More times than not when a company claims they're using AI to do something, it ends up being a call center full of people in a low COL country.
We can't even get our tools to talk to each other to automate processes. AI doing all this is a long way off. C-Suite making bogus claims about AI is today.
Very true. They still don’t understand it and it will take a while for them to figure out how to use it properly. But “by awhile” could be within the next 5 years. Things are certainly changing quickly.
We're still at the "our internal chat forgets, you don't have to stop using it when the answers get weird" stage. Most of our users are on the backend of their careers and just can't adapt to an open-ended tool like this.
You can rest assured nothing is getting automated when half our salesforce requests include a field that tells you where to find the paper document in the corporate office records room.
Yes, you’re right, there are millions of people working in automation, process improvement, etc only because it’s such a big nothing burger. It takes no effort at all !
I replace humans with AI for a living, in fact. Very specifically, my role is to automate away human complexity in favor of streamlined processes. I'm not even very good at what I do.
You talk like everyone on reddit is trying to spill their entire story to you, while having a simple low effort conversation.
Tech is being replaced far more rapidly by cheap labor. AI is a secondary - even tertiary - input. Why? Because AI is a new frontier but it’s not managing the daily work to be done just yet. Once memory and complex flows can be engineered, tech has a serious problem.
That said, cheap labor (in the form of offshoring or talent consolidation and over burdening remaining employees) is the M.O across the board.
Exactly. And offshoring of tech work has been accelerated by new WFH trends because companies realized that not only do they not need employees in the office, they don’t even need them in the country.
That was so obvious.
I don’t know how the people who are arguing so strongly that their work can not only be done from home, but also done better and more efficiently, don’t see the inevitable conclusion: that if their job can move from big city to rural farmland, it can just as easily move form inside to outside the territorial borders of the country at a much lower cost.
That’s before you even start talking about the automation and AI thing. So many people are failing to see how it can be used and implementing it wrong. They will be shocked when they lose their 6-figure gig and are replaced by a jr engineering masters grad at 80k a year. It will take some time but there are so many opportunities. Learn to use it and train customized models NOW. You’re still using paper and pen or maybe an old accountant calculator and keeping track of vendor invoices in a neat little folder and we’re in the process of rolling out Excel and ERPs.
My HR lead colleague who earns 250k a year and her team are so oblivious to it and they have been disconnected from business operations’ continuous margin seeking and process efficiency improvement cycles for so long. She argued tooth and nail that her team’s work could be done remotely and she got it, but she and half of her team are gone in the next re-org. The plans are already drawn up.
She can easily be replaced by an ambitious $150k a year US based worker, and easily 50% - and probably more - of what her team does is mindless monkey work that can be offshored or automated to reduce cost while improving quality. She thinks that everyone is as patriotic as her and will choose Americans over foreigners, but those CEOs are ruthless in their chase for the next millions dollars bonus to finish their Florida winter mansion.
I tried to tell her she was being myopic and failing to see the writing on the wall, but what she did was build the case for her own dismissal. She’s in her fifties now, failed to keep up with the last 20 years of technological progress, and she will never find another job at that level again.
It’s sad really but like I said, inevitable.
You’ve clearly never worked with an off shore development team lol. 3 off shores can’t replace a decent on shore and the one shores just spend half their time fixing the off shores code. I’ve seen it happen time and time again. Currently, the talent off shore is no where near on shore, it’s happened before, companies will offshore, realize it’s not working and bring jobs back on shore.
I think we *are* entering another off-shoring cycle.
We've seen this before. Like, what, early-mid oughts? Webapps were taking off, companies realized they could hire off-shore developers at a fraction of the cost, did so, and boy did those guys deliver. Then it came time for things like scaling and maintenance and, *whoops*. Their code was garbage and dealing with it was a nightmare.
Management brings in some quality folks on-shore to help manage and direct the off-shore folks and things are more or less hunky dory for a bit.
I think it's just going to be another round of this.
Not sure how saying the code quality is typically very poor from off shore devs when I’ve seen it over and over and over and over for 10+ years is racist, but ok. It’s just a fact. Sorry if that hurts your feelings.
I’ve worked with a few off shore devs in the Ukraine and they were amazing, super smart and super motivated to actually do a good job. Loved working with that crew.
I don't think so, but high tech in general is a brutal business. When business is bad, layoffs happen, and it is one of the things that you need to consider when you decide to work in the high tech business. So, whenever I hear the question as to whether or not one should be an engineer, I wonder if they realize how brutal this business can be. Those of us who are over the age of 40 have gone through some real tough times in the high tech business.
Tech is ridiculously ageist. Already went through one layoff a few years ago because I was the old expensive guy. Fortunately I was rehired due to my unique skill set.
