After a few conversations with seniors, several of them feel jaded and are looking for an exit from this industry altogether.
Thoughts?
Imagine I had a pill today that absolutely cured cancer. It would take years of clinical trials, testing on animals and humans, exploration of side effects, which cancers it fixes and so on. and so on. And thats before we talk about production at scale and so on.
The AI idea is the really fast part of the cycle, but its a tiny part of the process.
Besides for four years in the middle of my career from 2012-2016, I’ve always had a direct line to the customer (B2B until 2020 across multiple companies and then consulting). I’ve always enjoyed the stakeholder interaction and design and found coding a necessary evil to get the design done.
During the last decade, my vision/responsibility has been larger than I could accomplish myself - until AI got “good enough”. It’s taken the part of my job I find to be drudgery away.
I can go from requirements -> vision -> implementation much faster.
As a senior+, I have autonomy on how I implement projects (again consulting) and I don’t have to play the promotion song and dance. There isn’t any place for me to be promoted to. I an assigned an implementation, I get it done on time on budget and it meets requirements either by myself or someone else working with me and everyone leaves me alone.
Oh and I have been working remotely for 6 years across three companies
The grass is always greener so I absolutely fantasize about doing much anything else. I also wonder if I can keep on until retirement or if I should seek an exit while I have good finances.
As a Senior+ I’m constantly in battle with god awful leadership. So that sucks, a lot, it’s not what I’m here to do. I’m here to build good software. I’m also here to mentor, that’s fun, but without good leadership it’s pissing into the wind. Also, if you’re not a FAANG type you get capped pretty quick salary wise. While most folks would kill for a 160k salary and benefits the hedonic treadmill is something of a reality and inflation is also cruel.
Still, I get paid to work in flip flops and a t-shirt from my house. Set my own hours (mostly) and do something adjacent to what I love. So it is what it is.
It is also very stressful and frustrating at times.
However, early in my career I had challenging and stressful jobs with shitty managers who always tried to crack the whip, where I made 80k a year.
Now at least my stressful job has me pampered between stresses and mostly my boss telling me I did a good job (with occasional critical feedback on how to improve).
It's not an easy job though. I see a fair amount of coworkers counting their pennies so they can quit. Honestly I think you have to be a little bit crazy and enjoy tangly stressful problems to like this job.
If you don't like messing with tech, digging in, feeling confused and lost for hours and days before an 'aha' moment, then its' going to seem like a slog.
A little bit of humility goes a long way and separates the good ones from the rest. I hate being referred to as an expert because we're all still learning. Some more than others...
Now I am managing a team of developers doing enterprise API management. I am still a developer with development assignments. I spend very little time writing code. Most of my time is spent working with people to gather requirements, perform operational concerns, and troubleshooting problems concerning multiple teams. I also have to spend a regular amount of time doing administrative tasks as a manager.
This new profession is so much better. Jumping between high level concerns of managing a large team against getting into the weeds as a single contributor gets exhausting. I really think the primary reason this work is so much better is that the barrier of entry is substantially higher, so you are surrounded by better people.
At first I was interested in the tech, I deep-dived into it. Understood as much as I could. I understand how an LLM works and what it can and can't do. So, I realised pretty quickly that their use is limited. I figured it would blow over in a few years, the real use cases would be weeded out, and we'd all move on to the next thing like normal.
What I didn't account for is how addictive this technology is. The moment something "feels" like a person it's ascribed magical qualities, and people fall for it. Anyone can, doesn't matter how smart you are.
For the past six months I've felt nothing beyond a deep melancholic sadness. Not that my industry is changing, it isn't. Not really. These models will not replace people, and anyone who thinks they can is either trying to sell you something or is delusional. The readjustment and the end of the hype cycle will come eventually. But, I fear many people will never be able to let it go. I'm saddened that we're going to lose a generation of brilliant people to fiddling with token predictors, and many of them will never recover from it.
AI will set the industry back twenty years. Not because we will be replaced, but because so many people will be dragged into psychosis and addiction or waste decades chasing the future on a lie.
