What will you do if you're made redundant?

crash out

If you genuinely think that you might then planning for the eventuality might be a valuable exercise?

I have a hard time seeing any real job loss from AI, as it still has a hard time navigating spaghetti codebases which are the majority in enterprise.

If anything most job loss is due to incompetent leadership that has to balance their budgets as the cost of AI is increasing.

I think this is a good point, and I should add that I don’t mean just AI-related job losses (even if they are a ‘big’ visible factor) - others include what you said, as well as corporate greed and the change in company culture, where they seem to be cost cutting to the extreme now, and where output seems to matter more than anything - anything more than what used to.

The video below (and our own I genuinely hate programming now thread) prompted me to post this thread..

(But I’m genuinely curious what you’d do if it did happen - perhaps what you’d do might inspire someone to do similar, or follow their own dreams…)

A more serious reply:

The whole video is good but there’s a part I’m going to paraphrase:

When people try to sell you on the idea that the future is already settled, it’s because it is deeply unsettled. This promise of an AI future is really just a collective anxiety that very wealthy people have about how well they’re going to be able to control us in the future. If they can get us to accept that the future is already settled, AI is already here, then we will create that for them.

If something is gonna make us redundant, LLMs ain’t it.

But that’s not really what this thread is about Josef - this thread merely reflects the reality of what is actually happening in the industry today, ie, where there are real job losses.

Two things we can probably take as a given at present:

• There are, rightly or wrongly, job losses in the industry due to AI at present.
• The dev space has, rightly or wrongly, changed due to AI.

Even if someone doesn’t lose a job to AI, it may not actually be an industry they want to stay in (as echoed in the aforementioned thread)..

AI is just another tool, although bit of a slot machine. If your employer insists on using it, then you should do that to the best of your abilities, it doesn’t matter what you think about it, we are paid to solve problems, and most of the time that is in a constraint environment.

There will always be another job, so focus on learning regardless of that being software engineering, office politics or relationship.

So you’d get another dev job?

I will be working with software until I die and I certainly will be writing code as a hobby, it is by far the most approachable way to build something that has impact.

I’m all too familiar with what’s happening in the industry now. I was laid off a little over 2 years ago and I haven’t been able to find another full-time IC position.

What I’m rejecting is the "AI-related"ness of it. I wasn’t made redundant because LLMs exist. I was laid off because shareholder value is more important.