I’m 46, in tech, and I know my days are numbered. I’ve known this for a while and have planned accordingly. Something I heard a long time ago that stuck with me “if you’re living within your means you’re doing it wrong— you should be living below your means and saving”.
I had done a bunch of startups and consulting up to about my mid-40s, when I just stopped getting interviews in Silicon Valley. Ended up going to work in telecom and still there. Same work I did before, slightly more stable, less ageist.
It has always been boom/bust cycle industry and since the number of people in it is so much larger the swings seem to have even larger impact in terms of employment.
I can relate to it....It's one of the things that I want to mention to people wanting to come into the industry, but when you are 25 years old, 40 eeems a long way away. You never think it is going to happen you.
This is my plan. I assume I have another decade before finding work becomes difficult so I have been focusing on investing and paying off debt. Thankfully, my wife’s career field doesn’t have that issue so we should still be good to go overall.
There certainly are exceptions. Some people have tribal knowledge that can't be lost or they really are just that good... That said, look around, how many coworkers in tech do you have (or can you remember) in tech that are 50+? The only people I see that are 50+ qualify as exceptional or have a skill that is not easily found in a college graduate.
"gets out"? More like gets pushed out and then can't get an interview because they're over 40
You know how everyone wants the latest tech? The latest phone? That applies to people as well, sadly
I had a Librarian my freshman year in 99’ that was the first teacher to show how to use a search engine. Alta Vista was the biggest one at that time; I probably should been taught more in the Library.
No, your job is just getting outsourced to 3rd world countries.
Covid / work from home just accelerated this. All the US workers demanding remote work ironically are killing their own employment prospects since why would they hire an expensive American when a cheaper Columbian or Costa Rican would do the job for half the cost.
No. The difference is that there’s a bidirectional clustering of jobs.
People with actual computer science, math and other backgrounds will find and are finding enough jobs that will pay them much more than vanilla SWE’s ever could because they can work on and improve the group of technologies called “AI”. Heck, it’s even causing a surge in jobs for professionals like linguists, psychologists etc. Data Engineers who can build scalable data pipelines, statisticians who can interpret ML model outputs and apply them to the real world, experts who can sell “AI” to companies… they’re all finding jobs.
On the other end, there is a ton of work to be done to provide/curate data to these models. Without an input and output, AI is useless. So there is plenty of work there too.
The people who are getting shafted are those who simply “coded”. And I’m not referring to those who actually write high quality code but those people whose week of work could be done by a somewhat intelligent high schooler with access to SlckOverflow within a month. That segment will keep getting automated.
I've said this quiet a bit IT is the career of last resort -can't cut it as a roofer, tired of waiting tables, you can become a coder and make $100K a year in 8 short weeks. As a result we end up with a lot of people that know what they know and not much else. I see young guys with bs (bullshit) degrees in Cyber Security that are really good at Nmap but know almost nothing about layer 2 networking. They are houses built without foundations. As you indicated the people with the math knowledge, the people who have an actual foundation are okay but they lower end is getting wiped out.
If anything I think the industry is going to expand, there's lots of money being pumped into AI and that usually means jobs, what those jobs are I couldn't tell you I don't know if anyone can. As someone who has been in the industry close to 40 years I've seen a lot of ups and downs and what I see is that there is very little room for entry level employees and that's a shame, us old guys are going to die or open our goat farms and there's going to be a shortage of skilled workers but companies don't see to be very forward looking.
This is accurate except for the complete misunderstanding of “last resort.” Assuming the same $100k income, far more people would prefer a cushy WFH desk job in technology to roofing or waiting tables, making it the career of FIRST resort.
I'm glad you agree about the goat farm. But we do get a lot of people coming from other jobs, they have been told that learning "the computer" is the road to riches without understanding that IT is a brutal industry, with a high turnover rate that requires constant tolling and retooling. It is not a job for the lazy or unmotivated.
Well, if you really want to get into it. Tech has been automating itself since the 90s and probably even before. In the context of OP thinking a coder in the 2020s is akin to a librarian doesn’t make sense. This decade they’re more like the manufacturing blue collar guys of the 80s.
Me think it’s low? Do honestly believe it’s high? lol let Devin do your PRs. If it’s able to you were always on the chopping block.
No it’s just that for the last 4-5 years, every man and his dog thought that tech is the holy grail because FAANG were hiring anyone with a pulse with a $250K+ entry level starting salary and every other company had to compete. So everybody started studying for it. Now debt is expensive and cash flow is king so companies can’t just hire indiscriminately and need to right size as there is no longer Covid demand. So we have a lot of people who have been laid off (normal), a lot of people who started studying during the FAANG hype who are just entering the workforce, and now lots of people who think AI is the next big thing. They’re not librarians of the 2020s, there’s just too many of you and not enough jobs. Go do something else lol.
