I’m going to be a baker! just putting it off as long as possible because I don’t want to wake up at 2am.
Every other baker gets up at 2am. Be the only 2pm baker out there for fresh evening breads!
Not a bad idea, would be nice with fresh sandwiches instead of shitty burgers or sausages when going home from some event at night.
Yes, I’m sick of morning people getting all the good stuff. I want to come home from work and sit in a cafe/bakery and eat nice things.
We need a night owls society.
OK this really got me.
> the end of software engineering
> looks inside
> overhyped slop generator
To be fair having been in software for awhile, plenty of people were slinging slop before AI as well.
The difference is back then, we could block the PR, now management demands velocity at all costs.
It will catch up eventually.
IT guy here, not a programmer per se, but I have given up and am re-training into fraud detection. I want to take down some of the fuckers that ruined the industry before I die
I was in IT 20+ years.
I quit 4 years ago and opened an arcade. My only regret is I should have bailed out 10 years ago.
In before the AI shills show up, nice
I’m staying here, but my son who wanted to become a programmer has now decided to study for maritime officer. I don’t know when AI will take over ships.
getting licensed as an electrician has been on my mind recently. i’m so tired of the whole industry
I quit programming and became a school bus driver. I’m 100X happier even if I am making like 1/6 of what I used to make. What I’ll do after I’m replaced with AI I don’t know, but at least it will happen long after I would have been replaced as a programmer by AI. I’m more concerned about what the parents will do when their kids are run over by the fucking AI-driven school buses.
Computer, I need software please!
Why won’t it work? I asked for software!
You asked wrong! You forgot “no mistakes”
Did you try turning it off and on and then ask for software again?
Brb, restarting all data centers.
Hey maybe we need to keep them off until the coin battery dies so the bios resets?
Engineering not. Computer science also not.
So what are you doing that is not those 2 that is dying?
you’ll either be needed to extract dead systems after this all falls apart, or to build new systems for people that don’t want slop service in dead space.
Oops, requirements were written by ai too
For real.
I recently lost half a morning having to go through a slop requirements document and making a list of questions like “are you sure you want this? why do you want this? what does this even mean?”, to which the answers were all “I don’t know, ChatGPT wrote it”.
Like why did you even bother sending me this, you could’ve just sent me the prompt instead and saved me 2 hours of my life
AI;DR (AI; Didn’t Read)
My new favorite abbreviation
Call me a Karen, but that gets an angry email to their boss.
I wish. Sadly it was from the boss.
I’ve gotten fired for going over heads before and will do it again!
you could’ve just sent me the prompt instead
AI discovers compression algorithms.
People do stupid things when they don’t know any better but want to look like they know what they are doing. Enter LLMs now people think they look even smarter in an area they don’t know things.
Shouldn’t the book illusion be of some pipes? Or the guide topic be butchery?
Search for O’Reilly books, the style is spot on with their covers.
True. I never paid close attention. I probably saw a snake on a python book and assumed the front cover image was relevant to the contents.
I’m thinking cake decorator. Or florist. Maybe grave digger.
florist
This sounds nice. Working with something green and alive. Arborist too.
Granny worked as a florist, not her own shop though. She had incredible strong hands.
As a pupil I did a work experience day in the shop. It was really chilly (Germany usually has not Air Con), we consistently had to clean the floor in the back room to not slip on the leaves, it was tiny in there and we were four people. I got to wash a fake flower decor and rearrange it for a doctors office. That was nice.
She had incredible strong hands.
Maybe you should be a writer. Well placed, evocative, Hemminginway-esque sentence. You’re in the wrong neighborhood.
I never really understood the appeal of arranging severed plant genitals. Sure, it looks nice. But boobs also look nice, and I don’t cut them off and put them in a pretty bowl on my living room table.
You make a good point, but maybe no one had thought of severed boobs as decoration yet. AI will think of it for us, soon. What are the real dollar value of peasant boobs anyway-- I hear people arent generally worth very much if you do the math. And the rich + AI are doing the math.
