I'm terribly worried about my career as well. I built a large part of my identity around coding in my teens, and working in the industry when I got to my twenties were some of the happiest years of my life.
I was laid off from tech around the time that COVID hit, so this predates AI somewhat. I briefly became a contractor, but none of the contracts I was able to secure were renewed. I haven't worked in tech since 2023, right around the time I was introduced to AI.
They say that as you become more experienced in a domain, it should become easier and more lucrative... advancing in a career like tech should be a joy. With about seven years of experience, I can say that it hasn't been great. And aside from acquiring titles like junior and senior, there really isn't much advancement left after the 5-10 year mark.
I currently work in a grocery store and am giving that a shot, going to give it a good few years to see if I can advance through the different departments while I see how AI in the software industry pans out. The pay isn't nearly as good, and it's not something I'm passionate about; it's really quite mindless work. The positives are that I don't have to worry about outsourcing, or working from home, or massively disruptive technology like AI.
Throughout the latter half of my career, it almost felt as if every force was at play in killing what I was finally able to enjoy and also make a living from.
I wish I had something more positive to say, but as far as I'm concerned, I'm unfortunately stuck waiting this one out on the sidelines.
> Throughout the latter half of my career, it almost felt as if every force was at play in killing what I was finally able to enjoy and also make a living from.
that’s because they were. They needed to kill the career because we were educated, well off, fulfilled, and becoming organized. Turns out not all of us were either easily manipulated marks or unscrupulous money goblins and that was a problem for them.
Remember when Google employees stood up for what is right against the company? That’s when the powers that be in the industry decided to go all in on AI. They need to destroy the career and industry because we had to much power and intelligence.
I hear you, brother. The prospect of being just a babysitter for the clanker strikes me as hell on earth. I'll try to do it - better to be miserable but employed, after all. But if that happens I will mourn the death of a job which I truly loved for the rest of my life.
It isn't ideal, but I am starting to write code (with AI tab completions) while waiting for LLMs. The tab completions are sometimes overeager and I wish I had more control over them, but at least I am not staring at "Thinking" all day. Having said that sometimes you have to monitor AI because, e.g., AGY CLI, often goes off the rails completely, including writing code outside of the "sandbox."
It's not just waiting on them, you're going to be reviewing an endless flood of their agentic slop, cajoling or bullying them into sticking with a problem or looking harder for information, all in between glancing at AI summaries of your colleagues' AI generated Slack messages and approving the AI generated auto-replies.
It's like having a whole team of developers to help me!! Except they're all brain damaged and completely incapable of learning from experience and never improve on their brain damaged ways. On the plus side, I can let my frustration out by calling them fucking morons without getting HR mad at me
> It's like having a whole team of developers to help me!! Except they're all brain damaged and completely incapable of learning from experience and never improve on their brain damaged ways
Wait until the agents start assigning you real world tasks to earn a paycheck. They can easily become the boss when they hold the strings. I feel this side of the discussion isn't happening.
The job has changed from a craft to operating an unreliable machine.
Instead of satisfaction of solving challenging problems with your own skill and creativity, you babysit a text extruder and slog through mistakes in its generated output.
Arguably this may make software cheaper to make and accessible to non-programmers, but for people who liked their job it's like being demoted from a restaurant chef to a microwave button pusher.
This also perfectly describes the career change from software engineer to engineering manager.
Instead of solving things yourself, you need to learn how to describe them in a way others can solve them. Otherwise you will just be fighting the instinct to just do it yourself.
At least as a software manager you get the satisfaction of helping another human being develop in their own career. I doubt making Claude Code less prone to certain kinds of fuckups is quite as rewarding.
> The job has changed from a craft to operating an unreliable machine.
Many tech/software people were completely unsympathetic if not downright arrogant when their products displaced people in other professions who felt the same way.
The lesson here is that ultimately, change comes for everyone.
