I don’t think kids should be insulating from AI. The examples in this article suggest for example that some people are dropping out of college and going into trade schools. I get that society needs electricians and construction workers and new software graduates are finding it difficult to get jobs. But having had a moderately successful career building software, I tend to think there is a lot of scope for the $40 trillion white collar economy to be disrupted (re-imagined/made more efficient), so still see potential for software engineering demand to stay high over the next decade as the true ramifications of AI plays out. Am I biased/coping? Is this moving faster? Slower? - What should kids be aiming for according to you? Computer Scientist? Biologist? Finance? Construction?
Optimistically, I hope it filters out the people who were only interested in it for the money.
When I was in school, decades ago now, very few people went into CS compared to other majors. Everyone I knew going into it did it because they loved it. I would have done it regardless of the career opportunities because I want to build stuff.
Interviewing candidates over the years since then, my experience has been there are still very few of those passionate nerds and a lot of people who did it for other reasons, like the money or similar. There is nothing inherently wrong with this. I don’t fault people for it.
Maybe if we get very lucky, it will go back to a relatively few passionate people building stuff because it is cool?
Having an industry’s labour supplied only by those inherently passionate about it is a great way to crush wages and working conditions. Look at what companies like Blizzard get away with because their employees just want to make video games at their favourite dev studio. While they’re a pain in the ass sometimes, I welcome the devs who are only here for the cash.
This is totally leaving out the supply and demand aspect. People like the idea of making games more than working on the plumbing of some accounts payable software, so Blizzard can pay less and treat worse than NicheBoringFinanceCo.
The parent comment is describing supply and demand. If Blizzard attracts a larger supply of workers who will accept lower pay and worse conditions because they intrinsically want the job, Blizzard gains leverage. That is exactly why studios like Blizzard can get away with more than “NicheBoringFinanceCo.”
If an “industry’s labour [is] supplied only by those inherently passionate about it” the post says it would “crush wages and working conditions”.
That runs completely counter to the basics of supply and demand in a perfect competition market. It would be market with far fewer (labor) suppliers, who could therefore command a higher wage, not lower.
You are only looking at supply. Neither supply nor demand by themselves adequately describe prices (even in supply-demand 101 theory; in practice of course it gets significantly more complicated than just supply and demand). There are fields with few suppliers where supply is extremely cheap and fields with few suppliers where supply is extremely expensive.
Is the number of suppliers low because demand is also low or is the number of suppliers low because demand is high but supply is constrained?
A field that previously had a supply of labor in it "for the money" who all leave is indicative of the former scenario not the latter.
That does not lead to higher wages. That leads to low wages.
(There are a variety of reasons why this story is too simple and why I remain uncertain about developer salaries in the short term)
See also: public school teachers. You either need to be insanely passionate or incredibly stupid to take ~$55k/year for long hours as an educator that is also a babysitter. And insanely passionate teachers are in short supply.
Long hours? Teachers work the same hours or less than other adults per “New Measures of Teachers’ Work Hours and Implications for Wage Comparisons” by West.
“Teachers work an average of 34.5 hours per week on an annual basis (38.0 hours per week during the school year and 21.5 hours per week during the summer months).”
That’s leaving out the benefits of incredibly strong union protections, it being a state job with matched benefits, absurd job security even in the face of terrible performance, etc.
The Alaskan teacher's union is ranked 15th overall in the US [1]. I'm betting they're just fine, and that any issues are more general "Alaska-problems" than anything specific to teaching, unions, etc.
I bet a lot of teachers look at what devs do and think that its also insane to sit in front of computer all day, in a no boundary job, working on something you really don't care about and is potentially really bad for civilization only to make money off and lose your sense of self.
My spouse has expressed this nearly verbatim after transitioning out of a 16 year career in middle and grade school education to medical curriculum development. It was hell on her mental health but at least there was a clear motivation and purpose for being there.
>Optimistically, I hope it filters out the people who were only interested in it for the money.
I hope not, because we don't need software developers to be "starving artist 2.0".
And on that note: I vividly remember people staying away from the video game development industry because it was deemed "passion industry", and that had a really negative connotation of long working hours for asymmetrical return, and more.
I don't look forward for every other software engineering branch to become like that.
Brother, we need to eat. You don't need to go to college to learn about some topic, you can pirate textbooks. You need to go to college to get a piece of paper saying you did. If you were passionate about computer programming, you can do it in your free time while you flip burgers or do whatever you need to survive
> Maybe if we get very lucky, it will go back to a relatively few passionate people building stuff because it is cool?
I think we basically lost this when software/computer/internet entered the mainstream. Now, like everything else, it has to be bland, unoffensive, and a commodity.
I'm not saying that this is an incorrect read, but I think it's important to consider that young people might be responding to the general desperation of a tight labor market across the last generation. It used to be that you could get a degree - any degree - and that would be enough to get you in the conversation for a position somewhere. Today, a degree isn't any sort of guarantee of any sort of job - in your field, entry level, dead-end retail, anything. Tuition skyrocketed and only a few fields kept pace. So, you get the degree in the field that's a "winner." Of course, this just increases competition, robs other fields of needed competency, etc. Prisoner's dilemma?
> What should kids be aiming for according to you? Computer Scientist? Biologist? Finance? Construction?
