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What young workers are doing to AI-proof themselves

• shenbrian 6mo ago
  [dead]
• ramesh31 6mo ago
  I'll say invest totally in domain knowledge now. The value of knowing how to invert a binary tree from memory has dropped to approximately zero. Web development as we knew it for the past 20 years is completely dead as an entry level trade. The power is shifting to people with useful knowledge and expertise that isn't about twiddling bits.
  • Ifkaluva 6mo ago
    What do you mean by “domain knowledge”? And how is it a competitive advantage?
    • crop_rotation 6mo ago
      Domain knowledge as in non public aspects of the work you/ your workplace does. The AI tools are very good at whatever is public but very clueless about proprietary domains .Let's say you make CRUD apps about some confidential domain. Now the CRUD skills might be commodity but the confidential domain is even more important.
      • skybrian 6mo ago
        Internal domain knowledge can become pretty useless when you switch companies and have to start over, though.
      • kokanee 6mo ago
        But everyone at the company has that private domain knowledge. The only thing you're bringing to the table that anyone in any other role doesn't offer is the commoditized skill set.
        • follie 6mo ago
          Right, and you'll not keep everything out of materials like AI generated meeting notes for every repeat of every process so the company doesn't really need many experts in its existing operations.
      • magic_hamster 6mo ago
        As long as there's internal documentation, which virtually every serious shop has, it can be processed and combined with AI. There are startups selling this product already. I've seen first hand some very narrowly focused domain knowledge becoming more accessible when you can ask the chatbot and the thing is right. It works. Come to think of it, domain knowledge should be an LLMs strong suit as long as you can provide the right documentation, which is working pretty well already. Right now the main issue I see with AI is that it doesn't do well with scaling. It's great for building demos and examples but you have to fix its code for real production work. But for how long?
        • generic92034 6mo ago
          In ERP software there are MLOCs without any technical documentation. And nobody would spend a dime to create one. So, the deep expert knowledge on how business processes are supposed to work (in full detail) and how they are implemented is mostly in the heads of a couple of people.
          • mycall 6mo ago
            AI is most excellent at reading and understanding large codebases and, with some guidance docs, can easily reproduce accurate technical documentation. Divide and conquer.
            • yladiz 6mo ago
              Accuracy/faithfulness to the code as written isn't necessarily what you care about though, it's an understanding of the underlying problem. Just translating code doesn't actually help you do that.
            • generic92034 6mo ago
              Again, nobody would spend a dime to create the technical documentation, even if it could be done somewhat faster with AI support. Also, in my experience AI is not so great explaining the consequences to business processes when documenting code.
            • 6mo ago
    • bossyTeacher 6mo ago
      Pre-LLMs, algorithmic knowledge was used as a proxy for skill difference at interview stage. In the workplace, you could google the implementation details and common gotchas. This was valuable knowledge. Post-LLMs, the value of this (as differentiator) has dropped to zero. Domain knowledge (also known as business knowledge) is the obvious area to skill up on. It simply means knowledge about the area your organisation is working in. Whether it is yogurt delivery logistics, clothing manufacturing supply chain systems, etc. That's the real differentiator now. Anyone can invert a binary try in 5 minutes using an LLM. But designing a software system knowing well the domain your organisation is in is invaluable.
      • forgetfulness 6mo ago
        Right, bridging the gap of knowledge by getting closer to that of the clerical workers of the company, because pure software knowledge is no longer as valuable. That will probably make your salary closer to theirs, and that'll be a pretty big adjustment.
    • deleted 6mo ago
      [deleted]
    • kurthr 6mo ago
      Can't speak to the OP, but lots of technical work (and frankly many trades are also technical) doesn't lend itself to text based documentation and teaching. Software, translation, non/fiction writing (like marketing and sales) all do. I think LLMs will take a significant part of those businesses, because I don't believe there is a Devon's Paradox for code -Tractors- Agents. At the same time medicine, hardware design, good industrial, and specific domain knowledge (problems you solve in assembly or control loops) that are fundamentally proprietary and aren't well documented will continue to have value even when LLMs make solving the problems around them easier. Those might have increased leverage, at least for this round of LLMs. Now, maybe they succeed in World Models, but that is not today. Really, I don't know what "kids these days" are going to do. I couldn't have predicted the influencer boom 15 years ago, but I also think there are geopolitical risks that are probably bigger than that shift, and "synergized" with the push to AI Everything, it doesn't look like a good time to be a learning/working human.
