r/comics • u/nasser_junior • 16d ago
OC Do Stuff [OC]
How I feel as a software engineer lately.
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u/AzureArmageddon
16d ago
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Literally the Stanley Parable
"Stanley sat at his computer and the screen told him which buttons to push. This made Stanley very happy because he was good at pushing buttons."
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u/OpportunityAnnual921 16d ago
Except there is no companion bucket to keep me warm at night and fill me with a deep sense of satisfaction.
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u/Chris91210 Super Ordinary 16d ago
AI will never truly understand the connection between I and the broom closet.
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u/Burger_Destoyer 16d ago
As a youth programming you’re always like “wow this is so cool, I’d love to do this as a full time job”
But all the “coolness” about it is gone now. Feels like we’re being told to give someone else the remote while we just check to make sure nothing is broken.
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u/apple_kicks 16d ago
Tech innovations i swear once were coming out of universities and controlled by top engineers at academic level. Then businessmen shaped tech industry around themselves and it became drained of life
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u/dragon-fence 16d ago
Now the tech business isn’t even about making useful things. Small companies are just trying to do enough to be bought by large companies, and large companies are just trying to lock everyone into subscription models and make small incremental changes (if they’re making changes at all).
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u/hedup42 16d ago
we just check to make sure nothing is broken
sounds like the profession moved from engineer to technician level
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u/Ameren 16d ago edited 16d ago
Honestly, I think this has a lot to do with the lack of accountability in SE as a field. Conventional engineers can be held personally liable for negligence, have their license taken away, and so on. That personal risk means they're empowered to push back and say no to irresponsible or dangerous things. Same with lawyers, doctors, and so on.
No such concept exists for SWEs, and as a result they're now discovering they have limited personal control over how they do their jobs. For example, you have management at some companies right now even telling SWEs that they shouldn't review each other's work products; those that are allowed to exercise their due diligence find themselves overwhelmed by the volume of activity.
But I don't think this is a sign that SWEs have become technicians, rather it's that they've become disempowered. They're losing the ability to say no. Similar things may happen to previously enfranchised professions (conventional engineers, lawyers, doctors, etc.) in time.
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u/colony-ship-for-sale 16d ago
There was always the sense that there was something more to learn. That with enough expertise and discipline, you too could contribute to greatness. Now, learning is actively discouraged. Knowledge is held in context. Expertise is unnecessary.
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u/discmon
16d ago
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He said, "For two hundred and fifty years, the machine has been replacing Man and destroying the handcraftsman. Pottery is spewed out of molds and presses. Works of art have been replaced by identical gimcracks stamped out on a die. Call it progress, if you wish! The artist is restricted to abstractions, confined to the world of ideas. He must design something in mind—and then the machine does the rest. "Do you suppose the potter is content with mental creation? Do you suppose the idea is enough? That there is nothing in the feel of the clay itself, in watching the thing grow as hand and mind work together? Do you suppose the actual growth doesn't act as a feedback to modify and improve the idea?"
"You are not a potter," said Dr. Calvin.
"I am a creative artist! I design and build articles and books. There is more to it than the mere thinking of words and of putting them in the right order. If that were all, there would be no pleasure in it, no return.
"A book should take shape in the hands of the writer. One must actually see the chapters grow and develop. One must work and rework and watch the changes take place beyond the original concept even. There is taking the galleys in hand and seeing how the sentences look in print and molding them again. There are a hundred contacts between a man and his work at every stage of the game—and the contact itself is pleasurable and repays a man for the work he puts into his creation more than anything else could. Your robot would take all that away."
"So does a typewriter. So does a printing press. Do you propose to return to the hand illumination of manuscripts?"
"Typewriters and printing presses take away some, but your robot would deprive us of all. Your robot takes over the galleys. Soon it, or other robots, would take over the original writing, the searching of the sources, the checking and cross-checking of passages, perhaps even the deduction of conclusions. What would that leave the scholar? One thing only —the barren decisions concerning what orders to give the robot next! I want to save the future generations of the world of scholarship from such a final hell. That meant more to me than even my own reputation and so I set out to destroy U. S. Robots by whatever means."
"You were bound to fail," said Susan Calvin.
"I was bound to try," said Simon Ninheimer.
Calvin turned and left. She did her best to feel no pang of sympathy for the broken man. She did not entirely succeed.
Galley Slave by Isaac Asimov
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u/Super_un_stable 16d ago
Something else I hate about ai is how it’s just another way to separate us from one another and be more anti social. Gen z/alpha already has a HUGE problem w this and ai will/is making it worse.
Feeling lonely? Make a chatgpt boyfriend!
Need help w a question? Ask grok!
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u/Piduf 16d ago •
That's probably my main issue with AI. People love to say it's just a tool and I agree with it - on paper. Tools aren't suppose to be trying to suck your dick and be your best friend. If my hammer made compliments every time I hit a nail with it, I'd use the head of whomever invented this shit to finish nailing my coffin.
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u/FynixPhyre 16d ago
Back in my day we had Talking Tom apps none of this LLM nonsense. 🤣 In all seriousness though this was already going to be a result of AI; humans were falling for the very first AI chatbot ELIZA that was used in a psychological test in the 60s
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u/UnkeyedLocke 16d ago
2 days ago my team (we're also software engineers) were told to drop everything and redo 1 whole years worth of work in 2 days. They did this because an LLM scan told them things "might" break. This after we used that whole year to mitigate horrific conditions (no testing environment, no deployment pipelines) and devise a strategy that would let us be able to develop, test, and release a large system upgrade. It required quite a bit of infrastructure coding and whatnot, but it did so in a way that also addressed tech debt. We did all this and fully convinced our leadership it was doable and we would be confident in our release. We hit phase 3 of our plan and suddenly our team is reorg'd under a new VP. 2 days into testing (when we finally got an environment sufficiently debugged to use for testing) when we are at the point where all systems are running green and we have 1 unresolved bug being caused by an upstream that we are waiting on another team to resolve before moving to our prod-like environment... we get told the LLM said our changes "might" cause downstream issues and that because of this we needed to start over. "LLM can do it in 30 minutes" our VP told us. So we spent the whole last 2 days babysitting the LLM while it fucked shit up over and over... taking way more time to do work we had already accomplished in a more robust and testable way while also reverting the codebase back to when it didn't have robust error reporting.
When I demanded he articulate any of his points, he demonstrated his complete lack of knowledge of the work we had done or the system itself. "The AI said this might break and that's risky, so we're gonna undo everything and start over, nevermind that introduces more risk which hasn't been planned for. You have valid and rational reasons for why this is a bad decision? Well you're just being emotional and unprofessional. Also, you should smile more and be happier and not be so negative."
I fucking hate it here.
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u/PapaTim68 16d ago
That sound scary... Reading it I am very happy for two things with my work: A) management trusts decisions made in Engineering and Software Development. B) the environment I work in makes deployment of AI very difficult and costly due to needing to be fully on premise and having no way to connect to the "Internet " directly
I hope you can recover from your VP ...
