That's what I'd say in 2026. 2-3 years from now, not sure. But right now, AI can't run a vending machine without selling too many tungsten cubes.

Congrats for making an argument completely disassociated from reality.

> I would be so friggen happy I don't have to do this BS job anymore.

Alright the freezer's empty with no food and you have no money. Probably a family to manage with kids and demands or say have hobbies which costs money.

I am an extremely frugal person myself but even I will admit that there is just no way that one can purely just exist without a FIRE & even within FIRE some aspects of FIRE want you to have a job but not only just any job but the job you like.

Judging from GP's comment. I feel like the person they are talking about might not have saved enough money so they were a bit worried about it but even if they did, losing a job still impacts mentally and they (didn't?) want to go through such transition.

I guess the point is to really save money & be frugal at times. It's usually something which benefits me but I am single right now but I can imagine that with a family & a wife & different dynamics, frugality can be hard to live by when you have to convince your wife to say down-size or your children to & it can impact one's freedom probably.

Personally wishing to have a lot of savings to go through when single before getting married.

Unironically this & some sense of getting respect within society & getting the prospectus of some good dating connection in such sense is the reason why (many) people look for any jobs.

I will admit that if someone offers me such a job, the offer to take will be hard to resist (even though I would consider I have a stronger than average desire for a job that I truly like/enjoy fwiw)

And how many managers are effective vs. only information funnels?

1) understand what success means for their area 2) assemble a team and remove roadblocks for them to achieve 1.

I have to assume some of it serves a social, rather than practical purpose, like having people re-assure them that projects are going well. If that's the case, automation may just not make sense.

I thought that information is only available through organic conversations by the watercooler and cross polination of teams.

Does it mean you no longer will have to come to office as long as you talk to AI over Slack?

Or are they going to slap laptop on a Roomba and still mandate office attendance?

I don't see how eliminating your co-workers is any different. Software ate the world and now AI will eat the "software professionals".

When this is over, just like the rust belts there will be code belts where once highly valued software developers will be living in decaying neighborhoods and the politicians will be promising to create software jobs by banning AI.

could be, but the universe is odd in so many different ways

it's hard to be sure

At the end of the day, there'll still be a need for highly skilled technical experts, whatever that job looks like.

Well, this is kind of obvious right. Highly skilled people of next generation will do fine. The point is millions of highly skilled successful people of today could soon be below average category, jobless and can be called clueless, stuck in old ways who didn't simply see what is happening in the world.

And I am not blaming anyone. Despite seeing changes coming even I am not able to do much either. Just hilariously trying to do "cloud technology" courses which folks did decades back, made money and by now even forgot about it.

As another commenter said, we'll likely see a big change on the junior end, which will affect the more experienced hire pool as time goes on.

I would bet for the opposite. In a huge rush to optimization and job elimination, early career people suffer the most. However it also makes it impossible to switch careers, start from scratch, and etc.

Why? There was a time when there was a need for highly skilled seamstresses. And we never developed the technology to do their jobs as well as they could. But people just learned to deal with mass produced clothes that didn’t fit perfectly because it was so much cheaper.

But someone who is competent and can do quality alterations, mending, customize patterns etc, is going to make decent money. But I'm pretty sure where ever you live there are seamstress working and making good money.

I'm not even really sure where automation would have impacted being a seamstress. Sewing machines have been around since the 1700's and if anything the demand for textiles has increased more than the speed of production.

Maybe you are thinking more of knitting, which is highly automated and used to be a big job, now it's basically just a hobby.

Blacksmiths just evolved to modern day welders, iron workers, boilermakers etc. Still pays well.

> there’ll still be a need for highly skilled technical experts

Two different things.

Yes, many, many software developers will become obsolete in certain industries. It’s already happening. Putting on blinders doesn’t make it go away.

Yes, highly skilled technical experts will absolutely still be needed.

Turns out AI reduces the barrier juuuuuuuust enough for competent managers and clerks to automate their own processes.

Thank god most managers aren't competent, I might just make it to retirement.

you mean AI will eat everyone, because if software professionals will be automated - all other white collar jobs will be too via software.

And then all resources will be poured in hardware and blue collar jobs will be automated too, at least those that have more value.

Software engineering is a hubris-complete problem. Somehow, being able to do so much seems to make us all assume that everyone else is capable of so little. But just because we can write 1000 programs to do 1000 different things, and because AI can write 1000 programs to do 1000 different things, it doesn't mean that we can write the million other programs that do a million other things. That would be like assuming that because someone is a writer and has written 1 book, that they are fully capable of writing both War & Peace and an exhaustive manual on tractor repair.

