Ride the wave. You rode it when websites/webapps were the wave. I came into software industry before internet, kept changing my horse. You are never too old to learn new tricks. The new wave create new kind of work and workers. Be one of them. Ride the beast, master the tools. It's the same game again.
If there is any skill in consistent demand it is the ability to wrap your head around the new work, new processes, new people, whatever it all may be.
For me, understanding and development of this skill into a keen tool happened while I worked as a prototype mechamic. For those unfamiliar, a prototype mechanic does what it takes to make often demanding parts on consistently short timelines week after week.
Metals, plastics, you name it.
One gets good at ramping up on processes, machine tools, materials. And after doing that for a while, you end up able to very rapidly absorb new info and understand work far more quickly and accurately than many.
Anyone can start this.
Just get curious and build things. Then build more things.
Share your builds and build things other people want made!
Overall society feels more turbulent, but this is otherwise all the same song and dance all over again.
The 90s and 00s had this wave of "object oriented programming changes everything". Hey we're doing this thing that's been done successfully 100s of times before, but now it's OO. Writing some code in involving an airplane? Just purchase this omni-airplane object that does everything for airplanes (an actual thing I was told in college).
That's weird OO isn't the be all end all? Code gen, get this Ruby on rails running. Look at me building this website in two seconds. Code gen everywhere.
Huh, that's going to a funny place... TDD. If you aren't TDDing then you're such a bad engineer that you should be locked in prison (real conversation I observed). Oh wait, not TDD, BDD. That fixes it.
Lean, no Agile, no agile like with a small a ... but it was first, no scrum, no xml wait that was last decade, json, and finally SAFe.
Hey, have you seen this chat bot thingy?
Every iteration brings good stuff if you're paying attention. But it also brings a lot of hype and anxiety. Experiment and learn.
The one thing that's remained constant for me is that nearly everyone would rather die than to think carefully about the consequences of their dreams coming true. And as long as that remains true they'll continue to pay for someone else to ride the hype dragon on their behalf.
> Overall society feels more turbulent, but this is otherwise all the same song and dance all over again.
The thing is... everything you mentioned had only brought the need to retrain.
This new hotness AI? It's bringing actual layoffs, and not just of the boom bust cycle kind, but permanent, industrial-revolution kind that lasts for decades.
Covid overhiring, no more 0% interest rates, that one accounting change, and companies needing a "growth" sounding way to announce layoffs. Maybe that's bringing actual layoffs in the name of AI?
> Covid overhiring, no more 0% interest rates, that one accounting change, and companies needing a "growth" sounding way to announce layoffs.
That is only compounding the problem, because with each year, IT still gets a truckload of new bootcamp or "academia" graduates that hit the pool of the unemployed.
Of course they do. Even in industries that didn't overhire during Covid or did other strategic blunders over the last decades, you see jobs getting cut all the time. Big Tech makes the news because everyone is looking there... but the entire economy is a bloodbath.
And even those that don't do layoffs, have you looked at open job postings recently? It's all dried up, and to a large degree because C levels are waiting for the "cambrian explosion" of AI. A lot of the infamous "bullshit job" list is in serious danger of getting eliminated by AI.
Having lived through all of that as a professional dev, AI is completely different. There was no career anxiety of any significance for OOP or Code Gen (certainly no code gen) or TDD or Agile - there was annoyance at it by some, sure, but not the existential angst the industry is currently experiencing.
I don't know, maybe there's just too many juniors on social media posing as senors spreading existential angst? I mean if GC was introduced in a time where there was an engagement AI spreading dread far and wide then I suspect we could have had the same thing.
I certainly wish people would be less sad, but I'm not sure that means that things are meaningfully different on a technical level.