Can confirm. Left school to pursue trades. Happily making well over the national average (and the average for a bachelors degree earner). Union treats and pays us well. Guaranteed raises that outpace inflation in our contract for the next 3-4 years is also comforting.
That being said, if you are going to join a trade, do it through a union (easier said than done because even union trades are pretty damn competitive at the moment), otherwise you’re going to be stuck doing really shitty work for an average salary with little to no growth opportunities.
Virtually every software service from a company that has had mass lauoffs over the last 2 years has been buggy, compared to rarely encountering bugs for a decade prior to the mass layoffs
Big, big problem is that end-users are often willing to accept those bugs, though.
Unless the bug is a real showstopper, product and management are happy to let it slide to save a few pennies because at the end of the day it costs them nothing if they don't fix it. Features bring in customers, therefore lack of features loses customers. Customers don't quit your product *just* because of a few bugs.
You see it all over software today though it may be especially evident in the gaming industry. Software is so necessary, so entwined with what we do in our day-to-day, in our jobs, that we will overlook some glaring issues to keep what we know.
Obviously there's a spectrum here. Enough bugs, or bad enough bugs, or enough bad enough bugs, and you will drive away your userbase *eventually*. But if you're the only game in town right now, or their employer is entangled with your products, then who cares?
More like skilled blue collar workers who lost their jobs to offshoring.
It’s sad. But companies will do what companies will do unless there are regulations. And who pays off the politicians?
Most tech workers in the US are still actively employed in tech. There's been a massive shift from the tech industry to being favorable to job seekers, to it being very hard for job seekers not just in the US but across the globe. It's not the end of the technology workers in the US or globally. Eventually modest growth in some area of tech will return. But it's going to suck for a long while until then.
I have no evidence to support this but I don't see how this isn't directly related to COVID and the ubiquity of WFH.
Lots of bosses are old. They remembered a big trend of off-shoring in the 90s and 00s and they remembered all the problems it caused.
But then COVID came and they had their entire workforce working from home. And it was fine. The technology to enable remote work had improved a lot. It wasn't conference calls and slow speed Internet connections.
Once you demonstrate definitely that it doesn't matter where someone is working, and you have your team working from home, it's really really really easy to say 'Joe is making $215k but Vivek in India will do it for $20k'
And let's be perfectly honest...a lot of people are still racist. In the 1990s, there was still this belief that American tech workers were better/smarter than ones in dirt cheap countries. Now? Half the tech companies are run by first and second generation immigrants. They don't hold that same belief.
I'll be honest, I kinda sorta felt the same way until I worked overseas. It turns out, there are smart people all over the country and you can literally replace me with a team of six developers and save money. I might be better than the average offshore developer, but I'm not better than a team of them.
COVID forced companies to embrace remote and they have realized they might as well go really far remote.
Masters degree in LIS with certification by ALA. Internet and digital media tool sort replaced them. Today some phd in LIS are filling rolls of public librarians. Often they are too advanced for public and do not perform well. A few lawyers quit wanting to work in an academic setting finding out they are back to big law firms as assistants receiving a fraction of previous wage working long hours pulling cases from Lexus/Nexus. Most get burned out second time around.
You always need people that understand the full stack who can fix things when they break down. I've never seen systems just work with no break downs.
Also, it didn't get much press but Amazon spent a ton of money trying to make grocery stores more automated using AI and it failed. The walk out technology wasn't successful. It cost too much.
More likely it's like Amazon's "AI" eliminating registers in one of their stores that actually relied on offshore labor/outsourcing.
But claiming it's AI is way better for shareholders than announcing outsourcing.
When AI brings powerful mass automation for dickheads (CEOs), we see massive layoffs of tech workers. OK, I get it but…
On the other hand, OPERATING SYSTEMS and many big softwares are being shipped with increasingly built in AI features silently!!!!!
So who is going to really buy the shitty products those narcissists wanentrepreneurs are “building”?
Soon everyone will be overwhelmed with AI features on their phones that can be used for free and some of these can be used offline (read about Apple Intelligence).
AI increases automation and layoffs but significantly decrease really benefits and financial revenue generated by end users.
People are obsessed and spending time on YT and TikTok apps more than google.com search engine itself.
So the AI will be like exporting a word document as a PDF file and save it. A such essential feature you find in almost every app.
Back in the early 2000s such feature was only in paid software or professional edition of Adobe Acrobat for example.
