Ask HN: Not sure about the future of tech
The last few years working in tech have been pretty brutal and now with all of the AI hype in full swing I have never felt like more of a replaceable cog in a machine.
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!”
I feel the same way! I left corporate and chose a non-profit where the mission aligns with doing something good. I suggest you do the same. You may not get paid as well, but if you choose carefully, some could pay decently. But at least you can wake up every morning and feel good that you're contributing to something good, not lining up $$ for corporate greed!
Business has always been about maximizing profits for the investors. Technology might change, but the profit focus remains.
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.
If you are well connected, with various friends and acquaintances, have a discussion with them about what they do either for a living or for a hobby and you might end up getting a job in a profession you never imagined before, that you might actually enjoy it more than your current tech position.
Don't worry. Just quit, get a trades profession, get good at it and you'll never be out of job.
Being a building industry sub-contractor is lucrative. The biggest problem being clients / builders not paying on-time and sometimes going bankrupt. You need to be on your A-game in terms of collecting payment for work completed and not putting up with delaying BS.
Whats hilarious (in general, not directed at you personally) is that computers have been "taking people's jobs", at scale, for around 40 years now.
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.
>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.
Watching tech people slowly realize they aren't an elite class of philosopher kings but just labor has been amusing. Wish they could have come around to class consciousness before they ruined the world but I suppose better late than never.
It’s not wanting to be treated like some noble elite, just being treated like labor is fine. The problem now is instead of being asked to dig a ditch it a reasonable about of time, the company is making you dig that same ditch with no break, no lunch, for as long as you can. Then once you give out, they hand the next person on the street a shovel and they begin because if we get the ditch dug 3x as fast we can make more money
So, basically, exactly the way they've treated labor for hundreds of years....
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