Comment by throw83288
5 months ago
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.
5 months ago
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.
If you're taking a really high level look at the whole problem, you're zooming too far out, and missing the trees themselves. You chose the wrong parents to be born to, but so did most of us. You were interested in what you were interested in. You didn't ask what's the right thing to be interested in, because there's no right answer to that. What you've got is a good head on your shoulders, and the youth to be able to chase dreams. Yeah it's scary. In the 90's outsourcing was going to be the end of lucrative programming jobs in the US. There's always going to be a reason to be scared. Sometimes it's valid, sometimes the sky is falling because aliens are coming, and it turns out to be a weather balloon.
You can definitely succumb to the fear. It sounds like you have. But courage isn't the absence of fear, it's what you do in the face of it. Are you going to let that fear paralyze you into inaction? Just not do anything other than post about being scared to the Internet? Or, having identified that fear, are you gonna wrestle it down to the ground and either choose to retrain into anything else and start from near zero, but it'll be something not programming that you believe isn't right about to be automated away, or dive in deeper, and get a masters in AI and learn all of the math behind LLMs and be an ML expert that trains the AI. That jobs not going away, there's still a ton of techniques to be discovered/invented and all of the niches to be discovered. Fine-tuning an existing LLM to be better at some niche is gonna be hot for a while.
You're lucky, you're in a position to be able to go for a masters, even if you don't choose that route. Others with a similar doomer mindset have it worse, being too old and not in a position to them consider doing a masters.
Face the fear and look into the future with eyes wide open. Decide to go into chicken farming or nursing or firefighter or aircraft mechanic or mortician or locksmith or beekeeping or actuary.
I think if you believe LLMs can truly generalize and will be able to replace all labor in entire industries and 10x every year, you pretty much should believe in ASI at which point having a job is the least of your problems.
if you rule out ASI, then that means progress is going to have to slow. consider that programming has been getting more and more automated continually since 1954. so put yourself in a position where what LLMs can do is a complement to what you can do. currently you still need to understand how software works in order to operate one of these things successfully.
4 replies →
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.
If it is your autistic hyperfixation, then you can do it for fun as well. Not necessarily as a job.