Went for a network admin degree then watched as all the IT jobs vanished into the cloud until I graduated in '08 with zero prospects. I'm sure the cloud was great for mid-career people who could go right to datacenter work, but I wonder where the people to replace them in a few years will come from.
I could at least see Linux was becoming a big deal, so I picked that focus over Cisco or Microsoft. Despite everything, knowing how to Linux has been handy, and the state paid for most of it, so no debt.
every single time I think about trying to formulate my opinions on AI I wake up and see a blog post that illustrates my points better than I could have
Like you would not believe how much of my blogposting style is just surfacing internal and external arguments about things either recorded in headspace or in Discord
Essentially 100% of my blog posts started as a series of discussions and threads on social media. Eventually I had so many points rolling around that it was impossible to keep them straight without the structure and repetition possible in long-form writing.
One think I rarely see being brought up in discourse about AI is how different it is from all previous technological advancements. It took decades to modernize factories. Same for home electricity and internet.
But because AI is available immediately after it's made we might not yet realize ...
i love this. a friend who is a director at a big hedge fund in NYC said he has junior devs refusing to use LLMs because they want to learn. i wonder if this is happening elsewhere too.
> This is the true problem with AI. It's with who owns it, and what they will inevitably use it for. Whether it can do cool stuff with code or equal a junior developer is irrelevant. What it can do is less important than what it will be used for.
I see so many people differentiate the concepts... "look at what this technology can do" versus "look at who controls this technology" (if they even ask the later question at all)
> The article presents this as a modern trend, affecting existing junior employees.
>
> I see it as the natural extension of ~zero available training for unskilled workforce - which has dominated ~every industry since at least the 1980s.
the part about teaching juniors hit me a lot more because I'm still in high school 🫠 hard to not despair at the industry I spent my entire adolescent years dreaming of
Oh yes.
Companies only hire people with years of experience in a very specialized field.
And when they can't find someone, they scream 'we lack experts! Why is nobody training experts?'
The lack of junior positions in tech forced me out of the industry because nowadays hiring anyone with less than several years of in work experience is just not something companies want to do, even if they don’t explicitly state a position as “senior”. The lack of training is really shortsighted
> If the future finds that software written by computers is more profitable then that's just what it is. The universe doesn't owe us value on human-written software. Even food is not able to escape this hole: it's not profitable to manually cultivate food anymore if you wanted to do that as a career
> I have a whole list of things I'd like from my car that the market does not provide because it is not profitable to do so. Why do I get the feeling that instead of seeing this as a horror story you would scold me, even though it is the mirror form of the story you just told?
> Does this not horrify you? That the foundational discipline of humanity - nutrition via hunting, gathering, or growing - is no longer a "profitable enterprise"? Something every human needs in order to survive, has been perverted and denigrated to the point that it is no longer profitable?
the strange conflation of profit and what is good for society and the "inevitability" of the universe is such a bizarre mindset to me, but not sure what else to expect out of regular posters on the orange site.
"I don't fear the power loom. I fear the profit expectations of the factory owners."
yeah, this is it
I worry about the power loom for its potential, but I don't fear it as-is. My anger is directed at those who abuse its potential for profit, cutting corners and displacing workers.
Also, by extension, the disconnect between what the managers expect of the power loom, what they expect of the worker operating it, and what it can actually do.
AI tools end up underperforming, but they're still used to replace workers, and now fewer people have to put up with higher demands.
Comments
i maybe still kind of do want to get better as software dev (getting close to just quitting) but at times it seems companies aren't interested at all
But because AI is available immediately after it's made we might not yet realize ...
We have no time to study it in a controlled environment. No time to adjust.
And all of this only because the line has to go up.
The disconnect between management and dev is real.
A big part of this is lack of comprehension. Developers are wizards, so just wave your magic wand and move on to the next task.
AI is just different wizardry. A computer that can wave its own wand!
Palm, meet face.
> And now the crux of it: why is it so common that discussion concerning these shifts is rooted in everything except the consumer?
i've signed the paperwork to completely eliminate any reproductive function i may have had. i won't have children
my particular skillset is probably something that will only get more valuable as "AI" captures more mindshare.
and yet, i'm not happy
> This is the true problem with AI. It's with who owns it, and what they will inevitably use it for. Whether it can do cool stuff with code or equal a junior developer is irrelevant. What it can do is less important than what it will be used for.
but the two concepts are intrinsically linked
Really: AI is just somebody else's programmer
> The article presents this as a modern trend, affecting existing junior employees.
>
> I see it as the natural extension of ~zero available training for unskilled workforce - which has dominated ~every industry since at least the 1980s.
Companies only hire people with years of experience in a very specialized field.
And when they can't find someone, they scream 'we lack experts! Why is nobody training experts?'
yeah, this is it
I worry about the power loom for its potential, but I don't fear it as-is. My anger is directed at those who abuse its potential for profit, cutting corners and displacing workers.
AI tools end up underperforming, but they're still used to replace workers, and now fewer people have to put up with higher demands.