Well said! 5 years ago I could have a pretty solid picture of what my career would look like through retirement.

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.

▲

coldtea 18 hours ago | parent | next [-]

>loads of people have historically done giant pivots at midlife

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)

▲

tempest_ 17 hours ago | parent [-]

Everyone can't be a plumber.

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.

▲

darth_avocado 17 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> Everyone can't be a plumber.

Yes, but not for the reasons you say. It’s because if everyone is a plumber, you don’t need plumbers.

▲

auyez 11 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Also I imagine a lot of demand for plumbers might drop because AI might help you to learn to solve easy cases. Imagine you turn on you camera and it would just tell you what to do exactly.

▲

fodkodrasz 9 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I have just called a plumber to do a leaking radiator replacement. Not because I don't have the tools or I don't have YouTube, but because I didn't want to do it.

▲

coldtea 8 hours ago | parent [-]

That was always true if you could afford it.

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.

	▲	fodkodrasz 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Currently AI made me way more work and unpaid over hours already buy sorting out the 10x expectations and the slop grenades by the 10x workers, that is why i needed it... so I can't even have this much feeling of having accomplished anything myself. 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.

▲

dranudin 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Yes, buuut: I think we are already really close to that for a long time. You could learn a lot just from internet and youtube. But most people, I feel, just do not like to neither do plumbing/diy nor learn about it. Like if I tell people they can save hundreds of € by changing their own brake pads and that it is really easy to diy, they just shrug and go to the mechanic. So I am not sure if AI will really increase the percentage of people willing to learn these skills and do repairs etc

▲

cucumber3732842 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Yeah the information has been available for awhile. What stops people is all the indoctrination and conditioning.

"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.

	▲	dd8601fn 25 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Some stuff you really shouldn’t do just because you saw some youtube videos, and it has fuck-all to do with “government indoctrination.” 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.

▲

bitwize 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

That'll be Wario's arc in the next Super Mario movie.

"...And when everyone's a plumber... no one will be!"

▲

taneq 16 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Get the young guys to do the lifting, there’s still plenty of room for old guys with experience who know all the tips, tricks and gotchyas.

Edit: Fair point, you don’t want to be entering a trade which requires heavy lifting as an older guy with no experience.

	▲	drivebyhooting 15 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		If you are 40 making a career change you have no experience tips or tricks.
	▲	phoghed 15 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		When you lose your white collar job to AI you don’t have those tips, tricks, and gotchas for whatever work is left for you.
	▲	JDups 15 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		To be an old guy with experience you need to start as a young guy.

▲

tetraodonpuffer 19 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

pivot to what though, if "mind" jobs are going to be automated, it's not like there's a category of jobs that opens up, and going from mental to physical jobs in your 50s doesn't seem that easy

▲

mrheosuper 13 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It's a spectrum, with "physical" and "mental" at each end.

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.

▲

coldtea 18 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Physical jobs will drop in demand and increase in supply too. Unemployed "mind" workers don't have much to spend to drive much demand in manual work, and they might even try to pivot themselves to manual work, making things worse for manual workers.

▲

cowlevel 14 hours ago | parent | next [-]

and those who did the "mind jobs" 30-40 years ago retain that wealth, while wages plummet and they don't have to give up any significant part of their wealth to get what they want. This destroys class mobility , creating a type of feudalism.

▲

catoc 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

“Physical jobs will drop in demand too”

Why?

▲

emodendroket 12 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It seems unlikely "physical AI" will be a complete bust but the post you're replying to is positing that fewer people will have money to spend on their services.

▲

NiloCK 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

A lot of well-paid physical labor is going to face more competition from DiY + AI guidance among able-bodied and cost sensitive adults.

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.

▲

catoc 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Thx - that’s a valid point

	▲	coldtea 8 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Yeah, fewer "office jobs" and more automated jobs in general, means less demand for manual jobs from those (as money will be tighter). 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.

▲

cucumber3732842 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Because we have a largely paper pushing service economy and so the guy who's plumbing a luxury condo is dependent upon the existence of some overpaid javascript monkey who the builder/financiers are counting on to buy the condo when it's done.

If you automate the paper pushing what happens? Jeff Bezos isn't gonna buy more condos.

▲

fodkodrasz 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I guess being soldiers in the war against robots and their owners is a kind of physical job

▲

bigstrat2003 15 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> 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'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.

▲

georgemcbay 19 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> One sunny spot I have is that life is very long.

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.

▲

monknomo 19 hours ago | parent [-]

yeah, you're down to like 3/4 a career left, it makes sense that you feel that way. Less runway ought to feel different.

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.

▲

spidersenses 5 hours ago | parent [-]

>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.

	▲	exe34 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> 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. You missed the happy path.

▲

11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[deleted]

▲

lirolero 19 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

[dead]