I've been doing this for a long time, and I remembering quiting my sales job to make 50% less as a developer, but I loved the work, the growth opportunities were amazing and playing the long game worked out.
There's a huge difference, though, between tech jobs. Some are Jira mills, where you spend your days picking up Jira tickets, completing them, arguing about sprints and story points, soullessly going through to motions of writing software without any of the joy of writing software. Some are more joyful, where you actually take ownership of large chunks of software that people actually use. Some are further along that spectrum and you're the only person who knows how the software works and life is a continual stressful fight against stupid business decisions while keeping the plates spinning.
And as for anyone anywhere getting involved... no, not really. I would say it's harder to get a job in Big Tech than it is to get a construction job, for sure. And you're more reliably going to have a solid income as a plasterer or bricklayer than as a programmer these days.
Tech is an awful industry to live in. It just happens to be one of the few jobs in America that can reliably provide enough money for a decent quality of life. Whether you can actually enjoy that life is more up in the air.
When my dad worked as a butcher, he would cut himself all the time and the company was obligated to provide him mesh gloves to prevent such things, even though he was too stupid to use them.
Meanwhile in tech, we all sit in a chair 8 hours a day, something well known to cause real harms, and a creature that was never ever built to do Knowledge work is encouraged to run that system full bore for most of the day, even off hours, and when that inevitably harms you, burns you out, you get kicked to the curb.
When meat packing plants did this kind of thing 100 years ago, unionization was prominent and extremely effective at making sure my dad would be provided those gloves decades later. When unionization comes up for tech workers, a bunch of morons who are apparently incapable of reading history books insist that they negotiate better than any union could (laughable) because they make $300k a year while their employer pulls in millions a year per head.
It's truly astonishing just how little you have to trickle down to some code monkey to get them to think they are winning, and be willing to work against their own interests.
That union sure would have been helpful dealing with AI bullshit.
... and are we pretending that automating tasks is some strange new idea that has just appeared? Software engineers have always wanted to automate everything. The advice has been "automate it!" for the last 30, 40 years.
It is different that the steamroller is heading for our own domain this time, but really. The industry isn't doing anything new or out of character. Of course management were going to automate software engineering at the first opportunity. Any software engineer would. One of the things I've discovered since Claude crossed 1,500 on CodeArena is I don't even like writing code. Waste of time, writing good-enough code is a machines job.
Of course not. Paying people has always been undesirable for the people paying. Software has been an exceptionally cushy job for an exceptionally long time, so people are exceptionally excited to pay less.
Since the act of typing has never been the bulk of a software engineer's time -- the act of understanding has been -- the way that AI speeds up development is by allowing the shortcutting of understanding. The understanding of details is what has historically made software engineers expensive and difficult to replace. Any idiot can type fast, but typing fast doesn't someone a software engineer. The excitement is about automating the understanding of problems, because understanding is expensive.
You're saying that we should have more people get paid by artificially paying less people more...
Isn't that backwards? Don't they take money that previously would be going to the CEO/C-suite; (aka profit), and give it to the union and it's members? The corporation certainly isn't sharing it with the public (aka lower prices) for the fun off it.
You end up just having to cover slackers who choose the life of working less and making less money, but at a company where others want to work harder.