I can safely say that the way things are heading, AI is not going to take my job as a software engineer. Nobody is building AI. Everyone is building effectively explicitly coded agents that all still generally can't reason.
The only thing that AI has improved is the time from knowing what you want to getting it into working code. Which is significant. But for any time improvements that this gives, it also means that things can be written wrong faster, which means more time spent later on undoing it.
I’m going to keep getting a job the way I have for the past decade - my ability to use my now 30+ years of experience between development, 10+ years of leading architecture projects and being able to deal with the business and disambiguate and solve XYProblems. AI has changed nothing about the value o bring to the company. Now I just do a lot of the implementation drudgery myself faster or that I would have delegated to other people.
I was 50 the next year when I had a job within three weeks after spending a year at the shitty company I chose (I wanted to stay in consulting and didn’t want to work at $bigCompany again). I just responded to an internal recruiter who reached out to me a couple of days prior (dumb luck).
I’m much more worried about the state of the industry and current employment market which affects people of any age.
My other secret weapon is that I found out from a former manager/now friend that most non Black people have no idea how old a Black guy is once he shaves his head and face. Like Bill Burr said I think it’s the lotion…
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/OCC_XS-fQa0
And my resume only hoed back 10 years
Jevons' paradox tells us that AI will create more demand for software than ever. I see no threat to my career here.
AI will also create essentially infinite supply with, if you believe the predictions, little if any need for human contributions.
Including hardware? For that matter, developing the software on the hardware it had would not be a weekend job.
If you mean "develop it using current tools on current hardware", then yes, it might be doable in a weekend, maybe even a day.
But I think I agree with your overall point. Better tools let us level up. We get to do harder things. We've got cancer to cure, and Alzheimer's, and space to conquer. We're not going to get there by writing assembly for Z80s, so to speak. We need to move up.
1. Move out of the expensive city into a lower-cost of living country.
2. Buy cheap property with cash, reduce my expenses to a minimum.
3. Take a long time off to figure out what the world will look like in a year.
4. Learn a trade skill, hand-code for fun. Considering becoming an electrician, with a hobby for retrocomputing and repairing electronics.
I am at step 2 currently, and my current job contract ends in the summer. I can’t wait, man. Enjoy your AI-assisted coding; after 20 years I am out.
To be fair, to hedge my bets, I am working on a side-project/game. Clankers are a long way from creating art, and I need this outlet after decades of soulless engineering.
How do you plan to continue the processes of gaining sustenance and economic power as needed? Do you own the land or capital needed for your sustenance or do you need to trade for them? If you need to trade, what assets or capabilities do you have to trade?
How well are these guarded against theft, cyberattack, romance scams against you, quasi-legal expropriation and changes in the legal system that eliminate your status of having property rights?
We'd better hope that robotic replacements for human hands aren't soon in coming.
I am knee deep in a challange to build 25 projects in 25 weeks. I'm working on project #20 today.
I hope to build an audience through Patreon, sponsorships, and monetizing some of the projects. Maybe a micro SaaS or two? Maybe a newsletter or two?
No offence, but I'm not sure a pivot into micro SaaS software development or newsletter writing is much of a plan for AI job destruction.
To what extent has the net increase in jobs been because there have just been more people who needed to work in order for society to not collapse?
Population growth is slowing (expected to peak in 2080-ish). To some, AI feels like a different sort of "productivity enhancer" than we've seen in this past.
I don't think the person's premise is flawed. It's more that you just disagree with it.
So the fact that in the past new technologies have created new jobs is not a guarantee that AI will create new jobs.
On top of that have a look what happened say during the industrial revolution in Britain. You'd have a village with 2000 workers producing clothes or materials to make clothes. A rich guy opens a factory in that village that employees 200 people and produces more than the whole village before that. 90% are unemployed, the 10% that work in factory have far worse working conditions. Studying graves from that time shows the height of people went down during the industrial revolution - as the conditions in the factories were far worse than what they had before. Hence the luddite movement - but as the reach people owned the mass media, the luddites were portrayed as crazy. Eventually, many years later, new better jobs did appear.
Does the same thing happen if AI is a failure and all AI related stocks and investments crash?
But who knows if your job will be gone. There could be more jobs in order to fix the tech debt and AI slop. I'm using Claude daily to write all my code, I wouldn't bet my life on the fact I'm more productive individually, and I don't think my team/company is. But we'll see.
I suspect people will still be needed to create software for some time but increasingly it won't be software engineers who have spent decades learning syntax. It will be a relatively poorly paid role compared to today. If you're happy to be paid a fraction of what you're paid today, perhaps you can transition into a vibe coder role.
There will probably be some more senior people maintaining projects, but the number of people like this you'd realistically need at any org is probably in the single digits. The main hiring criteria will be that they're very personable, not the typical anti-social engineer type. The autistic 10x engineer's value is basically zero in this new AI economy.
Longer term (~10-20 years) we're all dead anyway so your priority probably shouldn't be to optimise for income or prestige.
What would that look like? Well, I've seen the statement that you can become a licensed phlebotomist (one who draws blood) for $500. That gives you an option that is not "write code until I get laid off". (Of course, in a true AI takeover, we're going to have blood-drawing robots eventually, so it's not a permanent fix.)
More generally, even if software stays around forever, you may not be doing the same kind of software for your whole career. (I have done both internet security software and embedded systems.) You almost certainly won't be at the same company for your whole career. Keep learning new things, and keep your eyes open for new opportunities. Right now is more scary than it often is, but we have always needed to keep our eyes open for what we'll do next.
If ai takes enough jobs from people.
we will all get together, start a revolution and overthrow our respective governments.
desperate people will do desperate things to survive
There are always more of us than them.
I truly hope that it happens in my lifetime. I really am sick of this shitty world.
Its not what I was promised 69 years ago when I was born.