Financial analysis is not easier than programming. You don't feed in numbers, turn a crank, and get out correct answers. Some people do only that, and yeah, AI can probably replace them.

"Computing" as a field only made sense when computers were new. We're going to have to go back to actually accomplishing things, not depending on the fact that computers are involved and making them do anything is hard so anyone who can make them do things is automatically valuable. (Which sucks for me, because I'm pretty good at making computers do things but not so good at much of anything else with economic value.) "What do you do?" "I use computers to do X." "Why didn't you just say you do X, then?" is already kind of a thing; now it's going to move on to "I use AI to do X."

Then again: the AI-dependent generation is losing the ability to think, as a result of leaning on AI to do it for them. So while my generation stuck the previous generation with maintaining COBOL programs, the next generation will stick mine with thinking. I can deal with that. I like thinking.

</end-of-weird-rant>

There are plenty of "human in the loop" jobs still left. I certainly don't want furniture designed by AI, because there is no possible way for an AI to understand my particular fleshly requirements (AI simply doesn't have the wetware required to understand human tactile needs). But the bureaucratic jobs will mostly be automated away, and good riddance. They were killing the human spirit.

Thats a really odd take. Software is merely a way of ingesting data and producing information. And information often has intrinsic value. This can scale from simple things like minor annoyances of forgetting your umbrella, to avoiding deaths/millions of dollars in losses due to ships sinking in storms.

Now the long term value of software does approach zero, because it can usually be duplicated quite easily.

I've been thinking a lot around a kind of smart-people paradox: very intellectual arguments all basically plotting a line toward some inevitable conclusion like super intelligence or consciousness. Everything is a raw compute problem.

While at the same time all scientific progress gives us more and more evidence that reality is non-computable, non linear.

What scientific problems are non-computable?

ANNs are designed to handle non-linearities BTW, thats the entire point of activation functions and multi layer networks

we can't do that for mostly any complex physical system, as would be for something like living organisms.

These two words do not mean the same thing.

Non-linear functions do not mean you cannot determine the output for a given input.

All non-linear means is that the condition f(x+y) = f(x) + f(y) and f(kx) = kf(x) do not hold for arbitrary x,y,k

For example f(x) = x^2 is a non-linear function. Can you determine what f(x) for arbitrary x?

Perhaps you meant what used to be called "chaotic systems", those which were highly sensitive to initial conditions. Yes, they are non-linear but they are completely deterministic. A classic example would be the n-body problem in physics under most conditions.

And I'm not sure what you understand what non-computable means. It means that the computation will not halt in a finite amount of time for a general input. For a particular input, it may indeed halt in a finite amount of time.

Most real numbers are non-computable, such as the square root of 2 or Pi.

Practically speaking however, we can get approximations as close as we want. In other cases, such as the Busy Beaver function, we can set bounds

    > And I'm not sure what you understand what non-computable means. It means that the computation will not halt in a finite amount of time for a general input. For a particular input, it may indeed halt in a finite amount of time.

In practice, yes, as I understand it, modern science is all about stochastic approximations and for all intents and purposes it's quite reliable.

I probably should stop using "non-linear" terminology. I really just mean that it's not 1:1. You mention how systems can be deterministic and I looked it up and yes wave function collapse specifically says:

    > The observable acts as a linear function on the states of the system

Thanks for the reply, this is much more interesting to me as it approaches philosophy, so admittedly I too loosely throw words-that-mean-things around.

It’s not, but if software engineering is solved then of course so is financial analysis, because a program could be written to do it. If the program is not good enough, then software engineering is not solved.

I think this what you were getting at with this part, but it’s not clear to me, because it seems like you were disagreeing with my thesis: “ because AI can write 1000 programs to do 1000 different things, it doesn't mean that we can write the million other programs that do a million other things”

I’m not sure if you’re saying that people weren’t using computers to solve problems before, but that’s pretty much everything they do. Some people were specifically trained to make computers solve problems, but if computers can solve X problem without a programmer, then both the computer programmer and the X problem solver are replaced.

I've never felt comfortable with the devs who just want some Jira ticket with exactly what to do. That's basically what AI/LLMs can do pretty well.

And before that the current direction is still enough to massively hurt the world because there will be less and less places for us humans.

Another point I noticed that nobody is talking around us is the technology adoption rates. When the car industry started, decades happened between the early users and cars being ubiquitous in the population (especially taking into account the world and not the richest countries). So a sizeable part of the transportation industry that was ultimately replaced by cars had the time to adapt, move to other jobs or arrive at the end of their work life.