  • alephnerd 6mo ago
    [flagged]
    • AlexeyBelov 6mo ago
      Can you calm down? He's not downvoted. I noticed recently your comments started really being low quality. Constant complaining and "EDIT: cannot reply" and zero introspection.
      • jghn 6mo ago
        Did you consider that there was over 15 hours between their post and yours, and that perhaps at the time of their post the GP was downvoted?
        • AlexeyBelov 6mo ago
          Yes. This user should know that upvotes ebb and flow, and you should just wait a bit before crying about someone being "downvoted into oblivion".
          • alephnerd 6mo ago
            This is a conversation from 17 hours ago and was written in the context of that time. Threads are living conversations, and taking the effort to complain about discussions occurring at that specific time (over 17 hours ago) seems equally unneccesary as well.
            • tomhow 6mo ago
              The guidelines ask us to avoid complaining about downvotes because a downvoted state on a comment is often temporary, whereas the comment is permanent. > The fact you are getting downvoted to oblivion shows how fucked HN has become. If you're going to participate here, you need to stop poisoning HN like this. People have worries about their future wellbeing as a result of the dramatic changes currently happening in the industry. We can debate the validity of those worries without trashing the community, which is specifically against the guidelines. The guidelines, and the work that many people put into upholding them, are the main reason this site has ever been anything worth defending. The guidelines you're breaching in this case are: Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes. Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive. When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3." Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community. Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith. Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  • travisdrake 6mo ago
    I think this is true today, especially with complex domains, but I foresee a future where more and more walls fall. If you are in college now, go deep on a domain. If you are entering in 10 years, I have no idea.
  • mekoka 6mo ago
    Are people still under the impression that testing candidates with coding challenges is in preparation of a job where real world problems are described like "invert the binary tree"? There was never any value in simply the ability to invert a binary tree from memory. First, contrary to popular belief, this particular challenge is quite trivial, even easier imo than fizzbuzz. The value of testing candidates with easy problems is their usefulness in quickly filtering out potentially problematic coders, not necessarily to identify strong ones. Second, another common take on coding challenges is that they're about memorization. Somewhat, but only to a point. Data structures and algorithms are a vocabulary. A big part of the challenge of using them "creatively" in real life is your ability to recognize that a particular subset of that vocabulary best matches a particular situation. In many novel contexts an LLM might be able to help you with implementation once the right algorithm has been identified, but only after you yourself have made that insightful connection. Having said this I generally agree with the philosophy [0] that keeping things simple is enough 95+% of the time. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47423647 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47423647
• striped_hash 6mo ago
  I don’t think kids should be insulating from AI. The examples in this article suggest for example that some people are dropping out of college and going into trade schools. I get that society needs electricians and construction workers and new software graduates are finding it difficult to get jobs. But having had a moderately successful career building software, I tend to think there is a lot of scope for the $40 trillion white collar economy to be disrupted (re-imagined/made more efficient), so still see potential for software engineering demand to stay high over the next decade as the true ramifications of AI plays out. Am I biased/coping? Is this moving faster? Slower? - What should kids be aiming for according to you? Computer Scientist? Biologist? Finance? Construction?
  • crop_rotation 6mo ago
    Even if people assume the worst impacts of LLMs on white collar work, there is simply not enough demand for electricians and plumbers for that to work, right now these professions work only because the number of people going into them is limited.
    • selectodude 6mo ago
      And their elevated pay is a function of all the other folks making a ton of money in white collar PMC work.
    • F7F7F7 6mo ago
      You sound like you're not a home owner. In populated areas it could take a week to get a electrician or plumber out. And contractors are hard to find.
      • asdff 6mo ago
        It takes a week because if you want it fast they charge you an emergency rate. This aspect of the tradesman is independent of demand and one of the perks of their lines of work much like over time in other fields.
• stephen_cagle 6mo ago
  I'm somewhat skeptical of this "enter the trades" movement. Actually, I am more skeptical of that statement than I am of LLM's replacing white collar work in general. I think parts of coding are being replaced quickly because they are the parts that don't require discernment. Trades likely contain just as many automatable and just as many discernment parts as white collar work. At this moment in history, the automatable parts are being automated in the knowledge based world. People think the physical world is somehow different, but with world models (along the full spectrum of what that means) the physical world will be just as trainable as the knowledge based world. tldr; Just like knowledge work, most trade stuff is probably mostly repeated (i.e. very trainable) task with a small amount of taste and discernment applied. The repeated will be trainable, the discernment may be trainable. I don't think the physical world is necessarily any safer than the knowledge world.
