"It’s obvious the game has changed" - it's obvious you haven't been in tech all that long. ;) that was a joke answer - no offence intended :) But seriously, I've heard "the game has changed" many, many, many times over the last few decades. Its true. The game is constantly changing. :)
"what you all are focusing on to stay employed in tech". - Same answer as its always been. Be reliable, show up, get stories in the Done column. Be friendly, nice, help others when they're stuck, ask for help when you're stuck, do a mixture of work, some with new tech you wanna learn, some on old legacy stuff or things other people don't like so they're grateful you did so they didn't have to and want to hang onto you 'cos you know the codebase. Look after your boss :) People forget to do this. (not being a sycophant, just genuinely making their life easier and trying to be not too much of a PITA to manage). If a job ends up being stressful / non-fun, or you're locked into all old tech with no future, then ask for a change to the role, or move jobs internally or externally.
Stop following the crowd. Where the crowd is, there are lots of people after your job, and if we're honest, probably better than you.
I've had one job my entire career (31 years and counting.) It's very niche tech. I'm good at it. There are maybe 10 other people in the world who can do what I do. And they're all overworked.
The real value and security in tech is in the edges, not the mainstream.
It sounds like you found your ikigai. Wishing you continued job stability, satisfaction, income, delight, health and peace. It's wonderful to read things like this.
For anyone else reading who is unhappy, uncertain or struggling, I hope you find the same for yourselves too. I probably don't know you, but there's complete strangers out there who want good things for you too. Don't give up.
Curious how this works out financially though. Following the crowd got people into faang with 500k incomes. Working on something obscure I haven’t seen payoff the same.
Are you that engineer that fixed that AS400? Back in the early 2010s, there were like 5 people across, the whole UK who could work on those mainframes.
I would be really interested to hear about what you do. If you don't want to share it in public, you can email me at the address in my profile. I'm always looking for a niche, but I haven't found one that has stuck.
It’s a trap to be scared and try to gamble on near future.
By the time most of today’s wannabe AI gurus are good enough to get a decent job offer - AI would not be such a big deal (best case scenario imo).
I didn’t notice any “obvious” changes in the game that weren’t there before.
For instance I don’t see anything different in requirements and comments of HRs reaching me.
JVM is still same jvm, bugs are still bugs, unit tests are still unit tests.
The fact that now instead of googling a problem you google and gpt it is a minor change in any real world complex engineering context that im aware of.
I agree on the AI stuff ... personally, I think it's going to need 5 years or so just to iron out all the legal and regulatory stuff before the 'next big push'
In general, I think you make your money in Tech at the ends.. Either bleeding edge or trailing edge. ATM, I'm working on Rust, serverless, playing with Pijul, keeping an eye on OpenTF, and pulumi.
For trailing edge stuff - I figure I'll be the worlds oldest COBOL coder by the time I retire and can use that to fund my retirement :-P
I think AI will still be important, but the AI of the future won't look like the AI that we have today. People have a tendency to redefine "AI" to mean whatever the new hotness is -- LLMs today, deep neural nets a few years ago -- but new things are created all the time, and fads always change. When I started grad school for comp sci nearly 20 years ago, I worked with a group that was big on "AI", but we were dealing with multi-agent systems. No neural nets or super-intelligences or anything like that. Neural nets were actually considered passé back then; I vividly recall a professor telling me that SVMs (support vector machines) were stronger than neural nets, because SVMs had a stronger theoretical foundation and were more amenable to mathematical analysis. Neural nets, on the other hand, just happen to work -- but they happen to work very very well! Deep learning didn't gain traction until after I had finished grad school.
The LLMs that we have today are amazing, but there is still plenty of room for improvement. Having to train it on a huge dataset is problematic for some uses; perhaps there is a related structure that can be trained more easily and more quickly. That would also reduce the effect of OpenAI's monopoly. LLMs also have specific weaknesses, like poor performance at arithmetic. At this stage, I wouldn't really feel comfortable feeding problems into an LLM and presenting users with the LLM's answers. It's still the Wild West in many aspects. There is always an improvement on the horizon, but it's hard to tell where it will come from and when it will come. Maybe we'll have LLMs that really start to resemble intelligence, or maybe we'll have a totally different structure that does everything LLMs can do plus more.
