9,388 engineers polled by Motherboard and Blind said AI will lead to less hiring. Only 6% were confident they'd get another job with the same pay.

Thousands of Software Engineers Say the Job Market Is Getting Much Worse::9,388 engineers polled by Motherboard and Blind said AI will lead to less hiring. Only 6% were confident they’d get another job with the same pay.

  • xtr0n@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    58·
    10 months ago

    Downturns happen. They don’t last forever. There is a lot of pressure from businesses to depress wages and get more work out of software engineers and IT and etc., since we’re one of the few classes of workers who actually get paid. But thinking that developers will be replaced by AI anytime soon is wishful thinking on the part of the bosses. 20 years ago it was how we’d all get replaced by dirt cheap engineers overseas. Well, I’m still waiting on that to happen. If the MBAs could clearly and unambiguously articulate exactly what needs to be implemented, then maybe it would work. But if they can’t do that when we’re all in a conference room together then they’re sure as shit not doing it over email with a 12 hour time difference.

    Keep your head up and keep trying to get an entry level gig somewhere. It doesn’t have to be Google or some hotshot startup or even a tech company. Doing IT or websites for an insurance company is still good experience.

    • Ottomateeverything@lemmy.worldEnglish
      16·
      10 months ago

      If the MBAs could clearly and unambiguously articulate exactly what needs to be implemented

      LOL if only… If this happened, we’d need half as many engineers, even without AI. It feels like a third of my work hours are dedicated to figuring out what the fuck they actually want, and half of them are dedicated to building the wrong thing because they change their mind or didn’t say something.

      Shit makes me feel like I should go into management but you could not pay me enough to sit around and talk to these people for 8 hours a day.

      Sure, AI would solve some problems if people could actually ask the right questions. But engineers are already being paid to be those translators on their own since companies cannot find any other way to solve this problem.

      • sigmund@lemmy.worldEnglish
        3·
        10 months ago

        Yup. My boss is an engineer by training and I would not take his job, even if it got me the extra $50k per year he makes

    • sigmund@lemmy.worldEnglish
      6·
      10 months ago

      Hell, even project managers who used to be engineers have trouble figuring out what they need. The reason engineers/general technical folk are valuable is because their job is to pick through the guesswork laid by management and formulate an actual working thing, regardless of whether it’s a physical object or a button on a website.

      Current language learning model AI has no chance if you can’t actually formulate what you really need.

      I can make AI write code for me, but actually knowing what I need it to write is more than half the battle