We have diggers.
I think manual labor that needs creativity (e.g. pattiserie or florist) has the best post-AI future.I used to think I could give hand jobs in alleyways if things got bad, but I hear AI is being trained to give those. Because of course it is.
Snatch anvil thief.
Wood carver! Oh they have mostly automated that with CNC machines…
There are also coffee art robots that can print something on the milk foam.
But it still requires the creativity.
And for sentimental stuff (e.g. pattiserie and florist) I would like to believe that humans value hand made stuff more than machine produced.For a special occasion perhaps, but on a regular basis is it valued enough to pay someone a living wage? Most of this stuff I wouldn’t pay for, might make it myself though.
I don’t think you can really have a creative focused economy when landlords and banks are taking so much from us.
We’ve been predicting the demise of the coding career since the dawn of the coding career, but even if it’s not dying, being proficient in coding and becoming proficient in one other trade is a good way to find opportunities to make software that makes that trade easier. The bar for quality in trade-specific software is shockingly low and money can be made in those niches.
Yep, the real money you make when being able to combine 2 different skills, because the amount of people having studied exactly this combination will always be a very small group. Coding and a learned trade is one of the rarer combinations - most coders (in my experience) acquire management or business skills to climb the corporate ladder.
Or more computing skills. In grad school there were a number of Masters students from the local region in our cs program. The employers would pay for it for them.
This is basically me.
I was in restaurant management in the late '90s, and knew it well, but loved computers and had been teaching myself programming for a while.
My last restaurant job was for a small franchisee, and I moved into IT and support for them after a couple of years (while also doing catering, covering vacations for managers, doing graphics on vehicles and banners, pretty much whatever needed to be done).
In 2001 I went to work for the company that sold us our POS Systems. Originally I did installation, training, and support, but started coding pretty quickly, and after a few years became lead.
I now own all of that software / IP, and my own company.
That rules. I hope you use your powers for good.
I’ve spent my entire career as a professor advocating that students should pick a minor, certificate, or double major if they’re capable.
My rationale is remarkably similar I think. Literally ever field, hobby, and area of study involve some form of technology. Many of those disciplines lack the sophistication of the tooling and that we have in more programming related fields, which makes people with an additional specialized skill set extremely valuable.
Hell, look around at fintech, bioinformatics, computational arts, etc. We have emerging Fields all the time that are essentially computer science combined with another field.
I’m a few weeks from graduating in software engineering, I think I’m going back to my old plan of finding a strong rope and a sturdy tree.
~(But to be straight: There are a lot of better options for a career, please try them first)~Don’t let it get you down. You need to remember that this whole AI hype / AI will replace everyone is coming from people who invested a lot of money into it and really need it to succeed now.
Many also have an oversimplified view of what the discipline of software engineering includes in addition to little understanding how different types of AI work.
Besides, skillsets you learned in SE can easily applied to other ‘non-virtual’ fields. Many people suck at providing clear and specific instructions or requirements; businesses also have many real world processes that need to be optimized; identifying problems in a system (you first need to see there is an issue, if you want to ask an AI to fix it for you in the next step); being able to break down and tackle large, complex topics; … I could probably come up with many more points.
In my career as a programmer mostly writing custom software for smaller companies, 90% of the job was understanding the clients’ businesses and working out what they needed the software to do. Designing, writing and supporting the software was relatively trivial. My bosses never understood my lack of enthusiasm when they would hire newly-graduated Computer Science students and stick them on my team. Never mind that they knew almost nothing about the actual process of producing complete working software – they were completely useless for the main task of gathering requirements.
Yea those things you really only learn being in the industry for a couple of years, however fewer entry level hires now, because of AI and overall degradation of communication skills, means a derth of competent employees in the industry later. Tragedy of the commons…
Nothing wrong with being an arborist.