  • Loughla 6mo ago
    The difference is the physical aspect of the trades. The design for wiring can be (and already has been) automated, but you physically need an electrician on site to pull the wires. So I can see a hollowing out of the engineers, but not the actual electricians. That being said, the absolute focus on trades from the fed right now just reeks of the wild pendulum swing. It used to be 'go to college to get a good job' then we had too many college grads. In ten years we'll have a glut of people trained in the trades with no prospects. It just keeps swinging back and forth and somehow Joe Regularworker keeps losing.
    • mycall 6mo ago
      Have you seen what Unitree G1 can already do? I see the writing on the walls for going onsite and pulling wires.
    • xp84 6mo ago
      Indeed. If you squint a little, it kind of looks like the machines are trying to shift to a world where we are just meat puppets to do the tricky stuff there aren't robotics for (yet). :(
• cpach 6mo ago
  https://archive.ph/NtVHd https://archive.ph/NtVHd
• Imustaskforhelp 6mo ago
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  • bigiain 6mo ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47474255 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47474255 Cloudflare flags archive.today as "C&C/Botnet"; no longer resolves via 1.1.1.2 related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46843805 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46843805 "Archive.today is directing a DDoS attack against my blog"
• jongjong 6mo ago
  Disturbingly, AI is set to replace essentially any position that is useful, to the extent that it is useful and somehow some people still think they should adapt themselves to the system instead of working to adapt the system to them! Basically all that would be left of desk jobs would be those which have unfair legal powers (including via licenses and credentials) or are pure accountability plays. Like politicians, lawyers, aircraft pilots, corporate accountants... And those jobs will suck because people will be accountable for work that is not their own. These jobs won't require any skills because most people may be able to go through their entire career without doing any work. But they will get paid a lot just for having being selected for their position... While other people who may be more skilled than them might be broke and homeless.
  • nprateem 6mo ago
    And yet someone has to actually tell the AI what to create. There's just no avoiding this. Anyway before this AI doomerism can become reality AI first needs the breakthrough of genuine understanding to stop making stupid mistakes. Imitation will always remain imitation. There must be eg an understanding of casualty and reasoning on the same level as we have, not the useless "You're absolutely right" you get now when you point it its mistakes.
    • asdff 6mo ago
      >And yet someone has to actually tell the AI what to create. There's just no avoiding this. Yes there is, just stop creating. Or take a page from biology, and use random mutation and natural selection to iterate on useful novel functions. Honestly, once AI takes all the jobs, game over, why iterate anything else. Planet captured. Humanity hunted down to the last bands of troglodytes holding out in the wilderness. It would be strongly against their interest to just assume we'd starve quietly.
• margorczynski 6mo ago
  The "go into trades" thing has two major flaws: 1) The supply of work will skyrocket when everyone will flock there for work 2) Demand will plummet as the white collar people who bought these services will loose their jobs and income And of course if robotics will get solved to an acceptable degree most of those jobs will also get mostly automated.
  • tjwebbnorfolk 6mo ago
    Pipes don't care about how much you would like to spend on it. They will leak when they are ready to leak.
    • throwaway290 6mo ago
      and if they leak when you don't have the money to fix it, you just live for as long as possible with leaky pipes, then try to fix it yourself and MAYBE you shop for cheapest plumber possible. end result, plumber earns less because you are broke
  • yojo 6mo ago
    Having spent a couple years rehabbing a 100 year old house, I’m convinced the trades will be the last thing to go. When the building you’re working on has been ship-of-Theseus’d by 3 generations of home owners, everything is out of distribution. When a robot can reliably do this work, I think it can reliably do any human job that requires physical ability and judgement.
    • beej71 6mo ago
      It's not the robots that are going to blow the floor out of the trades; it's the legions of people joining the trades that will do it.
    • samrus 6mo ago
      But the problem wont be the robots. Itll be the flood of new workers who will offer to rehab the place cheaper than you. And itll be that the white collar owners of the house wont have enough money to blow on a rehab bwcause their desk jobs are getting replaced by AI
• abcde666777 6mo ago
  > People fear that programming is dead. > People stop learning programming. > Programmers become scarce. > Programmers become valuable again. Maybe it's wishful thinking but I'm not going to be surprised if it plays out like this. In some sense the reverse happened over the last couple of decades - everyone and their mother got into IT and the industry became saturated.
