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I'm OK being left behind, thanks

shkspr.mobi

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Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#661

Post by bluefirebrand »

polothesecond wrote: post #360
samiv wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that we don't live in a society where the benefits of new technology benefit all. We're about to pull the rug underneath all knowledge workers. This will disrupt wage earners lives. This will disrupt the economy. You might feel great about when things become cheaper but remember that when things are cheap it's only because costs are low and when costs are low the revenues are low and when revenues are…

> We're about to pull the rug underneath all knowledge workers. This will disrupt wage earners lives. This will disrupt the economy. It will put and end to the middle class entirely, but that’s the intent. The reality is a lot of people who were formerly middle or upper middle class, and even some lower class populations will face steep, irreversible “status adjustment”. I’m not talking about “we used to be able to t…

I'm too old to be competing for day labour jobs, but not old enough or rich enough to retire

So I'm extremely bitter about this potential direction

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#662

Post by bluefirebrand »

chasd00 wrote: post #412
samiv wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I cannot but agree. It's a massive skill leveling where software development is transforming from high skilled coding to low skilled prompting. For an old dog like myself it feels an unjust rug pull.

I think looking at what the web did to the journalism industry as a model to what's happening to the software dev industry is worth while. Journalism didn't go away but it did completely change. Many old school journalists just couldn't adapt and left the industry, many papers died too.

And what is left of journalism of low effort high volume clickbait garbage

Boy I can't wait for the equivalent of low effort high volume clickbait to take over software. Yay!

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#663

Post by BasilofBasiley »

tavavex wrote: post #615
bogzz wrote: post #29

It's a horrifying feeling facing the possibility that the career I spent so much time and money to get into is fading away. Sure, LLMs are not there yet, and they might not ever quite get there. But will companies start hiring again? If productivity has gone up, and it seems like it has, then no. So, a decade of hanging by a thread, getting by and doubling down on CS, hoping that the job market sees an uptick? Or try…

> A flat tire is a flat tire, no matter whether a recession is going on or whether LLMs are causing chaos in white collar work. If I had no debt and a little bit saved up I might just content myself with a humble moat like that. Bad idea. Automotive repair is barely a moat, because you don't need that much training to work those jobs. There's a lot of people who want to do it. And cars are definitely susceptible to r…

>Automotive repair is barely a moat, because you don't need that much training to work those jobs.

You need to study for 3 years to be a car mechanic. And even then you'll need baby sitting for a while in the auto-shop because no one trusts the new guy fresh out of school, with good reason.

>There's a lot of people who want to do it.

No there isn't. What do you mean by lot of people? Automotive repair is a blue collar job with intense physical strain, you're exposed to chemicals you shouldn't be, there will be hearing loss involved no matter how much protection you have and it doesn't even pay all that well, considering the risks involved and the amount of training you need. And no, it's not because the market is saturated with car mechanics, it's because auto repair shops have a lot of pressure to be cheap. Job listings are full of car mechanic openings, you'll never be unemployed.

All the "if's" presented are solved by relocation and not even that much of it, except for this:

>if fewer people are buying cars

Then the skills are easily transferable to other vehicles. But less people are buying cars already, they use uber, which involves a car. A car that needs 10x more repair time than the car you drive daily.

So yeah, auto repair is a good moat. It's complex, not everyone can do it, it's not licensed in most cases (unless you work for a brand or a niche) but there's reputation involved and it's always needed. It just doesn't pay all that well, specially not compared to what I see on HN's monthly whoshiring.

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#664

Post by [deleted] »

temikus wrote: post #639

I’m in senior management and my take is - this is one of the very few times in our industry when the companies are actually both encouraging and investing in L&D at an unprecedented rate. When do you last remember a company being comfortable throwing 10,000$+ a year for you to learn a new skill and experiment at your own pace? This is why I’m encouraging my engineers so much - it’s free training! Take it while it las…

[deleted]

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#665

Post by archagon »

jmalicki wrote: post #648
SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #635

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think my employer should buy me a laptop and possibly a monitor or two to help my productivity because I subjectively feel they'd be helpful, and I have the market power to insist on tools that I subjectively feel are helpful. If my CEO announced that monitors are super important and everyone will be tracked on monitor space usage going forwards, I would still want to see evidence that this is going to accomplish s…

Your CEO likewise subjectively feels all of their employees using AI will be helpful, and has the market power to insist that their employees use them. When engineers demand evidence that AI is productive, but not that having laptops and monitors are productive, it screams confirmation bias. "I'm right, you're wrong" as a default prior.

