People will simple have to find some new work, it sucks but some of us have been dealing with not being wanted by corpo-world our whole lives despite our skills, and we are still here. You will all be fine. Much love to all who are going through this.
I shall continue my training watching Karpathy videos and reading Timothy Gowers' blog.
AI will have a massive impact, engineers might be the canary in the coalmine but no doubt other profession will follow soon.
To end in a bright note, software architecture and cyber security are going to be growing massively.
The repetitive nature of these jobs is a red herring, because people are not paid for ticking boxes. They are paid for being held accountable for the implications of the checks not being done.
For example, some roles are restricted to professional engineers and involve basically going to places, doing checks, and ticking boxes in a form. Other roles require a far greater specialization and complexity, but they don't require a professional engineer. Why? Because if your game server crashes no one dies, whereas if an office building falls down them the guys checking boxes will find themselves in a courtroom.
Software has always been a different kind of creative trade where if you stopped learning and embracing the trends you would get crushed sooner or later - if you just wanted decent paychecks until the end of time and protection by the sheer weight of your academic degree and years of "experience" then software development wasn't the best path forward.
But it often payed better than entry engineering or math jobs therefore many switched to software - although they would have been almost certainly happier staying a profession not so dependent on adapting yearly trends to this extreme. This was the first major lesson i got taught almost 20 years ago here. It was also around that time where i realized most software professionals never belonged in this creative trade camp but still got a lifelong career out of being more or less disconnected with the trends.
They were doing year for year the almost same tasks and collecting paychecks. Which is totally fine as long as there was more demand for writing code than qualified professionals hirable. The trope of ageism in software and silicon valley is as old as hacker news. But there was still some touch of truth to it - you wanted the best developers who never stopped learning, knew that code isn't the goal and didn't think their years of experience are worth anything three years from now on in a profession that's about trends solving business needs and less about formal engineering.
Not only did a lot of people care, it was the basis for all of the modern labor organizing starting in the late 19th century.
Start here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haymarket_affair
Like your entire post is 100% incorrect and clearly ignorant of the history of organized labor or class consciousness
Edit: It’s not anyone’s fault they are ignorant to this stuff because the amount of anti-labor propaganda is unbelievably pervasive. However it does prevent effective organizing if nobody thinks that there is actual process to organize around, so it just never happens.
Labor rights have been polarized through many revolutions and political upheavals in the time since then and yet...all those jobs are still gone and worldwide labor conditions in most places outside of a few small countries still aren't great for working people.
İ don't see how this is an anti labor message, quite the opposite. İ wish people would respect themselves enough to stand up for better conditions, but this starts not with bombs and anarchistic rioting like the Haymarket affair, which was very controversial in other ways, But by simply saying "no" to abuse. Unfortunately when your hungry or scared enough you will say yes to just about everything, and the powerful know this very well.
Again just totally incorrect and completely ignorant of the history of labor
But go ahead and go off on whatever you think is correct and continue to ignore the issue and then be confused about why the world is in the state
The reason propaganda is so pervasive is because it works and clearly so.
I actually have an advanced degree in and personal infatuation with history, so I would welcome proper debate on historical issues. But hand wavy "your just wrong bro cause propaganda" just isn't discussion.
My goal is so that other readers don’t take your statements seriously at all
At my employer, every incentive, every metric, every conversation, was aligned behind using AI. Every team performance meeting pulled up graphs on whether velocity was increasing beyond last quarter’s metrics, which should be going up because of AI. Choosing not to use it inevitably means getting let go since I’d be working at slower speeds. But as team lead this was already happening because all my time was spent reviewing slop and I had no time to produce my own code, because the entire team was being reckless with their submissions. I was going at 1/3 the speed of everyone else trying to keep things coherent. My manager preferred to fix forward rather than address my concerns that we were producing tech debt at 10x speeds, so none of my comments were addressed. As soon as our prototype was done, the other most senior engineer and I pleaded that we rewrite it from scratch before getting it to prod, but that of course would have been a two month setback. By now, all of upper management were ending every quarterly meeting with “If you don’t like AI, then leave now”.
I haven’t looked back, and I don’t think it will go well for them.
But one of the things I find interesting at the ground level is that AI can be incredibly empowering to individuals on the front lines, because suddenly one person can run down code, data, logs, and other tedious scope to cut through layers of bureaucracy that served no real purpose except to manage human bandwidth constraints. Now obviously this is not a panacea, it doesn't work everywhere, can be disruptive, lead to new ambiguities, etc. It's too early to see how it will actually pan out once model capabilities and human ways of working stabilize, and I'm sympathetic to the anxiety this produces. But my point is, bad management notwithstanding, modern AI tends to be most empowering to software engineers and other detail-oriented people, and I don't see this changing any time soon.
I also keep coming across videos of people talking about quitting Warhammer 40k. This doesn't mean there's a crisis, as much as a self-reinforcing pattern of interest.
My employer retains thousands of devs. I have a handful of software developer friends outside of work. These people are all happy (not to the same degree or the same usage patterns ofc) with the improvements to quality and process that AI has actively sourced or helped produce.
I don't understand where all these AI burnouts are coming from, but it's a minority. It's likely less than ~30% efficiency haircut for the industry - so there's likely to be no additional impact if you're unhappy.
This is far from the implication that all Software Developers are not okay.
I’ve decided not to complain.
We're not tiny (6000 employees or thereabout) and we do software as our primary business, so it's not like we're unfamiliar with the technology. I think we just have conservative management.
Where execution diagrams and integrations are now replaced by agents and prompts.
Tools integrations exist, but even those can be done with prompting.
At least on the world of enterprise consulting with SaaS products, the reality is already quite grimm.
People who used to do coding jobs in order to extract the money from Americans, just switched to different kinds of online scams, which they believed coding to be simply one of, perhaps legitimately so.
For any given product, the instant it is made (using AI or no) and distributed, its value drops to practically zero. It can be remade and modified infinitely at practically zero cost.