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Comment by mnk47 | Hacker News Reader

It took me much longer than usual to get past the depression phase. The main reason is that everyone online kept telling me I was dumb, too inexperienced or extremely incompetent if I thought AI was a serious threat to me, a junior developer. Friends offline said similar things, just in a nicer way.

Now everyone seems to be a "doomer" like me. I was too stupid to see that people (especially online) were lashing out at me as a coping mechanism. The worst part is that even though I had my "we're fucked" realization was earlier than many others, I didn't really do anything productive, I didn't make the right moves to pivot, I had no plan. Now I have a rough ~3-year off ramp plan, just like everyone else.

I suspect that there are many, many recent grads in my position, who also thought they were taking crazy pills when everyone around them dismissed their concerns

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If the circle you're listening to are "recent grads" stop listening to them.

They don't know how the industry works or what it needs, few of them them know how the technology works or what it's realistic near-term prospects are let alone the long-term ones, and none of them have lived long enough to understand the pace of a technology moving from discovery through to maturity and commercialization.

If you look to your experienced seniors instead of your peers, you'll discover two things:

1. They don't respect most contemporary juniors because of the industry boom and are happy to see most of you scare yourselves off

2. They're narrowing in on a familiar, respectful appreciation of recent content generators and their potential for assisting some basic use cases (highly valuable technology!) and are increasingly of the opinion that both the hype and fear of Q1/2023 was largely market manipulation by VC's trying to squeeze another boom out as money was tightening

Well, I did see that, or at least people who claimed to be seniors online, plus some mid-level friends and yes, a junior friend. Admittedly, it's just anecdotes, but it's very difficult to get hard facts, even from perusing bls.gov.

But something changed in the past 4 months or so. I used to see the two things you described, but now I see seniors repeating the same thing juniors (whom they ridiculed) used to say. Look at this very thread, for example. People are starting to realize that even if these AI startups are making ridiculous promises, the tech might be way more than just hype/smoke and mirrors.

I've read quite a few comments in HN, and right here in this thread, that say something along the lines of "I'll be fine... It's the juniors I'm worried about".

Experienced, older people are notorious for downplaying and dismissing the implications of revolutionary new technologies. They may be right this time, or they may be wrong. But age and experience aren't as relevant when it comes to revolutions.

And inexperienced people are notorious for falling for unfounded hype. Eventually they either learn to discern value, which is hard, or just write off hype, which usually works fine but occasionally makes them late to the party.

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