But now the technology goes from its few first users to being used by everyone and their cats in years if not months. There is absolutely no time to adapt, love over or endure things until you don't work anymore.

https://hbr.org/2013/12/how-google-sold-its-engineers-on-man...

With a USB stick and FTP. It's very easy to underestimate a problem when you've never encountered it or tried to tackle it in practice. Your shallow dismissal gives that away and brings no insight.

Human beings will always organically organize hierarchically. In a group one will have more initiative, one will be happier to be told what to do, etc. In the end informally you will end up with the same structure. And it's hell to deal with that when formally all have the same authority so none can override each other, but one guy just gathered enough support to do whatever he wants.

Do you think someone far away from everything you do will have a magic "workflow" that tells them what to do about the budget you requested, about the strategic decision you need, or about your conflicts, about who has to do the nice jobs or the shitty ones? And why would they have any say, they're not the boss.

Your logic is no better that those pretending today that a team of AI agents "with good workflows" can just replace all the programmers.

Valve the "game" company, has a relatively flat structure from what I've heard, and it's working pretty well for them, but they've also had it for a long time.

So if you have a company, that works like that from the start, that people know it works like that, that it has support for it. You could make it work.

I agree that forcing this structure everywhere wouldn't work, some people can work like this, others can't.

Valve has ~300 employees and operates in a field where they can afford more freedoms (try building large infrastructure projects with flat structures). Valve struck a good balance between autonomy for employees while still having some informal central coordination. Formally there are few bosses but in practice project managers and some people with seniority also act in those roles. At scale it can't work if you don't delegate any of the authority to smaller units.

It's bad to have too many or too few layers. Sometimes the result looks the same, lack of coordination and inability to deliver consistently.

Amazon has 1.5M workers. Can't imagine a flat structure working but I'm sure they were overdoing it with layers of management.

Because no one person is good at everything, and even if you managed to build a team of people who were good at everything, it is inefficient to make everyone keep up with all details of every aspect of the company so that they can be productive in an arbitrary role at the drop of a hat. Giving people a role allows them to specialize their knowledge and concentrate all their efforts into their area of expertise/competence.

Managers fill a role. Sure, some managers are bad, and some workplaces have seemingly mostly bad managers, and it leads to cynical opinions about how managers are busy-work-making dolts who don't understand anything. Some employers have mostly good managers and I feel sorry for you if you have never had the experience.

I'm 40 years into my EE career and I have always deflected efforts to make me a people manager or a project manager. I like being a grunt in the trenches solving problems at the bottom level, and a good manager increases their reports' productivity by shielding them from needing to deal with project management crap. I would have retired already except I've been blessed to have good managers for the past 20 years, while my managers have been attending umpteen resource allocation meetings and all the attendant report-making that requires.

Perilaus of Athens designed the Brazen Bull, a hollow bronze statue used to roast victims alive. When he presented it to the tyrant Phalaris, Phalaris was so disgusted by the cruelty of the device that he ordered Perilaus to be the first person tested inside it.

That tool was going to get built whether he did it or someone else did. Maybe only thing to do is buy time building it while actively looking elsewhere.

> That tool was going to get built whether he did it or someone else did. Maybe only thing to do is buy time building it while actively looking elsewhere.

This has such a dark vibe to it that I am unable to explain. It really feels like an I was only following orders command just hoping that you don't get to the wrong side of this stick as they was hoping for

At the same time protest isn't an option. It does feel like some form of active suffering for someone to write the replacement of themselves while the economy goes to complete dumpster fire and nobody's hiring (much).

All while Completely pure form of AI slop goes up and up so even any interesting idea or anything will have to fight really hard for attention in public spaces like say show HN or other websites.

So you are forced to pay "Internet rent" to the overlords like Google & Meta who will use the same money to then train better models (especially Google?) to continue this cycle.

All while people lose their privacy and nobody even talks about it. With all the thousands of problems happening.

Can we please just stop this circle just once and evaluate where things are going if they are net positive for humanity itself & if there is anything to stop this cycle.

Fundamentally most countries are democracies. Yes there are lobbying efforts but one forgets that these large corpos pay to somehow pursuade you or the politician that you elect.

Can someone smart in politics talk about such issues & raise them & a fight towards lobbying/corruption (all throughout the world?) be established.

I guess this becomes way too broad of a goal but somehow I always end up feeling corruption and politics & money's lobbying connection can be a root cause of many issues (much throughout the world)

Any manager whose job was this simple was on borrowed time anyway.