Can you sit down with an unfamiliar domain and develop enough genuine curiosity to get good at it, without a syllabus or a credential dangling in front of you?
The kids who'll do well in a world where the field-to-security mapping keeps shifting are the ones who can self-direct — not the ones who picked the right field in 2026.
Although full disclosure I'm short humans and very long paperclips.
> The kids who'll do well in a world where the field-to-security mapping keeps shifting are the ones who can self-direct — not the ones who picked the right field in 2026.
Agreed that if someone can self direct and is capable, they’ll do better. Assuming two people who are similar in that regard, what are professions that may benefit from AI rather than hurt because of it.
Even if people assume the worst impacts of LLMs on white collar work, there is simply not enough demand for electricians and plumbers for that to work, right now these professions work only because the number of people going into them is limited.
If things play out I see there being two classes of low paid developers in a decade or so: the first being the vibe coders who earn a subsistence wage because most people can do it (not everyone, there will still be a cost of entry, paying for the tools, which will exclude some groups), the second being the more “artisnal” developers working on the things that can't (yet) be vide coded and fixing up the problems caused by insufficient care by the vibers and those employing them. These will be low paid because while the work is important demand will be low and there will still be a fair few people with the skills and desire (they'll make ends meet between good jobs by taking on gig-economy vide-coding work themselves). There will be a lucky few still making a decent living, but a much lower proportion than now.
I'm hoping to arrange retirement before things get that far… Failing that I'll do something else (I could be a sparky, though if all the youngsters are training for that perhaps that industry will gain a bad supply/demand picture from the worker's PoV too!) to pay the bills and reclaim dicking around with tech as a hobby.
The prevailing sentiment on HN is that AI will make coders 10x more productive, but that we'll all keep our jobs and salaries, with the possible exception of people who don't embrace AI quickly enough.
But let me ask you this: has AI made life easier for illustrators, book authors, or musicians? They were affected by the technology earlier on. If they don't embrace AI, they face increased competition from cheaply-made products that the average consumer can't distinguish from the "real" thing. But if they embrace it, they can't differentiate themselves from the cheaply-produced content! In fact, for artists, the best strategy may be to speak out very vocally against AI, reject it early on, and build a following of like-minded consumers.
It’s also not exactly a secret that the executive class resents having to pay high-income workers and is champing at the bit for layoffs. Even if you fully embrace AI, they want white collar jobs to look more like call center work with high surveillance, less autonomy, and constant reminders of replaceability. Most people saw through that “our people are our greatest asset” talk before, but they’re not even trying anymore.
You're coping. Everyone wants a remote software job. These are dead. If you want something in software, it will need to be robotics or space related and you'll drive to a location to do it.
If you want to be in a remote, small town, get into construction and become a builder with their own GC license in a few years. Then charge people 400k to build that little dream cottage with 2 guys (you and a team mate) twice a year. 150k each 100k mats for each house. Just a small warning: It's hard but real work and very rewarding.
The thing I'm seeing in people's use of LLMs is that there's still a strong contrast in technical usage of them.
I went to the local Claude Code meetup last week, and the contrast between the first two speakers really stuck with me.
The first was an old-skool tech guy who was using teams of agents to basically duplicate what an entire old-fashioned dev team would do.
The second was a "non-technical" (she must have said this at least 20 times in her talk) product manager using the LLM to prototype code and iterate on design choices.
Both are replacing dev humans with LLMs, but there's a massive difference in the technical complexity of their use. And I've heard this before talking to other people; non-technical folks are using it to write code and are amazed with how it's going, while technical folks are next-level using skills, agents, etc to replace whole teams.
I can see how this becomes a career in its own right; not writing code any more, but wrangling agents (or whatever comes after them). The same kind of mental aptitude that gets us good code can also be used to solve these problems, too.
I still don't understand the logic that any job is safe from ai (if it lives up to expectations). Sure, it might not be directly impacted by ai but why is there this expectation that the excess labour from those directly impacted doesnt act to suppress the earning power of other jobs?
Especially considering that the implication is that humans just become a pair of hands with opposable thumbs?. Take the electrician in the article, sure its a skilled job but the barrier into it drops massively imo if you can just take a picture of whatever issue is at hand and ai spits out what is needed, no?
Agreed, there would definitely be knock-on effects. If a bunch of people who were otherwise going to be software developers decide to focus their career on the trades, then the wages for trades jobs will drop.
Having spent a couple years rehabbing a 100 year old house, I’m convinced the trades will be the last thing to go. When the building you’re working on has been ship-of-Theseus’d by 3 generations of home owners, everything is out of distribution.
When a robot can reliably do this work, I think it can reliably do any human job that requires physical ability and judgement.
But the problem wont be the robots. Itll be the flood of new workers who will offer to rehab the place cheaper than you. And itll be that the white collar owners of the house wont have enough money to blow on a rehab bwcause their desk jobs are getting replaced by AI
My thoughts exactly. I do think people tend to frame things in a developed economies sort of way when the worst fears of ai is actually more akin to a developing/emerging economy framework. And that says when where there's lump of labour available, most aren't earning that within trades.
Disturbingly, AI is set to replace essentially any position that is useful, to the extent that it is useful and somehow some people still think they should adapt themselves to the system instead of working to adapt the system to them!