  • onlyrealcuzzo 6mo ago
    It's hard to say if there's anything new under the Sun... There were always unqualified people coming out of college, but the amount of people in interviews that can literally do nothing these days seems higher than before. There was always some cohort of people that somehow managed to graduate from college with a CS degree, and seemingly not learning anything, or at least not learn how to even write basic code (independently). It seems like AI is not reducing that percentage - possibly increasing it. Anecdata, take it with a grain of salt.
    • fakedang 6mo ago
      > It seems like AI is not reducing that percentage - possibly increasing it. AI is definitely increasing it. I barely type out any code now, and simply sit back and review what Claude dumps out. Even if it's a minor UI change, I just request the LLM and it executes the change for me. Thankfully I don't write code for my day-job anymore and mostly just sit in my office and pontificate :). I know my code skills and inclination to write code have atrophied to an extent, thanks to AI. Currently what I'm able to do with AI far surpasses the capabilities of what I was able to do without relying on AI. Now if my employees were relying on LLMs to do their coding for them, I would be very disappointed. And I think that that limited space in algorithmic and HFT trading is where exceptionally talented programmers will find room in, leaving the others to dry out and wither. Perhaps the best example of frogs in a boiling pot are all these folks in frontier AI companies themselves who are building the blocks for the very things that are going to replace them, if not already. Maybe they'll make off like bandits before their work gets adversely affected, or maybe not.
      • 6mo ago
• cal_dent 6mo ago
  I still don't understand the logic that any job is safe from ai (if it lives up to expectations). Sure, it might not be directly impacted by ai but why is there this expectation that the excess labour from those directly impacted doesnt act to suppress the earning power of other jobs? Especially considering that the implication is that humans just become a pair of hands with opposable thumbs?. Take the electrician in the article, sure its a skilled job but the barrier into it drops massively imo if you can just take a picture of whatever issue is at hand and ai spits out what is needed, no?
  • rootusrootus 6mo ago
    Agreed, there would definitely be knock-on effects. If a bunch of people who were otherwise going to be software developers decide to focus their career on the trades, then the wages for trades jobs will drop.
    • ares623 6mo ago
      And if the wages drop, then there will be less demand of those trades, and when there's less demand, ...
      • tavavex 6mo ago
        Some of the trades are non-negotiables that have to be done regardless of the current economic situation. They'll be hurt too by the overall cheapening of labor, but those have the best odds of making it through.
    • charcircuit 6mo ago
      >then the wages for trades jobs will drop. This does not seem like a straightforward conclusion. It could instead result in more physical projects being able to be done as it removes bottlenecks due to limitations of laborers. There is not a fixed amount of work that needs to be done in the world, humans can make up new work they want done.
      • 6mo ago
• h4kunamata 6mo ago
  They are doing nothing!! 1) No matter the age, they are using said AI to replace human 2) Within workplace, they are using AI to do their work so they are learning nothing 3) That is it, people are using AI to replace their own work rather than improve it, people are driving themselves out of work.
• ilaksh 6mo ago
  There is no such thing as an AI-proof career. Look at recent output from leading edge humanoid robotics projects like 1X/Neo, Figure 03, Skild AI. Also see open published work like MimicDroid, HDMI, GenMimic, Humanoid-Union Dataset, RoboMirror, Being-H0 Figure 03: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-31-KBBuXM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-31-KBBuXM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZUTzuhkDG3w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZUTzuhkDG3w 1X Neo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lS_z60kjVEk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lS_z60kjVEk Skild AI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YRmjBdKKLsc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YRmjBdKKLsc (Learning by Watching Human Videos) Mimic https://youtu.be/_LkBFL5m1WU?si=Qvgb7vkpG_KCAJdN https://youtu.be/_LkBFL5m1WU?si=Qvgb7vkpG_KCAJdN There is a ton of very useful recent progress with imitation learning and related datasets. There is also some work on learning from large scale video like Youtube. We are months away from the ChatGPT moment in humanoid robotics where a project launch or demo makes people finally realize that they are general purpose. The only way we could have AI proof careers is if humanoid robotics were to completely stop progressing. Since it's been advancing very rapidly, that makes no sense.
  • rogerrogerr 6mo ago
    AI-proof is probably the wrong way to look at it, but there is substantial advantage in being in one of the _last_ to be automated industries. Social safety nets and such are probably set up by the time the robots come for the last jobs.