But I used to enjoy learning - I think most of us did. The existential crisis many are experiencing is about the lack of fulfilment in rolling an LLM slot machine all day in an already dopamine depleting environment.
you are not successfully riding the wave if you think prompting better is what they're talking about. They're talking about understanding the social structures your work happens in, how they're changing, and learning what you need to to be successful in that. Product and dev are getting closer together. Reviewing is becoming more important (and people don't have good theories about how to review, maybe you can make them.). New processes - and roles! are being created to deal with the vastly increased amounts of code produced, and the increased need for documentation and verification. Performance isn't a strong suit of the AIs, they get too rigidly stuck in existing architectures and fancy tricks, and often miss low hanging fruit that requires going and talking to some people to change the system. If you've got a statistics brain then metrics, logging and verification are booming (never met a manager who doesn't love a CHART). QA and testing are also bottlenecks of the new system, and unlikely to go away soon (ai can make tests, but it can't take the responsibility to say "this will work in production". You can!)
This is the way. But also - keep your head up - your mindset matters more than you think. If you consider yourself a victim of your circumstances with no agency, this will be harder for you. So get your mentality right. Something along the lines of 'this is an exciting new era and I'm well prepared to master this new domain like I have many times before'.
Except the entire value proposition of these tools is that there is no skill or mastery to be built.
The entire slop factory workflow, or sorry I mean "AI-native" workflow is:
"Woah, I cajoled a chatbot into building something I don't understand at all, I'm so good at my job!"
It's the participation trophy of building. Something else builds it, I take credit for it despite not understanding much about about it. There's no compounding return on my effort. No lessons learned. No understanding built. No insights gleaned for possible future innovation. No differentiation. Just mind-numbingly screaming into a void until the slot machine shits out some slop amalgam that seems "good enough", and then I do it all again the next day.
If that's the game, count me out. It's nice that others apparently enjoy it, I guess. But to think there's any sort of mastery here is delusion. The only requirement to be "successful" with these tools is to stop giving a shit and surrender to it.
I think there will always be some sort of mastery element to communicating with AI. You can see that nowadays with juniors who blow through tokens and still don’t produce good results. There will always be some group of people using AI better than others. Maybe the results will be equal in the far future, but some other dimension like cost may be better used by some people
>> Something else builds it, I take credit for it despite not understanding much about about it.
How much you understand what was built is entirely up to you. Literally nothing is stopping you, or anyone else, from having the AI walk you through it, or reading the code yourself if you don’t trust the AI.
What about the threat of unemployment due to not meeting AI usage/output metrics? I've personally found it has effectively coerced me to stop trying to understand pretty much anything, and instead just send out whatever passes basic test to "keep up".
Unless you want to just play bad-faith word games and say that "technically it's still not stopping you" in which case yeah man you got me good job buddy.
these tools cannot read your mind. every time you prompt it you condition what it will give you on what you gave it. there will either always be a limit to how good that will be or none of this will matter because no human will ever matter again.
so far the skill is to condition it to give you the best results.
there used to be a time where you had to hack together silly idiosyncratic prompts to get the model to do what you wanted. now you just go into the engineering and describe the object you want it to conjure for you in as much detail as possible (including the high level description of the internals if able) and any constraints you want on it.
Are there really companies losing right now for using less AI?
Think - would you rather your telecom company’s customer support be AI-forward? Would you pay an extra $5 per month to ensure that you get humans solving your problems immediately when you call with an issue?
What about your backup software? Would you rather choose the company that comes out with new innovations in backing up your data and tons of features, but occasionally breaks everything? Or would you want to choose a company for backup software that is slow at adding anything new and reliable? Isn’t it good if this is deterministic?
What about even a fitness tracking watch. Are there really that many missing features that need to be released way faster? Or is it better if it just tracks your heart rate and workouts well and then gets out of your way? Same here, don’t you want the features to be reliable and deterministic?
I'd be fine with an LLM for customer support, as long as it's empowered to solve my problem. There's nothing a low-level CS representative does that couldn't be handled by an LLM. In both cases, the limiting factor is the authority granted to them by their employer.
Nobody uses an LLM for watches or data backup AFAIK so those seem like moot points.
>There's nothing a low-level CS representative does that couldn't be handled by an LLM.
