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I lost my job as a programmer and I think it's over for me. No, you will not hack the device drivers in the basement but you're gonna be flipping burgers and out of cash or energy for anything else. Worst thing: you never gonna even be good at flipping burgers without experience or young age... Once you are out of the field, and your money is gone: suddenly you are useless, old trash. No one even wants to employ ex programmers as they simply don't fit into any other workfield...

/rant

Flipping burgers really isn't that difficult. It was my first job, and I even have nostalgia for it at times.

If I had to go do that again, the main problem would for me would be that I don't think I could stand in one place for that long anymore, my thigh and lower back start stinging and want me to sit down (at least they do when I cook at home).

I interacted with way more people at a fast food restaurant than I do now, and got to interact with customers as well. Which wasn't always positive, but it was at least interesting to see all the various people that came in.

Also it was a lot more laid back and less serious than what I do now (which is work on web apps for large corporations).

Also at least I knew what I worked on was going to get used. I've been on too many projects that end up getting cancelled, or only used by a small handful of (high paying) clients, etc. Or specific features that end up getting cancelled or delayed indefinitely, etc.

Too bad it pays so little, or I'd actually consider it for a change of pace (well, more likely I'd want to try being a barista instead, that seems more enjoyable and a lot less walking on greasy floors).

It is hard I'd you didn't do any labour work for 20 years. Impossible to compete with youngsters

> you never gonna even be good at flipping burgers

i promise you this is not true

understand the chemistry of fats an denaturing of proteins, understand myoglobin; it is not much different than understanding anything.

nothing stops you from trying to make the best burgers in the world

be curious, ignorant and kind

I know because I just got laid off from McDonald's. It's very hard: stress, speed, precision, noise.

You are competing with people 20 years younger. It's like watching professional athletes vs school soccer

sorry man i cant even imagine what you are going through i didnt mean to be condescending or anything, i just truly believe that people are amazing

to be amazing however requires food and roof and a bit of luck

i honestly dont know what i would do without a job, its hard to break into trades i hear, and also seems to be hard in mcdonalds

i will probably start a tool and die shop or something, or a burger joint, smash burgers only (those the only ones i love to make)

You must have a lot of capital already if those are realistic options for you.

You are talking about being a professional chef, not a fast food employee.

If I lose my job and fail to get another one in reasonable time, I guess I'll try my own business, if that also fails it might be the rope then.

At least I am not tied by family so I can be relatively mobile, I moved to Singapore from my European country since the market was not great and I managed to get hired here.

Anyway in my current company the bottlenecks are completely different than AI so it will take a fair amount of time to even apply AI properly to development here.

This is probably true, TBH. I can't think of any work that I can do whence I lose my job. Trade, Uber...those are not for me. I'm not competitive enough with people who bagged so many years of experience. At best I'd be at the lowest echelon and might as well just collect benefit from the government.

I really have no idea what I'm going to do, but I can probably still sit in the basement hacking kernels when I'm done with my whatever day job.

If you believe that, it could be true.

On the other hand there are lots of companies hiring still, so you could also keep working as a software engineer, if that's what you're good at.

The job has changed a lot though, it's not about writing code by hand anymore.

Provided one can go through the silliness of fitting golf balls into planes, or going through the algorithms and data structures books from 30 years ago.

It's not all like that, but yeah there's a lot of artificialness to interviews and there always has been.

What field has interviews without silliness like this. Jobs for lawyers in 1950 when all that mattered was your father and your alma mater? Hard pass.

I would take a interview premised on a know, learnable challenge (even if silly) over one that exclusively relied on what college you went to.

At work we do both. If you pass the somewhat artificial interviews we invite you for a trial week of 3-5 days working with the actual team on actual real work (a somewhat contained feature or problem).

Lets us evaluate people in real conditions and visa versa.

That only works for unemployed people.

In Germany for example, that isn't allowed, and there is the whole insurance discussion if something happens to someone that shouldn't be there as employee in first place.

It also works for people willing to take time off (PTO or otherwise). We do lose some people who aren't willing to do the trial, but that's considered acceptable. People who do the work trial and accept an offer are much more likely to stick around (much lower rate of mistakes on their part and our part.)

I'm laughing a bit at Germany, but Europe in general has lost the plot when it comes to innovation.

Who's gonna be able to afford burgers?

Burgers are cheap! You can easily find a place that has something meat-adjacent with too much bun and certified cheesonium topping for less than $30. Don't just try it once, start a layaway plan now so you can enjoy that three times a year!

I wish this was sarcasm...

It is. Here’s a vegan cheeseburger for four dollars in a popular west coast metro.

https://www.eatfaceplant.com/menu

They even have a working shake machine.

A vegan cheeseburger isn't a cheeseburger.

That's why it's called vegan cheeseburger and not cheeseburger! A toy car isn't a car, a step dad isn't a dad and an e book isn't a book, are they ?

A cheeseburger with neither beef nor cheese is not a cheeseburger.

A vegan sandwich would be right.

Do you also call a caesar salad a salad cheeseburger?

That’s right! And the vegan cheeseburger cited above is made with vegan cheese and vegan hamburger.

Go Costco! Costco is now my official restaurant whenever the family wants a bit of treat.

Most of us had been laid-off at some moment in our careers, and frankly, it always seem like you're unemployable. This is not true in the majority of cases.

