[DrewADesign]

I’m in a trade now. I’ll be fine. I’ve got a pension.

And those AI engineers won’t be making bank for very long.

Looking at basic economics— labor supply and demand within this field— is not being a ‘doomer’, it’s just not letting boundless optimism trump rational analysis. It’s not like this is the first profession to get sucked into the air intake of the machine that replaced them.

Switching from software dev to AI engineer is an achievable lateral move, and we will have a lot of surplus software devs. Few of them will have skills that will transfer cleanly enough to keep the mortgage paid. Guess what job they’ll try to move into? Unless this turns out fundamentally different from what the big companies are implying, we’re not going to see demand that isn’t wholly satisfied by the current workforce for decades. With that much expertise desperate for a job, there’s no reasonable path to keeping wages high.

Sure there might be a few tech PhDs + MBAs at the director level that are making bank, but we’re building a system that replaces us, and the industry is not going to magically stop at this arbitrary level of replacement.