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Ask HN: Are you switching to an AI related role?
With AI/AGI supposedly someday supplanting a subset of tech roles, are there folks who are retooling their careers to ride the wave rather than weather the storm? Are you taking courses, making internal/external job changes, adding AI sounding terms to your resumes? Or, maybe just abandoning simple coding work in favor of roles that are less replaceable via LLM autofill?
- sk11001 3y agoI'm an ML engineer and I don't agree with the assumption that AI-related roles are somehow different. I don't think they're necessarily in more demand, or pay more, or in lower risk of being automated away. I do think that, regardless of your job, AI assistance can be useful and worth getting used to, that's the biggest takeaway from the past 12 months.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- gtvwill 3y agoIm at a crunch point. I either leap further into IT and obviously leverage AI for work much as I do today. But I have no tickets and am a jack of all IT trades but a master of none. In IT the competition is high and the job security is low. So I either close my company and go work for a big dog and earn less than i would driving trucks, keep operating as a one man pty ltd and push to expand or bugger it all off and go building/laboring. Tbh bailing from IT as an industry is becoming more appealing. The industry sucks. Vendor lock in has gotten so bad folks don't implement good infrastructure rollout because of it.
- anonzzzies 3y agoI (and my company) are just incorporating LLMs into our products everywhere where they make sense. Which requires our engineers to know a lot more about them. We work with source code and data from clients and as such we have to use self hosted LLMs, so ops for ai related services is becoming a thing. I think this will become normal; it’s a tool to use next to other tools, for now.
- akudha 3y agoCan you talk a bit about your process? How do you identify where to use AI and how to you get business to agree? How do you pick models, how do you host them?
- matrix87 3y agoI dropped out of my swe job and replaced it with gig work, currently looking for a job as a prompt engineer. I think I'm going to go back to uni and get a degree in prompt engineering. The future is AI driven, whether people want to accept that or not Also my email is fuck_you@gmail.com if any journalists want to interview me, assuming journalists still exist in current year
- ravenstine 3y agoNo, because I don't think most companies even know what an AI role means yet. I'm not too keen on having my time wasted learning a bunch of already out of date crap for a company that can't muster a real plan around AI. Speaking of, I might have been more enthusiastic if I was a young man. In my 30s, I can hardly give a shit about spending my remaining years, before dedicating myself to a family, sitting in front of a screen trying to be relevant and learn some hackneyed Python scripts that implement already-outdated AI models. Fuck that shit. That's a young man's game. I already did that with JavaScript development, which now looks incredibly stable in contrast to AI. Most products integrating AI will be obsolete soon anyway. The idea that AI works better as an adjunct to existing applications seems reasonable in the short term, but LLMs will get more advanced to the point where doing things in a traditional way won't make sense. The people in charge of businesses right now are simply too set in their ways and are unwilling to actually understand this technology. They believe they will see riches by being a GPT-whisperer, and maybe they will in the short term.
- maCDzP 3y agoI am 35 and I thought I was young, dammit. 2024 is off to a bad start.
- ravenstine 3y agoYouth is at least somewhat relative. 35 is young in contrast to 95, but the difference between a beginner coder at 16 years old and a professional programmer at 35 is very different. Even a 10 year gap between 25 and 35 is significant given how fast the field itself changes. There are much older programmers than I who would consider me young (like my uncle who's a former COBOL programmer), but I definitely don't feel like a young programmer approaching 35 having been programming on and off since ~10 years old and spending over a decade as a web developer. I definitely don't have the same drive to ride the hype and master crazy new skills like I did back in 2013.
- mnky9800n 3y agoDo whatever you want. There aren't any actual rules for this stuff.
- joshxyz 3y agono, but im psitioning my projects in a way that can benefit rom those advancements.