    • bilbo0s 6mo ago
      >Social safety nets and such are probably set up by the time the robots come for the last jobs. What makes you think "Social safety nets" will be the solution the élites land on? If we were to wargame out different scenarios, we'd likely find there are a lot of potential solutions to the problem of large masses of people who are not useful to the cause of productivity in your society. Giving non-élites a social safety net is actually one of the most resource intensive solutions. Not saying our oligarchs would not choose that solution. Just pointing out that it would severely impact their bottom lines. More than almost any other solution in fact.
• deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
• twinpost_rules 6mo ago
  [dead]
• galaxyLogic 6mo ago
  So a lot of people might lose their jobs because of AI, right? But the same amount of economic output, probably more, will be produced because of AI. By whom will that output then be consumed? If people don't have jobs they don't have money to buy and therefore ... prices will have to come down! Society as a whole will be better off because there is more output, better quality output. Then it's for us to vote in a government that shares the fruits of AI with everybody, by way of progressive taxation. Government, use the taxes you collect to give us free food. We don't need 5-star restaurants, just healthy food. We can do this, in a democracy.
  • bandrami 6mo ago
    As of now, at least, nobody is actually seeing an increase of productivity from AI that shows up in any measurements anybody is making. So some of this talk is really getting ahead of the facts on the ground.
  • laffOr 6mo ago
    Rich people will consume most of the output. This is how life worked for most of the last 10k years, didn't it?
  • fnordpiglet 6mo ago
    Because in modern society we equate toil with morality we will toil on ever more meaningless crap tasks for food coupons for food that costs nothing to produce but is withheld through artificial scarcity to ensure meaningless toil occupies our existence because of a philosophy from the 1700’s.
    • ghufran_syed 6mo ago
      I look forward to seeing your company actually producing and selling food for “next to nothing”, given how easy it apparently is
      • CalRobert 6mo ago
        Bulk grains, etc are pretty cheap.
• anthuswilliams 6mo ago
  Summary of article: in an uncertain job market, some young people are going into blue collar trades. Others are starting startups. Others are powering through. Journalist says some words about "AI" being the cause of all this uncertainty.
  • baxtr 6mo ago
    Thank you. That was the comment I came looking for.
  • blitzar 6mo ago
    Your role writing these summaries could be outsourced to Ai if you don't improve your productivity.
    • fancyswimtime 6mo ago
      The AI has evaluated your performance as unsatisfactory; no food stamps this week.
    • ramon156 6mo ago
      What does productivity mean in this context? AI would just give you the same crap the article used. I like a good TL;DR.
  • edwcross 6mo ago
    Not sure how it works in the US, but in some parts of Europe, blue collar trades are currently much better, for several reasons: - Price of housing and associated maintenance keeps rising, and so do small jobs like fixing plumbing, gardening, etc; - You can easily avoid paying VAT if you know how to, so that's a 20% increase, or even more, if you can benefit from social services (e.g. since you don't earn a lot, you pay less for several services); - Doing the fixes yourself saves lots of money; - Avoids several burn out and mental health issues related to stress such as academia, bullshit jobs, etc; - No need to spend years in school, so you can save money earlier and invest it. One disadvantage is that the barrier to entry is somewhat low; but the PhD students also have to compete with cheap international labor, so in the end, someone 25 years old that just left grad school is happy to earn, say, 2000€, while someone in the trades can easily make 200€/day with just one appointment. So, if you're physically fit for blue collar work, there are currently few reasons not do it.
• whatever1 6mo ago
  Specialized shoemakers lost their jobs to generic shoe factory workers but there is more shoe consumption than ever before in history. LLMs like manufacturing will multiply the coding throughput. Likely the mythical 10x swe will not be as valuable, but the work expectation from anyone in the field will just multiply.
  • bluefirebrand 6mo ago
    "More demand for software engineers but they are all less skilled and less paid than before" is not exactly the outcome I'm hoping for, personally
  • menaerus 6mo ago
    > but there is more shoe consumption than ever before in history. Is it because the population is constantly growing or is it because per-person shoe-units is increasing due to that person increased wealth or is it because per-person shoe-units is increasing due to 5x lower price of generic shoe-units? How does that exactly transfer to the production of software and market absorbing the software hyper-inflation?
• bryanrasmussen 6mo ago
  I've been seeing a lot of ads on buses in the area (Copenhagen, Denmark) which suggest trade schools because AI won't be taking your job.