I think the person was feeding you a story around the campfire to impress you. Real management work doesn't operate like this.

After this he’ll probably become the literal king of the world.

Went bankrupt six times and is still hailed by his followers as an economic genius. Few people can pull that off.

My guess is that it also helps to owe lots of money to lots of banks at the same time. That way when one goes after you, the others will help you out or risk losing their money, too.

( And produce a show "the apprentice" to also pretend to be successful)

He's pretty lucky that he needed to pretend to be successful to at least let his name lease as a brand.

Basically the only thing that worked out in business.

Some people are so focused on whether they could automate their work output with an LLM to ask themselves if they even should.

Yeah, I've been in one of such places.

Why did you leave Amazon?

> I couldn't stand the management culture

Sooo... Why are you trying to bring it with you

I thought at some point I'd get to talk to a human who would immediately say "Oh this is ridiculous, sorry." Nope. I just got passed around between either more bots or offshore customer support employees, with I assume a gigantic incentive to not go against the fraud detection bot, until I ran out of appeals.

One of the most soul-sucking experiences I've ever gone through. I can't imagine the toxic culture that produced that system.

Don't know about Amazon but my experience with middle management is that it's exactly like that.

One could even argue that middle management is THE most critical role in corporations over a certain size. In that it is the glue that allows them to get to that size. But it's also what gave rise to things like Dilbert and the idea of rising to the level of your own incompetence.

Middle management is like the lug nuts on a wheel. If you start with 5, you can take one away and be OK, even two and no issues with normal driving. You can go down to two and as long as you aren't hitting large bumps and they aren't adjacent you mostly likely will be fine for a short trip. You could even remove ALL of the lug nuts and if you travel in straight line over a smooth road you can still drive.

After all they mostly just sit there, the tire, the transmission, all the other parts of the car are doing the work. But it's not fair to say that any of the removed lug nuts were doing nothing.

The point of middle management isn't really to do anything spectacular on a daily basis. If the company is working well, middle management effectively has no function. It's when things get out of line. Even then though, it's not really middle management that's calling the shots or fixing the problem, but they are critical in noticing the problems and directing resources. Middle management's role is in reducing the time that things are out of line.

At least that's the idea, and much like any position, the bulk of the group benefits are overwhelmingly produced by the groups most effective producers.

Middle management is the hardest role to hire while simultaneously being the hardest to gauge employee effectiveness.

Having worked at some dysfunctional companies where that didn't happen (and a few companies that were amazing at it), it makes a difference at scale.

Nothing is more disheartening than working your ass off as an IC, shipping, then finding out that your VP pivoted approach and your project won't be used.

The Peter Principle is of course well-known, but one of the insidious things is that once you have enough incompetent management and they are entrenched for a while, they will teach all the wrong lessons to an entire generation of new hires coming in. Due to the incentives and optics of large orgs, managers tend to spin everything in a positive light publicly, and the real unfiltered discussions of failure happen in tighter circles. At some point a lot of "successful" folks can have job hopped their way through a bunch of brand name companies just cargo culting on what they've seen done before with no real understanding of how their work actually impacts the company's bottom line.

This is one of the reasons I'm incredibly thankful to have spent most of my early career in small companies and startups where the big picture was so much easier to see.

Middle management is playing a completely different game. I don't envy them one bit.

Sure, there are toxic cultures created by bad management, but that can be said about any leadership role. There is a reason for the hierarchy, if you think you have a better approach to structuring a company, have at it.

A few times I took my hands off the wheel to see if I was truly redundant. Let's just say, I wasn't.

At worst, I was the only one looking at the schedule.

At best, I was a support mechanism for people working on an absolutely boring product.

True. But there are many people whose productivity slumps unless they are asked for progress updates every day. You have to offset this against the people whose productivity slumps BECAUSE they are asked for updates every day. In large orgs with unknown quality of people I guess it's not impossible that middle managers add value.

> Real management work doesn't operate like this.

I agree but in the opposite direction. So many managers not only doing that but doctoring, filtering and tainting it as well. So AI would be more effective for the most of bad managers.

Yeah, this sounds like the guy was just exaggerating for effect. Haven't we all joked before, "I'm writing a tool to automate my own job away."

I’ve definitely had roles where I sadly realized I’m automating the QA person next to me well before LLMs were mainstream.

In my experience I think, you would automate enough of a mid manager role that upper management doesn’t care for, and whatever left over responsibilities that couldn’t be automated is split between a high level IC and the next above. Then the bureaucracy sells is as a success.

