These jobs are still needed because AI needs guidance and even with knowledge of how AI works, you need someone to fix the many iterations of what AI does to get the right information.

The problem is AI needs to be supplanted with experienced developers and unfortunately that creates a skills gap because entry level gets the short end of the stick. This to me is now different than how many of these smaller shops that used to build PCs were slowly phased out by smaller form factors that pretty much come assembled at a cost less than white box systems.

At some point you will have a generation that doesn't understand the inner workings of software and just assume they didn't prompt the AI correctly whereas someone who has some level of code literacy can see where the bugs are in AI generated code and resolve them.

Learning to code is still relevant, just not at the level of entry where we coded previously.

> Just learn to code! That's going to -- I'm sorry, what? It's the coders that're on the chopping block now?

> Welp, I'm out of ideas.

I counseled my son to not go into that field 2 decades ago. It was obvious even then.

What's needed is people with both skills and competence to do electrical installations and coding/configuration of installations now that many homes are becoming "smart" in one way or another.

Good network technicians are also in shortage, even if it might seem like you could as a corporation just have some central control/management you could discover that it becomes a "keeping all eggs in the same basket" situation.

should OSI layer8 support even be considered tech? or "engineer"

speaking as one my self

> DAMNIT, there is more to the "Tech Job" sector than "developers"! But please, keep on thinking that, while I keep my stable, decently-paying (really, not sarcasm) "Tech Job" not being a developer.

People should pay attention to what you said.

I've always worked in Tech other than high school stuff. Despite what some think, Tech is no field to be in if a person demands stasis. And many do.

That programming and development was not going to be a stasis career, that those in that field would be in such demand that they could force employers to allow them to work only from home is one of the silliest things I've seen. Ain't happening.

Having started from school in the late 1960's I was impacted by

I confess to having quite a chip on my shoulder over how hardware is never considered part of "tech" but web sites are.

Tech jobs == jobs at tech companies. They have a statistic for that. Job postings are down in general.

Does that mean nobody is employed or well paid? No. And if you were fired tomorrow, might you care about how the market is doing in general? Yeah, I'd hope you would. Just because you have a bubble doesn't meant he rest of the world should mirror your 'happy happy, joy joy' delusions that let you ignore the pain around you.

Oh, AND they have a statistic for one prominent role at companies like those. Does that mean only software developers work at tech companies? No. Is that a major employer of that title? Probably. Was that an industry that was seen as a great place to get into until semi-recently? Believe so...

Yeah, plus many "software developers" aren't really tech jobs. In fact many "tech companies" barely have any "tech" in them. "Tech" is a highly inflated term these days.

Wrong. Grunt-level AI has already saved Amazon $260M. That's real money:

[1]https://accelerationeconomy.co... [accelerationeconomy.com]

[1] https://accelerationeconomy.com/cloud-wars/amazon-genai-slashes-260-million-in-costs-saves-4500-years/

> It's cyclic.

> This particular cycle, the software sector bet big on hiring for "AI" applications, and then found out that the applications (inaccurately) called "AI" are more of a toy than a product that's going to make them money.

> Wait for the next fad, they'll be hiring again.

I hate that they call it 'AI'. It is not intelligent. It is a predictive algorithm. Whether LLM, or some other base algorithm, it is not intelligent. Even the generative AI images are terrible as they cannot learn from their mistakes. In order for something to be called intelligent, it needs to be able to learn, and demonstrate that new knowledged. I have yet to see any AI do that.

Also, any 'AI' developer worth their salt will carefully avoid implying intelligence, they'll always lean back on the underl

This has nothing to do with AI. This has everything to do with the cost of borrowing money. It was almost zero cost for twenty years. Companies could spend, spend, spend without worrying about profitability as long as they were growing, because if the subscriber numbers were growing, investors would keep throwing cash at them because cash was so cheap. That's what's changed. And while interest rates have peaked, that free borrowing isn't coming back for a long time because the conditions that created it are gone. If you want a job in tech, look to the manufacturing industry. That's where the growth is.