Note: Auto suggestion and spelling corrections you see while typing on your phone virtual keyboard or the suggested nearby “you might be interested in these restaurants or meals” that you see on Uber eats or Grub Hub apps are all form of machine learning models that are the heart and engine of what song called AI.
So we are already using it.
But think back, how many people stopped using Grub Hub and dining out since the economy is in a very bad shape? Well , many according to me.
So the recommended meals AI model is not actually bring good benefit. Since many people are broke or poor with limited income and they cannot afford spending too much.
So the AI thing is timed
This post is like a fever dream. Tech hasn’t been replaced by AI. Honestly, co-pilot acceptance rate is brutally low (12%) at Capital One. GPT-4o doesn’t know how Azure works. None of the models were trained on bespoke installations, they can only give very vague answers.
The only people losing their jobs to AI were bad at their job to begin with.
lol. I think that libraries and public domain should be the AI of the 2020s.
You want to use ChatGPT, midnourney etc? - you need a library card.
That’s the only future that makes sense.
People need to stop worrying about this.
AI will be used as a tool that makes individuals more effective. Jobs will be lost due to that, but giving a shovel to a person makes a job that would require 10, only one.
Even with all of this, the amount of backlog and room for software to grow means those people will likely only be out of a job momentarily if they’re slightly competant.
If AI by itself is replacing software engineers, then work itself has become entirely meaningless as there is now nothing AI can’t do.
The size of systems and comprehension ability required would mean the AI is an AGI and at that point it’s over.
I'm skeptical that LLMs will boost productivity as much as the spreadsheet did, much less the Internet. The output is unreliable and there are too many potential liabilities. The AGI hypesters would have you believe we're going to have a Singularity by Thursday and get mad at anything to the contrary (their favorite move is replying with that "RemindMe" bot)- they're a filter bubble as much as their tech is a stock bubble, so it's hard to discern the truth about the tech's impact.
Another one of these posts without a look into micro/macro trends.
Going to leave this here: https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/i-will-fucking-piledrive-you-if-you-mention-ai-again/
It’s called offshoring due to interest rate increases by the fed reserve. Turns out ZIRP was a really stupid fucking idea when it came to inflation but yeah let’s bank it all on an LLM that can’t even give me proper code for managing data frames lol.
This post feels a little bit like “yeah those overpaid tech bros finally got what they deserved.”
Regardless, AI is mostly being thrown around as hype so companies can feel relevant and appease shareholders. This too shall pass and then we will see AI actually grow into new products that aren’t just desperate attempts at VC funding.
Not sure which part of the world you live in, but in the US, Librarians have a Master's degree by definition and that has been the case for a long time, though there are a lot of library roles that do not require the education.
People might not be getting corporate jobs as Librarians as much, but they are certainly getting hired with their MIS, MLIS, or MLS degrees in large organizations constantly. Sadly, even though the profession has much more to do with technology these days, it is still very poorly paid relative to the education required.
If you work in education tech or graphics design then you are probably in trouble now. Tech is such a broad word though, those developing AI are making loads of money now. Also I think US institutional crypto adoption is about to explode so workers that worked in crypto could make huge amount of money soon.
20 years ago when i went to school, General college graduates were getting around 40k per year to start while IT was getting 55k/year. It was advantageous to graduate with an IT background. Now there are simply too many IT professionals and not enough jobs. It's survival of the fittest. None of the friends that I graduated with that are in IT have been affected by the layoffs.
More times than not when a company claims they're using AI to do something, it ends up being a call center full of people in a low COL country. We can't even get our tools to talk to each other to automate processes. AI doing all this is a long way off. C-Suite making bogus claims about AI is today.
AI = All India
Very true. They still don’t understand it and it will take a while for them to figure out how to use it properly. But “by awhile” could be within the next 5 years. Things are certainly changing quickly.
Amen lol
Don’t forgot about H1Bers taking jobs from unemployed citizens
We're still at the "our internal chat forgets, you don't have to stop using it when the answers get weird" stage. Most of our users are on the backend of their careers and just can't adapt to an open-ended tool like this. You can rest assured nothing is getting automated when half our salesforce requests include a field that tells you where to find the paper document in the corporate office records room.
Is this actually a joke? You struggling to automate your work?
Yes, you’re right, there are millions of people working in automation, process improvement, etc only because it’s such a big nothing burger. It takes no effort at all !
It's because those of us who are good at it get paid extraordinary amounts of money to save others very minor amounts of money.
You’ve speak of this like you’ve read it on Reddit, not experienced it at a meaningful level.
I replace humans with AI for a living, in fact. Very specifically, my role is to automate away human complexity in favor of streamlined processes. I'm not even very good at what I do. You talk like everyone on reddit is trying to spill their entire story to you, while having a simple low effort conversation.