Basically all that would be left of desk jobs would be those which have unfair legal powers (including via licenses and credentials) or are pure accountability plays. Like politicians, lawyers, aircraft pilots, corporate accountants... And those jobs will suck because people will be accountable for work that is not their own.
These jobs won't require any skills because most people may be able to go through their entire career without doing any work. But they will get paid a lot just for having being selected for their position... While other people who may be more skilled than them might be broke and homeless.
I'll say invest totally in domain knowledge now. The value of knowing how to invert a binary tree from memory has dropped to approximately zero. Web development as we knew it for the past 20 years is completely dead as an entry level trade. The power is shifting to people with useful knowledge and expertise that isn't about twiddling bits.
Are people still under the impression that testing candidates with coding challenges is in preparation of a job where real world problems are described like "invert the binary tree"?
There was never any value in simply the ability to invert a binary tree from memory. First, contrary to popular belief, this particular challenge is quite trivial, even easier imo than fizzbuzz. The value of testing candidates with easy problems is their usefulness in quickly filtering out potentially problematic coders, not necessarily to identify strong ones.
Second, another common take on coding challenges is that they're about memorization. Somewhat, but only to a point. Data structures and algorithms are a vocabulary. A big part of the challenge of using them "creatively" in real life is your ability to recognize that a particular subset of that vocabulary best matches a particular situation. In many novel contexts an LLM might be able to help you with implementation once the right algorithm has been identified, but only after you yourself have made that insightful connection.
Having said this I generally agree with the philosophy [0] that keeping things simple is enough 95+% of the time.
Domain knowledge as in non public aspects of the work you/ your workplace does. The AI tools are very good at whatever is public but very clueless about proprietary domains .Let's say you make CRUD apps about some confidential domain. Now the CRUD skills might be commodity but the confidential domain is even more important.
As long as there's internal documentation, which virtually every serious shop has, it can be processed and combined with AI. There are startups selling this product already. I've seen first hand some very narrowly focused domain knowledge becoming more accessible when you can ask the chatbot and the thing is right. It works.
Come to think of it, domain knowledge should be an LLMs strong suit as long as you can provide the right documentation, which is working pretty well already.
Right now the main issue I see with AI is that it doesn't do well with scaling. It's great for building demos and examples but you have to fix its code for real production work. But for how long?
In ERP software there are MLOCs without any technical documentation. And nobody would spend a dime to create one. So, the deep expert knowledge on how business processes are supposed to work (in full detail) and how they are implemented is mostly in the heads of a couple of people.
AI is most excellent at reading and understanding large codebases and, with some guidance docs, can easily reproduce accurate technical documentation. Divide and conquer.
Accuracy/faithfulness to the code as written isn't necessarily what you care about though, it's an understanding of the underlying problem. Just translating code doesn't actually help you do that.
But everyone at the company has that private domain knowledge. The only thing you're bringing to the table that anyone in any other role doesn't offer is the commoditized skill set.
Right, and you'll not keep everything out of materials like AI
generated meeting notes for every repeat of every process so
the company doesn't really need many experts in its existing
operations.
Can't speak to the OP, but lots of technical work (and frankly many trades are also technical) doesn't lend itself to text based documentation and teaching. Software, translation, non/fiction writing (like marketing and sales) all do. I think LLMs will take a significant part of those businesses, because I don't believe there is a Devon's Paradox for code -Tractors- Agents.
At the same time medicine, hardware design, good industrial, and specific domain knowledge (problems you solve in assembly or control loops) that are fundamentally proprietary and aren't well documented will continue to have value even when LLMs make solving the problems around them easier. Those might have increased leverage, at least for this round of LLMs. Now, maybe they succeed in World Models, but that is not today.
Really, I don't know what "kids these days" are going to do. I couldn't have predicted the influencer boom 15 years ago, but I also think there are geopolitical risks that are probably bigger than that shift, and "synergized" with the push to AI Everything, it doesn't look like a good time to be a learning/working human.
Pre-LLMs, algorithmic knowledge was used as a proxy for skill difference at interview stage. In the workplace, you could google the implementation details and common gotchas. This was valuable knowledge.
Post-LLMs, the value of this (as differentiator) has dropped to zero. Domain knowledge (also known as business knowledge) is the obvious area to skill up on. It simply means knowledge about the area your organisation is working in. Whether it is yogurt delivery logistics, clothing manufacturing supply chain systems, etc. That's the real differentiator now. Anyone can invert a binary try in 5 minutes using an LLM. But designing a software system knowing well the domain your organisation is in is invaluable.
Right, bridging the gap of knowledge by getting closer to that of the clerical workers of the company, because pure software knowledge is no longer as valuable. That will probably make your salary closer to theirs, and that'll be a pretty big adjustment.
I think this is true today, especially with complex domains, but I foresee a future where more and more walls fall. If you are in college now, go deep on a domain. If you are entering in 10 years, I have no idea.
The fact you are getting downvoted to oblivion shows how fucked HN has become.
Ain't nobody gonna hire a code monkey - you are being hired based on whether or not you can reason and enable workflows via tech.
If you're only name to grace is you can write pretty Python but cannot architect at scale or care to actually understand the bigger picture of what is being built and why, you will get offshored to someone who is also using Claude Code.
If I'm working on a fullstack for a cloud security product like Wiz, I'd rather hire an average developer who deeply understands the cloud security industry versus a NodeJS doc wiz who has zero empathy or interest in learning about cloud security. There are too many of the latter and not enough of the former in the American scene now, and especially on HN.
