn the tools of the job.
Re: How to Survive in the Tech industry in 2026
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
> One major problem I see with the use of AI is that it will prevent people from building an understanding of . I don’t really think this is a problem. AI is a tool, you still learn while using it. If you actually read, debug and maintain the produced code, which I consider a must for complex production systems, it’s not really that different compared to reading documentation and using Stack Overflow (i.e., coding th…
I’ll bite - I’ve been a dev at a new company for about a year and a half. I had mostly done front end work before this, so my SQL knowledge was almost nonexistent. I’m now working in the backend, and SQL is a major requirement. Writing what I would call “normal” queries. I’ve been reaching for AI to handle this, pretty much the whole time - because it’s faster than I am. I am picking up tidbits along the way. So I am…
I can corroborate this. I coached mechanical engineers who had to learn some programming to conduct research by analyzing factory machine data I provided them (them being the domain experts). The ones who learned python and sql using AI hardly had learned anything after half a year, the ones I instructed where to find the API docs and a beginner tutorial weren’t just much further along, they were also on a faster trajectory for the future. I think AI is a beginner trap because it allows them to throw shit at the wall and see what sticks. It is much more useful in the hands of an expert in the long term.
Re: How to Survive in the Tech industry in 2026
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
We must be from _wildly_ different backgrounds.
It's possible we are from very similar backgrounds but bring wildly different perspectives. I'm always suspicious of statements of the form "X will prevent people from Y". The amount of progress humans have made over 2000 years, especially the last 100, is just phenomenal. If anything, there's very little evidence that any X prevents people from Y. X certainly might not require people to Y anymore but I don't questio…
Let me start by asking you this:
Where does the majority of an individual's general knowledge come from?
Re: How to Survive in the Tech industry in 2026
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’ll bite - I’ve been a dev at a new company for about a year and a half. I had mostly done front end work before this, so my SQL knowledge was almost nonexistent. I’m now working in the backend, and SQL is a major requirement. Writing what I would call “normal” queries. I’ve been reaching for AI to handle this, pretty much the whole time - because it’s faster than I am. I am picking up tidbits along the way. So I am…
I can corroborate this. I coached mechanical engineers who had to learn some programming to conduct research by analyzing factory machine data I provided them (them being the domain experts). The ones who learned python and sql using AI hardly had learned anything after half a year, the ones I instructed where to find the API docs and a beginner tutorial weren’t just much further along, they were also on a faster tra…
I think this has been shown for fast majority with homework. You just don't learn much by copying homework from somewhere else. Actual effort is needed for learning process. Unless you are some weird most likely rare genius...
Also makes me think of lot of incidental learning that can go on. Like when looking at API docs noticing the other things. Might not be useful now, but could very well be later.
Re: How to Survive in the Tech industry in 2026
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's possible we are from very similar backgrounds but bring wildly different perspectives. I'm always suspicious of statements of the form "X will prevent people from Y". The amount of progress humans have made over 2000 years, especially the last 100, is just phenomenal. If anything, there's very little evidence that any X prevents people from Y. X certainly might not require people to Y anymore but I don't questio…
Let me start by asking you this: Where does the majority of an individual's general knowledge come from?
their environment and life experiences
Re: How to Survive in the Tech industry in 2026
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
Let me start by asking you this: Where does the majority of an individual's general knowledge come from?
their environment and life experiences
Alright, so we have our first point of divergence. For me, the majority of my general knowledge comes from reading.
Where does the majority of an individual's _understanding_ come from?
Re: How to Survive in the Tech industry in 2026
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
their environment and life experiences
Alright, so we have our first point of divergence. For me, the majority of my general knowledge comes from reading. Where does the majority of an individual's _understanding_ come from?
> Alright, so we have our first point of divergence. For me, the majority of my general knowledge comes from reading
Reading is part of your environment - you didn't read your way into a vacuum - the very tools you use to read right now (language, symbols, syntax) are environmental gifts. Something, even if you're consciously unaware of it, made you read those material. The specific script you read is part of your environment (it's unlikely you will know what symbols in Hindi mean if you didn't grow up in that environment or weren't biased towards it). Your physical brain structure depends on the languages you speak and will physically morph as you change those languages.
If you have absolutely no clue what "mutton paratha" is, you won't ever start reading about "mutton paratha" right away. (there's another thread we can discuss about human biology, original thought and serendipity but that is better done over email than in HN comments). If you can hear and see, a lot of your general knowledge comes from hearing and seeing too, even if you're consciously unaware of it or don't acknowledge it. If you saw your dad working on cars all your young life, you might not think you have any idea about cars but you might be surprised.
> Where does the majority of an individual's _understanding_ come from?
Understanding is more complex than knowledge. Understanding and knowledge are at different levels of abstraction but you cannot understand something you have no knowledge of. Thus knowledge is a pre-requisite to understanding but insufficient. With sufficient understanding, you can synthesize knowledge. Nikola Tesla synthesized knowledge about AC Induction motors - a knowledge that's now taught even in high schools from his understanding of EMF. However given the same knowledge of EMF, many people at the times of Tesla didn't have sufficient understanding or motivation or capacity to birth AC Induction motors.
You can be extremely knowledgeable but understand absolutely nothing. LLM's are, I argue, excellent examples of this - they have tremendous knowledge but depends on human intervention and discourse to tease it out (as great as SOTA LLMs are, they are not going to randomly design apps without an initial prompt which provides them agency and biases them towards autonomy).
(Again, I'm discarding some details that we can discuss over email. For example: I can strongly argue that LLMs have some understanding of what its knowledge is - like the semantic distance between "mutton" and "paratha" and how they can change across various manifolds in latent space)
If we agree on this take on understanding, then I argue that the majority of an individual's understanding comes from their consciousness, when they have exercised those neural networks and processed their knowledge to arrive at inferences and re-enforced (belief) or disassociation (misbelief) of assertions