“Very specifically” lol
He’s very specifically a troll.
Yeah and I'm the King of England
Charles? Didn't know I'd find you on here. Get your senile ass back in bed, you shouldn't be up this late.
Tech is being replaced far more rapidly by cheap labor. AI is a secondary - even tertiary - input. Why? Because AI is a new frontier but it’s not managing the daily work to be done just yet. Once memory and complex flows can be engineered, tech has a serious problem. That said, cheap labor (in the form of offshoring or talent consolidation and over burdening remaining employees) is the M.O across the board.
I suspect this, too. AI has just become a convenient scapegoat.
Yes. It’s a threat but not the culprit. Everyone pouring into tech in 2020 promising to “make six figures” created a massive labor bubble.
Exactly. And offshoring of tech work has been accelerated by new WFH trends because companies realized that not only do they not need employees in the office, they don’t even need them in the country.
That was so obvious. I don’t know how the people who are arguing so strongly that their work can not only be done from home, but also done better and more efficiently, don’t see the inevitable conclusion: that if their job can move from big city to rural farmland, it can just as easily move form inside to outside the territorial borders of the country at a much lower cost. That’s before you even start talking about the automation and AI thing. So many people are failing to see how it can be used and implementing it wrong. They will be shocked when they lose their 6-figure gig and are replaced by a jr engineering masters grad at 80k a year. It will take some time but there are so many opportunities. Learn to use it and train customized models NOW. You’re still using paper and pen or maybe an old accountant calculator and keeping track of vendor invoices in a neat little folder and we’re in the process of rolling out Excel and ERPs. My HR lead colleague who earns 250k a year and her team are so oblivious to it and they have been disconnected from business operations’ continuous margin seeking and process efficiency improvement cycles for so long. She argued tooth and nail that her team’s work could be done remotely and she got it, but she and half of her team are gone in the next re-org. The plans are already drawn up. She can easily be replaced by an ambitious $150k a year US based worker, and easily 50% - and probably more - of what her team does is mindless monkey work that can be offshored or automated to reduce cost while improving quality. She thinks that everyone is as patriotic as her and will choose Americans over foreigners, but those CEOs are ruthless in their chase for the next millions dollars bonus to finish their Florida winter mansion. I tried to tell her she was being myopic and failing to see the writing on the wall, but what she did was build the case for her own dismissal. She’s in her fifties now, failed to keep up with the last 20 years of technological progress, and she will never find another job at that level again. It’s sad really but like I said, inevitable.
Not in the defense industry (offshoring hiring non-citizens/US persons for positions requiring security clearances is illegal)!
Well yeah obviously. Pretty sure we’re also not going to offshore our government representatives.
You’ve clearly never worked with an off shore development team lol. 3 off shores can’t replace a decent on shore and the one shores just spend half their time fixing the off shores code. I’ve seen it happen time and time again. Currently, the talent off shore is no where near on shore, it’s happened before, companies will offshore, realize it’s not working and bring jobs back on shore.
I think we *are* entering another off-shoring cycle. We've seen this before. Like, what, early-mid oughts? Webapps were taking off, companies realized they could hire off-shore developers at a fraction of the cost, did so, and boy did those guys deliver. Then it came time for things like scaling and maintenance and, *whoops*. Their code was garbage and dealing with it was a nightmare. Management brings in some quality folks on-shore to help manage and direct the off-shore folks and things are more or less hunky dory for a bit. I think it's just going to be another round of this.
Yep, 100%. Cut costs to boost stock, WHOOPS the code is a disaster have on shore fix it and hire up again — cycle.
Sounds basically the same as using chatGPT. You get mostly working but sophmoric code. You spend your time fixing it up.
The implicitly racist hubris of otherwise scrupulously PC redditors never fails to amuse and delight.
Not sure how saying the code quality is typically very poor from off shore devs when I’ve seen it over and over and over and over for 10+ years is racist, but ok. It’s just a fact. Sorry if that hurts your feelings. I’ve worked with a few off shore devs in the Ukraine and they were amazing, super smart and super motivated to actually do a good job. Loved working with that crew.
Writing was on the wall with the amount of accessible certifications, training for free , etc provided directly by big tech in most cases.
Stage one is offshoring. Stage two is AI/automation. India is about to go back to the stone age
Lol
I don't think so, but high tech in general is a brutal business. When business is bad, layoffs happen, and it is one of the things that you need to consider when you decide to work in the high tech business. So, whenever I hear the question as to whether or not one should be an engineer, I wonder if they realize how brutal this business can be. Those of us who are over the age of 40 have gone through some real tough times in the high tech business.
