While the idea behind AI was that it would automate manual tasks and help workers focus on more value-added activities, some workers fear it will outright replace them — and that’s already happening
Yeah, it already happened to the journalist that would have written this article. I find it a bit funny that the picture caption is just the prompt they used to generate it
First it was funny, then sad…
Maybe if people hadn’t pushed everyone in the entire fucking world into my field we wouldn’t have this problem
Do you mean to tell me it wasn’t a quick get-rich scheme and people who aren’t interested in the field will have issues after doing math puzzles 8 hours a day in front of a monitor before going home to do more on github?
But the rich non-programmer guy told me so!
If your job can be automated. Your job will be automated. Even if the work it produces is hot runny shit.
They would rather pump out pure garbage than pay an honest wage for honest work. It doesn’t even have to work. They’ll just put an arbitration clause in the EULA. Then sit back and count their money.
I’m not sure that works. There were 20 shillings to the pound.
So £0.75 a week.
This inflation calculator:
https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/monetary-policy/inflation/inflation-calculator
£75 in 1843 is equivalent to £8,310.96
So 15s then is equivalent to £83.11 a week, £4321.72 a year.
40 hour week (which is implied to be too low). ~£2.08 an hour
So if he worked over 40 hours you’re talking a sub £2/hour wage. Around $2.70 in US money.
I suspect the stat relies on converting to dollars before applying inflation as GBP to USD was about 1 to 5 then instead of about 1 to 1.33
It’s fun but I wouldn’t want to denigrate Dickens by saying he got poverty wrong to make a political point.
That was from December of '21. It would be $15.69 now.
Another thread put it at 16.14 an hour.
Not surprised, I just clicked on the first inflation calculator that came up. I think it was the BLS CPI calculator.
And I only did it in dollars from December of '21 until now. Converting back to shillings, either in '21 or Dickensian times, before bringing it forward to today could result in a big difference due to the charging exchange rate between the pound and the dollar.
GODSDAMN YOU BRETTON WOODS
Does anyone from Europe recognize this? Because it isn’t what I’m seeing.
This is because there isn’t a job shortage. It’s offshoring. The company I (thankfully willingly) left 2 years ago has shifted all of their software hiring to Europe. And since I left has had multiple US focused layoffs. All while the Euro listings keep popping up. And I get it, the cost of living is much lower and the skill set is equivalent. So yea, get your bank. But, this is companies exploiting Europe/Asia, rather than it being something Europe/Asia is immune to.
It took one year to find a replacement for a colleague who left the company. He was a senior in his field.
Maybe we should start with kicking out the non-nerds ??
nerds are often egotistical, selfish and individualistic. Let’s kick them out and unionize instead
Your logic is blowing my mind.
Nothing will meaningfully improve until the rich fear for their lives
It’s not just grads. I have 1 open senior position, 100 applicants. A good 10% of them with 15+ years of experience have had no job in the last year, or have things like “Amazon fulfillment center” as their most recent job. Shits rough if you find yourself laid off or if the company you’re working for went out of business.
This has why I’m happy to work in public service. It’s very stable but the salaries aren’t as high.
I know a guy with three degrees and decades of experience on a resume littered with well-known companies and astounding projects.
2.5 years out of work.
This is the guy who should be fixing slopper code and he’s working volunteers and startups so his resume isn’t toxic from an Uber or Amazon gig.
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Did I apply to your position as that sounds like me. Just passed the one year point.
I’ve been out of tech work for near as long as I have career experience.
Each day feels another nail in the coffin of those 6 years of education.
I don’t regret my education. My major wanted to get out of LAS the way engineering did and im so glad it was an LAS degree as I feel it is a much better foundation.
LAS?
So old man time. In the early nineties things did not look great. Almost any college degree was not bringing in a salary one could like think about having a family with. Then came the late nineties and dot com and tech jobs were like the only thing that paid to possibly have what was, in many peoples mind, the typical middle class life. You know own your own home thing eventually. Since then its been tech or bust and now tech is bust and there is no go to field for people to run to.
Homeowning and paying a mortgage, especially now, is the single most important thing maintaining my quality of life.
A neighbor recently sold and it is now a rental. Paying that rent would effectively raise my housing costs about $20k a year.
It’s almost exactly the same house and lot. It’s insane.
Is it fixed? although interest rates are likely to go down so even a non fixed is helpful currently.
I honestly think this is a lie because it’s because people are mainly going for SWE or Game Dev. But literally everything else in the computer bubble is still doing fine
To some extent, yeah. I work in web development and there’s no shortage of opportunities for someone good at reactive front end development and JSON APIs. But I think there is a shortage of grads who have the necessary skills.
