Even software people have bills to pay and mouths to feed. I think people like the article author are either single or have no dependents, and it's a big reason I cannot take many of these posts seriously. Much like the story of Peter Pan, the authors of these posts are college students who never grew up and had to be responsible.
The issue isn't losing my job. Many of us could deal with that by simply finding another similar job in the same (coding) industry. The issue is losing the entire industry.
That thing you spent years becoming good at? Getting paid lots of money for? Oh, we killed it. Start over and pick something else. You probably won't be paid well, if you can even find anything, because you're starting from ground zero and competing with all the other people flooding the job market. Oh, and yes, it'll require massive life adjustment on your part. Good luck!
> You probably won't be paid well, if you can even find anything, because you're starting from ground zero and competing with all the other people flooding the job market.
You won’t be paid well because rent is due next week, but the new job requires you to fund your training.
So you find something else that doesn’t pay well, but gets you something coming in. But in order to pay the rent you need to work 60 hours at this job. Of course, no way they’ll schedule you for 60 hours, so you’ll get an additional lower paying job or two.
Suddenly you don’t have the time nor the money to retrain for a higher paying job. All the money from your two jobs is going to ever ballooning housing and energy costs.
Eventually you surrender, understand your place as a peasant, and sell yourself into debt slavery in hopes in a decade you can start from scratch again.
I don't really understand what it is with CompSci graduates and their bizarre aversion to handwriting, note taking, and any kind of skill that's derived from arts disciplines or "average joe" office systems.
Shorthand notation exists and it's more than possible to develop your own. I'd trust a OBS recording going in the background over some AI slop that has some chance to micro-hallucinate what it's hearing. It also sounds like a skill issue that the author can't control the pace of his own meetings to where being able to take good notes is seemingly impossible.
The author's AI use cases seem like a band-aid to cover bigger problems. Let's not even get into the part of the blog post where the author has started delegating internal thinking and reflection to conversations with a LLM.
Saying it again, I think we're in need of a moratorium on "AI Has Changed The World Forever" posts. All of them read the same and offer nothing past "I asked a LLM to make a midsize feature, I haven't looked at the code but it compiles on my machine and that should terrify you" - buddy, we've had people pushing code that compiles on their machine and occasionally goes quickly read or unread in PRs, that terrifies me now.
I think what plagues a lot of pure STEM types in this tumultuous period of AI (or "AI") is that they've spent a majority of their lives mulling over some problem until they've worked out every possible imperfection, and once they've achieved something they consider close to that level of perfection, that's when they say they're done.
While this may be an unfair generalization, and apologies to those who don't feel this way, but I believe STEM types like the OP are used to problem solving that's linear in the sense that the problem only exists in its field as something to be solved, and once they figure it out, they're done. The OP even described his mentality as that of a "Thinker" where he received a problem during his schooling, mulled over it for a long time, and eventually came to the answer. That's it, next problem to crack. Their whole lives revolve around this process and most have never considered anything outside it.
Even now, despite my own healthy skepticism of and distaste for AI, I am forced to respect that AI can do some things very fast. People like the OP, used to chiseling away at a problem for days, weeks, months, etc., now have that throughput time slashed. They're used to the notion of thinking long and hard about a very specific problem and finally having some output; now, code modules that are "good enough" can be cooked up in a few minutes, and if the module works the problem is solved and they need to find the next problem.
I think this is more common than most people want to admit, going back to grumblings of "gluing libraries together" being unsatisfying. The only suggestion I have for the OP is to expand what you think about. There are other comments in this thread supporting it but I think a sea change that AI is starting to bring for software folks is that we get to put more time towards enhancing module design, user experience, resolving tech debt, and so on. People being the ones writing code is still very important.
I think there's more to talk about where I do share the OP's yearning and fears (i.e., people who weren't voracious readers or English/literary majors being oneshot by the devil that is AI summaries, AI-assisted reading, etc.) but that's another story for another time.
> I think what plagues a lot of pure STEM types in this tumultuous period of AI (or "AI") is that they've spent a majority of their lives mulling over some problem until they've worked out every possible imperfection, and once they've achieved something they consider close to that level of perfection, that's when they say they're done.
These people are miserable to work with if you need things done quickly and can tolerate even slight imperfection.
That operating regime is, incidentally, 95% of the work we actually get paid to do.
There's a great Twitter/X post floating around that I saw a few days ago that I've come to agree with:
"IMO it should be considered quite rude in most contexts to post or send someone a wall of 100% AI-generated text. “Here, read this thing I didn’t care enough about to express myself." - https://x.com/littmath/status/2010759165061579086?s=20
Rather than ignore it, I'd deem it rude that something as low-effort as an AI generated blog post was shared here. I may not be able to set rules, but I wish we could flag posts like these. Some faux-gineer told their agent of choice to write up another fearmongering post about software developers and AI; I feel like my time was stolen from me.
> If you don’t have a domain or hosting yet, now’s the time to buckle down and do that. Unfortunately, I don’t have good advice for you here. Just know that it’s going to be stupid and tedious and bad and unfun. That’s just the way this is.
I cannot remember if it was here or elsewhere but there was an amazing blogpost making fun of beginner and intermediate "coding" tutorials (coding as a catch-all for programming, markdown, etc.) where the author assumes the reader has deep familiarity with the subject at hand and all of its jargon. This has the exact same vibe.
1) This is a people problem, not a site problem. Technology professionals do not have a good track record of being socialized and generally well-adjusted, and for every singular tech professional who is, there are a dozen horrid maladjusted ones who are unfortunately successful and find themselves with power they aren't mature enough to have.
2) StackOverflow is still a treasure trove of information and a place anyone can go and ask questions about even niche and deprecated technology. Just recently asked a question about InnoSetup on StackOverflow and got a great response from possibly the expert fellow on InnoSetup.
Having an "invested community" requires an inordinate amount of effort from a tiny handful of founders for uncertain reward.
> Technology professionals do not have a good track record of being socialized and generally well-adjusted
Eh, this a pretty stigmatising boring old stereotype that's only vaguely based in reality at best. I've worked in a bunch of different industries over the decades, and there are unsocial and unadjusted people everywhere.
Places like this (hackernews) and Reddit are where concepts like 996 become normalized and picked up by everyone else, including unrelated industries. I think this is something that needs to be nipped in the bud ASAP and not given any time to fester because "startup founders need to work 996 to secure revenue" or whatever.
No sarcasm, no humor; 996 posts should be met with nothing but flat out ridicule and disgust. One's life isn't solely about work and this kind of behavior just makes everyone else's life worse in the long term because there's a chance for short term gain.
The most important question, in my opinion, is will this class-action suit actually result in any meaningful change or will Bezos/Amazon scrape up some cash to make this "little lawsuit problem" go away?