Members of a team creates a report explaining the state of their small section of the business, usually a 2x2 grid of boxes to fill.

This is then reviewed, usually in an in person meeting that requires full team participation.

These are joined together to create a weekly business review, that will require another meeting to review.

Each month the WBRs are combined to created the monthly business review, with a massive meeting requiring participation by multiple teams.

The pyramid of documents and meetings continues all the way up to the CEO.

I should probably point out, none of this information is unavailable at any level, its copied and pasted from system to 2x2 then copied from doc to doc. It's a spectacle that needs to be seen to be believed.

And that just the reporting, planning is another exercise in multiple report writing that I'll save for another day. But, hopefully you get the idea.

Amazon is 90% internal document writing and 70% work (9-5 does not really exist, it could, it just doesnt).

It's essentially a massive jobs program for middle management that aren't capable enough to join the TSA and that's being unfair to the TSA.

The only reason I can think for the existence of the reporting is to give managers something to do between pipping staff.

At least at companies where the upper management is aware enough of the details to make good judgements, and the business is critical enough for some reason that low level management can't just be entrusted to yeet/yolo-things into production?

Still, it documents the typical work culture of the US in the late 1990s / early 2000s. It's sad and amazing how much of that remains the same.

At the same time, what's the alternative? Progress happens. We no longer have liveries for holding horses nor horse shoe makers (not at the level we used to). We no longer have telephone operators.

Making up jobs to keep people employed isn't a viable solution to me. Supporting them in some way (re-training, UBI, service work, ...) seems like the only way forward.

I guess maybe I can imagine making it harder to fire people so you have to find something to do with them. But that also has negative consequences. Small companies won't/can't hire because they can't make the guarantees big companies can.

If I lost my software engineering job tomorrow and was unable to find work within a few months, I have a repurposing plan ready to go. Yes it would be terrible for me economically and I'm sure there would be some sad days, but sometimes bad things happen and we have to make the best of them and move on.

At the same time I'd be applying to senior software engineering positions geared towards anything energy/nuclear and possibly datacenter tech/engineering positions as well, but I would be extremely picky. Since everyone is so obsessed with AI/productivity, the electrical grid is going to be more stressed than ever. I'd target positions with no H1B competition, cleared positions and whatnot - this isn't a crack on H1B, but I would imagine there is higher probability in getting interviews without them in the picture. BUT I'm at the whim of hiring managers and whiteboards at that point, which isn't ideal, hence the trades route mentioned first.

I love software so much and have spent the majority of my life doing it, spent all that time getting a CS Master degree and whatnot. It would be a sad day for me, but you do what you have to do. I have a family as well, so not as much mobility and time to burn as a person without.

I think this plan is specific to my situation, but I hope it helps getting a few ideas kicking around in your mind. It is definitely a stressful thing if you think about it too deeply, but I try to distance myself from that mental mode and focus more on what I would have to do if that time comes.

I.e. it created far, far more jobs than it destroyed.

After all, Gutenberg had only a modest goal of printing and selling indulgences. He didn't understand what the printing press was good for, either.

Pretty much all the jobs today did not exist before the printing press that enabled them.

It's apparently not obvious that mode access to books , learning, and literacy will improve lives

Get back to me when you need to execute that plan with millions of others joining the bread line.

Life is actually very good here and there is a lot of mobility if you have even a small amount of motivation. I feel like I'm preaching to the choir here though jacquesm - if I recall correctly (I'm not going to look at your comment history), I feel like I read once that you come from a family of first gen immigrants that experienced conditions similar to what I did when I was younger, and I would love to hear more about their/your perspective on being in a place like the USA and the opportunities it did/didn't bring.

For a while. It will be musical chairs without many chairs as a growing number of people retrain into a fixed or shrinking job pool.

Food continues to go downhill the more agritech progresses and the planets population grows. Proteins are replaced by carbs with savoury flavouring, fats are replaced by thickeners etc. Eating good food like a good cut of steak requires out bidding other people which requires income.

Any more room as part of the painting and chess class this time, or are we all maintenance again?

We see it in worker replacement, in vestigial organic structures that shrink over millinea, and in the tools and objects we keep with us in our lives.

The question, once achieving this grandiose goal, is how long, and by what mechanism, will we continue to enjoy the fruits of our labor?

Perhaps there will be a time when we may enjoy this world without the pressure of being a cog within it, but ultimately this time may be short if we are able to manifest it at all.

The unease comes from the power we lose when we cease to be the means of production, and instead become a vestigial organ on a beast much more complex than ourselves.