If HNers cry about how cut-throat the American market has become, they haven't seen it in China, India, or the CEE.
I'm somewhat skeptical of this "enter the trades" movement. Actually, I am more skeptical of that statement than I am of LLM's replacing white collar work in general. I think parts of coding are being replaced quickly because they are the parts that don't require discernment. Trades likely contain just as many automatable and just as many discernment parts as white collar work. At this moment in history, the automatable parts are being automated in the knowledge based world. People think the physical world is somehow different, but with world models (along the full spectrum of what that means) the physical world will be just as trainable as the knowledge based world.
tldr; Just like knowledge work, most trade stuff is probably mostly repeated (i.e. very trainable) task with a small amount of taste and discernment applied. The repeated will be trainable, the discernment may be trainable. I don't think the physical world is necessarily any safer than the knowledge world.
Robots are expensive, software is not. I can instantly duplicate software 1 million times and run it in parallel, I can't just produce 1 million robots. Physical world is always harder.
Even if we get robots who can, say, build roads start to end, there is still a HUGE gap between that and it actually being used. There is a hard floor, too. Robots are made of physical things, physical things have scarcity, and there's no way around that to our knowledge. Even if you can build the robot for 1 cent, the material cost will still exist.
The difference is the physical aspect of the trades. The design for wiring can be (and already has been) automated, but you physically need an electrician on site to pull the wires. So I can see a hollowing out of the engineers, but not the actual electricians.
That being said, the absolute focus on trades from the fed right now just reeks of the wild pendulum swing. It used to be 'go to college to get a good job' then we had too many college grads. In ten years we'll have a glut of people trained in the trades with no prospects.
It just keeps swinging back and forth and somehow Joe Regularworker keeps losing.
Indeed. If you squint a little, it kind of looks like the machines are trying to shift to a world where we are just meat puppets to do the tricky stuff there aren't robotics for (yet). :(
Hasn't the US already minimised the cost of all the construction work that are "the parts that don't require discernment" to minimum wage who-cares-if-they're-documented-or-not day workers?
I am not quite sure with the controversy at archive.ph/(today) but If this may help anybody, I have used single-file to download from archive.ph and uploaded it to github
Maybe it's wishful thinking but I'm not going to be surprised if it plays out like this. In some sense the reverse happened over the last couple of decades - everyone and their mother got into IT and the industry became saturated.
Maybe, another possibility is the frontier providers change their pricing terms to try to capture more of the value once a sufficient number of people’s skills have atrophied. For example: 20% of the revenue of all products built with $AI_SERVICE. For someone several years out of practice they may have no other option.
It's hard to say if there's anything new under the Sun...
There were always unqualified people coming out of college, but the amount of people in interviews that can literally do nothing these days seems higher than before.
There was always some cohort of people that somehow managed to graduate from college with a CS degree, and seemingly not learning anything, or at least not learn how to even write basic code (independently).
It seems like AI is not reducing that percentage - possibly increasing it.
Software became ubiquitous because a huge majority of the population found utility and enjoyment from what software had to offer. Very quickly that number in the population is dwindling. (Good) software can only thrive in an environment where other sectors are also thriving. Who needs 99.999% uptime when your family is starving and freezing.
Assuming the AI maximalist digital god bros are wrong, there will always be some demand for programmers, the question is how much. It's not hard to see a future where programming goes the way of farming where the demand for small-scale farming still exists but at a tiny fraction of what it once was.
https://archive.ph/NtVHd
I don’t think kids should be insulating from AI. The examples in this article suggest for example that some people are dropping out of college and going into trade schools. I get that society needs electricians and construction workers and new software graduates are finding it difficult to get jobs. But having had a moderately successful career building software, I tend to think there is a lot of scope for the $40 trillion white collar economy to be disrupted (re-imagined/made more efficient), so still see potential for software engineering demand to stay high over the next decade as the true ramifications of AI plays out. Am I biased/coping? Is this moving faster? Slower? - What should kids be aiming for according to you? Computer Scientist? Biologist? Finance? Construction?
Optimistically, I hope it filters out the people who were only interested in it for the money.
When I was in school, decades ago now, very few people went into CS compared to other majors. Everyone I knew going into it did it because they loved it. I would have done it regardless of the career opportunities because I want to build stuff.
Interviewing candidates over the years since then, my experience has been there are still very few of those passionate nerds and a lot of people who did it for other reasons, like the money or similar. There is nothing inherently wrong with this. I don’t fault people for it.
Maybe if we get very lucky, it will go back to a relatively few passionate people building stuff because it is cool?
Having an industry’s labour supplied only by those inherently passionate about it is a great way to crush wages and working conditions. Look at what companies like Blizzard get away with because their employees just want to make video games at their favourite dev studio. While they’re a pain in the ass sometimes, I welcome the devs who are only here for the cash.
This is totally leaving out the supply and demand aspect. People like the idea of making games more than working on the plumbing of some accounts payable software, so Blizzard can pay less and treat worse than NicheBoringFinanceCo.
The parent comment is describing supply and demand. If Blizzard attracts a larger supply of workers who will accept lower pay and worse conditions because they intrinsically want the job, Blizzard gains leverage. That is exactly why studios like Blizzard can get away with more than “NicheBoringFinanceCo.”