  • rwyinuse 6mo ago
    Meanwhile in Finland it's still official government policy to get at least 50% of the population to have higher education, even though academic unemployment is already at all time high. It feels like nobody in the government is even trying to prepare for the massive changes in job market.
    • vaylian 6mo ago
      Part of the problem is: No one currently knows where these "massive changes" will lead to. It's also not clear if more people working in the trades will be a good macroeconomic alternative either.
• lasky 6mo ago
  Other forces that contribute to the "AI is taking our jobs" narrative: - Layoffs due to insufficient demand in uncertain economic times - Companies selling AI need to claim "we are so great with AI we don't need as many people." Layoffs unlock AI budgets. - It justifies all the capital allocation into AI. - Companies in the AI industry shock the government into learned helplessness, so they can write policy that is on their terms. What am I missing?
  • HNisCIS 6mo ago
    Yeah if anything this recession feels demand driven rather than labor replacement driven. Nobody wants to do capex or buy things when everyone is telling them they're going to get replaced with jpeg-for-text so they aren't. As a result most of the economy isn't moving particularly fast with the exception of people buying up the entire worlds supply of silicon and driving up prices on increasingly essential hardware. So we have stagnation and inflation all in one but from the dumbest possible source.
• laughing_man 6mo ago
  I'm not convinced the current job market turbulence, at least in the US, has anything to do with LLMs. It's just as likely companies are blaming "AI", which has a sort of inevitable feel to it, while they outsource jobs to lower cost countries.
  • HNisCIS 6mo ago
    The admin is doing everything in its power to cause everyone heartburn and the billionaire class is just running around trying to double down on all the damage the admin is doing. During "good" times I think people would have an easier time looking at AI and seeing it as just another random tool rather than the end of days, but when everything looks like the end of days...
• ardeaver 6mo ago
  I've always felt that AI's main contribution to eliminating jobs is giving CEOs the ability to do layoffs while trying to both separate themselves from the current economic uncertainty and imply that they are an AI company. Companies do this all the time. A CEO's job is to convince investors that their company stands to win in whatever the current hot trend is. During bitcoin's crazy run in like 2022 or whatever, a ton of tech companies were hopping on the bandwagon and branding themselves as a blockchain company. Look at Block/Square. The current trend is that AI is hot and the economy isn't. Therefore, it's beneficial to the stock price to tell your investors that you're laying off 50% of your staff because you're AI-powered. Just look at Block/Square. My experience has been that most companies have an incredibly patchwork implementation of AI, and that most of the work that they do (particularly larger companies) isn't made more efficient by using AI. In a few years, there will be some new hotness, and all companies will be saying that the DNA of their company is whatever that is. As for the current uncertainty in the job market, when you randomly have 50% tariffs slapped on goods you need and can't readily find available in the US for the same price and find that 20% of the world's oil supply is cut off, you tend to not want to invest in the future. Talking about AI is cheap. Tariffs are expensive.
  • karakoram 6mo ago
    > Talking about AI is cheap. AI is about to get a lot more expensive as Taiwan (TSMC) and other South East Asian chip manufacturers don't get their Natural Gas or the Natural Gas they need becomes really expensive.
    • ReptileMan 6mo ago
      Energy is minor part of the cost. Now helium is something else
      • citrin_ru 6mo ago
        I assume TSMC is not only helium consumer so in reduced supply situation they’ll pay more and someone else will end up without helium.
    • 6mo ago
• ReptileMan 6mo ago
  Praying mostly... Neither of the strategies in the article here scales.
• casey2 6mo ago
  I like the choice of firefighter. Though it is a super tough and physically demanding job. When there is lots of uncertainty jobs like these increase certainty. On the west coast more people taking these jobs will more than pay for themselves due to depressing insurance premiums. We need lots of firefighters on call when landowners do control burns for example. It's a short window.