And that same class of people who own everything would rather kill everyone else and also destroy the planet than give up their position or allow any of the socioeconomic changes necessary to change the distribution of wealth.

I actually wonder if solving this problem - this feeling of powerlessness in the face of progress is an interesting problem to solve in our time. Plenty of people have figured this out. The Amish, people move to islands and other countries to not be part of modern progress.

"Making up jobs to keep people employed isn't a viable solution to me. " Why not? I mean Keynes argued something like: if the Treasury filled old bottles with banknotes, buried them in disused coal mines, filled the mines with rubbish, and then left it to private enterprise to dig them up again, there would be no more unemployment and the real income of the community would probably become a good deal larger than it actually was."

But it really does feel sometimes like. Why do we feel this powerlessness to progress? Why can't we architect the world we want to have? I have really been wondering. Lots of religious groups want to revert some progress. Maybe these whole network cities folks have a point. Maybe we can have a city like pegged to the like technical and architectural standards of the victorian era.

Also - Horse shit doesn’t sound that bad. People stink in 2026 too.

But I do think, I dunno if inflection point is precisely the right concept, there will plenty of future developments I’ll be glad , but I think less and less of a percentage of our innovation is positive for general human happiness.

Big tech ceos even often talk about this sort of longtermist perspective where today’s human happiness doesnt matter, just progress toward an unknown future.

If this is what you think needs to happen and you live in the US, then you should be freaking out right now, not calmly posting takes like this. UBI is not a thing almost any current American politician is considering, and the overton window is speeding in the opposite direction.

You should not expect people to be reasonable about this. I don’t know what the answer here is, but if you want it to be UBI, you need to fight for it. The alternatives (artificial price controls, the dumb make-work policies you correctly disdained, first-amendment-breaking/privacy-violating AI bans) are out there, and if you don’t fight for the thing you want, you’re gonna get one of those.

Cost of UBI: 3,420,000,000,000

Where is $3.5 trillion going to come from?

As I remarked, the UBI math doesn't work.

Blood. If things don’t reverse course this trajectory historically leads to bloodshed.

In many respects it already has. How many people have died just this year already because businesses didn’t do what they were suppose to? Because cutting costs with no consequences is seen as the norm?

Of course nobody wants to account for those externalities and when that blood comes back on them they become scared and use government force instead. You’re seeing the trial run with ICE as we write our comments on this forum

That will change real quick if everyone loses their job to AI. But until then, yeah, it's not going to happen, and it shouldn't.

No, this is exactly my point: they will be angry, unreasonable, and thirsty for revenge. They’ll hand over freedoms like Halloween candy. How about a law where the government gets to survey your hard drive to make sure you’re not harboring an AI model? Sounds crazy, sounds insane, but in the current political climate I’d rate it more likely than UBI.

It’s going to sound naive and stupid, but I think it somehow works. There are millions of jobs here in Japan that exist for the sake of existing. Government knows, people know, workers know as well. But everyone understands that the flipside also sucks. Sure, we can say we should optimize and people need to re-learn and etc and etc. But that’s not the reality. At some point people just want to exist without worrying about 50 years down the road, or if they can feed their family tonight.

And as a gaijin living in Japan, I usually get extremely pissed off at the extreme inefficiency of Japanese companies, things that in any other country would take one month here take 5 years.

I agree with literally every point you made. Sure economy is stagnant, but I'd rather take stagnant economy than a collapsing one. I agree with a lot of things are slow, but also, most of things are just... not a big deal, at least for me? I lived in Canada, and have parts of my family living in NYC as well. For every slow government related slow things, you can find something that's also slow in the NA as well. I'm not going to mention Europe at this point, as from what I've witness from my European partner, you can find inefficiencies there as well. Again, pros and cons everywhere, just gotta pick and choose what matters to you.

The prime example for me was always driving at night in Japan and coming across some grandma waving a traffic light for construction. On the surface, it's ridiculous that she's even there - but then again she has a job and can pay her bills (presumably).

Shit might be annoyingly inefficient over there, but it does just work.

Time to downsize, "try," to stay in tech yet study to be a nurse.

My field and career of 20 years seems like a vanishing one.

But coming to this point, its absolutely unfathomable seeing the difference between these two types of things

On One hand we have cursor whose burning like 5-6 Million $ of money in trying to build a browser only for it to be riddled with bugs and literally just the money went into fire (read emsh's post and how he built better alternative)

I mean I guess I learnt something from them burning 5 million $ but I see a lot of Companies burn so much money.

My point is that all of these companies burn massive amounts of money in LLM's sometimes just for the sake of it and then some of these same companies go the other way and then fire people working.