If an “industry’s labour [is] supplied only by those inherently passionate about it” the post says it would “crush wages and working conditions”.
That runs completely counter to the basics of supply and demand in a perfect competition market. It would be market with far fewer (labor) suppliers, who could therefore command a higher wage, not lower.
You are only looking at supply. Neither supply nor demand by themselves adequately describe prices (even in supply-demand 101 theory; in practice of course it gets significantly more complicated than just supply and demand). There are fields with few suppliers where supply is extremely cheap and fields with few suppliers where supply is extremely expensive.
Is the number of suppliers low because demand is also low or is the number of suppliers low because demand is high but supply is constrained?
A field that previously had a supply of labor in it "for the money" who all leave is indicative of the former scenario not the latter.
That does not lead to higher wages. That leads to low wages.
(There are a variety of reasons why this story is too simple and why I remain uncertain about developer salaries in the short term)
Except that there are a LOT of people that want to work in video games (which is the supply) which then depresses the price (wages)
All of my developer friends in the gaming industry have had far worse working conditions then what I've had.
See also: public school teachers. You either need to be insanely passionate or incredibly stupid to take ~$55k/year for long hours as an educator that is also a babysitter. And insanely passionate teachers are in short supply.
Long hours? Teachers work the same hours or less than other adults per “New Measures of Teachers’ Work Hours and Implications for Wage Comparisons” by West.
“Teachers work an average of 34.5 hours per week on an annual basis (38.0 hours per week during the school year and 21.5 hours per week during the summer months).”
That’s leaving out the benefits of incredibly strong union protections, it being a state job with matched benefits, absurd job security even in the face of terrible performance, etc.
Wait-- I think you are confusing "teachers" with "police officers".
“ benefits of incredibly strong union protections”
Lol, try saying that to an alaskan teachers face and watch yourself get slapped for the absurdity of the claim.
The Alaskan teacher's union is ranked 15th overall in the US [1]. I'm betting they're just fine, and that any issues are more general "Alaska-problems" than anything specific to teaching, unions, etc.
https://fordhaminstitute.org/national/research/how-strong-ar...
I bet a lot of teachers look at what devs do and think that its also insane to sit in front of computer all day, in a no boundary job, working on something you really don't care about and is potentially really bad for civilization only to make money off and lose your sense of self.
My spouse has expressed this nearly verbatim after transitioning out of a 16 year career in middle and grade school education to medical curriculum development. It was hell on her mental health but at least there was a clear motivation and purpose for being there.
Where are the gamedevs in it for the money?
Working on boring accounts software.
I think you have the law of supply and demand backwards.
>Optimistically, I hope it filters out the people who were only interested in it for the money.
I hope not, because we don't need software developers to be "starving artist 2.0".
And on that note: I vividly remember people staying away from the video game development industry because it was deemed "passion industry", and that had a really negative connotation of long working hours for asymmetrical return, and more.
I don't look forward for every other software engineering branch to become like that.
Brother, we need to eat. You don't need to go to college to learn about some topic, you can pirate textbooks. You need to go to college to get a piece of paper saying you did. If you were passionate about computer programming, you can do it in your free time while you flip burgers or do whatever you need to survive
I only went into SWE for the money.
I initially pursued my real passion which was math and physics and got a cold water bucket to the face only after grad school.
> Maybe if we get very lucky, it will go back to a relatively few passionate people building stuff because it is cool?
I think we basically lost this when software/computer/internet entered the mainstream. Now, like everything else, it has to be bland, unoffensive, and a commodity.
I'm not saying that this is an incorrect read, but I think it's important to consider that young people might be responding to the general desperation of a tight labor market across the last generation. It used to be that you could get a degree - any degree - and that would be enough to get you in the conversation for a position somewhere. Today, a degree isn't any sort of guarantee of any sort of job - in your field, entry level, dead-end retail, anything. Tuition skyrocketed and only a few fields kept pace. So, you get the degree in the field that's a "winner." Of course, this just increases competition, robs other fields of needed competency, etc. Prisoner's dilemma?
> What should kids be aiming for according to you? Computer Scientist? Biologist? Finance? Construction?
Can you sit down with an unfamiliar domain and develop enough genuine curiosity to get good at it, without a syllabus or a credential dangling in front of you?
The kids who'll do well in a world where the field-to-security mapping keeps shifting are the ones who can self-direct — not the ones who picked the right field in 2026.
Although full disclosure I'm short humans and very long paperclips.
> The kids who'll do well in a world where the field-to-security mapping keeps shifting are the ones who can self-direct — not the ones who picked the right field in 2026.
Agreed that if someone can self direct and is capable, they’ll do better. Assuming two people who are similar in that regard, what are professions that may benefit from AI rather than hurt because of it.
> Although full disclosure I'm short humans and very long paperclips.
What a ludicrous world we live in where this is a socially acceptable view to hold.
> full disclosure I'm short humans and very long paperclips.
What does that mean in practice? Are there specific stock market bets you've made because of that world view?
Even if people assume the worst impacts of LLMs on white collar work, there is simply not enough demand for electricians and plumbers for that to work, right now these professions work only because the number of people going into them is limited.
You sound like you're not a home owner. In populated areas it could take a week to get a electrician or plumber out. And contractors are hard to find.
