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Comment by Hamuko

10 hours ago

According to the AI boosters, my career (and pretty much everyone else's) is already over anyway.

I am an AI booster, and this is incorrect. Your career will change, and if you change with it, it'll thrive.

  • What unique selling point do individuals operating AI still have if it's AI doing the heavy lifting and specialized work? I mean I don't believe that people in general will need to work less (no automation has done that), but I'm convinced many people will need to find new employment at lower wages in a society where cost of living only increases.

    I can't afford a pay cut, and AI isn't making my job worth more.

    • " will need to find new employment at lower wages "

      Why at lower wages? Most automation has led to people transitioning to higher wages. Utility works get paid 10x more than lamplighters. Why would that change here? Your job will have a bigger impact, affect more people, and you'll be doing more with less.

      I am not saying all employers will immediately start paying people more, but economically it doesn't make sense that pay will go down.

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  • I don't care if my career thrives. I care if I thrive.

    Currently, I don't see any reason at all to suspect that AI will make my life better or even just not make it worse.

  • Sometimes career tracks cease to exist…typists, secretaries, and in real time right now translators.

The job is to automate the enterprise, keep things safe and reliable, and make money for the company.

It was never about software. That was just the means.

Even in the software era, fads developed and tech stacks changed frequently. Now it's just moving a hundred times faster.

You need smart systems thinkers to do this. That's the role. Be smart in managing processes and complexity.

I'm not going to give coding interviews anymore, but I am going to give architecture, systems design, and SRE interviews. People still need to know how not to fuck up a database and how to design scalable and resilient systems.

  • Very much agree with most of this.

    The number of people who never seem to have understood what software and IT is in most companies is eye opening to me. Your job was never really to "write code" - you were always automating things.

    That the field got somewhat stuck for a couple decades seems to have made many people forget this.

    The vast majority of programmers who started in the 80's and 90's are basically directly responsible for massive waves of job losses in certain categories. Lots of cases of entire departments of secretarial level paper-pushing work being replaced with a small team of programmers. Same will happen with AI tooling. The difference is programmers are no longer the "winning" party here.

    Computers and software in the end are the most configurable and complex automation system society has ever created. They are simply a continuation of industrial automation, and AI is a continuation upon that.

    • I think it's helpful seeing AI in this context, at least in as much as it pertains to enterprise and industry.