Comment by monknomo
5 days ago
Well said! 5 years ago I could have a pretty solid picture of what my career would look like through retirement.
Today, unclear what that would look like as well as unclear if the career will even exist that long.
One sunny spot I have is that life is very long. I think I have 1.5 careers left in me, and a full pivot is alright. I've been talking with older folks, and loads of people have historically done giant pivots at midlife.
> One sunny spot I have is that life is very long.
Not sure exactly where you are in it, but as a 53 year old I disagree. The younger I was the less likely I would have been to disagree but imo/ime the older you get the faster it feels like it is flying by.
> and a full pivot is alright
The AI-related existential dread is that it is very unclear what a pivot looks like when the ground under everything is shifting all at once.
The shifting is certainly a lot more obvious in our career than some others, but all of that shift (so far) happened more or less in a mere 10 months and is accelerating. And I don't think it is very likely that our career will stay anomalous for very long in terms of how much AI impact there is.
yeah, you're down to like 3/4 a career left, it makes sense that you feel that way. Less runway ought to feel different.
I do agree that a safe 'next' is unclear. But I also think if ai truly hits all knowledge work as hard as it might we're looking at up to 50% unemployment. Frankly there is no point career planning at all in that scenario. We will all have much larger problems.
And if it doesn't, then pivoting to some field with a combination of rewarding work and 'enough' pay seems sensible enough.
>some field with a combination of rewarding work and 'enough' pay seems sensible enough.
What makes you believe those jobs will still exist or will be available to you competing against massess of other now unemployed software devs? Overabundance of desperate workers will depress wages.
1 reply →
> yeah, you're down to like 3/4 a career left
If that much. I'm 52, and I wish I had decided 20 years ago that I'd rather do something meaningful. Like become a doctor. It would not necessarily be impossible to pivot to that now, but it would be very expensive and have a good chance of failure. If everything went smoothly, I could be a doctor just in time to retire.
> One sunny spot I have is that life is very long. I think I have 1.5 careers left in me, and a full pivot is alright.
I'm 41 and I could, in theory, pivot. But realistically: I'm good at exactly one thing in this world in terms of job ability. I can cook, I can bake, I can play music, but none nearly well enough to actually make a living on it. Thus the end of my tech career, if it should come to pass, basically means I will have to work menial jobs to get by. The future is very bleak for me, and the only real hope is that the tech industry will wake up to what a bad job LLMs do compared to humans. But while I think they will do that eventually, there's no telling how long it will take, and the thought that the market will eventually correct is cold comfort if I can't get a job in the meantime.
Maybe, in the wake of our primary skill being devalued, we should (try to) combine multiple skills into something that has economic value, as Scott Adams put it - https://web.archive.org/web/20250910155157/https://dilbertbl...
The LLMs actually do a better job compared to humans.. and it will only continue to improve
I'm in the same boat as you. I'm not sure what the pivot is.
>loads of people have historically done giant pivots at midlife
Lots of people didn't have their field automated away though alongside most other knowledge work fields, or seen at the same time a drop in demand in manual work and an oversupply (drop in demand because of upcoming AI layoffs, and oversupply in manual fields, because of same)
Everyone can't be a plumber.
In fact one of the worst "trade offs" of the trades is they can very much be a young mans game.
It gets real hard to sling water heaters up/down tight stairs or pull cable in a 100+ degree attic into your 50s.
> Everyone can't be a plumber.
Yes, but not for the reasons you say. It’s because if everyone is a plumber, you don’t need plumbers.
12 replies →
Get the young guys to do the lifting, there’s still plenty of room for old guys with experience who know all the tips, tricks and gotchyas.
Edit: Fair point, you don’t want to be entering a trade which requires heavy lifting as an older guy with no experience.
3 replies →
pivot to what though, if "mind" jobs are going to be automated, it's not like there's a category of jobs that opens up, and going from mental to physical jobs in your 50s doesn't seem that easy
Physical jobs will drop in demand and increase in supply too. Unemployed "mind" workers don't have much to spend to drive much demand in manual work, and they might even try to pivot themselves to manual work, making things worse for manual workers.
and those who did the "mind jobs" 30-40 years ago retain that wealth, while wages plummet and they don't have to give up any significant part of their wealth to get what they want. This destroys class mobility , creating a type of feudalism.
“Physical jobs will drop in demand too”
Why?
7 replies →
It's a spectrum, with "physical" and "mental" at each end.
Some of Software folk i know move to repairing electronic devices for living. He still works in AC-room, but instead of holding mouse and keyboard most of the time, now he holds meter probe and soldering iron.
also AI can do physical job. AI can already drive cars, solving simple physical problem isn't going to be a big issue once token per second shoots up.
I guess being soldiers in the war against robots and their owners is a kind of physical job
[dead]