The obvious thing is gpt-6 (or even gpt-5) will be able to do your job better and faster than you. This will happen in 1-2 years. That doesn’t scare you?
I am a devops engineer working mostly with platform engineering managing over 80 eks clusters, I am learning more AI an embracing AI, it makes my job much easier and helps me write tooling faster. I notice people at work that resists AI and like to do things the way they have been doing it for years. I wrote an Azure wrapper that helps my team debug kuberntes issues in real time using AI , it also analyzes deployments and makes recommendations and this has caught the attention of teams that are now using my tool to debugg their workloads.
My company already is doing a hiring freeze and we have a lot of work so having tools like OpenAI has been invaluable to help me with my daily work.
> I wrote an Azure wrapper that helps my team debug kuberntes issues in real time using AI , it also analyzes deployments and makes recommendations and this has caught the attention of teams that are now using my tool to debugg their workloads.
I don't think it's obvious that the game has changed at all. I plan on doing what I've been doing to stay relevant in my career so far: keeping my skills fresh, tackling new problems, etc.
Not writing JavaScript for money ever again. I switched careers. Now all future jobs will either be in management or require certifications or someone else more naive can have it.
My solution in general terms is to go where competence isn’t ambiguous.
Or ubiquitous. When you are selling a skill that is as common as the ability to write JavaScript, then you aren't selling much, and you're very replaceable.
Learning a very niche skill is harder. Finding jobs with very niche skills is harder. But once you've done that you become very hard yo replace. (Your job might go away, but there's seldom outright replacement. )
I've been asking myself this question a lot, and I don't have a perfect answer, but here is what I am seeing so far:
We are moving from a period of time in which engineers were needed to do, essentially, day-to-day grunt work of software development (write this CRUD app, figure out this schema, implement these requirements) to a period of time where engineers will be needed to oversee, design, and manage relatively intelligent tooling that will do those things for us, and then be evaluated on its results.
Put another way: Engineers are currently like factory employees at the turn of the 20th century. Lots of manual tasks are needed to keep our "factories" running, tasks that, in the 21st century, robots can do just as well. But that doesn't mean no humans work in factories. Plenty of people do, but what they do are the things that the machines can't be trusted to do alone, or at least, can't be trusted to do alone sufficiently reliably for reasonable cost.
But even so, far fewer people work in factories now (as a proportion of the population) than did in the early days of the industrial revolution. It seems to me that engineering will likewise be winnowed down. That means that ultimately even the most valuable engineers won't be as valuable. You won't need as many of them to do the work, and you won't need to pay them as well.
If I choose to stay in engineering (which is by no means a guarantee), I think I will need to focus on moving from "day-to-day implementation" into "designing and monitoring the overall approach to systems." At most organizations, this means getting to and being successful in, at minimum, a staff engineering position, preferably higher (e. g. lead/principal). I am nearly there at my current organization, but I don't have the skills to perform at the next level yet. I can probably develop them, but that's also not for certain, and even if I do, I might not like that kind of work.
In that case, if I wish to remain in the workforce I will need to change career fields, and find one of the things that won't be automated away by LLMs or similar technology over the next 15-20 years. (For example, contrary to a lot of thinking currently, I think a premium will continue to be placed on genuine human creativity; I don't think AI will eliminate the desire for humans to consume art created by other humans. Any field which involves physically doing - such as the trades, or maybe some kinds of hardware engineering - would also be an okay bet.)
Or I could always coast on the coattails of my spouse, who is already in such a field. That might be easier :)
I keep an eye on the trends and kinda dip my toe in a bit so that I know the basics.
Like with AI, I've tried Copilot (in the free beta). I've poked around GPT both on the web and using the API. I've tried local LLM models and StableFusion.
Not going to go all-in on any of that, but I kinda know what's going on and where the tech is at.
Now if someone pays me to take a deeper interest, I already know where to start looking and who to ask for more information.
Also: look for the boring stuff. There's a ton of work in the uncool industries.