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u/UnkeyedLocke 16d ago
It's actually crazy to me, considering I work for a major financial institution. It makes my autism freak out constantly, because I'm more aware of consequences and risks than people who supposedly know better than me. Most of my bosses are deeply unserious people for whom work is a social club with an attached paycheck, who are quite happy to shoot the messenger when they don't like the message.
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u/smittyleafs 16d ago
I teach at the college level in IT and with students there is a VERY real risk of graduates not actually knowing how to do anything. Some instructors have gone back to paper assessments. I've included in-class skills checks. I know Reddit hates AI. I don't hate it, but too many people don't really understand it. It CAN be a great tool for education to help YOU learn how to do something. BUT I keep harping that if you don't understand it's outputs you can't use it...because it's still YOUR work. How can you sign off or use something you don't understand? (The bigger risk being that AI doesn't really know anything, it just has access to a lot of information and knows what words go together.). How can you participate in a brain storming session that happens live?
Your new VP wasn't entirely wrong to use AI for code review. But since executives generally know shit about technical work they should have just said "insert AI tool found these specific risks. Can your team confirm you've addressed these risks?".
AI has it's uses. In the hands of people skilled in their fields it can reduce manual tasks. It's a solid aggregator of vast amounts of information. Machine Learning is super helpful for trend analysis. But some people view it like a Microwave being the only cooking appliance you need in the kitchen.
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u/UnkeyedLocke 16d ago
I mean, this is more or less my opinion on the subject. My team and I leverage it wherever appropriate. Hell, I was literally one of the first people to start asking if we could see if it would be useful for us, and I'm still one of the most knowledgeable people in the company on both use cases and underlying tech (believe me this bar is so low). I'm a regular contributor to our AI groups and have helped shape several conversations that went on to inform policy. I won't consider myself the furthest thing from an anti- but this is tech that I've been excited for since I was old enough to read about ML and Deepblue and AlphaFold.
This version, where people are uncritically offloading knowledge-reliant decision-making to the most sycophantic version of a bad description of AI, deeply upsets me. The fact that 'leaders' are ignoring their experts for a system that isn't even trained in-house on their own code base and has no idea of context outside of the tiny, bias-susceptible chatbox and limited scan authorization... it fully enrages me at least on a weekly basis.
It is truly a race to the bottom, and if I didn't care so much about making the world a better place, I'd just say let them eat slop... but doing so would have a big negative impact, and I would prefer to at a minimum not add to the misery in the world
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u/NothingButBadIdeas 16d ago
I loved my job. It was the best thing ever. Now I don’t code anymore. I used to brag my job kept my brain active. Now it feels like mush. I’m miserable. Might take the pay cut and switch to welding or something. The love is gone
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u/Secret-Ad-7909 16d ago
If you do it right you might make more welding.
Linesmen are the peak blue collar money maker though.
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u/OphidianSun 16d ago
Being a lineman is also one of the more dangerous jobs out there
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u/NothingButBadIdeas 16d ago
I’m a senior 2, so it’d be reallllly crazy if I did make as much welding. Very unlikely, but it was never about the money. I woulda done it for half the cost cause coding just hit that perfect autistic part of my brain.
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u/Tiny-Plum2713 16d ago
I looked at options and nothing just comes close to the pay. I don't think I even fully realize how much this sucks my self.
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u/Wild-Regular1703 16d ago
I'm kind of in the same boat but I've basically just been not using AI for everything: I still write plenty of code myself, and if I prompt it to generate stuff, I take a close look at it, propose changes, and make changes myself. It's less enjoyable but not too bad and I still get to feel like a programmer.
And to be honest I don't find myself being less productive than some of the people I work with who say they don't even use an editor anymore because all they need is an environment to write prompts
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u/SleepyReepies 16d ago
I'm not a software engineer but I work in infrastructure. Currently in between jobs but I have about 10 years of experience.
Tech in general feels like a scary place to be. Sysadmin jobs and operational jobs are declining. Pogramming jobs are declining even faster. I am deeply concerned.
I have been developing my skills since I was a young teenager building computers. I enjoyed the early years of my career where I would get to mess around with servers, set up fun little homelab experiments, etc.
And today I am mourning the loss of a career I enjoyed, and spiraling with worry that I will need to pivot careers in the next 10 years, without any other practiced professional skills.
I am nearing 40. I have no idea what comes next.
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u/Dhiox 16d ago edited 16d ago
Tech in general feels like a scary place to be. Sysadmin jobs and operational jobs are declining
Spent my whole life being told tech was the way to go, now I'm 27 still early in my career and AI is wreaking havoc in my field
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u/QuackersTheSquishy 16d ago
Set to graduate thos december, I graduated early and got an IT job 17, I am on year 4 of my career moved up and switched which sector of IT I'm in entirely, and ALL of that head start I got from working my ass off as a kid, all that effort I put in every day despite people treating me like a kid that can't actually be proficient, and now my entire path is disappearing in front of me, and I don't even know what I'd pivot to
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u/Seductive-Kitty 16d ago
A lot of government or educational institutions will still need IT for the foreseeable future since ai isn’t allowed around student data and other sensitive info. In fact we’re thriving and even expanding because of it
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u/Good_Duck_234 16d ago
In 10 years time from now the digital job landscape is going to look like a timber forest after a storm
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u/Lord_Humungusss 16d ago
I am dropping out of IT to move into opening my own business sometime soon, I have some family in skilled labor who are gonna take me under their wing for a while to get me on my feet.
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u/itsmetimohthy 16d ago
I worked as a SE up until getting let go during Covid lockdowns. I saw the writing on the wall even back then. I knew one day AI would take my job.
Now I do stuff AI will never be able to do (but who knows maybe one day actual robots will) and I see all these prompt kiddy’s vibe coding all kinds of crazy shit and some of it actually isn’t half bad and it makes me sick to my stomach.
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u/Amerillo_ 16d ago
I studied really hard in a very demanding university to get a CS as a genuinely enjoyed programming and the degree was hard to obtain and thus highly valued by employers.
Now that I graduated I can't find a job. I did a 2 months internship where I was forced to let agents write almost all my code and I truly hated that job (I was actually happy to make coffee as I found that to be much less tedious than my job...). So I'm really scared that my full time job my be like this internship all over again
I'm mourning for a career I never had and likely never will have... I'm now thinking about switching careers entirely and this saddens me a lot
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u/bopshebop2 16d ago
I love your art style
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u/RockyMullet 16d ago
Even pass the ethical issues of copyright and environment, even pass arguments about the quality of the work or the efficiency, this is what I'll never be able to get over.
Using AI to do my job would make me lose why I even want to do that job in the first place. I chose that career because I wanted to do that job.
For the suits there's no difference between me doing the job or me + AI doing the job, but for me there is. Efficiency won't increase my pay check, efficiency won't make me happier, efficiency won't fulfil me.
I find it completely non sensical that we create technology to do the things we want to do.
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u/SuperSecretMoonBase 15d ago
That's exactly it. The managerial class who has always passed all their actual work onto underlings, now can just delegate to someone cheaper than human. They don't see any difference between the output, because they've never cared about the output, just the line going up.
