Today, unclear what that would look like as well as unclear if the career will even exist that long.
One sunny spot I have is that life is very long. I think I have 1.5 careers left in me, and a full pivot is alright. I've been talking with older folks, and loads of people have historically done giant pivots at midlife.
Not sure exactly where you are in it, but as a 53 year old I disagree. The younger I was the less likely I would have been to disagree but imo/ime the older you get the faster it feels like it is flying by.
> and a full pivot is alright
The AI-related existential dread is that it is very unclear what a pivot looks like when the ground under everything is shifting all at once.
The shifting is certainly a lot more obvious in our career than some others, but all of that shift (so far) happened more or less in a mere 10 months and is accelerating. And I don't think it is very likely that our career will stay anomalous for very long in terms of how much AI impact there is.
I do agree that a safe 'next' is unclear. But I also think if ai truly hits all knowledge work as hard as it might we're looking at up to 50% unemployment. Frankly there is no point career planning at all in that scenario. We will all have much larger problems.
And if it doesn't, then pivoting to some field with a combination of rewarding work and 'enough' pay seems sensible enough.
What makes you believe those jobs will still exist or will be available to you competing against massess of other now unemployed software devs? Overabundance of desperate workers will depress wages.
You missed the happy path.
If that much. I'm 52, and I wish I had decided 20 years ago that I'd rather do something meaningful. Like become a doctor. It would not necessarily be impossible to pivot to that now, but it would be very expensive and have a good chance of failure. If everything went smoothly, I could be a doctor just in time to retire.
I'm 41 and I could, in theory, pivot. But realistically: I'm good at exactly one thing in this world in terms of job ability. I can cook, I can bake, I can play music, but none nearly well enough to actually make a living on it. Thus the end of my tech career, if it should come to pass, basically means I will have to work menial jobs to get by. The future is very bleak for me, and the only real hope is that the tech industry will wake up to what a bad job LLMs do compared to humans. But while I think they will do that eventually, there's no telling how long it will take, and the thought that the market will eventually correct is cold comfort if I can't get a job in the meantime.
I'm in the same boat as you. I'm not sure what the pivot is.
Lots of people didn't have their field automated away though alongside most other knowledge work fields, or seen at the same time a drop in demand in manual work and an oversupply (drop in demand because of upcoming AI layoffs, and oversupply in manual fields, because of same)
In fact one of the worst "trade offs" of the trades is they can very much be a young mans game.
It gets real hard to sling water heaters up/down tight stairs or pull cable in a 100+ degree attic into your 50s.
Yes, but not for the reasons you say. It’s because if everyone is a plumber, you don’t need plumbers.
"I'm not allowed to replace my water heater, the government says I need permits, the government says only a plumber can connect a gas line"
I don't think people realize that the people doing entry level skilled work like replacing your water heater or swapping your brakes at jiffy lube often only exceed the caliber of labor that's in a McDonalds when it comes to attendance and pissing clean.
I grew up in trades. I’ve seen shit work and dangerous work and serviceable work and beautiful work. And sometimes even I didn’t actually know the difference until an inspector (and family member) explained it.
So I do small stuff. If it’s serious and I can afford it, I use a trusted professional.
I'm with you here. Though I have to say, on the flip side, oftentimes when I choose to DIY something it is because I don't necessarily trust that I can find a professional who won't cut corners in ways not obvious to me. I've seen it happen too many times. I may be a lot slower, but I'm extremely thorough at the stuff that I do myself.
But get a little more squeezed and with less salary due to AI eliminating your job or your field's salary bargaining power, and you'll try to not call one if you can avoid it, even if you don't want to do it yourself.
I'm not sure how this will work out. Burnout will be standard, and almost universal soon, apart from the previous low-performer, low skilled bottom of barrel folks who will mass produce crap with this.
It's a humbling reminder that not all fields of knowledge application are verifiable in post-training.
-They restricted the number of apprentices. That limited the number of people in the field similar to medical school.
-They could bar substandard workers from practising in the city of London.
-They kept their craft knowledge in house and it was never written down. Apprentices swore oaths never to reveal the “secret of the mystery.”
If you look at programming we do everything the opposite. It’s no wonder salaries will collapse. In fact the only question is why didn’t they collapse sooner.
"...And when everyone's a plumber... no one will be!"
Edit: Fair point, you don’t want to be entering a trade which requires heavy lifting as an older guy with no experience.
Why?
But also, many existing office jobs type will try (or be forced) to get into manual jobs, and many young people will see AI-dominated fields as a dead end and also try to get into a manual job career, increasing supply, and further driving manual job wages down.
I'm glad I'm not inclined to be a doomer, because the future would seem pretty bleak.
Even 1.5 years ago I replaced a blower motor in my vehicle with something like Sonnet 3.8 as the driver - saving myself $400 in labor and having a fun and educational experience to boot. Many home repair items fall into categories like this, where the actual physical skill demands are fairly low, but skills + background knowledge + supplies-on-hand were the value driver.
The BG knowledge is now available to anyone for free, and it comes with its own knowledgeable shopper.
If you automate the paper pushing what happens? Jeff Bezos isn't gonna buy more condos.
Some of Software folk i know move to repairing electronic devices for living. He still works in AC-room, but instead of holding mouse and keyboard most of the time, now he holds meter probe and soldering iron.