Tech Job Seekers Without AI Skills Face Lower Salaries and Fewer Roles | Hacker News Reader

Tech Job Seekers Without AI Skills Face Lower Salaries and Fewer Roles

wsj.com

20 pointssizzle14 comments

What exactly are "AI Skills"? What are these companies aiming to achieve by hiring people with these skills? I'm a programmer and I use AI to help with my work. If my employer wanted, I could set up an AI-backed chat support or similar. But I obviously don't have any degree related to AI, or any past titles with "AI" in it, or any meaningful accomplishments with AI given that it's a brand new field.

So what precisely are they looking for and why?

Another question for AI-bros:

I don’t know how to do prompts and I really don’t care right now because I think it’s a waste of time.

What prevents me from learning this "skill" in a few weeks in my spare time if/when it becomes useful? Is it really 10 times harder than learning C++?

99% of relevant AI skills right now are writing prompts, sticking search results in prompts (making sure to always call it RAG), and figuring out how to use Ollama — all of which can be "learned" in a matter of hours. Maybe word2vec and the like are relevant too, if one considers that ML. As far as actual AI skills, they are so quickly made obsolete that it can be hard for some to justify even bothering with, meaning we are approaching peak cargo culting in tech.

People panicking and fleeing tech jobs will reduce supply, creating a better market for those who didn’t overreact to the LLM hype.

Over two decades passed from the first automobile to cars outnumbering horses in American cities. It took even longer for personal computers to become ubiquitous in homes after the first microcomputers hit the stores. I seriously doubt LLMs will wipe out every programming job in a few years. More likely they will create new and different opportunities for skilled people — and I don’t mean “prompt engineers.”

Then again I could have it completely wrong and lose my job to an AI next month. But 40+ years programming have taught me to look skeptically on hype and fads and doomerism.

Dang. After all those “code ninjas wanted” posts I’ve invested all my character points into nunchaku skills.

I feel you. I was following the "rockstar developer" path so I spent all this time trying master some sick riffs for nothing.

Sadly, even all the firefighting skills I learned in tech are not transferable.

Why are they calling an accounts receivable PM a tech job? Is an HR role at an IT company also a tech job?

Presumably they directly manage programmers? Whereas HR doesn’t.

It’s that weird grip recruiters have on the pipeline once again. I was applying for a mobile client role and was told I didn’t have “AI ML experience” so I was disqualified… for a mobile client role. I guarantee you the hiring manager doesn’t care about that.

It is prompting guys, just write it into CV even when you have never worked with GPT or other tools. You will learn it under 1 minute if a need arises.

Also posted as https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39751658.

so what i'm hearing is "put chatgpt and dall-e on your resume; earn $100k more"

what a time to be alive!

The question is how to pivot to another job that is as personally and financially as rewarding as tech? Is a Masters degree the best bet?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com