There's software in tractors, mining equipment, smart metering etc. It's not the cool whiz-bang stuff where you can rewrite everything in Rust, but on the other hand it's stable work where the software is just a part of the bigger machine and you're usually not writing code with a fire under your ass. Nobody expects 16 hour work days and there's actual work-life balance.
Stay employable? I have been unemployed for 1.5 years. Absolutely NOBODY needs a product management leader anymore. If anything only entry level and I am overqualified to do that (not saying it arrogantly, but companies don't ever consider me stepping 3-4 levels back).
Tech is in a slow death spiral.
I've been navigating this question myself - in the mechanical engineering world.
Much of my background is in product design, particularly sheetmetal enclosures. I grinded through a few different jobs in that space, picking up some skills in CAD Administration, PDM (think engineering document workflows), and programming (mostly VBA and Python). I saw myself moving away from product design/manufacturing into engineering automation... but I kept getting pulled back into designing widgets.
In my early career, designing widgets was fun and interesting. Even got some patents. But indecisive customers and overpromising salescritters made the experience extremely frustrating. Some people just love to quibble with designers over minutiae, resulting in delays and overruns. "Sure, the product is functional, but... it doesn't look like what we had in mind."
I got laid off this past summer, but lucked out with two competing employment offers. Company A needed a product designer, and they needed a CAD/PDM Administrator as well. Company B needed someone to reverse engineer existing CAD models and program mesh generation scripts for simulation software verification models. In comparing these, I realized I had an opportunity to pivot away from designing new manufactured products - and negotiate for more money in the process. So I picked Company B, even though my skills were probably a better fit for Company A.
Since starting my new job, I've found myself lately enjoying lots of downtime. In product development, I was always scrambling to produce and change designs to meet ever-evolving requirements. The design process often trends toward instability and complexity as requirements contradictions arise. In contrast, reverse-engineering naturally reaches a point of stability, and quickly. It's very satisfying doing well-defined modeling tasks and knowing that the tasks are DONE.
Future-proofing a tech career is often seen as an exercise in skill-building, focusing on what employers are trying to acquire in new hires. But I think tech workers really need to think about eliminating their career pain points as well. Reducing burnout can open your mind to new career possibilities.
I'm creating a low-code platform using AI to automate my own work (to be more productive) and also trying to learn how to engage an audience on social media (around AI and software development) to use as leverage to get contracts, launch apps and make a profit.
As a coder since 2002 (when I was 12 years old), I feel like I got into tech at the right time. Nowadays the new hacker is the people that can amass a big audience doing interesting things. If I was 12 years old now, I probably wouldn't hack my way coding, I would do it through social media.
I am doing the same thing; this will be my 5th since the mid 80s with the AI (obviously) being a lot better than in the past decades. It's hard but fun.
Back in school in 2004, I had to make a choice: go into quantitative finance, the stuff was piping hot, and people there made a lot of money OR follow my interest in AI/neural nets, possibly not making much.
I chose finance, then the crises kept hitting. I don't regret it, because I'm still very employable and I did make some money. But to me it's a bit of a missed opportunity.
The point is: don't look at what is hype now, look at what could be good in a few years. My guess is that the next huge thing is robotics.
Definitely adding generative AI clients on my portfolio, then just using the latest tech I like.
I don't take side gigs unless they're AI, Rust or solid.js.
The focus is still on making products and live off them though, more than staying employable.
Staying employable is a nice side effect of training the "building products" muscle.
I don't think it will be too soon but at some point work done by humans will lose any meaning and we'll just divide in people with income/value generating assets and people without.
I've been avoiding having a real job for most of my adult life. I am trying to build an online business or two that leverages AI. Such as for fine tuning LLMs or an open source agent hosting system.
Although right now I don't have the energy to work on that stuff since I am scrambling to get the next crap Upwork contract.
If you are following the trend of the moment, your chance of success is low.
Everyone and their friend is "working on an AI business" right now. Some might make it. You might be one of them. Most will turn into nothing.
Again, with respect, jumping into AI now shows a lack of imagination. If you want to make something of value, you need to get outside the mainstream, be more creative, not something that's just riding the current hype wave.