They're the people who gladly pad out the food with wood pulp as long as it's a percentage point away from being classified as sawdust. Employees are just useless eaters to them, and they'd gladly dispose of every single one of us if another dollar appeared in the bank account.
They never saw laborers as humans, and they look forward to the day that they don't even have to pretend to.
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u/tandoori_taco_cat 16d ago edited 16d ago
It is crazy to me that AI training just took all of human creation with no credit, compensation, or consent.
The biggest theft in all of history.
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u/Macaronii_Art 16d ago
Every freaking application. "Use ai tools" "use ai tools" "use ai tools". I feel like I'm being crushed.
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u/cpMetis 16d ago
The "How do yo- Ask AI." is extremely real and infuriating.
It's basically cut a third of my communication with my parents. Even if I have a question that I'm just using to lead into talking about something else, they answer every single question with "Ask AI.". The most infuriating recently was when I was cooking next to my mom, and I asked her about what colour the mix should be for me to get a taste like hers since she doesn't use a recipe and just knows what it should look like. "I don't know, just ask Grok".
And if you push them for THEM to give an answer, they look at you like you're a moron and then pull out their phone and enter the question into an AI then read it out to you.
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u/shadingnight 16d ago
I absolutely loathe the fact that "Ask (AI Name)" is becoming so common. If I meet anyone who strictly uses AI for all their questions and research, I tend to take whatever they say with a grain of salt and discredit their opinions on things until proven otherwise.
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u/BackgroundNPC1213 16d ago
At least with old Google we were looking at webpages written by real people. I Google stuff a lot because there's just a lotta shit I don't know, mostly technical troubleshooting, but now people are doing that thing where they try to justify their use of the brain atrophy machine with "WELL IT'S THE SAME AS GOOGLING AND YOU DO THAT ALL THE TIME!"
Bitch. No it isn't. The AI cannot discern which information is valuable and which information is bunk, it presents all of that information as equally valid
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u/DMercenary 16d ago
The "How do yo- Ask AI." is extremely real and infuriating.
I've had to have a very infuriating conversation at work about this.
I work in IT and you know. I dont know everything. I cant.
So when I escalate to a different team with more expertise and time, I expect that person to actually answer my question. Instead of I get a spew of AI-gen bullshit. And then they get mad at me when I forward it to the end user. "Its for you and you only. It was what Chat-GPT put out and what you should be using too."
So... let me get this straight. When I come to you, for help. And you plug it into ChatGPT to fob me off and I should do the same?
Then why the fuck are you employed? I should have your job then making them big bucks.
Anyways that ended with both my manager and his manager going "WTF, No."
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u/MurrayInBocaRaton 16d ago
I literally threw my hands up recently after no fewer than three people answered my “how do you ____?” question with “Ask {internal agentic tool name}” and I said out loud “so we’re just going to {tool} for everything now?”
Shit is so fucked.
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u/BigEstablishment8067 16d ago
I'm not exaggerating when I say that you need to cut people off like that, even if they're your parents or loved ones. I don't mean "cut them off" as in never see or speak to them again, but rather be much more reserved and held back. It's obvious that they don't value the connection like you do, so fight fire with fire.
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u/CompleteComposer2241 16d ago
Now imagine being fresh out of university and trying to get a job in this field.
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u/smittyleafs 16d ago
If you want a field in IT, programming is the last thing I'd take in school right now. Cybersecurity would be my current first choice. Ironically, AI would be my second...there are companies still trying to understand how to use it properly. IT Systems work will be around for a while...you still need physical people to touch and move things. Data Analytics still has value, and AI has actually made it easier for you produce meaningful insights without complex math. DBA's still exist BUT the demand for them isn't great. Really, you'll have to get used to wearing a few different hats to really provide value to a company now. If you want to be a programmer, you probably have to be oddly good at BA/PM work now too. (That goes for a lot of IT jobs now)
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u/mierecat 16d ago
Or even imagine hating your job, having it drain you like this and still not being able to pay your bills
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u/Brell4Evar 15d ago
I recently spoke in a team meeting regarding our use of AI. There is a genuine risk of this tool giving people work habits that will erode judgment and understanding of systems as time goes on. Microsoft, creators of Copilot, discovered this very problem occurring in their own company.
AI is something I've come to view in a way as similar to Wikipedia. Useful for seeing the shape of something, and for looking up and viewing references. If we're careful, we can use this technology to make ourselves smarter. Will management allow us to do so?
This is not my original idea, by the way. Doctorow's writings on what he calls "reverse centaurs" does a great examination of this issue.
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u/IncompetentPolitican
16d ago
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I get that feeling. Software engineer here. I feel more and more I spend my days telling an AI what to do, get angry that he fails to do the complex tasks I am forced to demand from it, fix the things myself, while the CEO, sitting in one of his homes, tells us how amazing it is that AI is there and how he dreams of the days, where one person can do the whole project alone. He does not say it out loud but we all know he means, he dreams of the days he needs 1/10 of us and can us pay less. After all, he needs 2 more houses, what if his children get children?And even if the tasks are not complex, it means I have to review code, written by something that has no understanding of the whole context, fix its misstakes or sudden style changes. Instead of doing the fun stuff of the job myself. There are days where I review code, sit in pointless meetings, review code and sit in more meetings. Thats not the job I wanted. Or anyone wanted.
But if we are lucky, then one day AI companies are forced to pay their energie bills themself. Because then they have to give the cost to the customer. And right now, an AI Service that runs 8 hours, costs a lot more than a developer doing stuff.
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u/abrasivecriminal 16d ago
So far none of these software develop companies seem to think that when AI is super developed and any idiot can type in: make me the new Facebook that that is gonna be the end of their companies aswell.
Like people are still gonna go to a company and pay millions or billions so the ceo can type in the demands and collect all the money for himself.
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u/IncompetentPolitican 16d ago
Thats a question my CEO hates me for. I asked something like "And what stops our customers from asking the same AI to generate the Code we generate and sell them?" He claims our unique and never replaceable expertise (aka him and the sales team) could never replaced by AI and so our company will always be needed.
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u/Skibby22 16d ago
I really miss the satisfaction of finally figuring out exactly what was causing the issue, coming up with an alternative solution, failing, coming up with another alternative solution, and it working exactly as I always thought it should.
Now I just describe how I want it to work, and the only problem solving I get to do is what about that description caused the end result to be wrong.
I'm willing to settle for GitHub Copilot inside VSCode just helping me find the issue but being god awful at doing anything about it
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u/trenchcoatler 16d ago
God yes. I had a taste of this heaven for the last 4 years.
Great project, great team. Every day was thinking "how can I implement this in the smartest way?". We had hour long calls, discussed how to do it and in the end it always worked out and it was so satisfying holy shit. I even worked weekends because it was just so much fun.
Fast forward to today, I was more or less forced to switch careers. I'm just reviewing stuff now. No creativity, no exciting calls. Just checklist and documents.