This kind of feeling is mostly just our old minds that cannot stop identifying this situation as social rejection or being shunned off; both things amongst the most terrible events that can happen to social primates like us.

Now it's different. AI and I'm older. There is like 70% less offers. There are very few programmers around at age 40

It kind of depends on where in the globe one is, many countries see programmers as a white collar job that happens to be better paid than a plain secretary, a mere transition phase into management, that is the success story for most families, the programmer turned boss.

So those of us that fight against becoming managers, it was for love of programming and the related technical details, as it usually comes with a payment and career ceiling.

And being unemployed beyond 50 years old in many countries that see being a programmer as yet another office job, means too old for employment, and too young for retirement.

> So those of us that fight against becoming managers, it was for love of programming and the related technical details, as it usually comes with a payment and career ceiling.

I think quite a lot of these programmers don't fight against becoming a manager, but it's rather that they don't have traits (character traits, demeanour, low on dark triad traits (it is known that the selection process and work reality for managers actively selects for these), ...) that are necessary to get "selected" to become a manager.

In many career paths, after senior developer there are only management roles.

Doesn't matter what traits they have, the only way up, to get that raise, additional benefits, or not being thrown into some improvement program is to accept becoming a manager in one of its various forms, or go elsewhere where hopefully there is a more sane career path.

> Doesn't matter what traits they have, the only way up, to get that raise, additional benefits, or not being thrown into some improvement program is to accept becoming a manager in one of its various forms

You did not get my point: it is not about non-acceptance of becoming a manager, but rather about having traits that commonly imply that "those in power" won't select you for becoming a manager.

You are the one not getting it, there are companies where those in power only offer two pills, the red one allows to remain a company employee, the blue one means out willing or not.

People aren't selected, they are dragged into their Peter principle role.

For those of us "not getting it" the only option on offer is the blue pill. Imagine that.

Maybe they choose not to exude those traits by choice (when a leader slot opens up), and can use them when they are circumstantially relevant. I have gone full founder, and I’m not happy with who I was. It’s an IC’s life for me.

The only thing is, we’re all managers now. We’ve been given a fleet of robots to support a set of outcomes. We have to set expectations, monitor outputs, coach, intervene, step back, onboard new team members, train regularly, make sure they have the tools they need, etc and so on. Are those “soft skills” or just engineering? I’m curious if and how people are lacking in these areas when it’s just text.

Correction:

"low on dark triad traits" -> "high on dark triad traits"

I love this take, i feel similarly. LLMs can never rob me of my personal enjoyment of computing.

Sure they might make my work life hell, but i've always considering my programming hobby to be completely separate from work.

> when it was seen as low-status profession in the late 80s.

I don't remember this at all. I became a professional programmer in 1987, but perhaps it was the fact that I went directly to Unix, did not pass go, did not collect $200 and worked entirely on systems programming that helped skip any of the "low-status" of people doing RDBMS/forms work ?

Low status is underselling it, but it certainly wasn't seen as an alternate path for those those considering medical/law/finance.

I started my CS degree in '94, and my junior year was... weird. Suddenly a quarter of the faces in the lab were not the types you would ever expect to see there.

At least in pop culture in the late '80s and early '90s, being into computers was for asocial dorks and other unflattering nerd stereotypes. It was really the rise of the Internet and dotcom boom in the late 90s where [EDIT] owning a computer became unavoidable and the first of the software industry billionaires started seeping into the public consciousness that being a computer nerd became respectable.

It’s always been a low-status profession, the pay is just better now

> I feel like I got into programming when it was seen as low-status profession in the late 80s.

No, you didn't! If you are 45, then you were 5-10 years old in the late 80s. You might have started playing around with programming at that time, but you didn't "get into" it in any professional sense. I am willing to bet anything that you had no knowledge, let alone concept, of the professional status of programming at that time.

Fair. My perception was my parents thinking this is a dumb waste of time.

When I eventually went to college in the late 90s / early 2000s that attitude seemed to switch. Add to that today's coding bootcamps for kids. It seems like quite a different world.

This.

If you enjoy it for the sake of it, do more of it. You don’t need society with you.

If, however, your job is to build value for a user, then you or the man or the system are to naturally optimize for what’s productive to that end. Arguing about generics doesn’t create any/enough value. It doesn’t build a product.

These are two different sides of the profession and serve different ends.

> If society collapses because 80% of white collar jobs disappear, I guess I'll just be in my basement wanting to know how a linux kernel driver works.

I'll probably do the same (actually doing this), camping in the woods or something, using a camper van.

HN is a terrible barometer for our profession opinions because here is the VC World Pravda Central. There are lots of brilliant folks here, but a lot of them are in it because of carrot of multigenerational money. Not that there's anything wrong with it, but it is definitelly a different ethos from the old slashdot.

Programming is not going to disappear, neither AI coding assistants. But if anything I fear more a future backslash against those useful tools than being replace by them. Overly excited people using those tools without any controls are what is going to give us sooner or later a lot of high impact incidents, lik e Therac 25, but in a massive scale, and my fear is that the companies will err in overcorrecting once this inevitably happens.

Also, cheap assistants are not going to last forever, real inference costs, despite all the hand-weaving will inevitably rear their ugly heads, and investor s will tire of subsidizing inference.