I’ve been trying to grow my business, and it’s frankly depressing how many people graduate with computer science degrees without learning the basics of the field, the volume of vibe coders is too damn high.
I find the jobs are super picky. Had one with a laundry list except for one job scheduling software and I had experience in the one they wanted but the feedback I got back was that the other one was real important even though I had the other and everything else. So I had experience with job scheduling software in general. including one they used. but not the other. and in that laundry list is software way more complicated than job scheduling. Through most of my career having about half of what they wanted was fine and they got that picking up the rest was not going to be a big deal for anyone who had experience in the field.
Tech is kind of all based around SWE though. What are these other roles you are referring to?
what runs the software?
I don’t like my job so I went back to school for tech. Not for the salary, but because I genuinely enjoy it. After 8 months of applying, I got 1 phone interview.
The job I hate went fully remote around that time and I just gave up entirely. I’ll just keep doing a job I hate but at least I can work at home.
The first sentence of the article shows the problem.
For years, we heard about the tech talent shortage — that there were a glut of jobs and not enough bodies to fill them.
The problem wasn’t ever “bodies,” which people have always misunderstood. It’s qualified workers.
I worked in tech for a long time, at a bunch of different companies, and I never once worked anywhere that there was a glut of jobs and “not enough bodies” to fill them.
The people going into these careers includes a large number of people who want the money but aren’t qualified do what we’re looking for.
It’s not just that. HR departments (who, let’s be honest, were never exactly super-clear on what tech roles are or do because they’re busy with everything else) have been infected by AI to the point that no one can just see a job and apply for it unless they rearrange everything in the resume to match the job posting verbiage exactly.
Everyone who makes it past that hurdle are sorted lowest-to-highest salary requirements. Oh you have seventeen years experience? Fuck you. Everyone after that is sorted by age/race/ whatever. It’s the perfect system for fucking up tech hiring.
Unless you rebrand everything you do as AI. Then you’ll get 100 million dollars from Zuckabug. (It used to be “cloud” but that was a long time ago now). So the tech manager who knows what they’re looking for gets a bunch of applications from newbies who talk like AI is everything and they don’t want that.
It’s super fucked.
Its more than that; companies also continuously propagate the message of “shortage of workers” while continuing to raise the requirements for entry level positions more and more. It reaches a point where “entry level” is not attainable for most fresh grads to get experience, and keeps their starting wages (and continuing wages) very well depressed due to the high supply.
Its a very targeted campaign to make sure educated workers are oversupplied, tied down with student debt, and don’t get too many ideas of independence in their heads.
I knew of a company that listed an internal tool as a job requirement so they could claim a skill shortage and hire foreign workers. They coached them to put that tool on their resume.
It’s a bit more nuanced than that. A lot of college grads I’ve interviewed come out expecting to be senior level when they don’t even have a basic foundation of IT. Don’t expect to get paid 6 figures right out of college when you have 0 experience and can’t even provide basic answers to questions that help desk people know. Colleges have lied to them that we(the IT industry) needs them and that they’re special. Show me you have the foundation before telling me how the industry works.
can’t even provide basic answers to questions that help desk people know
University is not a job training program though. A degree demonstrates that you have the skills to figure things out, not that you already have everything figured out. Even with decades of experience, it takes me a bit of time to spin up on a new library, framework, programming language, etc.
Companies are supposed to provide this training, not just to new hires, but to all employees. It does take a little extra time to teach new hires, but their salaries are also lower so it should balance out. And if they want to keep those employees around, then they should give them generous pay increases so they don’t just jump for a salary increase.
Sorry but a degree just demonstrates that you can pass exams and follow rules. Almost all new graduates I knew had a big ego, a lack of critical thinking, that combined in a massive Dunning Kruger effect. They are better middle management material than engineers. They can’t even RTFM, like c’mon. And AI is just making all this worse.
I don’t expect you to know everything, but while you’re in college you can still learn AD, spin up a server, make a domain. See the basics of a web server, see how HFWs work…the foundation of IT. Companies shouldn’t be paying you and paying to train you for learning things that, if you’re interested in this career path, you should have learned on your own.
Master in computer science
Doesn’t know how to restart a web server.
I don’t mean “doesn’t know the flavour of Linux” I mean doesn’t conceptually know what a web server is so can’t restart the service running on the box.
Yeah, it’s going to be a couple years before you break into the high earner. The problem is that silly valley was hiring tech grads at $300k total comp when money was cheap. Money isn’t cheap anymore.
AI money is stupid cheap if you know who to bullshit. And, y’know, have no principles.
God this is true.
I’ve seen some real snake oil projects get massive finding and everyone on board getting promos.
The number of times I’ve had to just say “thank you for your time” and cut a interview shoot is way to much. Shit like this is way way to common.
