jobs are for suckers, be a consultant and charge triple
MisterNeon@lemmy.world 4 days ago
I hope this is true. I would like to have a job again.
burgerpocalyse@lemmy.world 4 days ago
MisterNeon@lemmy.world 4 days ago
I’m absolutely not charismatic enough to pull that off.
burgerpocalyse@lemmy.world 4 days ago
youre in luck, i offer consultation for consultancing, now give me money
some_designer_dude@lemmy.world 4 days ago
This person sounds confident! You’d be stupid not to take them up on it.
yggstyle@lemmy.world 4 days ago
It’s technically closer to Schrodinger’s truth. It goes both ways depending on “when” you look at it. Publicly traded companies are more or less expected to adopt AI as it is the next “cheap” labor… so long as it is the cheapest of any option. See the very related: slave labor and it’s variants, child labor, and “outsourcing” to “less developed” countries.
The problem is they need to dance between this experimental technology and … having a publicly “functional” company. The line demands you cut costs but also increase service. So basically overcorrection hell. Mass hirings into mass firings. Every quarter / two quarters depending on the company… until one of two things becomes true: ai works or ai no longer is the cheapest solution. I imagine that will rubberband for quite some time. (saas shit like oracle etc)
In short - I’d not expect this to be more than a brief reprieve from a rapidly drying well. Take advantage of it for now - but I’d recommend not expecting it to remain.
CosmicTurtle0@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 days ago
The line demands you cut costs but also increase service.
The line demands it go up. It doesn’t care how you get there. In many cases, decreasing service while also cutting costs is the way to do it so long as line goes up.
See: enshittification
yggstyle@lemmy.world 3 days ago
Absolutely. I should have used the term productivity rather than service. Lack of caffeine had blunted my vocabulary. In essence: more output for less work. Output in this case is profit.
Enshitification is, in essence, the push beyond diminishing returns into the ‘lossy’ space … sacrificing a for b. The end result is an increasingly shitty experience.
CosmicTurtle0@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 days ago
I think what makes enshittification is “give users less and charge more”. It’s about returning shareholder value instead of customer value.
Netflix is a great example. They have pulled back on content, made password sharing more challenging, and increased cost. They still report increases in paying users.
They’ve done the math. They know they can take lost in users because they know they’ll make up for it. That’s the sad part in all of this.
kescusay@lemmy.world 4 days ago
It’s true, although the smart companies aren’t laying off workers in the first place, because they’re treating AI as a tool to enhance their productivity rather than a tool to replace them.
ShittyBeatlesFCPres@lemmy.world 4 days ago
I don’t know if it even helps with productivity that much. A lot of bosses think developers’ entire job is just churning out code when it’s actually like 50% coding and 50% listening to stakeholders, planning, collaborating with designers, etc. I mean, it’s fine for a quick Python script or whatever but that might save an experienced developer 20 minutes max.
And if you “write” me an email using Chat GPT and I just read a summary, what is the fucking point? All the nuance is lost. Specialized A.I. is great! I’m all for it combing through giant astronomy data sets or protein folding and stuff like that. But I don’t know that I’ve seen generative A.I. without a specific focus increase productivity very much.
cecilkorik@piefed.ca 4 days ago
As a senior developer, my most productive days are genuinely when I remove a lot of code. This might seem like negative productivity to a naive beancounter, but in fact this is my peak contribution to the software and the organization. Simplifying, optimizing, identifying what code is no longer needed, removing technical debt, improving maintainability, this is what requires most of my experience and skill and contextual knowledge to do safely and correctly. AI has no ability to do this in any meaningful way, and code bases filled with mostly AI generated code are bound to become an unmaintainable nightmare (which I will eventually be paid handsomely to fix, I suspect)
6nk06@sh.itjust.works 4 days ago
That’s what I suspect. ChatGPT is never wrong, and even if it doesn’t know, it knows and still answers something. I guess its no different for source code: always add, never delete.
jaxxed@lemmy.ml 4 days ago
Getting to deprecate legacy support… Yes please, let me get my eraser.
I find most tech debt resolution adds code though.
jjjalljs@ttrpg.network 4 days ago
A lot of leadership is incompetent. In a reasonable, just, world they would not be in these decision making positions.
Verbose blogger Ed Zitron wrote about this. He called them “Business Idiots”: wheresyoured.at/the-era-of-the-business-idiot/
scytale@lemmy.zip 3 days ago
I just watched an interview of Karen Hao and she mentioned something along the lines of executives being oversold AI as something to replace everyone instead of something that should exist alongside people to help them, and they believe it.
Ulrich@feddit.org 4 days ago
Fuuuck, this infuriates me. I wrote that shit for a reason. People already don’t read shit before replying to it and this is making it so much worse.
MisterNeon@lemmy.world 4 days ago
I was a frontend developer and UI/UX designer that specialized in JavaScript and Typescript with emphasis on React. I’m learning Python for Flask. I’m skipping meals so I can afford Udemy courses then AWS certifications. I don’t enjoy any of this and I’m falling apart.
Shanmugha@lemmy.world 3 days ago
Hey there. Of course, I am in no position to say “do this, and it will be all right”, but I will say that if there is any other way to live that won’t put this kind of load on you - do it. You being happier is way way more needed in this world than you getting those certificates
WanderingThoughts@europe.pub 4 days ago
So some places started forcing developers to use AI with a quota and monitor the usage. Of course the devs don’t go checking each AI generated line for correctness. That’s bad for the quota. It’s guaranteed to add more slop to the codebase.
k0e3@lemmy.ca 3 days ago
It helps with translating. My job is basically double-checking the translation quality and people are essentially paying me for my assurance. Of course, I take responsibility for any mistakes.
Photuris@lemmy.ml 4 days ago
Productivity will go up, wages will remain the same, and no additional time off will be given to employees. They’ll merely be required to produce 4x as much and compensation will not increase to match.
It seems the point of all these machines and automation isn’t to make our individual lives easier and more prosperous, but instead to increase and maximize shareholder value.
pelespirit@sh.itjust.works 4 days ago
Does anyone have numbers on that? Microsoft just announced they’re laying off around 10k.
Bishma@discuss.tchncs.de 4 days ago
Microsoft did the June layoffs we knew were coming since January and pinned it on “AI cost savings” so doing so would raise their stock price instead of lower it.
Tollana1234567@lemmy.today 3 days ago
they also admitted that thier AI isnt generating profit too.
SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 days ago
Doesn’t that have more to do with Gamepass eating game studios’ lunch though? And a lot less with AI? Just regular ol’ dumbass management decisions.
DeathsEmbrace@lemmy.world 4 days ago
It’s Microsoft would make most sense its mangement decisions considering recently theyve pulled all the stops out to guarantee the software cant be shittier. They even made all there software spyware now.
Grandwolf319@sh.itjust.works 4 days ago
Idk about engaging productivity.
If your job is just doing a lot of trivial code that just gets used once, yeah I can see it improving productivity.
If your job is more tackling the least trivial challenges and constantly needing to understand the edge cases or uncharted waters of the framework/tool/language, it’s completely useless.
This is why you get a lot of newbies loving AI and a lot of seniors saying it’s counter productive.