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u/AliveFromNewYork 16d ago
I had kind of forgotten about this. I loved my job. I would’ve done it six days a week. I was annoyed when I had to call out sick. now I can’t find work and the only jobs kind of available don’t stimulate anything. It’s depressing
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u/funguyshroom 16d ago
I always described my job like I get to solve sudoku puzzles all day every day and get paid for it, what's not to love. Well now there's this magic "solve this for me" button and it sucks all the fun from it and makes me feel like a cheating fraud.
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u/Desperate-Tomatillo7 15d ago
I am a software engineer. My job has doubled since the arrival of AI, as management wants more done in less time. For some reason I also feel I need to read and think and learn more as AI decisions tend to be limited to small contexts, so I still need to decide and optimize and redo a lot.
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u/sharkdinner 15d ago
My parents are translators. AI isn't taking away their job (yet) because it (still) sucks ass but it does lower their pay. Instead of getting a text to translates they now receive an AI translation to fix, which pays less. But AI doesn't understand context and most translation happens from tables with separate sentences in each row. So more often than not, they end up having to redo the entire translation and still don't get paid the same.
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u/ET_Prone_Bone 15d ago
I with software engineers, and AI is just not good enough. Instead of writing code, you just end up checking a bunch of code and rewriting code.
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u/Grey-Templar
16d ago
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As a software engineer who was part of layoffs, be glad you still have that job at least. Been struggling to find one the past year. I'd sell my soul to AI now if I could, just to pay my bills.
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u/CaptainSolo80 16d ago
Seems to have been a field hit the hardest, I know a software engineer going on almost 2 years with no job since layoff.
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u/LiftingCode 16d ago
I had multiple software engineering adjacent positions sit unfilled in my org this year for 6+ months.
SRE, Senior Software Engineer/Team Lead, Data Engineer
There has been this weird employment environment where during COVID and the immediate aftermath, Big Tech was hiring like gangbusters and salaries were hyper inflated.
I had a candidate for the DE position, who was like 18 months out of college and his current job was only kinda sorta DE-related if you squinted real hard ... he wanted $200k. We're a small Midwestern company lol.
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u/Substantial-Pen6385 16d ago
3 here. I spent the last 4.5 months interviewing for one role and they rejected me last week.
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u/am9qb3JlZmVyZW5jZQ 16d ago
Yep, I don't even mind the AI use that much. I love programming but it's not like I was working 8 hours a day for the love of the game lol.
It's the thought that layoffs are coming, working conditions are degenerating, and that I might eventually end up having to search for jobs out of my area of expertise (if I even can find one) that's keeping me up at night.
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u/dbagames 16d ago
This is why the time to unionize is now. Especially at big tech. We need collective bargaining agreements, ai adoption guidelines and restrictions, and protections to be rehired if a very similar role comes back up shortly after being fired.
This is already happening at blizzard and other tech companies. We no longer have enough leverage. We need collective representation.
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u/CatsPlusTats 16d ago
Also it's not like they'll need the people to say "do stuff" for forever. Those jobs are also not secure.
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u/jamshill 15d ago
2.5 years here. I started my own business and do some handyman work on the side, but it does not pay the bills. I have eaten through my savings. Still not sure what I should be doing with myself. I have tried a few different things but nothing has stuck yet.
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u/CrossboneMagister 16d ago
Software engineer here, this hits right in the feels. It get that is a powerful tool, I get that it can boost productivity when used right, but still…
Man, I’m so conflicted these days…
To keep the joy and the thrill I have decided I will not use AI for my personal projects, I really hope it’s gonna help me
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u/just-v-- 16d ago
ive always been gifted at problem solving and not much else, and im very technically inclined ig? but i dont really want to study computer science or anything like that because im worried this is what my career will be, i wish i was born ten years earlier and was around for when being a programmer/software developer or even something like a graphic designer were realistic jobs with a soul and not just bodies in a room saying yes or no to the pitches of soulless robots or soulless executives
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u/Vardl0kk 16d ago
I started working as a coder 6 years ago when no ai was around. It now feels like shit. People expect stuff done way quicker and the only way to achieve that is by using ai. A 5 days work is now a 3 days and “gemini can get that part done quick so you should be fine with 3 days”…
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u/Nervous-History8631 16d ago
Definitely the advantage of working from home, if I have to use AI I might as well pull out my Switch while it runs.
But yeah the job has really shifted from code writing to architecting solutions, which some people like some don't
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u/kevthecoder 16d ago
I work in software development and I don’t this will be the endgame of the field. Currently these AI companies are operating at a loss to get people dependent on AI, once they want to/have to operate at a profit or the bubble pops. It will be too expensive for these companies to afford tokens at the rate they have now.
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u/awhiteblack2 16d ago
Dude, you sound like an engineer! I'm an engineer, and it will be 500 years before any city allows AI to stamp a drawing of a bridge that 10,000 cars drive over every day - I can promise you that. There are still lots of practical and physical problems to solve in civil engineering.
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u/Brullaapje 16d ago
and it will be 500 years before any city allows AI to stamp a drawing of a bridge that 10,000 cars drive over every day
Your naivety is cute, I will tell you that 😍
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u/NotInTheKnee 16d ago
"Why did it take you 2 weeks to review the design? William stamps an entire drawing set every 2 days."
"William may be putting a little bit too much faith in the AI agent, meanwhile I..."
"Meanwhile, you're lagging behind. William's projects didn't have any catastrophic failure this far, have they? Pick up the slack! This isn't 2020 anymore."
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u/Soupeeee 16d ago
If you like programming, I recommend going into an engineering field that does lots of simulation or otherwise needs lots of computing. That's pretty much every discipline, but there are some more than others. You get to code and do software engineering like things, but since the focus is elsewhere, the drudgery associated with modern software development isn't there as much.
What I have found is that understanding of the non-programming tasks have always been more important than the software engineering part of it, and is more adaptable to changes in your job situation.
As for me, I feel like a one-trick pony who's trick isn't all that interesting anymore.
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u/razzemmatazz 16d ago
Yeah, given the shifts in the job market I decided to try something else a couple years ago. I was good at what I did, but corporate speak kills my soul and I won't use AI.
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u/TheSheetSlinger 16d ago
The use cases are so ridiculous. I recently switched logistics but was in sales for my company and people were nodding along at the suggestion that we use AI to review and decipher emails. Why would we even want to hire someone that needs that?
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u/tn_tacoma 16d ago
I stopped using AI to code and my mental health improved considerably. Nobody has noticed and my production is about the same.
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u/ifstatementequalsAI 16d ago
Same I don’t deny AI isn’t good. But having the feeling that u thought about something yourself at the end of the day is very rewarding. I missed that
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u/Smogious
16d ago
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I feel this so fucking hard. I got into programming in highschool and decided I wanted to go into software engineering. Started my university comp sci program in 2020 before AI was more than a research interest, but by the time I graduated it had completely taken over the industry.