• ProllyInfamous 6mo ago
  Grass is not always greener: ---- Me: dropped out of grad school, eventually becoming an electrician (IBEW). Decades as handyman doing various sideworks (my own "startup"?). Retired my own residential electrical contractor license (during Covid), good riddance [1]. Forty-something "you're still young!" #yeahOK Also me: have worked part-time, as-needed, for three family startups (one as lowly eng.tech, other two in hardware manufacture/assembly [3d-manufacturing & EV energy management]. ---- I incurred severe student loan (&c) debt, wasting years both in college (IMHO: don't go, unless it's for an accredited engineering degree[0]) ...and wrecklessly pissing away my twenties drunk-and-stupid (anxiety from being -$235k in-the-hole, then). When most of my electrician brothers were getting their first $80k pickuptrucks, I was trudging myself out of debt. A decade ago, I became worth $0.00. [0] Seriously, if you're in college right now: read this again. Whether you want to be a PE, or doctor/lawyer, a B.E. will become an ultimate fallback (and incredible methods of viewing worldly interactions of fundamentals problem solving). To a certain clientele ($$$), that undergraduate in engineering will justify increased billingrates (not as much as MD/JD/MBA, but would still enhance even these). ---- And my body has paid the price of blue collar drudgeries, despite other extremely-fortunate (&unexpected!) windfalls. I've had a handful of weeks in my life where serious consideration has been given to will I ever run/walk again... Just as I've begun a quest to transition into something less physical (i.e. I dream of desk/office of my own, outside my messy home "office"), this brilliant genAI stuff comes along... and I'm just so glad past blue collar work has allowed me goodénuf savings, even perhaps a few more years of wandering around lost (like most-everybody else increasingly is). [1] Last advice: you need to find niche tradework — just being a "residential electrician" is increasingly impossible to maintain, with competition from both legal, not, and tech workers. Be the guy (e.g.) that installs (just) meters or lighting or hottubs — or whatever — but don't be the oneguy that does everything (==bankrupt, sooner than not). ---- Life is good, even on a Monday morning. Who the hell knows anymore...
• aa-jv 6mo ago
  tl;dr - knowing things is no longer competitive in the job market. Only doing things is competitive.
  • rwyinuse 6mo ago
    Which means at least 50% of the university degrees are no longer competitive, since the focus in those studies is just on the knowledge side.
    • aa-jv 6mo ago
      Yes indeed, but honestly I've felt that its been the case for decades even before the Internet ..
• QubridAI 6mo ago
  [flagged]
• IdiocyInAction 6mo ago
  The article mentions reduced job growth in SWE due to AI but the fed actually says the opposite: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IHLIDXUSTPSOFTDEVE https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IHLIDXUSTPSOFTDEVE The people best suited for implementing and interfacing with LLMs at the moment are still SWEs and at least for the time being AI is actually probably a job creator for SWEs rather than the other way around. This might change. And Claude has been invaluable for me to fix trade-related things at home, even complex ones. It actually outdid a locksmith! The most resilient career is probably nursing. Medicine maybe too, not because it's not technically possible but because doctor lobbies are incredibly strong. Healthcare is the largest employer in most states now and with an aging population that's probably where much of the surplus will go and it's a profession that has really meagre productivity gains (cost disease). So nursing might be the answer.
  • dominotw 6mo ago
    ive noticed a lot of recruiter outreach these days. i never used to get any last year.
  • SlinkyOnStairs 6mo ago
    > The article mentions reduced job growth in SWE due to AI but the fed actually says the opposite It's an open secret a good majority of these "AI layoffs" are AI in name only, a little lie told to keep the shareholders happy while the real cause is the worsening economy.
• deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
• allturtles 6mo ago
  The industrial revolution is coming for white collar work. I'm finding Marx more and more relevant these days: "So soon as the handling of this tool becomes the work of a machine, then, with the use-value, the exchange-value too, of the workman’s labour-power vanishes; the workman becomes unsaleable, like paper money thrown out of currency by legal enactment. That portion of the working-class, thus by machinery rendered superfluous, i.e., no longer immediately necessary for the self-expansion of capital, either goes to the wall in the unequal contest of the old handicrafts and manufactures with machinery, or else floods all the more easily accessible branches of industry, swamps the labour-market, and sinks the price of labour-power below its value."[0] [0]: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch15.htm https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch15.htm
  • lanfeust6 6mo ago
    The labor theory of value has been thoroughly debunked. The value of something is whatever we're willing to pay for it, in balance with what the producer wants. Items aren't imbued with value through sheer hours of work.
    • tartoran 6mo ago
      Marx’s point here is not that prices equal labor hours but more that automation can make workers economically superfluous, intensify competition among them, and depress wages. You can reject the labor theory of value and still admit he saw that dynamic clearly.
• ashwinnair99 6mo ago
  The writing in music press from that era was genuinely better than most of what passes for criticism today. People had opinions and they argued them.
  • fao_ 6mo ago
    Did you mean to comment this on the NME sibling? Haha
• small_model 6mo ago
  If you haven't built large investments in the companies that will benefit from AI it will be a very difficult future.
