Ask HN: Are you switching to an AI related role?
With AI/AGI supposedly someday supplanting a subset of tech roles, are there folks who are retooling their careers to ride the wave rather than weather the storm? Are you taking courses, making internal/external job changes, adding AI sounding terms to your resumes? Or, maybe just abandoning simple coding work in favor of roles that are less replaceable via LLM autofill?
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I do think that, regardless of your job, AI assistance can be useful and worth getting used to, that's the biggest takeaway from the past 12 months.
My contributions are multi-faceted:
1. Despite having a technical background in software engineering and lacking expertise in machine learning/deep learning, I am actively building my skills in DL. This enables me to understand the DL features (training, inference loops, segmenation, object detection and fine-tuning etc) required by the domain and how they should be developed in the backend and frontend.
2. On occasions, I also delve directly into DL code to solve some minor bugs to enhance my understanding which allows me to make more informed decisions.
The DL skill set proves beneficial during customer product onboarding sessions because the customers are technical and ask lots of deep learning questions. It also helps in the effective communication with both frontend and backend teams, helping them visualize the problem and determine the necessary workflows to support DL processes.
So, yes. I am upskilling myself in DL to stay relevant in the AI product management.
In IT the competition is high and the job security is low. So I either close my company and go work for a big dog and earn less than i would driving trucks, keep operating as a one man pty ltd and push to expand or bugger it all off and go building/laboring.
Tbh bailing from IT as an industry is becoming more appealing. The industry sucks.
Vendor lock in has gotten so bad folks don't implement good infrastructure rollout because of it.
Also my email is [email protected] if any journalists want to interview me, assuming journalists still exist in current year
Speaking of, I might have been more enthusiastic if I was a young man. In my 30s, I can hardly give a shit about spending my remaining years, before dedicating myself to a family, sitting in front of a screen trying to be relevant and learn some hackneyed Python scripts that implement already-outdated AI models. Fuck that shit. That's a young man's game. I already did that with JavaScript development, which now looks incredibly stable in contrast to AI.
Most products integrating AI will be obsolete soon anyway. The idea that AI works better as an adjunct to existing applications seems reasonable in the short term, but LLMs will get more advanced to the point where doing things in a traditional way won't make sense. The people in charge of businesses right now are simply too set in their ways and are unwilling to actually understand this technology. They believe they will see riches by being a GPT-whisperer, and maybe they will in the short term.