Comment by throw234234234
5 months ago
It has the potential to effect a lot more than just SV/The West Coast - in fact SV may be one of the only areas who have some silver lining with AI development. I think these models have a chance to disrupt employment in the industry globally. Ironically it may be only SWE's and a few other industries (writing, graphic design, etc) that truly change. You can see they and other AI labs are targeting SWEs in particular - just look at the announcement "Claude 3.7 and Code" - very little mention of any other domains on their announcement posts.
For people who aren't in SV for whatever reason and haven't seen the really high pay associated with being there - SWE is just a standard job often stressful with lots of learning required ongoing. The pain/anxiety of being disrupted is even higher then since having high disposable income to invest/save would of been less likely. Software to them would of been a job with comparable pay's to other jobs in the area; often requiring you to be degree qualified as well - anecdotally many I know got into it for the love; not the money.
Who would of thought the first job being automated by AI would be software itself? Not labor, or self driving cars. Other industries either seem to have hit dead ends, or had other barriers (regulation, closed knowledge, etc) that make it harder to do. SWE's have set an example to other industries - don't let AI in or keep it in-house as long as possible. Be closed source in other words. Seems ironic in hindsight.
What do you even do then as a student? I've asked this dozens of times with zero practical answers at all. Frankly I've become entirely numb to it all.
Be glad that you are empowered to pivot - I'm making the assumption you are still young being a student. In a disrupted industry you either want to be young (time to change out of it) or old (50+) - can retire with enough savings. The middle age people (say 15-25 years in the industry; your 35-50 yr olds) are most in trouble depending on the domain they are in. For all the "friendly" marketing IMO they are targeting tech jobs in general - for many people if it wasn't for tech/coding/etc they would never need to use an LLM at all. Anthrophic's recent stats as to who uses their products are telling - its mostly code code code.
The real answer is either to pivot to a domain where the computer use/coding skills are secondary (i.e. you need the knowledge but it isn't primary to the role) or move to an industry which isn't very exposed to AI either due to natural protections (e.g. trades) or artifical ones (e.g regulation/oligopolies colluding to prevent knowledge leaking to AI). May not be a popular comment on this platform - I would love to be wrong.
Not enough resources to get another bachelors, and a masters is probably practically worthless for a pivot. I would have to throw away the past 10 years of my life, start from scratch, with zero ideas for any real skill-developing projects since I'm not interested at all. Probably a completely non-viable candidate in anything I would choose. Maybe only Robotics would work, and that's probably going to be solved quickly because:
You assume nothing LLMs do are actually generalization. Once Field X is eaten the labs will pivot and use the generalization skills developed to blow out Field Y to make the next earnings report. I think at this current 10x/yr capability curve (Read: 2 years -> 100x 4 years -> 10000x) I'll get screwed no matter what is chosen. Especially the ones in proximity to computing, which makes anything in which coding is secondary fruitless. Regulation is a paper wall and oligopolies will want to optimize as much as any firm. Trades are already saturating.
This is why I feel completely numb about this, I seriously think there is nothing I can do now. I just chose wrong because I was interested in the wrong thing.
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I'm sure lots of potential students / bootcampers are now not going into programming (or if they are, the smart ones try to go into niches like A.I and skip web/backend/android altogether). This will work against the numbers of jobs being reduced by A.I. It will take a few years though to play out , but at some point we will see smaller amounts of people trying to get into the field and applying for jobs, certainly for junior positions. We've already had ~ 2 bad years, a couple more like this will really dry out the numbers of newcomers. Less people coming in (than otherwise would have) means for every person who retires / leaves the industry there are less people to take his place. This situation is quite complex with lots of parameters that work in different directions so it's very early to try to get some kind of read on where this is going.
As a new career I'd probably not choose SWE now. But if you've done 10 years already I'd ride it out, there is a good chance most of us will remain employed for many years to come.
When I say 10 years I say that I've probably wanted to work in this field since maybe 10. Computing is my autistic hyperfixation. This is why I'm so frustrated.
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