[Verdex]

This here.

Overall society feels more turbulent, but this is otherwise all the same song and dance all over again.

The 90s and 00s had this wave of "object oriented programming changes everything". Hey we're doing this thing that's been done successfully 100s of times before, but now it's OO. Writing some code in involving an airplane? Just purchase this omni-airplane object that does everything for airplanes (an actual thing I was told in college).

That's weird OO isn't the be all end all? Code gen, get this Ruby on rails running. Look at me building this website in two seconds. Code gen everywhere.

Huh, that's going to a funny place... TDD. If you aren't TDDing then you're such a bad engineer that you should be locked in prison (real conversation I observed). Oh wait, not TDD, BDD. That fixes it.

Lean, no Agile, no agile like with a small a ... but it was first, no scrum, no xml wait that was last decade, json, and finally SAFe.

Hey, have you seen this chat bot thingy?

Every iteration brings good stuff if you're paying attention. But it also brings a lot of hype and anxiety. Experiment and learn.

The one thing that's remained constant for me is that nearly everyone would rather die than to think carefully about the consequences of their dreams coming true. And as long as that remains true they'll continue to pay for someone else to ride the hype dragon on their behalf.

[mschuster91]

> Overall society feels more turbulent, but this is otherwise all the same song and dance all over again.

The thing is... everything you mentioned had only brought the need to retrain.

This new hotness AI? It's bringing actual layoffs, and not just of the boom bust cycle kind, but permanent, industrial-revolution kind that lasts for decades.

[Verdex]

It is?

Covid overhiring, no more 0% interest rates, that one accounting change, and companies needing a "growth" sounding way to announce layoffs. Maybe that's bringing actual layoffs in the name of AI?

[mschuster91]

> Covid overhiring, no more 0% interest rates, that one accounting change, and companies needing a "growth" sounding way to announce layoffs.

That is only compounding the problem, because with each year, IT still gets a truckload of new bootcamp or "academia" graduates that hit the pool of the unemployed.

[neta1337]

It is clear that layoffs don't happen because of AI

[mschuster91]

Of course they do. Even in industries that didn't overhire during Covid or did other strategic blunders over the last decades, you see jobs getting cut all the time. Big Tech makes the news because everyone is looking there... but the entire economy is a bloodbath.

And even those that don't do layoffs, have you looked at open job postings recently? It's all dried up, and to a large degree because C levels are waiting for the "cambrian explosion" of AI. A lot of the infamous "bullshit job" list is in serious danger of getting eliminated by AI.

[gilbetron]

Having lived through all of that as a professional dev, AI is completely different. There was no career anxiety of any significance for OOP or Code Gen (certainly no code gen) or TDD or Agile - there was annoyance at it by some, sure, but not the existential angst the industry is currently experiencing.

[Verdex]

> AI is completely different.

Okay?

> existential angst

I don't know, maybe there's just too many juniors on social media posing as senors spreading existential angst? I mean if GC was introduced in a time where there was an engagement AI spreading dread far and wide then I suspect we could have had the same thing.

I certainly wish people would be less sad, but I'm not sure that means that things are meaningfully different on a technical level.