I mean is there no way for a company to be reasonable. You worked there 8 years, You knew how things worked. Getting anyone new up and running would be hard especially given you had customer relations.

Tf they mean doing a great job but they have to lay you off? I mean, is the company doing really bad (I am considering something like tailwind happening here?) or what exactly.

But tailwind's situation was (unique?) because their business was eaten by AI itself. Not sure about your (former) company though but I hope that you can tell more specifics if possible.

The contracting company I worked for promotes on their LinkedIn their use of AI saying we created this prototype with AI in less then a day vs. years, months and days. In September they told us this is the way forward as all govt contractors are bidding for contracts with smaller teams using AI. Per that story they are telling they need to change to survive.

> The contracting company I worked for promotes on their LinkedIn their use of AI saying we created this prototype with AI in less then a day vs. years, months and days. In September they told us this is the way forward as all govt contractors are bidding for contracts with smaller teams using AI. Per that story they are telling they need to change to survive.

Thanks for providing more context, This feels much the govt. faults than the contractor but I feel like moves like these will come to bite the govt. sooner than later.

I feel like though contracting companies also might've overhyped. Like yea sure for basic things AI's fine but AI won't be fine for govt. projects & shouldn't be fine.

Govt.'s can spends an unknown amount of money on defense with literally no accountability with billions of $ literally not knowing where they went but they will try to price squeeze thigns here only to some years down the line have catastrophic event.

I mean LLM's still hallucinate and they can be poisoned. If govt.'s use LLM the aspect of poisioning becomes really important.

Chatgpt still pulls grokipedia whose primary source is X where bots can be created and spread and a certain narrative can be established.

I am pretty sure that if we see govt.s in any capacity have AI generated websites then the idea of poisoning the whole web to negatively impact the other nation becomes a good strategy for agressions between countries.

Although I may have gotten off topic but sorry to hear this that you were in such a weird and messy chopping block due to mistakes from the govts in general.

Wishing you the best in your future that things get better for ya :hug:

As you point out we've had plenty of examples in the past of jobs being displaced but (while I'm sure it always sucked to be one of the people displaced) those displacements were always relatively contained to certain industries within different time periods.

The nightmare-inducing aspect of AI-related job displacement is the possible combined breadth and speed of it, which we have absolutely never seen before.

Assuming the optimistic (from the perspective of the AI providers) AI predictions pan out the oncoming rush of AI job displacements are going to upended a lot of industries simultaneously, causing both increased uncertainty of what the (stable) other options are (the ground will be shifting everywhere, all at once) plus drastically increased competition for whatever other options do still exist when the music stops playing. I don't think it'll work out for us all to be nurses, plumbers, electricians and influencers.

> Supporting them in some way (re-training, UBI, service work, ...) seems like the only way forward.

I agree that these sorts of solutions are the rational way forward, but it just seems incredibly unlikely that this is how it is going to play out, at least in the US where we seem to be putting approximately zero political or corporate effort into planning for these possibilities. A violent class war seems far more likely of an outcome to me if we're being honest.

And what is? AI slop? There is no objective purpose to any of this, all of it is preference.

I prefer that people have a way to express themselves in a way that gives them subjective meaning, maybe a bullshit job is a good enough solution.

Management, warehouses, logistics, driving, retail/service industry, entertainment and advertising, programming/software engineering, even research and education. Potentially tens of millions of jobs in the US alone.

COMBINED with the seemingly zero discussion in mainstream politics about improving the welfare system of the country to prevent system-scale unemployment and poverty, while the profits from "efficiencies" go to the small group of already-wealthy shareholders and owners.

Everyone works 20 hours/week.

The 'problem' isn't what you think it is. The people in power are worried that lifting the boot off of the neck of the working class may result in loss of power for them.

They are right. Hence the stalemate.

That's what the TSA is in the US

If "Progress" means a massive immiserated underclass is necessary for it to proceed, then who is it for? The answer is obvious.

The people whose jobs were shipped overseas were physically stronger and less sheltered than you. If they couldn't stop it, your pencil arms and retreat into revolutionary cosplay fantasy certainly doesn't bode well for you. They weren't even fired because of an advance in technology, they were fired because we just dismantled workers rights and allowed every job to be shipped to China, Mexico, Indonesia, India, Bangladesh, the Philippines. And literally, now, the "opposition" is angrily protesting for free trade and for illegal workers with no rights; you all still don't get it.