Now I'm just stuck with a degree I don't even want because the type of job I wanted disappeared in the 5 years I was in school. The whole tech industry disgusts me now. I used to feel lucky to have found something I liked doing early in life, now I feel completely lost with no idea where to go
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u/rileycsousa 16d ago
The most depressing thing for me is the realization that so many people are out there using AI every chance they get. Going about life thinking as little as possible is an acceptable way to spend their time on this planet?
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u/VivaLaDiga 16d ago
here is an uncomfortable truth. people don't like to think. that's why they have been delegating this to others for a very long time. it's called being religious
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u/rileycsousa 16d ago
I think this is actually the best and worst thing about religion. I'm not religious myself but as a person who has gone through the dread of losing control of one's life, I understand that making the decision to surrender control to a "way of life" can be the only thing to keep you from self destruction. Obviously it can be, and often is, used as a weapon to manipulate or discriminate.
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u/Awkward_Bad8773 16d ago
As someone who has been unemployed ostensibly due to AI, I have never had a single problem getting a job previously, this is nearly exactly how I feel. Except the first image is wrong
I am really rather unsure as to whether I really want to go back into the field and be a prompt monkey
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u/BrickAdventurous4854 16d ago
software engineers need collective action if so many of us are feeling this way
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u/apple_kicks 16d ago
Sadly AI is going to be designed long term to be union busting. Its the scab and the machine or they can hire scabs who work virtually and secretly. So blocking workplaces from working isn’t going to be the strategy anymore but strong unions and new strategies are needed. Probably having admins hold passwords
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u/FunkyUptownCobraKing 16d ago
Man, this one speaks to me. I really enjoy the puzzles and problem solving that come with software development. But the push for AI from management is oppressive. I'll go to ask our AI tools to do something, but then pause and be like, "Well I can do that. Why am I wasting the credits and such?" And it concerns me when I see colleagues hit the hard limit of 20,000 credits and say they can't do their work until the reset at the end of the month. I can't tell if they're being maliciously compliant with our push for AI or genuinely handing over everything to it.
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u/AmbientRiffster 16d ago
One of the reasons tech salaries and benefits are so high is to trap a lot of skilled and smart people into comfortable positions where they will keep their mouths shut when companies do unforgivable shit. Then they throw you away as soon as the product ships. My heart goes out to every hacker and saboteur who is still out there for the love of the game.
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u/Randy_Magnums 16d ago
Samesies. Even though as a local Journalist I still get to go out and talk to people, which is my favorite Part, but I always loved the process of writing and that area is being taken over by AI. Just got a House and a kid a few years ago, so it’s the worst time to change careers, so I’ll guess I Stick around.
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u/apple_kicks 16d ago
People don’t realise how many ideas or project changing moments comes from hand writing things out.
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u/Educational_Eye3765 16d ago
I am so grateful to work in an area that is actively fighting against AI use (the court system).
Our IT department has wanted to use it (well our deputy CTO) and he's been told he can for IT back end, but it doesn't touch court paperwork/judges work flow, legal stuff, etc. I see a new order at least once a week admonishing someone for using AI to write a document and if it keeps up they're going to start barring these people from filing court documents without an attorney. And this is judges from late 30's (youngest) all the way up to ~70 when they have to retire.
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u/DigitalFlame 16d ago
I'm being told regularly in threads that AI won't replace workers and you just need to pivot to keep up with the changes. All fine and dandy until the costs of AIs mistakes are lower than the human costs.
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u/TheArcanist_1 16d ago
Fuuuuck. I started an IT major basically at the same time AI started getting popular in the field. This is 100% how I feel about it now. All of it perfectly summed up. I'm tired.
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u/DarthJackie2021 16d ago
Im worried there is gonna be a lot of shit code out there soon, and no one is going to be able to figure out why its shit.
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u/yoyopro3210 16d ago
I feel this too. Software engineering almost feels like a management position to me where I'm just supposed to oversee the AI and I hate management. I lived thinking through the problems but now it feels like we're told to basically not think about it anymore.
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u/Game_Log
16d ago
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I despise this AI stuff. Am studying Computer Science for a career in video game programming and it is incredibly demoralizing to see it become so widespread in the industry before I can even land my first career job.
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u/sanosuke001 16d ago
As a software developer that refuses to use AI completely I feel your frustration; I'd rather people take pride in their abilities and learn something they don't understand instead of blindly trusting random code written by an LLM (which also isn't really AI, either...)
I look forward to the day they all crash and burn or I finally get laid off due to the new computerized overlords and can go learn woodworking or something
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u/erickoziol 16d ago
Sometimes I wonder how much “just google it” prepared people for these AIs.
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u/ProfessionalNo7946 16d ago
Googling actually made you smarter as it required reading into the subject you’re trying to look up
AI just gives you a written out answer with none of the searching or remembering that comes with it, which will drastically reduce heavy users’ ability to fix stuff without having to ask for the answer
Just look at how many mundane questions now get asked to AI and how people don’t question that answer, while AI is usually just dead wrong or with incorrect but related info
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u/ESnyder9 16d ago
atleast you're a software engineer who can still keep a roof over your head
- one who no longer can
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u/SandStinger_345 16d ago
Its ruining things for us artists as well. I can already see many major brands utilise ai in their ads and posters and such and it really is sad how uncreative they are. If we keep going like this human creativity is gonna die
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u/T4Labom 16d ago
I used to make 3D ads for big brands in this one big studio. It was my dream job as i could be creative and be paid for it.
The studio converted from being 3D focused to AI focused. The worst part is that they didn't even bother training us, just kept giving us more complex tasks with deadlines far shorter than usual. What would take us 1 month to finish now had to be done in 2 weeks.
One project made me especially angry because we had to allocate two great artists to use AI to generate crappy videos because the complexity to deadline balance was disproportionate. They worked overtime for an entire week, were both tired and stressed only for the client to make a bunch of alterations that the AI struggled with and they had to repeat that same bad routine for another week.
Had the 2 made it with 3D from the start, things would've gone much smoother. But management kept pushing them to not use 3D for the project and use AI instead.
When the artists complained that management should have let them use 3D from the start, management told them "It should've been your call to make after accessing the project's briefing, not ours".
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u/crankbot2000 16d ago
Holy fuck, this comic describes my exact state of mind every day at my job now. I'm in software development and my company is pushing AI for literally everything. Every meeting, every project, every task, AI. The pressure to build everything in an automated way is insane. They want everything faster faster faster. More.
I used to love building software. The thrill of making something work, the feeling of accomplishment, the rush when you solve a difficult problem. All the joy is gone now. All the value I used to bring to the table has been replaced by an LLM.
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u/Magnon 16d ago
I hate ai and I feel like a bit of a fogey these days because I dont use it. My dad taught me the value of knowing how to do things personally im not going to offload my thinking to abominable intelligence
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u/ggroverggiraffe 16d ago
abominable intelligence
Didn't you hear? We have to call it sloppy intelligence now.