Development is the same though.
If things play out I see there being two classes of low paid developers in a decade or so: the first being the vibe coders who earn a subsistence wage because most people can do it (not everyone, there will still be a cost of entry, paying for the tools, which will exclude some groups), the second being the more “artisnal” developers working on the things that can't (yet) be vide coded and fixing up the problems caused by insufficient care by the vibers and those employing them. These will be low paid because while the work is important demand will be low and there will still be a fair few people with the skills and desire (they'll make ends meet between good jobs by taking on gig-economy vide-coding work themselves). There will be a lucky few still making a decent living, but a much lower proportion than now.
I'm hoping to arrange retirement before things get that far… Failing that I'll do something else (I could be a sparky, though if all the youngsters are training for that perhaps that industry will gain a bad supply/demand picture from the worker's PoV too!) to pay the bills and reclaim dicking around with tech as a hobby.
And their elevated pay is a function of all the other folks making a ton of money in white collar PMC work.
Agree.
The prevailing sentiment on HN is that AI will make coders 10x more productive, but that we'll all keep our jobs and salaries, with the possible exception of people who don't embrace AI quickly enough.
But let me ask you this: has AI made life easier for illustrators, book authors, or musicians? They were affected by the technology earlier on. If they don't embrace AI, they face increased competition from cheaply-made products that the average consumer can't distinguish from the "real" thing. But if they embrace it, they can't differentiate themselves from the cheaply-produced content! In fact, for artists, the best strategy may be to speak out very vocally against AI, reject it early on, and build a following of like-minded consumers.
It’s also not exactly a secret that the executive class resents having to pay high-income workers and is champing at the bit for layoffs. Even if you fully embrace AI, they want white collar jobs to look more like call center work with high surveillance, less autonomy, and constant reminders of replaceability. Most people saw through that “our people are our greatest asset” talk before, but they’re not even trying anymore.
You're coping. Everyone wants a remote software job. These are dead. If you want something in software, it will need to be robotics or space related and you'll drive to a location to do it.
If you want to be in a remote, small town, get into construction and become a builder with their own GC license in a few years. Then charge people 400k to build that little dream cottage with 2 guys (you and a team mate) twice a year. 150k each 100k mats for each house. Just a small warning: It's hard but real work and very rewarding.
Wha do you mean these are dead? I work a remote software job and it ain't going anywhere from what I can see.
The thing I'm seeing in people's use of LLMs is that there's still a strong contrast in technical usage of them.
I went to the local Claude Code meetup last week, and the contrast between the first two speakers really stuck with me.
The first was an old-skool tech guy who was using teams of agents to basically duplicate what an entire old-fashioned dev team would do.
The second was a "non-technical" (she must have said this at least 20 times in her talk) product manager using the LLM to prototype code and iterate on design choices.
Both are replacing dev humans with LLMs, but there's a massive difference in the technical complexity of their use. And I've heard this before talking to other people; non-technical folks are using it to write code and are amazed with how it's going, while technical folks are next-level using skills, agents, etc to replace whole teams.
I can see how this becomes a career in its own right; not writing code any more, but wrangling agents (or whatever comes after them). The same kind of mental aptitude that gets us good code can also be used to solve these problems, too.
I still don't understand the logic that any job is safe from ai (if it lives up to expectations). Sure, it might not be directly impacted by ai but why is there this expectation that the excess labour from those directly impacted doesnt act to suppress the earning power of other jobs?
Especially considering that the implication is that humans just become a pair of hands with opposable thumbs?. Take the electrician in the article, sure its a skilled job but the barrier into it drops massively imo if you can just take a picture of whatever issue is at hand and ai spits out what is needed, no?
Agreed, there would definitely be knock-on effects. If a bunch of people who were otherwise going to be software developers decide to focus their career on the trades, then the wages for trades jobs will drop.
And if the wages drop, then there will be less demand of those trades, and when there's less demand, ...
The "go into trades" thing has two major flaws:
1) The supply of work will skyrocket when everyone will flock there for work
2) Demand will plummet as the white collar people who bought these services will loose their jobs and income
And of course if robotics will get solved to an acceptable degree most of those jobs will also get mostly automated.
Having spent a couple years rehabbing a 100 year old house, I’m convinced the trades will be the last thing to go. When the building you’re working on has been ship-of-Theseus’d by 3 generations of home owners, everything is out of distribution.
When a robot can reliably do this work, I think it can reliably do any human job that requires physical ability and judgement.
But the problem wont be the robots. Itll be the flood of new workers who will offer to rehab the place cheaper than you. And itll be that the white collar owners of the house wont have enough money to blow on a rehab bwcause their desk jobs are getting replaced by AI
It's not the robots that are going to blow the floor out of the trades; it's the legions of people joining the trades that will do it.
If the other 2 comments still make it hard to understand, South Park had a great episode explaining this.
My thoughts exactly. I do think people tend to frame things in a developed economies sort of way when the worst fears of ai is actually more akin to a developing/emerging economy framework. And that says when where there's lump of labour available, most aren't earning that within trades.
Pipes don't care about how much you would like to spend on it. They will leak when they are ready to leak.
Disturbingly, AI is set to replace essentially any position that is useful, to the extent that it is useful and somehow some people still think they should adapt themselves to the system instead of working to adapt the system to them!