Tech is ridiculously ageist. Already went through one layoff a few years ago because I was the old expensive guy. Fortunately I was rehired due to my unique skill set. I’m 46, in tech, and I know my days are numbered. I’ve known this for a while and have planned accordingly. Something I heard a long time ago that stuck with me “if you’re living within your means you’re doing it wrong— you should be living below your means and saving”.
I had done a bunch of startups and consulting up to about my mid-40s, when I just stopped getting interviews in Silicon Valley. Ended up going to work in telecom and still there. Same work I did before, slightly more stable, less ageist. It has always been boom/bust cycle industry and since the number of people in it is so much larger the swings seem to have even larger impact in terms of employment.
I can relate to it....It's one of the things that I want to mention to people wanting to come into the industry, but when you are 25 years old, 40 eeems a long way away. You never think it is going to happen you.
This is my plan. I assume I have another decade before finding work becomes difficult so I have been focusing on investing and paying off debt. Thankfully, my wife’s career field doesn’t have that issue so we should still be good to go overall.
Usually, but I worked with a guy, retired, 70+ and still works. It depends on your skills and field.
There certainly are exceptions. Some people have tribal knowledge that can't be lost or they really are just that good... That said, look around, how many coworkers in tech do you have (or can you remember) in tech that are 50+? The only people I see that are 50+ qualify as exceptional or have a skill that is not easily found in a college graduate.
I've never seen anyone over 40 working for my company other than the execs. Kind of scary. Everyone else gets out to more stable lands.
"gets out"? More like gets pushed out and then can't get an interview because they're over 40 You know how everyone wants the latest tech? The latest phone? That applies to people as well, sadly
I think its more like "cheaper labor"...
Right? Tech certainly sucks nowadays. But I've seen worse
I don’t even think it sucks it’s just in a dip, we have blood baths every 5-7 years.
I had a Librarian my freshman year in 99’ that was the first teacher to show how to use a search engine. Alta Vista was the biggest one at that time; I probably should been taught more in the Library.
No, your job is just getting outsourced to 3rd world countries. Covid / work from home just accelerated this. All the US workers demanding remote work ironically are killing their own employment prospects since why would they hire an expensive American when a cheaper Columbian or Costa Rican would do the job for half the cost.
No. The difference is that there’s a bidirectional clustering of jobs. People with actual computer science, math and other backgrounds will find and are finding enough jobs that will pay them much more than vanilla SWE’s ever could because they can work on and improve the group of technologies called “AI”. Heck, it’s even causing a surge in jobs for professionals like linguists, psychologists etc. Data Engineers who can build scalable data pipelines, statisticians who can interpret ML model outputs and apply them to the real world, experts who can sell “AI” to companies… they’re all finding jobs. On the other end, there is a ton of work to be done to provide/curate data to these models. Without an input and output, AI is useless. So there is plenty of work there too. The people who are getting shafted are those who simply “coded”. And I’m not referring to those who actually write high quality code but those people whose week of work could be done by a somewhat intelligent high schooler with access to SlckOverflow within a month. That segment will keep getting automated.
I've said this quiet a bit IT is the career of last resort -can't cut it as a roofer, tired of waiting tables, you can become a coder and make $100K a year in 8 short weeks. As a result we end up with a lot of people that know what they know and not much else. I see young guys with bs (bullshit) degrees in Cyber Security that are really good at Nmap but know almost nothing about layer 2 networking. They are houses built without foundations. As you indicated the people with the math knowledge, the people who have an actual foundation are okay but they lower end is getting wiped out. If anything I think the industry is going to expand, there's lots of money being pumped into AI and that usually means jobs, what those jobs are I couldn't tell you I don't know if anyone can. As someone who has been in the industry close to 40 years I've seen a lot of ups and downs and what I see is that there is very little room for entry level employees and that's a shame, us old guys are going to die or open our goat farms and there's going to be a shortage of skilled workers but companies don't see to be very forward looking.
This is accurate except for the complete misunderstanding of “last resort.” Assuming the same $100k income, far more people would prefer a cushy WFH desk job in technology to roofing or waiting tables, making it the career of FIRST resort.
I'm glad you agree about the goat farm. But we do get a lot of people coming from other jobs, they have been told that learning "the computer" is the road to riches without understanding that IT is a brutal industry, with a high turnover rate that requires constant tolling and retooling. It is not a job for the lazy or unmotivated.
No. The librarian was automated. Tech is being offshored. If you want a better example think of the blue collar workers that worked in manufacturing.
Technology is being offshored AND automated, even if you believe the automation curve is still low.
Well, if you really want to get into it. Tech has been automating itself since the 90s and probably even before. In the context of OP thinking a coder in the 2020s is akin to a librarian doesn’t make sense. This decade they’re more like the manufacturing blue collar guys of the 80s. Me think it’s low? Do honestly believe it’s high? lol let Devin do your PRs. If it’s able to you were always on the chopping block.