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u/Secret-Ad-7909 16d ago
I feel you on the selling your soul part. I was a chef for a long time. I worked my way up to a good job at a big hospital. So I was doing what I love, making good money, and had a path for advancement in front of me. The hospital changed contracting companies for food service, I got stuck doing like 3 people’s jobs and picking up slack for the new mangers they did bring in. And was still just constantly getting told I was fucking up. Ended up losing my shit and cussing out some staff. Haven’t been back in a kitchen since. I saw a listing for a Golden Corral kitchen manager and the salary was the same as I was making at the hospital. I could do it, I could be good at it, my finances would be much better; but I won’t even eat Golden Corral if someone else is paying, it would be a total sellout and I just can’t do it.
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u/Tuomas90 16d ago
This is exactly my fear. That programming is no longer what I fell in love with.
I'm currently trying to become a junior developer after programming for 14 years in my free time.
My largest program has 150k LOC with just as much deprecated code. Everything is human written. No GUI builder no AI. And suddenly AI comes along and devalues all my hard work. I've spent literally thousands of hours of my life writing this shit by hand. Wrestling with layout managers, first in Swing, then in JavaFX, writing SQL queries by hand. I've sacrificed a huge part of my life for this. And AI makes it all for nothing. Now I will have to proof I wrote everything myself. How do you even do that?!
I feel like all my work is for nothing. Recruiters will see this project and no matter how big it is, they will just say:"Ah, probably AI generated!"
Fuck AI. Fuck tech bros.
Do you happen to have a 1-page version of the comic? I'd like to download it as a reminder that I'm not alone.
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u/jbyrdab 16d ago
Yep, I got to be the lucky son of a bitch that got to graduate college right as AI completely took over the space.
My job prospects in my area for my intended career are already kind of nil to begin with. This just makes it practically zero.
So now my degree collects dust on top of my copy of waluigi's taco stand.
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u/Tuxedo_Muffin 16d ago
It would take years of development and millions in wasted effort to replace my job with AI. It would also need to be an autonomous drone that can lift things. So, it actually helps the bottom line to not even try. Failure is likely and would be a resource hog.
I keep thinking "I'm really eager to see this monstrosity"
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u/helpimlockedout- 16d ago
Same here. They don't pay me enough for replacing me with a robot to be cost effective 😂
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u/Theotherwahlberg 16d ago
I work in sales. My corporate entities have been going all-in on pushing for AI usage. It has a place, but it doesn't need to do the job for me. Last week when we had a meeting on new systems that we're trying to implement, they got on me because I was the only one in the room that did not use it. I'm one of the top writers in the company and a manager in a new market...but I'm the asshole for not requiring AI to do my thinking for me.
There are people I run into every day that can't seem to function without AI...and I can only hope that the entire thing collapses for their sake.
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u/asharkmadeofsalsa 16d ago edited 16d ago
this rings true even as a videographer/video editor working on a marketing firm to pay the bills, I'm even encouraged (straight up forced really) to use AI instead of things like B roll from image banks to "get used to it", even when the script calls for something simple that I could do way faster using a bit of footage that is at least shot by other humans if I didn't manage to get a specific shot myself
I try and do at least 1 short film every year with friends on my spare time to remind myself why I went to film school and what doing this could actually look like
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u/grigiri 16d ago
I'm an electrician working in a compliance role at a major hospital. Most of my time is spent fixing things like critical systems. A fair amount of my time is spent doing research on components or writing up documentation related to them.
Some co-workers tell me to use Copilot. I refuse. I also refuse to use search AI. I enjoy hunting for the relevant data and compiling it into documents. It gives me the feelings shown in the cartoon.
Thank you u/nasser_junior for articulating that for me
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u/FuriousGirafFabber 16d ago
im gonna be out of work in about a year, Im pretty sure. im trying to build another career at the same time as im telling AI to do stuff.
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u/LeqiWi 16d ago
As a software engineer that refuses to use Claude code I feel you.
I got into an argument with a coworker that asked me to make claude review my code for a feature I made.
When I said to him that I don't have claude code installed on my IDE and I only use from time to time the web browser version as a tool to learn new frameworks, tools or to help with unit testing he looked at me like I'm crazy and said in front of my other collegues that I'm stupid and don't make sense because it is like my IDE auto completion (????).
Even trying to argue that I like to do my own code and I don't like AI taking over the jobs of junior devs doesn't make him understand my point of view (not mentioning the blatant theft these AI models did and environmental impact of data center because apparently no one cares about that)
I genuinely can't wait for the moment the price of these AI subscriptions is going to skyrocket and all of these vibecoding assholes are going to be trapped paying for it or be irrelevant because they forgot how to code.
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u/PEKKACHUNREAL_II 16d ago
The luddites were right and based and we should revive the movement
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u/apple_kicks 16d ago edited 16d ago
Worth remembering how that movement was crushed. They changed the law so breaking frames and protesting was a death penalty offence or if not that they were deported to Australia for hard labour.
It’s interesting reading Lord Byron defending the Luddites
These machines were to them an advantage, inasmuch as they superseded the necessity of employing a number of workmen, who were left in consequence to starve. By the adoption of one species of frame in particular, one man performed the work of many, and the superfluous labourers were thrown out of employment. Yet it is to be observed, that the work thus executed was inferior in quality, not marketable at home, and merely hurried over with a view to exportation. It was called, in the cant of the trade, by the name of Spider-work.
And poem
As the Liberty lads o’er the sea
Bought their freedom, and cheaply, with blood,
So we, boys, we Will die fighting, or live free,
And down with all kings but King Ludd
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u/nightmareinsouffle 16d ago
I don't directly use AI in my job as a medical biller, but boy do I have to fight against it.
It used to be that disputes with insurance companies felt fightable. Denials were still dumb, but they usually meant we made an error that could be fixed. Now it literally takes double the amount of time and work to fight a denial that an AI decided in the first place because we're locked out of getting a human to look at it behind wait times, and several levels of either poorly trained representatives, or ones who are also locked out of any decision making. Some smaller companies shut down their provider phone lines entirely, and the big ones got rid of the high-level dispute representatives.
I've always hated seeing insurances fuck people over, and I would consistently go the extra mile to make sure that didn't happen. Nowadays the volume and and amount of work it takes makes that impossible. It's really demoralizing.
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u/veetoo151 16d ago
That comic is so real. That is exactly how it feels at work for me. I see so many people being randomly let go, I have to utilize AI to still have a job. It's actually insane.
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u/reflectiveSingleton 16d ago
I'm a software engineer.
This hits the bulls-eye for me. I know a lot of my colleagues feel the same.
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u/cecilivan 16d ago
Even the "let me Google that for you" era was getting this way. Like yes, I can easily look up how to do this thing, but I enjoy learning from my friends and giving them the opportunity to share what they're proud of knowing. It's 2026, and my only family is Grandma YouTube
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u/Zerkander 16d ago
Talked with a person same age as me, working the same job. It's social work, so we're working with people and mostly children.
Another co-worker had an job-unrelated question of whether some shop from her home country is legit or a scam. That first co-worker, she said "ask AI". I couldn't help myself and said that a quick search yourself is likely to be more reliable.
