If the bottom falls out of AI market, what's job Plan B?

[tabtab]

AI smells bubbly and there's a reasonable chance it could pop soon, throwing many thousands of AI engineers onto the streets to survive. What are similar alternative jobs and the best way to get ready for them? What's in your Aipocalypse Planner? Even if you disagree with the pessimists, it's always good to be prepared.

[mindcrime]

I'm more worried about the other scenario - AI continuing to improve steadily and ultimately resulting in significant job displacement among so called "knowledge workers" (including programmers and other engineering types). My concern isn't "what happens when there aren't jobs for AI engineers", it's "what happens when millions of highly-educated, intelligent, and previously highly-paid white collar workers suddenly find that there is no demand for their skills?"

[alephnerd]

Good SWEs get paid to think and reason about architecture, design, and tradeoffs - not to print out lines of code.

If you are hired for boilerplate coding and no reasoning, you're anyhow screwed career-wise.

If AI/ML reaches the point where it can truly reason in an inductive and dedictive manner comparable to an experienced domain expert, then the Turing Problem has been solved and we're in a new world.

[alephnerd]

There was a similar AI/ML bust in the mid-late 2010s.

If you're truly knowledgeable in your subdomain's technical fundamentals (information retrieval/databases, MLOps/DevOps, GPU Programming/systems programming, etc) you will land a job in other adjacent fields or remain relevant in the AI/ML space.

Algos and Systems Programming are core fundamentals of CS, and weak fundamentals in these two core areas of CS are a major reason SWEs start lagging in their careers.

If you are a Pandas/SKlearn script-kiddie, you're screwed, but for the same reason a front-end or backend dev who doesn't understand architecture or design is screwed as well.

The Perf_Events bug writeup on HN is a great example. A good GPU Programmer/ML Infra Engineer will have that level of Linux Kernel and eBPF knowledge, and could easily pivot into adjacent fields like HFT, Databases, Cloud, etc.

[benoau]

Software is software, the specific nature of it at a point-in-time hardly matters in the overall scope of your career: what happened to the developers building those ANSI POS terminals running in DOS? They learnt new ways to write software, for desktops. Then they learnt new ways to write software, for the web. Etc.

[smt88]

If you're trying to say that the labor market for programmers is immune to issues of over-supply that causes under-employment, you are delusional.

[gjvc]

"when", not "if"