alt Hacker NewsThere seems to be an understanding between older engineers (who have watched technology evolve, and expect it to happen) and much younger engineers (where technology and AI already happened, so don’t know any different). It’s the mid-aged people in-between who seem to think they are entitled to a certain kind of job.
Times change and so do jobs. I worked in restaurants in the 00’s when that was hot, now without cash and different service expectations it’s not the boom it once was. Many sales jobs no longer exist because customers expect to self-serve. Just because a sector is hot is no guarantee it will continue, nobody should expect to take high wages and their individual value for granted.
There are plenty of jobs available in the world, and in the US the minimum wage and benefits are some of the highest they’ve ever been. But, many people don’t want the available jobs. Plenty of people have degrees in other fields and chose software because it was a better option at the time, similarly many software engineers may have to figure out what skills they have that will translate elsewhere.
None of this is new. And globalization makes all of it more competitive than ever. No man is an island, better to find ways to contribute within the community and support each other, especially if we want change and believe we should have a fallback in social services.
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> US the minimum wage and benefits are some of the highest they’ve ever been.
That's completely expected. You could say this at any point since 1938. But minimum wage is dramatically behind inflation
Maybe I should tell another story.
I wanted originally to be a graphic designer, as a kid spent years in Paint and PaintShop Pro, finally learned Photoshop. I tried to intern with a graphic designer and he basically said "you don't want this job", it was already competitive and becoming automated.
I was not such a versatile illustrator and was better at layout, I joined newspaper and learned InDesign and Pagemaker while at a place that still laid out classifieds by hand. I remember when my Editor's older brother came in who worked at Time with a digital camera and said, "We don't develop photos anymore, and we can even send them in from the field." I believed in journalism but the tech side of it for me, a dead end. Only a few people were needed now for the production.
So I learned web development, cut my teeth on Internet Explorer and DHTML. We hated the fight between browser behemoths, why couldn't they agree on a standard? Well, they did. And now, anybody who could read a standards doc could do my job. So, I moved on to app development.
Apps were exciting — still are! — now I could make a program and see people use it in their hand in their daily life. Many competing technologies, Android seemed like the right choice, open core so the ecosystem thrived. A few years in, this also meant anyone in the world with a basic subsidized phone and a computer that could run Java could do my job. I switched mostly to iOS.
I think you see where this story is going, but I agree with the article. We fight for equal access to knowledge and tooling. Information wants to be free! And I see that firsthand every day. That is — to reference TFA — a double-edged sword. As we share information we lose control of it.
Is AI the potential greatest success of open-source or its failure? I think we still have time to decide if we make the right choices.