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Comment by ivape | Hacker News Reader

First, your role gets renamed …

Then you get laid off.

It’s kind of sad to see everyone being walked out of the factory, the final shutters on the modest profession of programming. I guess this is kind of exactly what it would look like, that bittersweet moment of ‘it’s actually really happening, and it’s actually really sad’.

Part of me wishes we could freeze time, that if we could just keep it like this, this many jobs, this many people, keep it a nice small village …

But this tidal wave before us doesn’t care. So long folks.

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Most of people here think "I will be fine, only the other guy gets fired, programmers always will be needed". And we are tempted by new shiny stuff or we think using llms will help us keep the job but really by agreeing to what is happening and not being skeptic and standing against we dig our career graves. Kind of tragedy.

Should’ve gone the art-industry route instead of this. Posting any kind of ai-generated art in an art community gets hostile pretty quickly.

If you view yourself as a "backend developer" or, worse, "a react developer" then sure. If you view yourself as a "person who solves business problems with technology" then the only thing AI does is enable you to do more.

business owner solves business problems with your assistance. you are saying llms cannot in near future give this assistance. seems debatable.

Then become a business owner? Im not sure what the argument is. That industries should resist change because somewhere down the line they become obsolete?

> Then become a business owner?

You mean like all those "business owners" in gig economy who don't have contract anymore due to llms? How's that helpful?

Look at another post from today where Google’s Agent deleted a whole drive.

give it five minutes and someone will be like "but remember that story how an employee nuked entire company by mistake, humans are no better"

A lot of people here have overgrown egos and really believe they are irreplaceable. And reality can come at you really fast.

Even actually being irreplaceable doesn't help if management doesn't agree.

And increasing costs 10 fold due to letting go of someone that were doing two teams worth of work on some internal system he had 20y of experience with wont show up in some table in some power point.

You're replying to an LLM.

how do you know it's an llm? how do you know I'm not an llm? how do I know you're not an llm?

that nicely summarizes one of problems with llms.

That was probably the feeling of thousands of scribes when the printing press spread and more people could afford to buy books. The art of writing, including calligraphy, still exists, but primarily as a hobby.

If you are 40 and haven't transitioned from a linear employee to manager or a small shareholder, your trajectory is that of jaded sadness. I write this to those who are still young enough to read and listen.

Almost all of the couple-hundred employees laid off at my company in the past year have been managers.

For me, I paid off all my debts, and I'm reducing my spending to build up a big stockpile to weather a rough period or large salary decrease. TBH I'd rather find other kinds of work than lean into AI tooling. It's so boring & demoralizing.

This is the wrong advice in my view. Senior engineers are the ones more empowered by AI than anyone else, provided they update their skills.

What a world we will live in when everyone with skill and experience has moved in to management. Then who will be doing all the work?

this happened with all manner of engineering in America. Industry is power-driven, and only-workers do not protect a place to stand. At the same time, massive fortunes were made, and many, many companies died. Its not a static environment.

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