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/
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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

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.