Yip, cyclical. The tricky part is one of the cycles skipped by for some reason, and people got complacent.

There have been IT slumps starting approximately in 1983 (game crash), 1992 (Glasnost), 2002 (Dotcom bubble), and this one.

There should have been one around 2010, but the smartphone boom appears to have injected market energy, absorbing non-phone IT layoffs caused by the mortgage bubble crash.

I know one that is looking. I doubt it will take him long to find a new one, and I sent him a few leads I know (my company is hiring for example).

There are fewer remote-only contract jobs than they used to be. Lots of place one full-time with transition to a location near the company office. That sort of job doesn't really cut it for coders who have kids or grandkids.

Entry-level jobs for fresh grads seem downright ethereal these days though. Like you said, a lot of them demand about several years of experience right off the bat for what is basically a glorified junior-level position. It gate keeps a lot of fresh talent from developing the necessary experience to progress in the job market.

That all said, I think what people miss are the days when punching out a summer session in boot camp was an almost guaranteed path to a six-figure salary. Those days are definitely gon

I'm currently hiring for my team and have encountered some devs affected by these layoffs.

Some of them have felt like poor performers, like they didn't meet the expectation for their former title. Some felt clearly talented and were likely part of an unimportant project that got binned or a stable enough one that was put on maintenance mode.

> I don't know any software developers looking for jobs

Tens of thousands of software developer jobs have been terminated by big tech companies during the past two years. What, do you think all of those laid off employees just retired really, really early?

Try visiting the Blind app, where you'll see thousands of developers anonymously complaining about how they have to interview with dozens of companies just to get a single offer. Mean-time to hire went from three weeks to 15 months.

Your anecdotes are meanin

If your job requires you to be in an office, you can resist, or not... but do realize that whatever work output you have is meaningless busywork. It ultimately doesn't matter, because the value of the corporation/company you're working for is effectively zero in the broad scheme of things.

I don't think anyone said to quit your job if a company calls for RTO. Just keep your resume up-to-date and either don't comply with the RTO or do the absolute bare minimum or possibly less to see how far you can push it. Keeping your resume up to date is basically the strategy we've always used in this profession. Make sure you have your next job lined up and hop over there when the pay is better or the work is more interesting or the conditions are better (rarely the case, all companies kind of suck). Do

> Resist RTO! Quit your job! they said. Funny how for 2 years I've been seeing lay offs after lay offs and most slashdotters still don't grasp that RTO is just not something they can resist.

When companies announce RTO mandates, they know that some people will quit out of protest, it's calculated into the cost of the mandate. Some companies are even using it as a form of layoff that saves them money since a person who quits doesn't get severance.

Have fun managing teams that are 12 hours away. And don't expect managers you hire in that region to adapt well to your own company's management practices.

While software development is basically a machine where you put requirements into one end and turn a crank. If half of the requirements spill out of the hopper or are misinterpreted and the crank is usually jammed or falling off. Then your product's release is going to have a bad time.

> Automation is going to keep chipping away, especially LLMs & ML. We're going to have to do something about it

Maybe not. Boomers are going to retire or die at the desk at some point.

Forces 5 year amortization of all R&D costs instead of the previous 'all in the current calendar year' expectation like all other business costs have. Meaning businesses could be only taxed on profits, but now R&D and all software work is not. And many startups can't last 5+ years.

It'll help a bit, but there's no way we can get back to the practically zero interest rates that silicon valley enjoyed for so long, and that's because the amount of capital available in the system is much lower now, and it's going in the negative direction. That's because so much of the capital is tied up in boomers' retirement savings, and they're moving all that money into safer (less risky) investments, which is typical when you get near retirement age. So it's not going to be in "growth" funds anymor

Mod parent up

> I interviewed for them many times and even got offers...but if you couldn't tell me what I was doing or where I was working, I will instead sign with one of your competitors who will

I think you misperceived how they work. In these companies a team knows it needs and has budget for headcount in one of a few broad categories (generalist, systems, ML, ...), and the company adds together all the headcounts from all the divisions across the company, and it sets out to centrally hire roughly that many people. Once you're hired then there's a process lasting many weeks where you're brought up to speed on company tech setup, and you try out with the different teams for a week or two, and you a

> I call "talent hoarding." This is a very expensive strategy.