Meh. Since when "typing" implies "solving challenging problems with your own skill and creativity". The "solving" and the "creativity" happen in your head while "typing" is a manual labor. I can contemplate multiple problems at the same time but I can only type one thing at a time. Writing code is like 10% of my programming job. I take an LLM to do the typing for me any day. I still solve challenging problems. Because my secret skill isn't typing, you see. Yeah, call it "dismissive".
You must truly have no love for your craft if you see "manually" writing code as _just_ typing. That's like calling writing a novel just dragging ink over paper.
Yeah, sure. We both know it’s not black and white. Like all of you write rocket ship software. You’re all funny. Heads too far up your asses. What fucking craft are you talking about “implement this html and css exactly like described in the ticket”, or “write this deployment pipeline for that client for the 50th time”, or “implement authentication for the 15th time this year”. Really fucking novel stuff. Craft my ass.
Not going to bother responding to most of that as it does not warrant a response, but I would point out that the word craft does not imply novelty or uniqueness.
In many cases the really key idea that transforms the overall system design comes from working closely on the specific implementation details. Maybe you don't redesign the system this time, but you saw how you might do it, and you get ideas about how to do it the next time. The craft involves a back-and-forth between different levels of abstraction, and cutting that link does feel like we're sacrificing something.
Yeah, you do it every day for money, right? And someone is paying you for that? Dude, people designed ships, aircrafts, the shuttle with a ruler and a pencil, today people use CAD and CFD because it’s cheaper and better but people still know how to use the ruler and pencil! At least those who want to know, know. But not everything has to be designed with the ruler and the pencil. Be the guy who presses buttons, and knows how to use the ruler and the pencil!
It’s different, because in our field we’re often learning or doing new things, as opposed to merely rehashing the exact same thing we’ve done before.
I find it very difficult to learn a new thing by reading it, vs by doing it.
And indeed, most mathematicians, who do get paid to do math, work a lot with pencil and paper. If math is secondary to your job, you likely will not, but if it’s your primary job, you likely spend a lot of time working ideas out in the more primitive fashion.
Nah, they want to think beyond the superficial prompting level. A lot of real programmers feel exactly the same.
It is hard to notice this sometimes on HN because this site is rife with the very idea-man-VC-pilled-finance-bro-pseudo-hackers that over the past 15-20 years have turned the tech industry from one of optimism for a brighter future to one that most normal people now distrust and hate.
Exactly. I work on line of business stuff, not curing world hunger or reinventing the train. One of the few sources of joy in the job is the brain teaser/puzzle of understanding clever bits of code and writing it too. Now you can just shit out massive volumes of basic code that does the job, which is all you really need for a standard corporate software product, and it can do it multiple times faster than I can so I have no choice but to use it. Well at least my shares are looking good.
I'm terribly worried about my career as well. I built a large part of my identity around coding in my teens, and working in the industry when I got to my twenties were some of the happiest years of my life.
I was laid off from tech around the time that COVID hit, so this predates AI somewhat. I briefly became a contractor, but none of the contracts I was able to secure were renewed. I haven't worked in tech since 2023, right around the time I was introduced to AI.
They say that as you become more experienced in a domain, it should become easier and more lucrative... advancing in a career like tech should be a joy. With about seven years of experience, I can say that it hasn't been great. And aside from acquiring titles like junior and senior, there really isn't much advancement left after the 5-10 year mark.
I currently work in a grocery store and am giving that a shot, going to give it a good few years to see if I can advance through the different departments while I see how AI in the software industry pans out. The pay isn't nearly as good, and it's not something I'm passionate about; it's really quite mindless work. The positives are that I don't have to worry about outsourcing, or working from home, or massively disruptive technology like AI.
Throughout the latter half of my career, it almost felt as if every force was at play in killing what I was finally able to enjoy and also make a living from.
I wish I had something more positive to say, but as far as I'm concerned, I'm unfortunately stuck waiting this one out on the sidelines.
Here's wishing you the best for the future.