While one class of worker is watching the skills that once made them indispensable become easier to automate, the premium is shifting toward those who can keep pace with AI, where the skills in demand can seem to change almost by the day.
Is this why Lemmy, which I thought would be filled with tech guys and early adopters, hates AI so much?
A lot of software engineers are in denial because the idea of your job being automated is deeply upsetting. You see it in comments like “AI code is slop” or “No one wants to maintain that garbage.” And, while there is some merit to AI not being perfect, the truth is it makes writing code so cheap and easy that correcting the code output is trivial. If it’s wrong, just make the AI agent fix it by being more specific about what you want. This “being specific” is where software engineers are adding the most value these days. For this reason, it is true that not all software jobs are going away tomorrow, but few people are writing code in their day to day roles now. Eventually, it seems likely that software will be written entirely by AI. The amount of human oversight required is the varying factor. Now there is more oversight. Over time, there will be less and less. It’s probably a 5-10 year timeframe before most software jobs as we know them have gone away. Some of those jobs may be replaced with more roles defining requirements and performing high level QA testing, but how much is not known now.
I actually love AI. And though I would never celebrate people losing their jobs, the tech people who are suddenly worried about their jobs are no more special than the rest of us who always had to worry about job loss. It’s life, it happens. Sure it sucks, but software engineers have had it really good for a really long time.
Now they can find out what it’s like for the rest of us non-tech people that ALWAYS had to adapt and pivot during layoffs.
I get tired of the “it’s slop!” comments on Lemmy, because I fucking know that most of Lemmys are using AI on their jobs anyway. The hypocrisy on here, usually for the dopamine hit of an up arrow, is annoying af.