And there's nothing any of us can do about it now.
I would rather losing sleep hacking ancient Linux kernel with the help of ChatGPT, knowing that exactly one person is going to use what I code.
With AI, I can independently build my own products. I'm no longer confined to being a product manager; I'm a true developer. Thanks to my previous coding experience and entrepreneurial ventures as a product manager, AI has accelerated all my skills. Perhaps most of my skills were just starting out before, but with AI, they can quickly transform into productivity and rapidly improve in practice.
What I dislike is that the market has become more cutthroat. It requires more energy to build, build, build faster.
Nowadays, I'm mostly concerned about my next evaluation cycle, and whether my job will still exist in 1-2 years. Also, piloting AI to produce slop is really not fun, and fighting fire even less.
Why? This is the best time to be in this industry.
Never been a better time to join.
I suppose that I agree to a certain extent - I feel less exhausted at the end of each day, I think, because a lot of the tedium of dealing with boilerplate and implementation details can be smoothed away with AI. I do enjoy my current position more than I have ever before.
But I don't know if I'm optimistic about the future. I think software engineers are still essential, or at least that the skill of software engineering is still essential, but I don't know if the market will have fully internalized that knowledge soon enough.
What do you think?
Ignore both the AI boosters and the doomers on either extreme side of this as they are both wrong and have incentives to hype at investors.
So to answer your question:
> Do you feel optimistic about employment in the future?
Of course.
Employment will change, but to separate yourself is to know what needs to be built rather than just building for the sake of building because you can with AI.
This exactly. I am neither a boomer nor a doomer. It has helped a lot both at work and in accelerating my personal projects. But now that the C-suite and middle management has jumped on the agentic bandwagon, I'm unsure where this will go and what casualties ensue. At the very least, in the short term there's going to be a lot of "Now that we have agents, this project should be achievable in half the time".
Old because I can see behind the curtain now. Things feel different than they did when I first started working in tech around 2006-2008. So much of the fixation on recurring revenue, rent-seeking, optimization at all costs, dark patterns, manufactured addiction... I watched the industry as it slowly stumbled into these ideas, leaned in, and ultimately perfected them. But when I read accounts from people older than I am, they all have their version of this comment. The early days of the PC era and browser wars had no shortage of dark shit. It's not like corporate fuckery wasn't rampant in the 80s or 90s. I was just too young and dumb and optimistic to understand most of it. I've gotten much more cynical in the last ~15 years.
I feel young because AI tech actually feels new and promising and exciting in ways I haven't seen since the dawn of mobile and web2.0. There's suddenly this vast new surface area for innovation, a bleak geopolitical landscape, and a palpable rush to create. 2008-2012ish kinda sucked, economically. The fallout from GWOT + GFC, OWS, snowden leaks, etc. The nerdosphere had this collective feeling that the jaws were tightening around us. And yet the technology was moving so fast, was enabling whole new ways of interacting between people and machines. You could tell that the future was going to be completely wild, but it was early enough that it had to be built, and there was a frenzy of excitement, like we'd just been set loose across the louisiana purchase to figure out what was possible in a whole new kind of environment.
It was an oasis. A refuge from everything else that felt broken in every other part of the world. You could just duck down and build shit nobody had ever seen before in a week, and people would take it seriously because there was this shared understanding that nobody knew what the new rules were yet, and the next big idea might come from anyone.
It feels like the best time in a long time for technologists who thrive on curiosity, optimism, and inventiveness. We've finally got a gold rush for experimental tinkerers! Crypto is just grift tech, NFTs were transparently stupid, AR/VR has mostly felt like a gimmick, etc. AI is already so useful, and it's only the beginning.
The market's delusional, the US government is horrific, megacorps are squeezing every drop out of anyone they can stuff in their mouth... but did anyone really think we had a future where that doesn't happen? That snowball's been rolling since long before I was born. I'm just stoked at the chance to get to experience technology as magic again for a little while along the way. Maybe that's a cope. Or escapism. IDK, fuck it. So far, it's nice. The bad shit I've been expecting for many years. The good shit surprised me.