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Comment by gwoolhurme | Hacker News Reader

Then what do us software engineers do? If we are obsolete. College diplomas are worthless outside of self improvement. UBI isn’t coming. Even then, I’m in the country I live in through a working visa. If what you say is true… I see this on HN every day at this point. It fills me with enough anxiety. To me, as an engineer I like to think of different scenarios but there is no good scenario with AI. The worst one is, I lose my visa, job, house, at that point I lose 10+ years of my life. I’ve thought about just ending it at that point… talking to a therapist over that obviously, but there are days when that dread is there. There is the thread about the 3D artist replaced essentially by AI. Due to my visa I can’t legally work a blue collar job that will be safe until a robot comes. I don’t want to move back to a country I don’t even know anymore. Death doesn’t sound bad…

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I feel you, but remember this, every technological upheaval has lead to a higher quality of life (mostly).

Meaning, you might be extinct as banging out code for a living, you might become assisted by the computer and focus on higher tasks like architecture design, communications and ... probably, rewriting half of what the AI did.

When I started, being a web developer was NOT a thing! There were some classical graphic designers that came from Print and started doing web stuff, and it was regarded like a dirty work.

Even today a lot of system developers will look at web developers and say this isn't programming.

Things are in flux, always, so embrace the change, don't deny it, and trust that there will always be something to be adding value to later on. The worst thing you can do is become a denier of change and lock yourself up.

That said, a certain common sense is required, like jumping off the band wagon and calling yourself a web3 crypto bro developer isn't going to do much for your resume. So sit tight, admire the show, and learn what you can.

None of us know how this is going to play out. I feel anxious too but let’s at least see what happens. Right now the world is still much the same as it was before LLMs arrived. Take some time to look at the flowers. They are still there.

I hope so... I really do. Looking at HN, and I understand nobody knows what the future holds, but to get to those flowers a lot of pain is going to come I think. For me, for other people... to me the most disgusting comments I've seen on HN has been SV people who say that I should have saved up enough as a buffer. That isn't the case for us SWEs who live abroad. Not all of us make SV salary. I could go on and on about this. I really just hope there is a light at the end of the tunnel for us in the short term, because if it is coming for our jobs in 5 years or less, many of us in society will be left for rot.

Life is always better than death. If things really do get bad, you won’t be alone. Take solace in the fact that there will be a huge community of people in the same boat as you with whom you can connect and work with.

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