Automation raises productivity, and creates wealth that we can choose to share, even though "we" don't. Not lowering labor standards and not allowing jobs to be shipped out to poverty stricken countries with low labor standards would have just taken compassion and not being completely self-centered for at least 5 minutes a day. Fighting when you had something to lose rather than waiting until you have nothing. I'm supposed to make up a fake job for you?

There won't even be Oxy for you to turn to. You'd better be happy with legal weed, even if you can barely afford it on your Taskrabbit income.

I stand by my point that there is no political will among the current elites for meaningful distributional policies.

For the record I am a staunch defender of worker rights in all industries and deeply despise neoliberal economics.

Geez man

But for all the talk about UBI in techbro circles, it seems to never actually translate to any meaningful political moves. Microsoft, Amazon etc are pretty happy to throw millions of dollars at politicians to ensure that they can keep building their data centers, but UBI just gets lip service.

AI and automation are rapidly erasing roles across both white and blue collar work. this is now a present present reality in almost all sectors. extrapolating this, it is clear this ongoing displacement will drive successive waves of unemployment and underemployment, placing severe strain on social contracts and accelerating societal instability. countries with strong social compacts may weather the coming storm. but others, especially those with larger population that lack "cultural ballast" >cough USA< will likely to slide into chaos, if not outright anarchy.

harder question to ponder is this: in a world where human labor is no longer the primary allocator of income and resources remain finite, sustaining nearly half of today’s global population under existing economic models begins to look fundamentally untenable. china’s one child policy starts to feel less irrational and more prescient.

beginning to think that perhaps I should be advising my kids to learn a trade on the side, as a backup plan, even as they chart their budding careers in the corporate world.

So what if my job is no longer a thing in several decades. That's the entire point.

There's infinite number of ways to make a living. My way isn't better than anyone else's.

People willing to adapt will always have opportunities awaiting them. The world is rich and fruitful.

Plus all the fun parts of computer science are still remaining to be pondered. The fun of computers is the high of the aha moment, not the coding lol

But what will happen when there is no job that can't be automated anymore ?

Yet, here I am, an experienced software engineer, unemployed for over a year now. It still seems to me the right ideal, so the 'karmic' outcome feels unjust really.

That sounds an organizational issue. I always thought that a manager should push product vision at their own level, get and organize resources, and assess the talent as fairly as possible. That is, a combination of the job of a general and a PM. Controlling the information may be necessary for survival, but it should not be the job description.

LOL, reality is very different. Manager first of all is working to keep his position, second to get promoted. Most of them. For keeping he need to become irreplaceable. For that they create kill zone around eliminating competitors. Working against those with brain, not promoting, giving negative reviews, creating 'cases', taking credits for others job. Making those who can leave. I've seen a lot of this shit. This creates a local depressive shithole. It can go for decades in monopolies and in low competition markets.

There are a lot of inefficiencies I can see what this manager at AWS was trying to optimize for.

We won't be hiring middle management, no product managers, no engineering managers, VPs

The only aspect we don't have solved is a buffer between sales/execs and engineers, but all other functions are automated away alongside other AI assisted coding that there actually is bandwidth for the schizophrenic ideas. Things that used to be tech debt and not prioritized by engineers without management suddenly are all solved, AI makes the cleanest REST API's I've ever seen, obscure verbs properly implemented immediately. Test cases all done.

It's working really well and the friction with non technical PMs and hierarchies is gone

its a 1 liner to add relevant mcp servers to Claude Code, and every ticket tracker already has an mcp server out

for triaging between UX designers, we also just don't. we use an mcp server for UX, I can point playwright - which is usually used for testing your own site - at a competitor's website and feed all the UX information and implementation into Claude Code to promote the synthesis of an extremely advanced and already engaging design pattern into the project

at this point, I would say its a lack of competence to manage a software project or org, any other way. Amazon's deep cuts are a shot across the bow to others that know they need to "do the needful", and will be watched closely

Most experienced devs already know writing code is the easy part, it's really understanding the business requirements that takes time (I think a lot of junior devs don't understand this so they get overly enthusiastic about AI). But it turns out that most middle managers were already churning out slop to begin with so replacing them with AI is a big improvement.

As an engineer, roughly speaking, every task AI helps me get done faster is roughly negated by someone else's AI slop I need to clean up. But when it comes to middle management, I can't tell the difference. I'm pretty sure most product roadmaps generated by AI are actually more sensible than those generated by clueless managers.

Cost structures are changing everywhere, not just in big tech. Hiring has stayed about the same everywhere else and the job descriptions for an SWE in the normal corporate world seem focused on getting off AWS, GCP, etc.