Not to mention that many IT degrees are basically worthless as far as practical experience is concerned. You’d be better off spending $100k on certification training.
%100 agreed on that. The amount of on the job training I’ve got to put into fresh college grads is insane.
It doesn’t help that conpanies lie on their requirements in job postings. Even entry level retail jobs are asking for 2-3 years of retail experience. That’s just insulting to those with retail experience and an impossible “entry level” requirement. Leads people to just ignore any requirements.
How much is it that these companies don’t want to train. I have a hard time believing your job is so advanced and technical you couldn’t find someone qualified at any point.
Training people up would be a great idea when you have the attitude that you’re going to keep working there for 30 years. Those old “company man” jobs are all but gone. If you stay at a job 5 years, people start to wonder if there’s something wrong with you. That’s just starting to be enough time for training to be worth the investment.
If tech was unionized, and the union had the attitude that they are basically a trade guild that will build up your skills, that would change things.
(…) I never once worked anywhere that there was a glut of jobs and “not enough bodies” to fill them.
I have. My first job wasn’t the worst at this but it happened to some extent. My last company had such a huge disparity between work and employees that every single one of their IT projects (dunno about the rest) was in constant state of delays, hotfixing and putting out fires. Things were so bad people were moved between projects on daily basis and at one point management decided to throw everyone in the department (including folks who just joined the company and newbies with little to no programming experience) to triage one of them.
That’s not to mention poaching team members from projects they promised more bodies to (only informing the client about the latter decision) and many other issues. They absolutely needed more people but the way the company is run does little to help with that.
The worst party? They’re still growing as a company while their burnout rate stays unchanged. So yeah, it’s a thing.
Ultimately the problem is an over saturated market and universities letting their programs grow too large.
No, the problem is greedy corporations.
There is an active need for many developers, think of every time you’ve used terrible software, every time a program crashed or you found yourself manually doing something and thought “there should be a tool for this”, every bad search and broken social media site.
Hell, we’re supposed to be in the middle of an “AI boom” and someone has to actually implement all those pie in the sky “automate away everyone’s jobs”. While AI can, debatably, write the code for that, it still takes a person to design, architect, implement, test and validate those systems.
No. The entire technical foundation on which “computer science” is built is crumbling due to lack of maintenance and funding and desperately needs people to fix it, however corporations are doing their what they do best; devaluing, destroying, and parasitizing their surroundings.
The ultimate problem is greed and an uncontrolled lust for power.
No.
They would like it to be. We’re really expensive because they can’t do it. As soon as all shit hits the fan guess who starts earning more.
As soon as all shit hits the fan guess who starts earning more.
A tech farm in <insert developing country> who will vibe code a patch for half the cost? (h/j)
Two decades of “just learn to code bro”, will do that to a profession.
The industry has brought in a ton of soulless goons and uninterested/stupid workers for a decade and it’s destroyed the industry.
I’m not saying there aren’t good people, but I have interviewed hundreds of people over 10+ years for jobs in tech, and the quality bar dropped a lot.
This started well before AI. I met people from Apple/Amazon/Google/etc. who functionally could not do their job, contributed nothing to projects, and were highly paid. Only a few big companies were the exception.
I’ve met a ton of people with phds and advanced degrees from prestigious schools that were total crap too.
We shovelled so many people into the system because the jobs sounded amazing and they’d pay stupid prices for a degree. We fully industrialized low performance hiring, so yeah, no surprise packages are dropping.
Plus, I used to get time to teach interns and new grads too. The staff we taught grew into way better workers than the job hoppers with 6 jobs at fancy companies over 3 years who had never completed a real project beyond the shiny prototype.
The last 3-4 years I had been constantly threatened about looming layoffs, and that we needed to meet targets at all costs. I’ve been perennially told “if we’re just heads down and all out until [6 months from now/project completion] it’ll all be good again”. Only for the cycle to repeat again and again and again.
The big tech machine destroyed my mental health and I’m out, and I’m much much happier and healthier. I still work in tech, but I’m incredibly selective about the jobs I take, and I’ll never work in corporate tech again.
I still work in tech, but I’m incredibly selective about the jobs I take, and I’ll never work in corporate tech again
What exactly do you mean by this? I’ve also wanted to get out of tech but have zero experience in anything else so idk what to do
I will only work for small companies now. And only when my personal views match and I honestly feel what I’m working on is worthwhile to society.
I like the experience a lot more this way.
I’m lucky to be able to make that choice, but the work is much more rewarding.
Biotech is also awful rn
6 figure jobs are still common, but not at the entry level. The companies that used to offer such thing are taking that money and investing in AI, thinking that they won’t need new blood.
They’re wrong, but that’s what’s happening.
This is bang on.