Sounds like it would be pretty productive for employees to unionize and replace their CEO with an LLM.

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#666

Post by cineticdaffodil »

augusto-moura wrote: post #164
stiiv wrote: post #33

> If this tech is as amazing as you say it is, I'll be able to pick it up and become productive on a timescale of my choosing not yours. Broadly speaking, I think this is a wise assessment. There are opportunities for productivity gains right now, but it I don't think it's a knockout for anyone using the tech, and I think that onboarding might be challenging for some people in the tech's current state. It is safe to…

What I get a bit annoyed is companies forcing AI tools, getting usage metrics and actively hunting the engineers that don't use the tool "enough", I've never seen anything like it for a technically optional tool. Even in the past, aside from technical limitaions, you were not required to use enough of a tool. It just sounds like a giant scheme to burn through tokens and give money to the AI corps, and tech directors…

[dead]

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#667

Post by ctoth »

kjkjadksj wrote: post #575
bitwize wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, this is wrong. AI has drastically shortened the time and effort between idea and implementation. The upshot being, that not only do you get things done faster, but things you wouldn't otherwise countenance doing are now within reach.

So where is all the new tech years into ai? Turns out that wasn’t the limiting factor. The limiting factor is still what it was 10,000 years ago in business: accumulating capital to start and finding a fit in the market to last.

Wait. Which one is it? Is Show HN overwhelmed with too much new stuff because of AI? Or is there no new stuff? I am so confused!

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#668

Post by jryle70 »

samiv wrote: post #449
chasd00 wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i made this point a few comments up but i think what's happening to the software dev industry is what happened to the journalism industry when the web really came into its own and everyone was now a journalist. There were even books written by tech people about how great "creative destruction" is heh now the shoe is on the other foot. How many "old dinosaurs" did web development and software dev in general put out of…

yep you're absolutely right. the value in journalism and journalistic output was based on the scarcity, i.e. the cost of publishing reduced the amount of available content. With web the costs were obliterated so the content exploded and the value of any individual piece dropped to essentially zero. When it's worth zero your revenues are zero and zero revenues you can't really pay for any journalism. So then you have…

I'm not seeing you calling it unjust that journalism has been disrupted. Why do you think software development is different?

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#669

Post by Semiapies »

bogzz wrote: post #29

It's a horrifying feeling facing the possibility that the career I spent so much time and money to get into is fading away. Sure, LLMs are not there yet, and they might not ever quite get there. But will companies start hiring again? If productivity has gone up, and it seems like it has, then no. So, a decade of hanging by a thread, getting by and doubling down on CS, hoping that the job market sees an uptick? Or try…

I'm maybe less pessimistic, but I expect in the next decade or two, I'm going to spend a lot of time fixing apps that people who were moderately technical vibe-coded years before. They seemed to work well enough until they didn't, and at some point, they became central to the business.

MS Access and so many more "you won't need a programmer again" dev tools over the decades blazed the trail.

Re: I'm OK being left behind, thanks

#670

Post by timacles »

monegator wrote: post #35
butILoveLife wrote: post #4

This would hit harder if Bitcoin didn't win and AI coding didn't completely change our jobs. Why not simply evaluate things instead of ignoring them until its too late? Sure, we don't have infinity time, but the fact that OP mentions these two things, means the pattern showed up enough.

daily reminder your have yet to start paying for using LLMs, the current paid tiers are just to lure you in. It also has changed nothing in the way i do stuff. Checked it out, not for me, thanks but no thanks (Sick and tired of hearing how you made an ui in a couple of hours by directing the code when it still takes me the same couple of hours of coding.)

But they didn’t have to think as hard, so they win

Oh wait…

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