Brutal. I think AI led to my being laid off as a software developer, too. It's not quite so clear as the examples here for copywriters, but the company was very interested in using AI to ease the workload, and I can't even say I disagreed with it. I was using it myself.
I can't even paint them in a sinister light. They couldn't afford me, and now they had a way to get all the work done with their other developers that were less senior. They were clearly sad to let me go, but they didn't see that they had any choice financially. They weren't a big FAANG company with jillions of dollars. They only had a couple dozen employees.
I do wonder how people are going to get to be senior anything in the future, though. It's only going to be people who are really into it that are willing to work that hard to make it happen. The alternative, AI, is just so much easier than it's hard to justify putting that much effort into learning it, unless it's your thing.
The problem is that in most cases businesses can afford you, but they choose to be "unable to". It's called budgeting, and the ceiling only represents existential limits for small or dying businesses. The rest of the time, it is defined only to maximize profit, which means using their power to shift the negative part of economic changes onto individuals as much as mathematically possible, rather than the business suffering proportionately.
Engineers (both HW and SW) are often fantastically bad at understanding how business works, including where their salary comes from and how much value they are producing, versus how small the % of the value they produced is which gets returned to them as their salary.
This problem is acute with older hardware and manufacturing engineers who drank all the corporate propaganda they've been fed for decades. I once worked with a senior manufacturing engineer who didn't clock his overtime because he didn't want the huge, multinational corporation we worked for to go bankrupt.
> How do the wealthy get so wealthy? Mostly by some form of cheating. One way that's relevant to one current case is depicted in Philip Roth's 2004 novel 'The Plot Against America':
> "Every subcontractor when he comes into the office on Friday to collect money for the lumber, the glass, the brick, Abe says, 'Look, we're out of money, this is the best I can do,' and he pays them a half, a third -- if he can get away with it, a quarter -- and these people need the money to survive, but this is the method that Abe learned from his father. He's doing so much building that he gets away with it..."
Nobody wants to stop using AI but people don’t want to admit that it is a way to senior-free future and people bored by AI. But as there will be an interrupted continuity the next generation will be…
Competition is hard so we have to use AI to stay competitive - last time I read similar was… testimonies of concentration camp guards when they were asked why they overlooked atrocities.
> people don’t want to admit that it is a way to senior-free future
Can you tell me more? Everything I've read indicates it affects juniors/new devs more. Is that what you mean by a 'senior-free' future? One in which there are no seniors in 10-20 years because there are no juniors now?
I would say "yes" because a) they don't have to demean themselves by racing to the bottom against an AI b) they no longer have to work for such a scummy company.
(Of course, I'm not being 100% serious, and your personal financial situation may be at odds with the tone of this comment)
I can't even paint them in a sinister light. They couldn't afford me, and now they had a way to get all the work done with their other developers that were less senior. They were clearly sad to let me go, but they didn't see that they had any choice financially. They weren't a big FAANG company with jillions of dollars. They only had a couple dozen employees.
I do wonder how people are going to get to be senior anything in the future, though. It's only going to be people who are really into it that are willing to work that hard to make it happen. The alternative, AI, is just so much easier than it's hard to justify putting that much effort into learning it, unless it's your thing.