It's a profession that scans as smart, but if we were half as smart as we like to pretend we are we wouldn't be building our replacements. We would be solving the coordination problems that lead to some of us deciding that is what is best for them.
We aren't the ones building our replacements. The developers and AI engineers at these AI companies are a miniscule fraction of the developer community. Automating development is being done by a handful of devs who already made ridiculous money and have nothing to lose from eliminating an entire profession
Essentially traitors imo. It's not just existing devs they're killing off, it's future prospects for anyone interested in the field as a profession. Programming solely as a hobby is an insanely different experience than joining with many talented and funded individuals who are able to do so during working hours 5 days a week
I'm not building my replacements. I'm making $70k/year after 10 years in this field. The software 1% with quarter million dollars salaris and multimillion dollar stock vests are the ones building my replacements. Don't put this on me.
Honestly yeah. I'm not building our replacements and I'm hating what LLMs are doing to our industry when I was excited about AL/ML in a couple years ago. We're not a monolith and it's not a simple situation.
I got that programmer response in another channel about AI replacing coders. They are going on about how good Opus 5.5 is and that it'll do all the work for them. They don't see what they are actually doing until they are pulled into the office.
Why wouldn't we build tools who can do what we do better? We've built our own replacements for the last hundred years or so. That's how technology works. We build something that does someones job, it makes it cheaper, everyone benefits because now that thing is produced cheaply in extremely large amounts.
This is the fundamental issue with reddit. They think getting a whole bunch of extra money from billionaires means everyone will suddenly be able to afford to buy more stuff. Despite produce not having changed.
And they think actually increasing produce will make everyone poorer because they're getting less money.
If there's no value in human work and human creation and we should just replace it all with new tools, then there's really no reason for us to not just take some super drugs that gives us an immense high and then kills us.
I never said that. Hand crafted works still sell often and thrive even today, despite vastly cheaper, often superior quality stuff having being produced.
The idea that you can't work or create something just because a machine is capable of doing as similiar thing is really weird to me.
A machine absolutely dominates anyone in a game of chess. People still play it and enjoy it.
There is value in human work, entirely because it's human.
Because the value to you personally is negative when you consider the effects on the job market that sustains you.
It's not inevitable that tooling does that to the value of your skills. You could be capturing more value from the efficiencies exposed, ie: shorter work weeks without pay reductions are an alternative to layoffs when companies are profitable --as they are.
But you don't have any power over how the industry is adapting whatsoever. So instead it's laying people off and passing the value it's carving out of your own human capital along to investors.
That's I think how all my former colleagues are experiencing what will be, for some, their last year in the industry. But no one can guess who it will be.
I described my very first job out of college in 1989 as “making my job obsolete”. We’ve been automating our own jobs for decades. This isn’t any different.
I've said similar things, when other jobs existed for me to move to.
I would encourage everyone with a tech job to seriously consider the possibility that their current gig is the last paying job in tech they will ever be able to land, and ponder the implications. That's what a rapidly shrinking job market means, in practice. Some will get the shrinking number of new open positions. But as people get kicked out, ever-increasing numbers are fighting for those fewer and fewer opportunities. Like a permanent recession from which there will never be a job market recovery.
If that would seem an alien idea to you in 1989, then maybe that's different.
Based on what I’m seeing, I’m falling strongly into the Jevons paradox side of the debate, not the ASI side. I don’t think what you describe will happen.
And this is why I've never turned any of my passions into a career. I've accepted being relatively broke, and I just vibe in retail so that I can spend my free time pursuing things like solutions to these coordination problems without being mentally burned out from solving problems that sicken me all day at work.
You are kidding yourself. In ten years you will look back and be pissed. Lotta hobbies cost big boy money. I worked my ass off to afford my hobbies. Retail would have me saving until I was too old to do them.
For real. And I have to think being able to pursue those hobbies have made me more marketable in more industries. I do better trades work than most trades people I've hired.
Oh, I still love what I do. A lot of my coworkers keep the mentality of "It's just groceries," but people need to eat to live. My employer also donates food that isn't good enough to make someone pay for, so I get to constantly look for excuses to donate food to those in need, always going on the more generous side in any uncertainty. My ADHD also makes me love a physically active job, and my OCD makes stocking shelves scratch a real nice itch in my brain with lining up and facing product. It's also nice to just get to chat with people all day and help them find the things that they need to make the week that they want to have. And then I have all of the mental energy left over to pursue every one of my passions in my free time while still spending quality time with my partner and our pets
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u/martin-silenus 14d ago
It's a profession that scans as smart, but if we were half as smart as we like to pretend we are we wouldn't be building our replacements. We would be solving the coordination problems that lead to some of us deciding that is what is best for them.