I’m taking some time to go back to school and finish my bachelors. I work with a lot of rural ISPs so I think for the moment I’m ok. I might pick up some networking skills. It seems like networking changes slower than server side stuff cause it more often requires hardware upgrades.
Not sure about your capability but what I see in most of new devs and techs is serious lack of fundamentals. I would start there. Once you tick that box it doesn't really matter what's next. You'll pick it up quickly.
I used to believe this too. It’s completely true, but only a half truth.
It doesn’t matter how awesome you are, because in most cases employers are viewing the world as a bell curve and targeting the large population in the center. Being supremely awesome in your skills and capabilities moves you far away from the center of the bell curve.
Most employers realize many of the people in that swollen center seriously lack the fundamentals and adapt the environment accordingly, such as lowering barriers of entry and lowering minimally acceptable quality criteria. That is not the environment a top skilled developer will strive in.
My goal moving forward is to work in jobs with higher barriers of entry, preferably some manner of institutional barriers.
I work for a company that I think will last, and is good to work for so just hold on tight! I did move over to devops (platform if you prefer) which I think is more evergreen. So knowing both app development, being the person who can configure tailwind on npm, how to do backend queries and set up an ingress controller in kubernetes is kinda a good jack of all trades to have!
trying to get my Amazon AWS Machine Learning Cert. Certs definitely give you credibility in this game nowadays. Google Cloud certs are also good, as well as CyberSecurity stuff
Dunno, I got AWS CSA-P and it never got me any new interviews. Granted I stopped looking and only took interviews from people that looked for me actively.
nickd2001|2 years ago
j7ake|2 years ago
sirspacey|2 years ago
Everyone who works in tech or aspires to should read it.
bruce511|2 years ago
I've had one job my entire career (31 years and counting.) It's very niche tech. I'm good at it. There are maybe 10 other people in the world who can do what I do. And they're all overworked.
The real value and security in tech is in the edges, not the mainstream.
hammyhavoc|2 years ago
For anyone else reading who is unhappy, uncertain or struggling, I hope you find the same for yourselves too. I probably don't know you, but there's complete strangers out there who want good things for you too. Don't give up.
metabro|2 years ago
CountGeek|2 years ago
Tommah|2 years ago
mouzogu|2 years ago
disagree. fewer jobs. less turnover. like yourself - 3 decades.
better go for the next big thing. whether AI, VR or something.
long as it has a barrier to entry. even just complexity.
aristofun|2 years ago
By the time most of today’s wannabe AI gurus are good enough to get a decent job offer - AI would not be such a big deal (best case scenario imo).
I didn’t notice any “obvious” changes in the game that weren’t there before.
For instance I don’t see anything different in requirements and comments of HRs reaching me.
JVM is still same jvm, bugs are still bugs, unit tests are still unit tests.
The fact that now instead of googling a problem you google and gpt it is a minor change in any real world complex engineering context that im aware of.
What exactly is obvious to you that im missing?
mech422|2 years ago
In general, I think you make your money in Tech at the ends.. Either bleeding edge or trailing edge. ATM, I'm working on Rust, serverless, playing with Pijul, keeping an eye on OpenTF, and pulumi.
For trailing edge stuff - I figure I'll be the worlds oldest COBOL coder by the time I retire and can use that to fund my retirement :-P
Tommah|2 years ago
The LLMs that we have today are amazing, but there is still plenty of room for improvement. Having to train it on a huge dataset is problematic for some uses; perhaps there is a related structure that can be trained more easily and more quickly. That would also reduce the effect of OpenAI's monopoly. LLMs also have specific weaknesses, like poor performance at arithmetic. At this stage, I wouldn't really feel comfortable feeding problems into an LLM and presenting users with the LLM's answers. It's still the Wild West in many aspects. There is always an improvement on the horizon, but it's hard to tell where it will come from and when it will come. Maybe we'll have LLMs that really start to resemble intelligence, or maybe we'll have a totally different structure that does everything LLMs can do plus more.
p1esk|2 years ago
penguinlinux|2 years ago
My company already is doing a hiring freeze and we have a lot of work so having tools like OpenAI has been invaluable to help me with my daily work.
okdood64|2 years ago
Can you elaborate on this? Very interested.