This kind of reductionist take is an immediate tell that one has no experience in that kind of role. More worryingly, it hints of something antisocial and misanthropic. Do you not enjoy talking with other people during your day? Have you never experienced the resolution of complexity or ambiguity from a person that is intimately familiar with a product, its documentation, or internal processes?
Do you not enjoy talking with other people during your day?
CS reps? No. You must be very lonely, yourself, if your mind went there in the context of this conversation.
Have you never experienced the resolution of complexity or ambiguity from a person that is intimately familiar with a product, its documentation, or internal processes?
Yes, and it's universally something that should have been possible online without talking to anyone, AI or human. That's my real hope.
Stage 1: Corporations replace impotent CS reps with AI.
Stage 2: Corporations gradually empower the AI to interface with their existing internal systems in order to get the customer off the phone faster and avoid social-media brouhahas. Yes, they could have empowered the people in stage 1 to do that, but they didn't.
Stage 3: Corporations realize the AI is just another unnecessary middleman on their payroll, and empower customers to check status, report and escalate issues, handle SLA and billing problems, and obtain RMAs directly via their websites. Which should have been how it worked all along.
No, not lonely, I simply choose to not dehumanize those who work in that role.
> it's universally something that should have been possible online without talking to anyone
why do you think it is the case that quite literally zero medium+ sized companies have no customer support? do you think it’s possible that not every single iota of knowledge or edge case is immediately digitized and ready for consumption by an LLM?
is it also possible that customers that pay serious money for a service don’t want to click about on a website to solve a problem they didn’t cause? wasting someone’s time like that when you already fucked up is a very quick way to lose a customer; one throat to choke, as they say.
but since you’ve drawn the rest of the owl with those stages, I can only assume you’re raking in mad consultant fees for companies like Meta - they certainly haven’t had any issues replacing their humans with AI recently!
Are you shocked that techbros (and especially their CEO leaders) are misanthropists? We have probably empowered the most society adverse group of people in human history. Ones that didn't even need to speak to other humans to become rich.
no, not shocked; just willing to check that perspective more publicly than most.
the vonnegut quote is hitting hard today -
“why don’t you go online and buy a hundred envelopes and put them in the closet? And so I pretend not to hear her. And go out to get an envelope because I’m going to have a hell of a good time in the process of buying one envelope. I meet a lot of people. And, see some great looking babes. And a fire engine goes by. And I give them the thumbs up. And, and ask a woman what kind of dog that is. And, and I don’t know. The moral of the story is, is we’re here on Earth to fart around. And, of course, the computers will do us out of that. And, what the computer people don’t realize, or they don’t care, is we’re dancing animals.”
So, this is a complete nonsense take. Why do people keep making this kind of comparison? Is there really such a lack of critical thinking being taught these days?
What you were taught no longer matters, compared to what some of the rest of have learned over the past couple of years. Sorry. Shoot the messenger if it makes you feel better, but it won't change anything.
This comment has no substance to it. It's the same as posting "I am right and you are wrong. 'Sorry' if me being right makes you feel bad, but you are wrong."
People are asking legitimate questions whenever this is brought up, because the comparison is wrong. Compilers are an optimization of the previous paradigm, they let you do the exact same thing as what was done in the preceding decades, just faster. LLMs are not that, they are just a completely separate thing that exists alongside regular programming. Arguing that their use isn't just another option, but a superior and total replacement doesn't explain why you think that randomness is a perfect substitute for determinism. The only people I see promoting this view are ones who only want to look at graphs where lines are going up without caring about anything else. Because I think that even if LLMs get 10 times better, we'll still have industries and use cases where determinism will dominate, ones where you get one take to get things right. For instance, I would not fly on a plane with firmware that was created by a guy hitting Generate, going for a coffee break, coming back and saying "yea looks good".
Ride the wave. You rode it when websites/webapps were the wave. I came into software industry before internet, kept changing my horse. You are never too old to learn new tricks. The new wave create new kind of work and workers. Be one of them. Ride the beast, master the tools. It's the same game again.