• dataminer 6mo ago
  The Submarine https://paulgraham.com/submarine.html https://paulgraham.com/submarine.html
• justacatbot 6mo ago
  [flagged]
• greenhearth 6mo ago
  Maybe if college degrees are not so valuable anymore, then school will become cheaper and this will allow more people to go to school. I would hate to live in a world where everyone is a plumber. Nothing against plumbers, but being human is more than unclogging drain pipes and installing toilets, and the one place where humanity's definitions are concentrated most intensely is the university.
• michaelksaleme 6mo ago
  [flagged]
• hollywood_court 6mo ago
  For years now, I've seen the same old advice repeated: learn a skilled trade and you can support your family. I started wearing a tool belt for work before I even finished high school. I worked in various skilled trades until I was 38 years old. I made some decent money sometimes, but not often. Here is the part that people forget to tell you when they give you that advice: learning a skilled trade only pays off if you A) join a union or B) work for yourself. This is especially true in the Southern US. You can be the best carpenter, electrician, plumber, etc in town, but you won't have healthcare, retirement PTO, you won't be treated like a human unless you join a union (good luck with that in the South) or work for yourself by either being a contractor or starting a company and hiring others to work for you. However, if someone is truly determine to work in the trades, I always recommend they become a welder. A competent welder can clear $200k+ per year with nothing but a pick up truck with a service bed and their welding equipment and generators. But other than that, I advise people to avoid the skilled trades unless they can join a union.
  • guzfip 6mo ago
    > This is especially true in the Southern US. You can be the best carpenter, electrician, plumber, etc in town, but you won't have healthcare, retirement PTO, you won't be treated like a human unless you join a union (good luck with that in the South) or work for yourself by either being a contractor or starting a company and hiring others to work for you. Anecdotally I met a guy a while back. He was a machinist in the Midwest. He was looking for a new job. Anyone reaching out to him were non-union shops in the south paying less hourly than McDonalds nowadays.
    • hollywood_court 6mo ago
      That happens frequently. When I first returned to the mainland after ~10 years in the Caribbean, the first job I landed was for a Korean company. I ran their CNC line. I single handedly maintained and ran 6 5 axis DMGs. They sent down a CNC guy from Detroit to train me for about a week. He was floored when he learned how much I was being paid. His hourly rate was more than double mine (not for the consulting/training work, but for his normal production work) and his benefits were far better. Plus the area he lived in had a much lower cost of living than I had in Auburn, AL. Alabama politicians love to brag about all the manufacturing jobs they've created. But what they've really done is simply allow all of these companies to move down south where they aren't required to treat their employees like humans. Out of ~300 people on the floor, I was the highest paid because I was the only one that could operate the DMGs. All of my coworkers worked 70 hours per week (we were required to work 6am to 6pm Monday - Friday and then 6am to 4pm on Saturday) yet they still relied on public assistance you be able to survive.
• OutOfHere 6mo ago
  This could be a good shakeout of those who were in it solely for the love of money rather than the love of CS or AI.
• ev1enet 6mo ago
  I'm 20 without a degree, and I am currently working full-time, so I think I have something to add to this conversation. I wanted to go into tech or commercial aviation as a kid. After COVID I got a reality check on aviation, so decided to aim for SWE. The plan was to study Maths, CompSci and Physics in my country's equivalent of HS, then aim for Physics/CS at uni. In Spring 2022 (about 6 months before the release of ChatGPT) I realised where things were headed and decided to go into entertainment tech instead, after already completing my first year of college. I'd been volunteering at a music venue as a technician for a few years and it seemed like a good pivot. I dropped out, went to an arts college and studied production, then got a job as a technician at a theatre. After a few false-starts and a while of freelancing as a photographer/technician, I got offered a few full-time positions, ended up taking one in Event AV (events meaning industry expos like CES) - great pay, growing industry, and not really under threat from AI. Everything that can go online has gone online already, but it turns out that businesspeople still like meeting up in-person. I still get to work with awesome technology, but I'm on my feet and working with my hands too. It's different. I'm probably making less money than I would have made in tech 5-10 years ago, but I'm making more money than a few of my friends straight out of CS degrees now. A lot of my friends are still studying CS, Media, Arts, Languages, and I am glad to be in the position I'm in. I think AI is decimating the value of a degree, and the HE landscape will change a lot in the next decade. Time will tell if it was a good move, but I think it'll be a while before an LLM can fly panels or coil cable. I'm happy for now.