I’m sorry, not sure what you’re saying in second graf, maybe some typos?
Automation curve? I think you’re right. LLMs will replace us.
No it’s just that for the last 4-5 years, every man and his dog thought that tech is the holy grail because FAANG were hiring anyone with a pulse with a $250K+ entry level starting salary and every other company had to compete. So everybody started studying for it. Now debt is expensive and cash flow is king so companies can’t just hire indiscriminately and need to right size as there is no longer Covid demand. So we have a lot of people who have been laid off (normal), a lot of people who started studying during the FAANG hype who are just entering the workforce, and now lots of people who think AI is the next big thing. They’re not librarians of the 2020s, there’s just too many of you and not enough jobs. Go do something else lol.
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Can confirm. Left school to pursue trades. Happily making well over the national average (and the average for a bachelors degree earner). Union treats and pays us well. Guaranteed raises that outpace inflation in our contract for the next 3-4 years is also comforting. That being said, if you are going to join a trade, do it through a union (easier said than done because even union trades are pretty damn competitive at the moment), otherwise you’re going to be stuck doing really shitty work for an average salary with little to no growth opportunities.
I worked in a library and as a sw developer. Being a Librarian is 10x easier.
Virtually every software service from a company that has had mass lauoffs over the last 2 years has been buggy, compared to rarely encountering bugs for a decade prior to the mass layoffs
Big, big problem is that end-users are often willing to accept those bugs, though. Unless the bug is a real showstopper, product and management are happy to let it slide to save a few pennies because at the end of the day it costs them nothing if they don't fix it. Features bring in customers, therefore lack of features loses customers. Customers don't quit your product *just* because of a few bugs. You see it all over software today though it may be especially evident in the gaming industry. Software is so necessary, so entwined with what we do in our day-to-day, in our jobs, that we will overlook some glaring issues to keep what we know. Obviously there's a spectrum here. Enough bugs, or bad enough bugs, or enough bad enough bugs, and you will drive away your userbase *eventually*. But if you're the only game in town right now, or their employer is entangled with your products, then who cares?
More like skilled blue collar workers who lost their jobs to offshoring. It’s sad. But companies will do what companies will do unless there are regulations. And who pays off the politicians?
Most tech workers in the US are still actively employed in tech. There's been a massive shift from the tech industry to being favorable to job seekers, to it being very hard for job seekers not just in the US but across the globe. It's not the end of the technology workers in the US or globally. Eventually modest growth in some area of tech will return. But it's going to suck for a long while until then.
I have no evidence to support this but I don't see how this isn't directly related to COVID and the ubiquity of WFH. Lots of bosses are old. They remembered a big trend of off-shoring in the 90s and 00s and they remembered all the problems it caused. But then COVID came and they had their entire workforce working from home. And it was fine. The technology to enable remote work had improved a lot. It wasn't conference calls and slow speed Internet connections. Once you demonstrate definitely that it doesn't matter where someone is working, and you have your team working from home, it's really really really easy to say 'Joe is making $215k but Vivek in India will do it for $20k' And let's be perfectly honest...a lot of people are still racist. In the 1990s, there was still this belief that American tech workers were better/smarter than ones in dirt cheap countries. Now? Half the tech companies are run by first and second generation immigrants. They don't hold that same belief. I'll be honest, I kinda sorta felt the same way until I worked overseas. It turns out, there are smart people all over the country and you can literally replace me with a team of six developers and save money. I might be better than the average offshore developer, but I'm not better than a team of them. COVID forced companies to embrace remote and they have realized they might as well go really far remote.
Masters degree in LIS with certification by ALA. Internet and digital media tool sort replaced them. Today some phd in LIS are filling rolls of public librarians. Often they are too advanced for public and do not perform well. A few lawyers quit wanting to work in an academic setting finding out they are back to big law firms as assistants receiving a fraction of previous wage working long hours pulling cases from Lexus/Nexus. Most get burned out second time around.
You always need people that understand the full stack who can fix things when they break down. I've never seen systems just work with no break downs. Also, it didn't get much press but Amazon spent a ton of money trying to make grocery stores more automated using AI and it failed. The walk out technology wasn't successful. It cost too much.
Depends on the tech sector, things are hot in AI
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Oh no! That sucks! It’s all moving too fast.
Hahaha no.
 I would like to be Conan the IT-Rian
I’d suggest code janitors
No
More likely it's like Amazon's "AI" eliminating registers in one of their stores that actually relied on offshore labor/outsourcing. But claiming it's AI is way better for shareholders than announcing outsourcing.