JohnFen|2 years ago
austin-cheney|2 years ago
My solution in general terms is to go where competence isn’t ambiguous.
throwaway167|2 years ago
badpun|2 years ago
And you went into management?
bruce511|2 years ago
Learning a very niche skill is harder. Finding jobs with very niche skills is harder. But once you've done that you become very hard yo replace. (Your job might go away, but there's seldom outright replacement. )
Plus of course some protection from offshoring.
sandreas|2 years ago
- Using modern tools (ChatGPT, Phing, Copilot but also GH Actions, docker, etc.)
- Workflow improvement (Faster typing, how to use keyboard shortcuts, write scripts for automation)
- Debugging and measurement (Finding issues quickly, Analyse performance, etc.)
- Basic infrastructure understanding (Networking, Orchestration, Deployment, CI, etc.)
- Automated Testing (How to write Unit-Tests efficiently to save time ignoring all the TDD 95% coverage bullshit)
- Learning Markdown (How to write good technical documentation quickly)
- Learn concepts, not Frameworks[1] (tinker with other languages, command line, GUI, Web, etc.)
- Basic Operating System and Hardware understanding (Tanenbaum: Modern Operating Systems, drivers, etc.)
[1]: https://pilabor.com/blog/2021/05/learn-concepts-not-framewor...
ivraatiems|2 years ago
We are moving from a period of time in which engineers were needed to do, essentially, day-to-day grunt work of software development (write this CRUD app, figure out this schema, implement these requirements) to a period of time where engineers will be needed to oversee, design, and manage relatively intelligent tooling that will do those things for us, and then be evaluated on its results.
Put another way: Engineers are currently like factory employees at the turn of the 20th century. Lots of manual tasks are needed to keep our "factories" running, tasks that, in the 21st century, robots can do just as well. But that doesn't mean no humans work in factories. Plenty of people do, but what they do are the things that the machines can't be trusted to do alone, or at least, can't be trusted to do alone sufficiently reliably for reasonable cost.
But even so, far fewer people work in factories now (as a proportion of the population) than did in the early days of the industrial revolution. It seems to me that engineering will likewise be winnowed down. That means that ultimately even the most valuable engineers won't be as valuable. You won't need as many of them to do the work, and you won't need to pay them as well.
If I choose to stay in engineering (which is by no means a guarantee), I think I will need to focus on moving from "day-to-day implementation" into "designing and monitoring the overall approach to systems." At most organizations, this means getting to and being successful in, at minimum, a staff engineering position, preferably higher (e. g. lead/principal). I am nearly there at my current organization, but I don't have the skills to perform at the next level yet. I can probably develop them, but that's also not for certain, and even if I do, I might not like that kind of work.
In that case, if I wish to remain in the workforce I will need to change career fields, and find one of the things that won't be automated away by LLMs or similar technology over the next 15-20 years. (For example, contrary to a lot of thinking currently, I think a premium will continue to be placed on genuine human creativity; I don't think AI will eliminate the desire for humans to consume art created by other humans. Any field which involves physically doing - such as the trades, or maybe some kinds of hardware engineering - would also be an okay bet.)
Or I could always coast on the coattails of my spouse, who is already in such a field. That might be easier :)
theshrike79|2 years ago
Like with AI, I've tried Copilot (in the free beta). I've poked around GPT both on the web and using the API. I've tried local LLM models and StableFusion.
Not going to go all-in on any of that, but I kinda know what's going on and where the tech is at.
Now if someone pays me to take a deeper interest, I already know where to start looking and who to ask for more information.
Also: look for the boring stuff. There's a ton of work in the uncool industries.
There's software in tractors, mining equipment, smart metering etc. It's not the cool whiz-bang stuff where you can rewrite everything in Rust, but on the other hand it's stable work where the software is just a part of the bigger machine and you're usually not writing code with a fire under your ass. Nobody expects 16 hour work days and there's actual work-life balance.
ulfw|2 years ago
hilux|2 years ago
AznHisoka|2 years ago
switch007|2 years ago
all_usernames|2 years ago
I've often found fundamentals to be just as important, or more important, than chasing the trends.
neonlights84|2 years ago
Much of my background is in product design, particularly sheetmetal enclosures. I grinded through a few different jobs in that space, picking up some skills in CAD Administration, PDM (think engineering document workflows), and programming (mostly VBA and Python). I saw myself moving away from product design/manufacturing into engineering automation... but I kept getting pulled back into designing widgets.