Basically all that would be left of desk jobs would be those which have unfair legal powers (including via licenses and credentials) or are pure accountability plays. Like politicians, lawyers, aircraft pilots, corporate accountants... And those jobs will suck because people will be accountable for work that is not their own.
These jobs won't require any skills because most people may be able to go through their entire career without doing any work. But they will get paid a lot just for having being selected for their position... While other people who may be more skilled than them might be broke and homeless.
They are doing nothing!!
1) No matter the age, they are using said AI to replace human
2) Within workplace, they are using AI to do their work so they are learning nothing
3) That is it, people are using AI to replace their own work rather than improve it, people are driving themselves out of work.
I'll say invest totally in domain knowledge now. The value of knowing how to invert a binary tree from memory has dropped to approximately zero. Web development as we knew it for the past 20 years is completely dead as an entry level trade. The power is shifting to people with useful knowledge and expertise that isn't about twiddling bits.
Are people still under the impression that testing candidates with coding challenges is in preparation of a job where real world problems are described like "invert the binary tree"?
There was never any value in simply the ability to invert a binary tree from memory. First, contrary to popular belief, this particular challenge is quite trivial, even easier imo than fizzbuzz. The value of testing candidates with easy problems is their usefulness in quickly filtering out potentially problematic coders, not necessarily to identify strong ones.
Second, another common take on coding challenges is that they're about memorization. Somewhat, but only to a point. Data structures and algorithms are a vocabulary. A big part of the challenge of using them "creatively" in real life is your ability to recognize that a particular subset of that vocabulary best matches a particular situation. In many novel contexts an LLM might be able to help you with implementation once the right algorithm has been identified, but only after you yourself have made that insightful connection.
Having said this I generally agree with the philosophy [0] that keeping things simple is enough 95+% of the time.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47423647
What do you mean by “domain knowledge”? And how is it a competitive advantage?
Domain knowledge as in non public aspects of the work you/ your workplace does. The AI tools are very good at whatever is public but very clueless about proprietary domains .Let's say you make CRUD apps about some confidential domain. Now the CRUD skills might be commodity but the confidential domain is even more important.
As long as there's internal documentation, which virtually every serious shop has, it can be processed and combined with AI. There are startups selling this product already. I've seen first hand some very narrowly focused domain knowledge becoming more accessible when you can ask the chatbot and the thing is right. It works.
Come to think of it, domain knowledge should be an LLMs strong suit as long as you can provide the right documentation, which is working pretty well already.
Right now the main issue I see with AI is that it doesn't do well with scaling. It's great for building demos and examples but you have to fix its code for real production work. But for how long?
Documentation rarely reflects how anything is actually done, referred to by good business analysts as 'shadow functions'.
In ERP software there are MLOCs without any technical documentation. And nobody would spend a dime to create one. So, the deep expert knowledge on how business processes are supposed to work (in full detail) and how they are implemented is mostly in the heads of a couple of people.
AI is most excellent at reading and understanding large codebases and, with some guidance docs, can easily reproduce accurate technical documentation. Divide and conquer.
Accuracy/faithfulness to the code as written isn't necessarily what you care about though, it's an understanding of the underlying problem. Just translating code doesn't actually help you do that.
But everyone at the company has that private domain knowledge. The only thing you're bringing to the table that anyone in any other role doesn't offer is the commoditized skill set.
Right, and you'll not keep everything out of materials like AI generated meeting notes for every repeat of every process so the company doesn't really need many experts in its existing operations.
Internal domain knowledge can become pretty useless when you switch companies and have to start over, though.
Can't speak to the OP, but lots of technical work (and frankly many trades are also technical) doesn't lend itself to text based documentation and teaching. Software, translation, non/fiction writing (like marketing and sales) all do. I think LLMs will take a significant part of those businesses, because I don't believe there is a Devon's Paradox for code -Tractors- Agents.
At the same time medicine, hardware design, good industrial, and specific domain knowledge (problems you solve in assembly or control loops) that are fundamentally proprietary and aren't well documented will continue to have value even when LLMs make solving the problems around them easier. Those might have increased leverage, at least for this round of LLMs. Now, maybe they succeed in World Models, but that is not today.
Really, I don't know what "kids these days" are going to do. I couldn't have predicted the influencer boom 15 years ago, but I also think there are geopolitical risks that are probably bigger than that shift, and "synergized" with the push to AI Everything, it doesn't look like a good time to be a learning/working human.
Pre-LLMs, algorithmic knowledge was used as a proxy for skill difference at interview stage. In the workplace, you could google the implementation details and common gotchas. This was valuable knowledge.
Post-LLMs, the value of this (as differentiator) has dropped to zero. Domain knowledge (also known as business knowledge) is the obvious area to skill up on. It simply means knowledge about the area your organisation is working in. Whether it is yogurt delivery logistics, clothing manufacturing supply chain systems, etc. That's the real differentiator now. Anyone can invert a binary try in 5 minutes using an LLM. But designing a software system knowing well the domain your organisation is in is invaluable.
Right, bridging the gap of knowledge by getting closer to that of the clerical workers of the company, because pure software knowledge is no longer as valuable. That will probably make your salary closer to theirs, and that'll be a pretty big adjustment.
I think this is true today, especially with complex domains, but I foresee a future where more and more walls fall. If you are in college now, go deep on a domain. If you are entering in 10 years, I have no idea.
