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Comment by piloto_ciego | Hacker News Reader

All I ever wanted to do in this universe was fly airplanes. And I did it professionally for nearly 15 years. Then I got sick, and couldn’t do it anymore. Suddenly, all my skills were meaningless and unemployable.

I got over it. But it took time. I reinvented myself - I had always liked writing code. So I pivoted to this and literally went back to grad school to study AI.

I’m watching a lot of people right now flounder like I did in the first year or so after I got sick. They’re grieving. They’ll move beyond it, but it’s immensely painful to them right now.

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I really feel for you. One of my friends was also a pilot, licensed to fly Airbus planes. He had to quit because of COVID. I still remember seeing Thai Airways pilots and crew working as street vendors during that time.

It’s become much harder to get back into the airline industry now because of the supply-demand situation.

Anyway, my friend now became regular staff at local factory, doing something completely unrelated to aviation and aerospace knowledge. It’s really painful to break out of our “locked-in” comfort zone.

Not covid for me, but around that time. One of the last things I did before I got sick that year was fly Covid patients out of rural areas. It was a very stressful time - especially when I was so damn tired all the time for no real apparent reason. Whatever, I'm on the mend now more or less.

I would go back tomorrow if I could, but I also recognize that chapter of my life is over, over 7000hrs is enough for one life time. But maybe I'll get lucky, and medicine will advance? I'm not holding my breath.

Reguardless, that's what I see, people grieving and being ANGRY because they aren't quite sure what to do with their newfound uselessness. I was that way for a long while. The feeling like you're not a part of it anymore, or that all that work and effort, was for nought.

But if anyone reading this is struggling with these sorts of feelings (like OP), understand that the experiences that brought you here, they are what make you who you are! They're a part of you! But they don't totally make you up. You should use your perspective to see if you can make even more crazy and creative and magnificent things than you ever could before! And most importantly, do it for you.

Society is really going to be totally overturned by this. The responses I see, the attitudes people have, a lot of it is stuff I just lived through a couple years ago. Good luck folks, you should probably go hiking more.

If all the pilots were affected, it would be a disaster, not one person's personal challenge. If you switch out "pilot" for something even more common/fundamental in the economy, like "tradesman", "scientist", or "software developer", it gets even more grim. You write as though you are enlightened, but in this light, your anecdote is selfish. It's selfish to apply your personal experience to the whole world with the broad "just handle your situation like I did mine" brush.

You should just handle your situation. Though, not necessarily like I did, but handle it none the less. I am enlightened on this particular topic - one of the few in the world I'm qualified to viscerally understand. This is the second time I'm living it, and this time is far more fun because I'm less invested in the identity of "programmer" but it is still daunting.

Selfish? Maybe. What I see from a lot of people I talk to about this stuff is anger and frustration. So they lash out at the guy who says, "hey you can be mad, but you're still going to have to figure out your stuff." I can give advice, you're free to take it or not, but this is not a situation where there is a rule book. You're going to have to forge a new path - things are changing, and you will have to adapt or suffer the consequences of not adapting. There is no one person to blame for this problem (except for maybe yourselves if you were too invested in "dev" as an identity), there is no way to un-invent these tools. It's not going away.

"Just handle your situation" is the right answer here. That's what you're going to have to do anyway. When you get done blubbering about what could have been (and believe me, I did quite a bit of blubbering too), you'll eventually need to get up off your ass and do something in this changed world. I know that sucks, and I know it's not what you want to hear. But these are the facts on the ground right now.

I'm sorry this is happening to you guys (and I guess me twice), but I've been here before, I know what it is like. You can take the advice of a guy who's already been hiking a similar mountain for a few years, or you can say, "screw you man!" That's up to you, but I promise you that being angry will not halt AI coding agents or AI progress in general. You're going to have to adapt to the new world, and if you cannot adapt you are going to suffer more. How do I know? Because I fucking lived this already once.

Once you're done grieving, you can start to say, "oh, what are the new found opportunities in this world where I can't do $old_career?" If you need help along the way, I'm here, but you shouldn't expect me to abandon my lived experience with this stuff. It sucks to lose a career, but the faster you can let go of the old identity and forge a better one, the better you'll be for it.

I think you're talking past what OP really meant. Millions of people change careers, and it usually isn't treated as a sign of failure or deficiency.

The effects they're talking about are not as shallow as finding employment in doing the same thing they initially expected to do. The reason so many people feel hollow, in addition to the job loss, is that the deployment of AI coincides with the accelerating hollowing-out and financialization of the world, especially the tech world. I don't think nearly as many people who still can be employed in tech would have such a big problem if they still felt like they were paid to solve problems and make things happen, even if indirectly. Instead what everyone is feeling, even many expert AI users, is that now everyone is increasingly working on creating the appearance of value, not actual value. Instead of serving customers, they make numbers look good to shareholders, hype up whatever they want to hear and line the pockets of people whose level of wealth they will never reach. The number of tech sub-fields where this isn't a theme is thinning by the day. So it goes much deeper than "I need to train for another job" - lots of people make that choice every day. By suggesting that these people need to study AI like you, you're telling them they need to accept the corporate system they hate. Become one with the financial interests.

I am your opposite. I started out by being enthusiastic about machine learning, I was fascinated by GPT-2 or image generation demos years before normal people found out about it. I saw the tech field as flawed, but good enough. And after all, back then engineers had a real value and a voice, they could push back and advocate for better technical solution, they still hadn't become the unvalued scavengers of "look what AI made for me" produced by people who have no idea what they're doing. Now that AI has pushed 80% of tech firmly into the "enriching the immensely wealthy and bringing about a dystopian world" paradigm, I'm looking to go back and do something that will actually benefit real people. Not any of the grass-is-greener farming fantasies people post about occasionally - I still like technology, I just want to use it for real, actual work. That's what OP and many others are probably feeling.

I have never said they need to accept the "corporate system they hate" - I'm saying they need to adapt, and the genie is never going back into the bottle.

You can take my advice, or you can ignore it. Up to you, but what I see, from my limited perspective, is a lot of people grieving not being useful in the same way they used to be. They can adapt, or they can suffer. Not trying to be callous or whatever, but the sooner people stop making their identity about their careers the better.

And let's be real, 99% of code never created any real value in the world anyway. You think that the B2B SaaS dashboard you built for some company called Wankytottle was really valuable in any sense of the word? You don't have to accept "the system," especially now.

Sorry, I assumed that accepting the system was what you advocated for given your example of moving to AI combined with the message of needing to adapt. It's a common argument used by AI advocates, that AI and all its consequences are the only way in all industries, and that everyone has a choice of either doing AI or dying (metaphorically or literally).

I explained why the grief that people feel isn't just tied to employment, but their overall perception of how the world is doing and what it's like to thrive in it. It's especially pertinent because OP isn't pushed out and trying to find something else to do - judging by the post, they're still in the game, still doing all the right AI things. They're just exhausted and questioning the meaning of it all.

I find these emotions to usually be the strongest for people who used to do something they saw as valuable in the past, but don't anymore - or at least people who thought that were satisfied by solving problems even if no one but them would ever appreciate the solution. The B2B SaaS webdevs and similar archetypical solvers of trivial low-value problems are the ones who love AI the most.

You're right on target. Indeed this is what it is.

But, you know, we can move past that grief, and instead use it as fuel! We'll be better for it in the long run even though we might not like it now.

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