When AI brings powerful mass automation for dickheads (CEOs), we see massive layoffs of tech workers. OK, I get it but… On the other hand, OPERATING SYSTEMS and many big softwares are being shipped with increasingly built in AI features silently!!!!! So who is going to really buy the shitty products those narcissists wanentrepreneurs are “building”? Soon everyone will be overwhelmed with AI features on their phones that can be used for free and some of these can be used offline (read about Apple Intelligence). AI increases automation and layoffs but significantly decrease really benefits and financial revenue generated by end users. People are obsessed and spending time on YT and TikTok apps more than google.com search engine itself. So the AI will be like exporting a word document as a PDF file and save it. A such essential feature you find in almost every app. Back in the early 2000s such feature was only in paid software or professional edition of Adobe Acrobat for example. Note: Auto suggestion and spelling corrections you see while typing on your phone virtual keyboard or the suggested nearby “you might be interested in these restaurants or meals” that you see on Uber eats or Grub Hub apps are all form of machine learning models that are the heart and engine of what song called AI. So we are already using it. But think back, how many people stopped using Grub Hub and dining out since the economy is in a very bad shape? Well , many according to me. So the recommended meals AI model is not actually bring good benefit. Since many people are broke or poor with limited income and they cannot afford spending too much. So the AI thing is timed
Adding to your excellent thoughts….a LOT of frustrated teachers view Library Science as their ticket out of the classroom.
This post is like a fever dream. Tech hasn’t been replaced by AI. Honestly, co-pilot acceptance rate is brutally low (12%) at Capital One. GPT-4o doesn’t know how Azure works. None of the models were trained on bespoke installations, they can only give very vague answers. The only people losing their jobs to AI were bad at their job to begin with.
No. Librarians provided a valuable service.
Thanks for building your replacements. Now you're being replaced.
lol. I think that libraries and public domain should be the AI of the 2020s. You want to use ChatGPT, midnourney etc? - you need a library card. That’s the only future that makes sense.
A librarian would at least not have such bad grammar in the title
In your day to day interactions, do you find that people often say that you seemed to have completely missed the point?
No, not really but people make a lot of whoosh sounds around me
People need to stop worrying about this. AI will be used as a tool that makes individuals more effective. Jobs will be lost due to that, but giving a shovel to a person makes a job that would require 10, only one. Even with all of this, the amount of backlog and room for software to grow means those people will likely only be out of a job momentarily if they’re slightly competant. If AI by itself is replacing software engineers, then work itself has become entirely meaningless as there is now nothing AI can’t do. The size of systems and comprehension ability required would mean the AI is an AGI and at that point it’s over.
I'm skeptical that LLMs will boost productivity as much as the spreadsheet did, much less the Internet. The output is unreliable and there are too many potential liabilities. The AGI hypesters would have you believe we're going to have a Singularity by Thursday and get mad at anything to the contrary (their favorite move is replying with that "RemindMe" bot)- they're a filter bubble as much as their tech is a stock bubble, so it's hard to discern the truth about the tech's impact.
Another one of these posts without a look into micro/macro trends. Going to leave this here: https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/i-will-fucking-piledrive-you-if-you-mention-ai-again/ It’s called offshoring due to interest rate increases by the fed reserve. Turns out ZIRP was a really stupid fucking idea when it came to inflation but yeah let’s bank it all on an LLM that can’t even give me proper code for managing data frames lol.
This post feels a little bit like “yeah those overpaid tech bros finally got what they deserved.” Regardless, AI is mostly being thrown around as hype so companies can feel relevant and appease shareholders. This too shall pass and then we will see AI actually grow into new products that aren’t just desperate attempts at VC funding.
Not sure which part of the world you live in, but in the US, Librarians have a Master's degree by definition and that has been the case for a long time, though there are a lot of library roles that do not require the education. People might not be getting corporate jobs as Librarians as much, but they are certainly getting hired with their MIS, MLIS, or MLS degrees in large organizations constantly. Sadly, even though the profession has much more to do with technology these days, it is still very poorly paid relative to the education required.
OP quit spending so much time eating glue and doom scrolling r/cuckold
Yes, they are
If you work in education tech or graphics design then you are probably in trouble now. Tech is such a broad word though, those developing AI are making loads of money now. Also I think US institutional crypto adoption is about to explode so workers that worked in crypto could make huge amount of money soon.
20 years ago when i went to school, General college graduates were getting around 40k per year to start while IT was getting 55k/year. It was advantageous to graduate with an IT background. Now there are simply too many IT professionals and not enough jobs. It's survival of the fittest. None of the friends that I graduated with that are in IT have been affected by the layoffs.