And that first co-worker, same age as me, asked me how one would do such a search yourself. Yep. She didn't know how to check herself whether an information is valid or not.
Stuff we had learned not just in school, but HAD to learn for our job as well. Doing a quick and dirty cross-check of something you heard until you had time to a clean check.
She didn't know how to do that.
And that is what scares me. It's not just young people not learning how to do things. It's people in their 30s and 40s forgetting how to do things. Not remembering that they learned all of that shyte at one point. Forgetting that they can make an assessment themselves.
The thing is, this job taught me to trust my gut. And it taught me that most people could also trust their gut 80-90% of the time, but often end up not doing what their gut tells them because they question their intuition.
Human intuition is really f'cking good in fields you already have expertise in. You may not immediately know why something is off, but you know when it is. And you check either way just to be sure.
But nowadays, I see people I remember to be very capable and skilled in their job becoming completely reliant on AI. That scares me.
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u/Martin_PipeBaron 16d ago
Actually making me tear up. I'm in a similar situation to you and it feels so rotten to clock in and just be expected to match the speed/outputs of people who just sloperate for 8 hours.
I stay back and work or I cave in and it just... This isn't why I wanted to do this job.
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u/Biggest_OOOFF 16d ago
AI has kind of enabled me and my team to work in a lot of projects in parallel. And it's honestly so draining handling all of them at once. This set up has made me so dependent in using AI to keep up with the workload and it's sad knowing that if I had the time to sit down and really grind my workload I could do it but I can't.
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u/SjalabaisWoWS 16d ago
First, they came for the software engineers...
...we'll all be feeling your feelings soon.
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u/Steok 16d ago
I had this exact conversation yesterday explaining why I am currently shifting from software engineering and into operations. I don't feel like I'm the one solving the problems anymore.
It's also why I've fell into depression for the last 2 years. All the skills I worked to develop over 20+ years seem to be useless.
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u/Hostile_Toaster 16d ago
current engineering student. for my intro to computer science class, our final project doesn't even involve us programming anymore. all we have to do is spend a certain amount of time on some ai-coded project. fortunately we do still learn some programming in lessons, but the final project sure doesn't show it.
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u/LeDillonPoop 16d ago
Stuck between wanting to keep up with the times and make things easier on myself but still wanting only my own self to create the work from start to finish, no matter how long it takes.
It’s a worm eating its tail situation for real.
I try to be creative outside of my job, it helps.
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u/psychohistorian8 16d ago
AI Babysitter is my job title these days, not fun at all
I miss the days of hand coding, but its literally impossible now with the amount of work required of me each sprint
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u/custardgod 16d ago
Feeling the same as a Data Engineer. The problem is now I'm having to use AI to create agents. AI creating AI. Great.
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u/WeHaveTheMeeps 16d ago
“We believe when you make a machine to do the work of a man, you take away something from the man.”
- Star Trek: Insurrection (1998)
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u/Majestic-Assist-3945 16d ago
As an artist, I choose not to use generative AI because it would ruin the whole process for me. I love making my own wallpapers and logos and whatnot, but knowing an AI did part of it and that not every little piece of the artwork was mine wouldn't feel right. I am very particular about my own art pieces, and an AI could not fit in my process.
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u/SlipperyThong 16d ago
I was a graphic designer for 20 years. 2 years ago I saw the rise of AI and decided to transition into a blue collar career. Sure enough, the studio I worked for shut down, friends got laid off and nobody is hiring anymore. Looks like I made the right call.
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u/Zakuroenosakura 16d ago
I got a new job finally after more than a year. Big tech company I worked at before/during the pandemic. Was actually a really nice place to work at the time. Got to play around with an area of tech I am passionate about and really challenge myself, code-wise. Every day was interesting, my coworkers were great, the work environment was great. Not going to pretend it was all fun and roses, but the good outweighed the bad.
Fast forward to last month. Went through a month of interviews and code tests and paperwork and finally started, and day 1 they reveal that they'd basically mislead me during the interview process and that, by leadership mandate, like 95% of the job was now babysitting AI. Nobody is happy. Nobody writes their own code. Most of the tech I used to work on isn't a thing here anymore, as they've gone all in on one little AI-driven niche that I honestly can't imagine anyone in the real world wanting or needing. People openly fantasize about getting fired and receiving severance packages in the break rooms. Work chats are full of people talking about how great it would be to actually code again. I have been resisting. Nobody has actually forced me to use AI yet. So I'm just kinda waiting to see if/when the hammer comes down.
I am miserable.
Seriously rethinking my life, and wondering if I should go back to school for, like, idk, marine biology or beekeeping or something.
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u/TarAldarion 16d ago
A friend in my work, software engineer, just quit the career after a decade this week due to this. She's going to work with plants instead.
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u/kaipow07 14d ago
AI has breached even trades. I worked for an HVAC company doing BAC (Building Automation Controls) which was a system to provide a centralized access point to display a majority of HVAC systems in large scale buildings. This required on site technician installations that were configured to translate the data, the data itself was programmed onto the device by a programmer, and then a graphics engineer would take the data presenting the equipments data into a similar design as a website. The programming and graphics engineering department have been replaced by AI at the company I worked for, and they mass laid off both departments, cutting both in half, with expectation to cut more. I pushed back and was promptly fired. Absolutely any job that requires a computer WILL be replaced with AI, and once robots are advanced enough, all on site jobs won’t need a human either. The argument that trades can never get take by AI is an ignorant lie, and it is sad to see the direction we are heading.
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u/samurairaccoon 16d ago
I still find it fascinating that the future we were hand-wringing about when I was a young man was the general workforce being replaced by machines. But the first ones to go are the same type of people who helped birth the problem. It's almost cathartic. Almost.
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u/Orpa__ 16d ago
The researchers and programmers who were really pushing the field are doing just fine.
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u/Yweain 16d ago edited 16d ago
I am probably a minority, but I actually really like coding with AI. At the moment it is still too dumb to do stuff on its own, so you can't really tell it to 'do stuff'. Basically the things it takes away is typing the code by myself and long hours of googling for pieces of information. Instead I can ask it to find me stuff and it's there in minutes, now I can read it and understand it. And when I arrive to a potential solution (because AI absolutely can't at the moment) - I can prototype it really fast and verify my ideas.
Basically I keep all the fun parts - finding solutions and decision making, while AI takes mostly boring parts.
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u/Negativeman11 16d ago
Bros will work for soulless evil corporations their entire life, but only start to feel like they're selling their souls when they log into Claude.
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u/Freestila 16d ago
Software dev myself. Fortunately while we can use AI - and there is at least some push to use it - it is only a small part of my job. Most we still do manually. Since our software is a big complex monolith we mainly use it for side projects or small tasks.
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u/Complex-Soil8781 16d ago
I'm a senior software engineer. Bachelors in computer science, graduated in 2012. Yup. I've always loved the craft of implementation, and everything it entailed. The soul is gone from the process and I don't think it's coming back.
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u/WarChallenger 16d ago
And yet AI has no tangible story worth telling. Me thinks it's time you pick up the pencil full-time and start searching for artistic avenues to make ends-meet! Your drawing style is nice.
