this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2023
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I've been unemployed for 7 months. Every online job I see that's been posted for at least 6 hours has over 200 applications. I'm a senior Dev with 30 years experience, and I can't find work.
I'd say generative AI is an existential threat as bad as offshoring was for steel in the early 80s. I'm now left with the prospect of spending the last 20 years of my work life at or near minimum wage.
After all, I can't afford to spend $250,000 on a new bachelor's degree, and a community college degree might get me to $25/hr, and still costs thousands. This is causing impoverishment on a massive scale.
Ignore this threat at your peril.
Your issue sounds more like a capitalism issue. FANG companies lay off thousands of employees to cut costs and prepare for changes in the economy. AI didn't make them lay off all those employees, just corporate greed. Until AI can gather requirements, accurately produce code with at least 80%, can compile the software itself, it isn't a threat.
Edit fix autocorrect
and 100% accuracy. Only a fool would trust something coming out of AI and slap it right into production right now.
I agree though I was following the 80/20 rule. if the softwares essentially free and does 80% of your business needs businesses would be happy. Either way AI is nowhere near that since it requires someone with the knowledge currently to get it anywhere close to a complete project.
I understand how it works. The fact remains that companies already laid off people because of AI, and until now, I have never been unemployed more than 2 months.
I've also never seen a market in which most job posting garner 200 to 500 applications within 24 hours. It is armageddon out here.
I'm a senior dev too, and at first I thought the same, but really it's a market downturn. Companies are just afraid to hire right now. I'd look into generative AI, try to understand how it works. That's how I've been spending my time, and yeah, it's intuitive the way they do it but the more you understand how it works the more you realize that it's not ready to take our jobs. Yet. Again maybe someday, but there is a lot of work that needs to be done to get something semi up and running, and the models that Google uses are not going to be usable for every company. (Take a look at all the specialized models already).
Our job never goes away, but it does constantly evolve. This is just another point where we have to learn new skills, and that may be that we all need to be model tuners some day. At the end of the day the user still needs to correctly describe what they want to have happen on the screen, and there are currently no ways to take what they describe into a full piece of software.
Hard to believe a senior dev can't find work. Those positions are the most needed. Also 25 an hour is 50k a year. No where in the US are senior devs paid that little. I suppose you may not be US based, but your cost for college seems to imply US, albeit at an expensive school.
I was not saying 25 for a dev job, i was saying that for other kinds of work i might be able to get without getting a new degree.