I’ve taken the last year off from software engineering and have worked a mix of jobs that primarily exist outside the magic circle of the internet. I think one thing that surprised me was just how little computers were used; there was some basic scheduling and retail management software, but the meat of the job was in the real world. Not only that, but most of the community was similar: their jobs were based in the physical world and computers were kept at an arm’s length. Even bookings were made over the phone, not online. It was eye-opening coming from my service-based economy bubble just how little computers (and because of that, LLMs) affected life in certain pockets of the world, some of them very large. A step further than that is to realize that all the value we extract at the software level comes from value produced in the real world at some stage.

What the article says about sprinkling in a bit of the physical world into your work was one of my takeaways from my year off as well; even without worrying about AI and job security, it just feels more rewarding.