I work in software but I have a side job working for an arborist, and you might have been joking but it’s legit a great industry to have a backup plan in.
Most arborists near me have more work than they can keep up with. You see, the thing about trees is, you trim them, wait a year, and the bastards grow back! It’s like a giant scam and the trees are all in on it!
It’s a pretty fun job too, if you’re relatively fit. You get to climb trees, throw logs into giant scary chippers, and you get first dibs on all the best gun and sword shaped sticks.
I was half joking. 😅 Of all the tradesfolk I’ve hired to do work on my house, my arborist is the only one who’s job I could see myself actually liking. He gets paid to be a nerd about something (trees, tree health, tree care), the work itself seems a lot more pleasant than dealing with plumbing or electrical repairs, and at least my guy is a one man band who just shows up and does his thing, which is certainly appealing after a career of various EMs, PMs, TPMs, and other people who need to be appeased when doing work. Also the fun tools.
I know this is a haha community, but software isn’t dead. Most corps are going to insist you use AI. Especially as a junior dev. Look for places that say things like “engineers make the decisions”. You need to find a place where you can get experience learning how software is built, even if the bot does the typing. People have been getting laid off and that sucks but software devs aren’t going anywhere. Ai writes bad code. They need us to make sure bad code doesn’t go to production.
I am a junior dev and I am not earning that great, but at least my company is not forcing me to use AI, which from some reports I have read is quite the exception. They do mention it a lot (“just let claude generate this or that driver”) but they actually understand when I say I dislike using it because I need to learn this stuff and build experience, which simply does not happen when I offload my brain, like some do.
They need us to make sure bad code doesn’t go to production.
what worries me: that’s not something a junior can do.
I see it with the local lawyers office, they have stopped hiring junior lawyers and are replacing the junior’s tasks by AI. Fine for now, but I wonder what happens when the others retire, who’s going to replace them if no juniors are trained?
I got a degree in development a few years ago and couldn’t find a job. There was nothing out there for a junior dev. I was persistent for about a year then, I just gave up.
Now I work in Commercial Real Estate but I can see this industry is about to be decimated by AI also. They are slowly starting to figure it out and build AI tools that do their job.
Bet on it, there will be (or are already) big revolutions in engineering/programming and art (and music), especially these 2 areas.
Instrinsic/individualistic expression (also motive) is going to become a new form of rocketfuel in that vacuum being created by clankers. Human potential and what really defines existence scales faster than boring exponential growth of calculation power.
It’s interesting and scary; if the human spirit is worth anything creatively, we’re about to find out how much.
Bold of you to think they wouldn’t replace AI with more AI and lie to their own face in the mirror that their company collapsing is good just because, AI.
Yeah, I suggest following the age old wisdom of rats on this. Abandon the sinking ship before it sinks with you in it.
Ah so you’re a black man in a predominately racist white county with a strong police force?
For real though. If life sucks, try something else. Teach English abroad, move to another state or country. Not much to lose if you’re struggling.
You could learn farsi and arabic and join the military. They are always hiring lately and they have lowered their standards a lot I hear. Medical, maximum enlistment age, drug history, criminal background, fitness, intellgence, all lowered. You can start your first enlistment at 42 now. As long as you get in before your 43rd birthday you’re gold.
(I’m just kidding, dont join the military)
Gross!
I’m no an american, and i would rather die than support the people who put pinochet in power and are currently gutting south america once again
I sent this to my plumber to congratulate him on his career choice.
Turns out now he’s an electrician and his company got hired to help build an AI data center. 💀Sixty electricians from his company alone on one job. Drones surveilling the repetitive work overhead.
So much for escaping the impacts of AI.
I know an electrician who moved beyond doing it day to day, he was telling me he knows of data center job sites that are paying regular electrician wages + $250/day. I think the data center boom might be bigger and crazier than we even realize somehow.
lol, you’re joking
No.
managers have been into “remote work” long before workers have.