The fact you are getting downvoted to oblivion shows how fucked HN has become.
Ain't nobody gonna hire a code monkey - you are being hired based on whether or not you can reason and enable workflows via tech.
If you're only name to grace is you can write pretty Python but cannot architect at scale or care to actually understand the bigger picture of what is being built and why, you will get offshored to someone who is also using Claude Code.
If I'm working on a fullstack for a cloud security product like Wiz, I'd rather hire an average developer who deeply understands the cloud security industry versus a NodeJS doc wiz who has zero empathy or interest in learning about cloud security. There are too many of the latter and not enough of the former in the American scene now, and especially on HN.
If HNers cry about how cut-throat the American market has become, they haven't seen it in China, India, or the CEE.
I'm somewhat skeptical of this "enter the trades" movement. Actually, I am more skeptical of that statement than I am of LLM's replacing white collar work in general. I think parts of coding are being replaced quickly because they are the parts that don't require discernment. Trades likely contain just as many automatable and just as many discernment parts as white collar work. At this moment in history, the automatable parts are being automated in the knowledge based world. People think the physical world is somehow different, but with world models (along the full spectrum of what that means) the physical world will be just as trainable as the knowledge based world.
tldr; Just like knowledge work, most trade stuff is probably mostly repeated (i.e. very trainable) task with a small amount of taste and discernment applied. The repeated will be trainable, the discernment may be trainable. I don't think the physical world is necessarily any safer than the knowledge world.
Robots are expensive, software is not. I can instantly duplicate software 1 million times and run it in parallel, I can't just produce 1 million robots. Physical world is always harder.
Even if we get robots who can, say, build roads start to end, there is still a HUGE gap between that and it actually being used. There is a hard floor, too. Robots are made of physical things, physical things have scarcity, and there's no way around that to our knowledge. Even if you can build the robot for 1 cent, the material cost will still exist.
> Robots are expensive
People are not, though, and all the folks who are no longer necessary in knowledge work are available for physical work.
The difference is the physical aspect of the trades. The design for wiring can be (and already has been) automated, but you physically need an electrician on site to pull the wires. So I can see a hollowing out of the engineers, but not the actual electricians.
That being said, the absolute focus on trades from the fed right now just reeks of the wild pendulum swing. It used to be 'go to college to get a good job' then we had too many college grads. In ten years we'll have a glut of people trained in the trades with no prospects.
It just keeps swinging back and forth and somehow Joe Regularworker keeps losing.
Indeed. If you squint a little, it kind of looks like the machines are trying to shift to a world where we are just meat puppets to do the tricky stuff there aren't robotics for (yet). :(
Have you seen what Unitree G1 can already do? I see the writing on the walls for going onsite and pulling wires.
Hasn't the US already minimised the cost of all the construction work that are "the parts that don't require discernment" to minimum wage who-cares-if-they're-documented-or-not day workers?
Seems the answer is no, the average wage is about $25/hr depending on region.
I am not quite sure with the controversy at archive.ph/(today) but If this may help anybody, I have used single-file to download from archive.ph and uploaded it to github
https://serjaimelannister.github.io/wsj-article/
and I have also uploaded the github link on archive.org for persistence/archival purposes.
https://web.archive.org/web/20260322213950/https://serjaimel...
I hope that this might help some people and I have another friendly suggestion to please donate to archive.org :-)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47474255
Cloudflare flags archive.today as "C&C/Botnet"; no longer resolves via 1.1.1.2
related:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46843805 "Archive.today is directing a DDoS attack against my blog"
> People fear that programming is dead.
> People stop learning programming.
> Programmers become scarce.
> Programmers become valuable again.
Maybe it's wishful thinking but I'm not going to be surprised if it plays out like this. In some sense the reverse happened over the last couple of decades - everyone and their mother got into IT and the industry became saturated.
Maybe, another possibility is the frontier providers change their pricing terms to try to capture more of the value once a sufficient number of people’s skills have atrophied. For example: 20% of the revenue of all products built with $AI_SERVICE. For someone several years out of practice they may have no other option.
I think there's a decent chance that the open weight models remain close enough to the frontier labs that they won't be able to do things like this.
It's hard to say if there's anything new under the Sun...
There were always unqualified people coming out of college, but the amount of people in interviews that can literally do nothing these days seems higher than before.
There was always some cohort of people that somehow managed to graduate from college with a CS degree, and seemingly not learning anything, or at least not learn how to even write basic code (independently).
It seems like AI is not reducing that percentage - possibly increasing it.
Anecdata, take it with a grain of salt.
I think this happened with airline pilots and they're experiencing a boom now
Software became ubiquitous because a huge majority of the population found utility and enjoyment from what software had to offer. Very quickly that number in the population is dwindling. (Good) software can only thrive in an environment where other sectors are also thriving. Who needs 99.999% uptime when your family is starving and freezing.
Essentially what happened after .com bust. For years CS departments had to sell themselves and convince people there was a future in computers.
Not that AI is the same as Websites all going broke. But no one can see the future and it’s unlikely that deep technical knowledge will be obsolete.
Assuming the AI maximalist digital god bros are wrong, there will always be some demand for programmers, the question is how much. It's not hard to see a future where programming goes the way of farming where the demand for small-scale farming still exists but at a tiny fraction of what it once was.