Ask HN: Not sure about the future of tech
It’s always seemed like a little bit of a race to cash out as quickly as possible by promising the world, selling, then letting everyone else deal with the fallout but now it seems like everyone is seeing the door about to close in front of them so they need to extract every ounce of productivity from those below them to get out while they still can.
I don’t want to be treated like a component in someone’s vehicle that you just swap out for a new one after you’ve burned it out which is what my entire job feels like more than ever.
I’m not excited about “AI” and I think while useful to some extent it will do more harm than good as our monkey brains scramble to make sense of what it is and fight each other for control over it. Does anyone else feel like this? What are the alternatives for someone who still likes programming but doesn’t want to be doing it professionally anymore if it means I’m going to have to be harnessed to the front of the dog sled while my boss screams “mush!”
We didn't really care when it was factory workers, or payroll clerks, or switchboard operators. But now that it's going after programmers, now we care.
The good news is that there are a bunch of other jobs still left. And for a long time yet there are still lots of IT jobs that are safe.
To be fair, low-skill programming jobs have been replaced for years. Lots of them outsourced offshore. (Does it matter if your job goes to AI or a Bengali?). But today's systems are huge, and complex, and require a lot more than what AI can do (impressive as that is.)
Frankly, if you work at a place, and you look around the room, and all you see are cogs in the machine, and you dont want to be a cog, then you're already in the wrong place.
Regardless of the industry, the workers are a fungible resource to business.
If you don't want to be an easily replaceable cog in the machine, then you need to develop domain expertise which allows you to solve high value problems. You then might become a gold-plated cog in the machine.