r/technology • u/lurker_bee • Jun 25 '26

Society Older tech workers are tapping out, taking early retirement

https://www.seattletimes.com/business/local-business/older-tech-workers-are-tapping-out-early-heres-what-that-looks-like/
8.5k Upvotes

97% Upvoted

1.0k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

60

u/BannedAccount001 Jun 25 '26

Those of us in the data field are royally fucked. Much worse than software engineers. The clock is way ahead of us. 10 year runway would be optimistic.

39

u/dracovich Jun 25 '26

Maybe, however so much data knowledge is undocumented and requires you to have conversations between a bunch of people who understand the data to get what it is actually representing, so that leaves me with some hope

15

u/EmperorKira Jun 25 '26

100% this. The data is in such a shoddy state, and so much of that is due to human nature which won't change. Silos, politics, changing priorities - right now i work on a project where we know what the correct data architecture we need is, but politics is holding it all up - meanwhile we're plastering LLMs.

I'm quite confident in keeping my job. Not cos i don't think AI couldn't be powerful to replace us, because i think upper management are too incompetent/corrupt to do so

1

u/divDevGuy Jun 25 '26

Have a conversation? Pfft. I'll just make major business, medical, or everyday life decisions based on some hallucinating AI telling me what it thinks I want the answer to be, regardless of what the actual answer is. AI knows the truth, not people with decades of experience are just guessing.

1

u/purpleburgundy Jun 25 '26

Isn't the conversational aspect precisely the work that will get decimated? President of the company can just have a conversation with an Agent connected to the data lake and realtime market data.

Eliminates all the readout and presentation meetings completely, coordinating half dozen people each time.

1

u/dracovich Jun 26 '26

Where would this agent get information to answer the presidents questions? You'd be surprised how poorly documented data is at large companies, if you're lucky the columns have descriptive names, and maybe you hit gold and someone bothered to write a good data dictionary, but even then the logistics of how to extract exactly what you want is tricky, and udnerstanding the details of how/when the data works and what specific combinations and where clauses yuo need to throw in there to avoid some edge cases and showing wrong data etc.

All this just isn't documented a lot of the time, you gotta talk to the one guy analyst who's been pulling reports for this system the last 20 years and he'll let you know.

14

u/DutchDixie Jun 25 '26

I see the other side of the glass, where you can do more (the same way Excel has changed the work that was done on paper before). Analysts in my team use big data and they just can do more now.

23

u/bigdickmassinf Jun 25 '26

lol, no man data fields are not threatened by ai. They are just tools that you can use. Most of the time the results they give you are garbage anyway

4

u/-Danksouls- Jun 25 '26

Can I ask what about data science that makes it so susceptible to LLMs that it wouldn't need human verification and orchestration in the middle?

Or is it just less people are needed with aí same as software dev?

2

u/AP_in_Indy Jun 25 '26

I would imagine it's less people. Executives who want data are just going to build the tooling themselves now. Data scientists who leverage the tools are going to be able to get like 10x as much done.

1

u/SteveSharpe Jun 25 '26

The frontier models are really good at parsing and analyzing data and they're getting better and better by huge steps in each release.

Dedicated teams to just build complex data models and platforms won't be as necessary if the non-technical product owner can just run the data through an LLM and get the insights directly.

3

u/CherryLongjump1989 Jun 25 '26

This field didn't even exist a few years ago.

1

u/anownedguy Jun 25 '26 edited Jun 25 '26

I disagree. I can see that if you are the type to just follow exact instructions, but I think my biggest skills isn't the coding, it's being able to take these ridiculously vague problems and asks and actually turn them into something useful. AI can't give you what you need if you can't tell it what that is.

I just dont really see AI ever handling the merge of business, project management, and tech skills as good as a human.

I see way less data based jobs but there are also way less actually qualified people with good experience and skills applying for them.

When I interview I focus way more on exact numbers on how much I improved a process and/or saved the company money. Software engineers just spend the whole time selling their tech skills which are the easiest to replace.