I’m close to despondent about how my job has changed. If the next 15 years of my life is just waiting on LLMs, I don’t think I can do it.
I'm terribly worried about my career as well. I built a large part of my identity around coding in my teens, and working in the industry when I got to my twenties were some of the happiest years of my life.
I was laid off from tech around the time that COVID hit, so this predates AI somewhat. I briefly became a contractor, but none of the contracts I was able to secure were renewed. I haven't worked in tech since 2023, right around the time I was introduced to AI.
They say that as you become more experienced in a domain, it should become easier and more lucrative... advancing in a career like tech should be a joy. With about seven years of experience, I can say that it hasn't been great. And aside from acquiring titles like junior and senior, there really isn't much advancement left after the 5-10 year mark.
I currently work in a grocery store and am giving that a shot, going to give it a good few years to see if I can advance through the different departments while I see how AI in the software industry pans out. The pay isn't nearly as good, and it's not something I'm passionate about; it's really quite mindless work. The positives are that I don't have to worry about outsourcing, or working from home, or massively disruptive technology like AI.
Throughout the latter half of my career, it almost felt as if every force was at play in killing what I was finally able to enjoy and also make a living from.
I wish I had something more positive to say, but as far as I'm concerned, I'm unfortunately stuck waiting this one out on the sidelines.
Here's wishing you the best for the future.
that’s because they were. They needed to kill the career because we were educated, well off, fulfilled, and becoming organized. Turns out not all of us were either easily manipulated marks or unscrupulous money goblins and that was a problem for them.
Remember when Google employees stood up for what is right against the company? That’s when the powers that be in the industry decided to go all in on AI. They need to destroy the career and industry because we had to much power and intelligence.
But you repeat yourself.
The job has changed from a craft to operating an unreliable machine.
Instead of satisfaction of solving challenging problems with your own skill and creativity, you babysit a text extruder and slog through mistakes in its generated output.
Arguably this may make software cheaper to make and accessible to non-programmers, but for people who liked their job it's like being demoted from a restaurant chef to a microwave button pusher.
I find it very difficult to learn a new thing by reading it, vs by doing it.
And indeed, most mathematicians, who do get paid to do math, work a lot with pencil and paper. If math is secondary to your job, you likely will not, but if it’s your primary job, you likely spend a lot of time working ideas out in the more primitive fashion.
The whole point of the discussion about LLMs in our field is exactly what you say. Yes, we do often find ourselves doing new things. They are exciting the first and the second time we do them. Later they become a chore.
When you’re doing something that requires a lot of typing for the 17th time… why! Like, how many times are you going to write that golang http server scaffold. Or, how many times are you going to create that new terraform project with those same modules. I hear people say “oh yeah, write a generator”. To which my answer is: do you have a budget for it, or do I need to invest my own time.
It’s possible to guard the model so that it acts according to your expectations. Just invest the time in that tooling. It’s as exciting as any other problem. You learn the domain by writing software guardrails, your effort results in a software analysis of the business domain problem. It’s a much more valuable and rewarding work than writing some code.
Instead of solving things yourself, you need to learn how to describe them in a way others can solve them. Otherwise you will just be fighting the instinct to just do it yourself.
Many tech/software people were completely unsympathetic if not downright arrogant when their products displaced people in other professions who felt the same way.
The lesson here is that ultimately, change comes for everyone.
Nah, they want to think beyond the superficial prompting level. A lot of real programmers feel exactly the same.
It is hard to notice this sometimes on HN because this site is rife with the very idea-man-VC-pilled-finance-bro-pseudo-hackers that over the past 15-20 years have turned the tech industry from one of optimism for a brighter future to one that most normal people now distrust and hate.