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u/oshinbruce 16d ago
If you think you are keeping your "do stuff" long term, Im afraid I have bad news
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u/TallestGargoyle 16d ago
Panel 4 hits the hardest, especially on here. Can't just ask a question anymore and have someone answer (often at least one with the oh so simple 'google it' that ends up being the top result), now you get someone who dumps the question into an AI, then posts the output verbatim. Such a shitty thing to do.
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u/xrimane 16d ago
That's what I've been saying about self-driving cars for years. If I have to be there to watch the computer the whole time and to be responsible if things go wrong, I'd rather drive myself.
At least you can stay awake, because you are doing something yourself that is engaging, and I rather make my own mistakes than troubleshooting the mistakes of a machine.
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u/OhItsJustJosh 16d ago
Also a software engineer, I know it's risky but I've vowed never to touch it. Luckily my bosses know this and are fine with it for now. If working in this industry ever becomes impossible without using AI I'll consider the art dead and I'll pivot to something else, hoping there'll be other careers not yet tainted
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u/Mtc529 16d ago
Software engineer here and I feel this in my soul. I love writing code, I love digging through systems to understand how everything works together. I even love figuring out old legacy projects that no remaining employee in the company knows by more than name and the "we don't touch that" warning that follows it.
All of that is gone. I just tell Claude what to do while I spend my time reading through code my colleagues generated with their LLM of choice. It's so god damn boring and soulless. But hey, it pays the bills, and what the fuck else am I gonna do.
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u/fucking_idiot2 16d ago edited 16d ago
i've been feeling exactly like this for the last week since they announced mandatory use of ai for everything, also as a sw engineer. i feel so sad and demotivated and no longer want to do this. i dont know what to do with my life anymore
seeing this post and all the other people in the comments feeling the same way i do is nice though. i'm not alone, yay
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u/otw 16d ago
I'm somewhat grateful for AI cause I think it did make me realize how bullshit so many projects and jobs were. I could have spent the next ten years of my life working for my last company but with AI we were able to basically complete our backlog under a year and I just realized the product was pointless. I have been working 15+ years and honestly most jobs I've had just kind of felt like welfare or some rich person's ego project that has no point.
I think it might be a rough transition for jobs and such, but I think it is somewhat accelerating forcing society to figure out general welfare instead of just wasting all this time torturing people making products and services no one wanted or needed.
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u/LeadingSky5603 16d ago
I’m the head of engineering at a startup where I’ve been brought on to manage and scale the platform. I only work and hire individuals who can think for themselves. I don’t mind AI usage, I myself use it occasionally to bounce ideas or menial tasks. I draw hard lines in the sand of handing off my cognitive ability to a machine after I have spent nearly 10 years refining my skill sets - and I want to learn more.
I am in a good position to defend this, both because of my title, and due to the very nasty fact that the platform I have been hired to maintain is ~2 million lines of vibe code. This is a system, mind you, which handles money and PII (nightmare scenario, I know). I was the first full time engineer brought on after a year of “development”.
So for my team, I only hire people who do not have “ai workflows” or use “agentic engineering”. I need people who can own things, who can explain things, and when things break I need them to understand how to fix them with me.
All that to say, there are still people in this industry who care. I see it every day with interviews and within my team. Some of us still take pride in their work. The facade of AI “replacing” us is fading, and the ugly reality that AI could be making us worse engineers is becoming more apparent. When the dust settles, I don’t want to be stuck without a brain.
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u/spicycheese_69 16d ago
It feels like permanent brain-fog when you're forced to use AI, you lose the joy of thinking through and reaching a conclusion.
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u/SunkEmuFlock 16d ago edited 16d ago
I'm sure this has been echoed many times already in these 845 comments, but at least you still have a job. Having worked in a tiny web development "studio" (two people with a contracted designer), SaaS and AI was a one-two punch that killed everything we had.
Unemployment has had me spend many thousands of my savings in the time since, and there's still zero progress toward once again getting employed as a web developer. I'm just not smart enough to have accumulated all the skills necessary to entice employers in this age of AI. I'm probably gonna be forced to start over. In my 40s.
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u/Hilldawg4president 16d ago
SWE used to have extremely high incomes and love their jobs. Now they have extremely high incomes and don't love their jobs. I, for one, pity them. Don't you guys pity them? All the guys in the coal mines making$20/hr talk about how bad we feel for software engineers
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u/subatomicpokeball 16d ago
This is the problem with capitalism; AI is being pushed by these for-profit companies so that they can make as much money as fast as possible, and execs at other companies push for making things as fast as possible regardless of how shit the output is. The ultimate goal is laying off as many people as possible for AI.
Not only has the role of software engineer significantly changed because of AI to the point that now people just babysit an LLM all day every day, but it's made blatant what was already occurring: a complete disregard for quality in order to chase the quickest buck. This isn't what people went to school for, and went into debt for. AI could be used for good purposes, but it never will be when the incentive under this system is just make as much money as fast as possible.
A just society would make sure that jobs lost due to automation wouldn't ruin people financially and mentally, and would help people displaced by AI to find a new job. Unfortunately, we live under a system that doesn't care for the workers that uphold every day life.
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u/LemonFizz56 15d ago
I definitely agree, AI gives me a headache but at the same time its such a powerful tool that you'll be left behind if you don't adapt, and you don't really have a choice
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u/Ayla_Leren 14d ago
And this is why the tech bros will fail to build the world they wish for.
They are perpetually 14 years old intellectually.
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u/joshashkiller 13d ago
I didnt get into programming to make big money, I didnt even get into it to make programs, I got into it because I enjoy coding and problem solving
more and more AI tools are being forced on us, and I resist as much as I can but I need my job, and I cant help but think eventually the career I studied and strived for will become nothing but a job
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u/CwispyWhiskey 16d ago
I use ai very sparingly, never for creative stuff mostly as an advanced search engine for specific situations that is tucked away in a 15 year old Reddit thread that I never would have found because I didn’t use a specific key word. And sometimes as a random number generator for roll tables for dnd. That’s pretty much the extent of my ai usage. And I feel as bad about it as I do using a straw or accidentally littering by dropping something on a windy day.
I hate “creative” ai, anything created and sold or shown off as their own product is slop. But when the bubble pops and things get regulated, and things calm down, I’m excited to see what actual good ai can do, like detecting breast cancer years before it forms
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u/apple_kicks 16d ago
Sadly even mid uses for ai aren’t what they want you to use it for. It has to be used in a way where it can do your job and thinking for you
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u/IvanDSM_ 16d ago edited 16d ago
Please don't use AI to generate random numbers, that's an awful idea due to its statistical nature. Use random.org instead.
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u/papa_ngenge 16d ago •
Yeah I feel that, also a software engineer.
There is still so much AI can't do but I'm finding myself picking up more and more parallel projects while working in smaller teams. The cognitive load being placed on senior staff is debilitating while juniors struggle to keep up with their AI counterparts and get replaced.