In my early career, designing widgets was fun and interesting. Even got some patents. But indecisive customers and overpromising salescritters made the experience extremely frustrating. Some people just love to quibble with designers over minutiae, resulting in delays and overruns. "Sure, the product is functional, but... it doesn't look like what we had in mind."
I got laid off this past summer, but lucked out with two competing employment offers. Company A needed a product designer, and they needed a CAD/PDM Administrator as well. Company B needed someone to reverse engineer existing CAD models and program mesh generation scripts for simulation software verification models. In comparing these, I realized I had an opportunity to pivot away from designing new manufactured products - and negotiate for more money in the process. So I picked Company B, even though my skills were probably a better fit for Company A.
Since starting my new job, I've found myself lately enjoying lots of downtime. In product development, I was always scrambling to produce and change designs to meet ever-evolving requirements. The design process often trends toward instability and complexity as requirements contradictions arise. In contrast, reverse-engineering naturally reaches a point of stability, and quickly. It's very satisfying doing well-defined modeling tasks and knowing that the tasks are DONE.
Future-proofing a tech career is often seen as an exercise in skill-building, focusing on what employers are trying to acquire in new hires. But I think tech workers really need to think about eliminating their career pain points as well. Reducing burnout can open your mind to new career possibilities.
meiraleal|2 years ago
As a coder since 2002 (when I was 12 years old), I feel like I got into tech at the right time. Nowadays the new hacker is the people that can amass a big audience doing interesting things. If I was 12 years old now, I probably wouldn't hack my way coding, I would do it through social media.
anonzzzies|2 years ago
vasili111|2 years ago
d--b|2 years ago
I chose finance, then the crises kept hitting. I don't regret it, because I'm still very employable and I did make some money. But to me it's a bit of a missed opportunity.
The point is: don't look at what is hype now, look at what could be good in a few years. My guess is that the next huge thing is robotics.
jokethrowaway|2 years ago
The focus is still on making products and live off them though, more than staying employable.
Staying employable is a nice side effect of training the "building products" muscle.
I don't think it will be too soon but at some point work done by humans will lose any meaning and we'll just divide in people with income/value generating assets and people without.
Better be rich by that point.
wmoxam|2 years ago
p1esk|2 years ago
ilaksh|2 years ago
Although right now I don't have the energy to work on that stuff since I am scrambling to get the next crap Upwork contract.
bruce511|2 years ago
If you are following the trend of the moment, your chance of success is low.
Everyone and their friend is "working on an AI business" right now. Some might make it. You might be one of them. Most will turn into nothing.
Again, with respect, jumping into AI now shows a lack of imagination. If you want to make something of value, you need to get outside the mainstream, be more creative, not something that's just riding the current hype wave.
I say this to be constructive. Not to insult.
mrnotcrazy|2 years ago
helij|2 years ago
austin-cheney|2 years ago
It doesn’t matter how awesome you are, because in most cases employers are viewing the world as a bell curve and targeting the large population in the center. Being supremely awesome in your skills and capabilities moves you far away from the center of the bell curve.
Most employers realize many of the people in that swollen center seriously lack the fundamentals and adapt the environment accordingly, such as lowering barriers of entry and lowering minimally acceptable quality criteria. That is not the environment a top skilled developer will strive in.
My goal moving forward is to work in jobs with higher barriers of entry, preferably some manner of institutional barriers.
plasticchris|2 years ago
But more seriously, just keep learning stuff. New languages, systems, tools, whatever grabs your interest.
quickthrower2|2 years ago
jessenaser|2 years ago
The future you can bet on is the one you create.
em-bee|2 years ago
whateveracct|2 years ago
unknown|2 years ago
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pokoblond|2 years ago
kidgorgeous|2 years ago
explaingarlic|2 years ago
hardfriendship|2 years ago
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smiling-hen-285|2 years ago
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