You might call it expensive, but Google's revenue is 300 billion dollars and they have about 182k employees. That is 1.6 million dollars per employee. So they can afford to pay good salary for the best talents.

> I am not even sure it's an effective one

I don't know either, but I follow the AI development and I have to say that I am really impressed with the work they do at Google Deepmind. What they did with games was inspiring, but especial

Beyond what you listed, I think we're just entering an age where to work with code you'll need domain specific skills. The need for someone clueless to poop out a simple module based on a hard spec is evaporating. The need for people with real understanding of a project or industry, who can also write code, is only growing. This isn't the death of software development, it's the democratization of it.

True workflow automation is one thing, but I have been instructed to implement Microsoft's latest "workflow automation" tools by multiple employers on multiple occasions, and I can say with relative authority that, of all the threats to my employment as a programmer, the prospect of my job being taken by non-programmers dragging pictures around is the one I take least seriously.

> Just like the company I worked for made a ton of money by fixing up outsourced projects that were mismanaged to hell and back for a quick buck, I'm sure we will make a ton of money by fixing up AI-driven projects that were mismanaged to hell and back for a quick buck.

I have an AI-driven project that will fix AI-mismanaged projects.

Next will be AI-driven project that solve AI-mismanaged projects that were fixing AI-mismanaged projects.

What is the cutoff point, the minimum of skill level that justifies layoffs? Is it the bottom 50% of workers? The bottom 25%? The bottom 10%? Okay, what about the second-lowest 10%? Is it okay to lay them off once the first 10% is gone? How many times may this be repeated?

What happens to the lower-skilled people who are laid off? Their families? Should they seek menial employment at a lower rate of pay? Should they be re-trained to do some other professional job? What if that economic sector subse

You might be surprised at how many very skilled horsemen lost their jobs when we moved from horses to cars. The fact that you are good at what you do does not mean someone is going to pay you to do it. In the startup economy, innovation was the key to grabbing market share. I am not sure the current tech monopolies need take risks with people who are innovative. They need people who are safely competent doing their current job until that job is no longer needed. A lot of tech jobs are no longer needed.

[1]The Democrat-controlled Senate just blocked Section 174's repeal last month. [leyton.com]

[1] https://leyton.com/us/insights/articles/senate-blocks-tax-relief-bill-section-174-capitalization-and-amortization-rules-remain-unchanged/

Jordan Peterson?

Don't be so optimistic. What can go wrong, will go wrong. ;-)

This is just untrue. While piles and piles of investment money were fueling silicon valley, where new startups were thrown gobs of money, and tech companies could grow on zero interest rate borrowing and worry about profitability later, the rest of the economy, particularly manufacturing, was suffering because it had all been moved overseas. If you were just a person who finished high school and went out to find a job, there were no good manufacturing jobs left that paid well enough to start and raise a f

I work with plenty of women. None hate men. They hate a certain kind of men. You know, the kind of man who writes a post like this.

just because women think you're a choad doesn't mean they hate *all* men.

It is highly ironic that software engineers like myself, after years of building skills, are suddenly obsolete because a computer learned how to write the fiction C-level executives would rather hear than bad news.

"The greatest nation the world has ever known", - can I have some of what he is smoking?

> The entire economy is going to become a Darwinian game show

that's capitalism for you, has been since like forever. what are you, a hippie, a commie or a hippie commie?

> Women have been trained and drugged so they will hate men.

wat??

( [1]https://static.wikia.nocookie.... [nocookie.net] )

excuse me, sir. have a good day and i hope you find help.

[1] https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/memepediadankmemes/images/c/cc/Wat8.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20180913191230

I have my doubts that AI can produce anything other than well written fiction.

It'll look like it works, but it will be *extremely* hackable and it will not scale.