As a software engineer it is hard for me to feel sorry for these mathematicians. Software engineers are getting laid off because of advancements made by AI. Math researchers are employed at universities, and universities aren't laying off mathematicians now that OpenAI has solved some of their puzzles. Mathematicians can still feed their families, software engineers displaced by AI can't. Yet I see far more of these blogs about the plight of mathematicians, not enough about the plight of software engineers.

When software engineers spent the last 50 years eliminating the work of clerical, secretarial, and dozens of other back-office functions, were they concerned about how those people would feed their families? Do you think anybody but other software engineers feels any sorrow for them today, now that they are facing the same fate?

There are orders of magnitude fewer mathematicians with full time academic positions than there are software engineers. The economics are different and consequently academia tends to be more slow moving in reacting to market trends. It doesn't mean it isn't coming, but it will look somewhat different

I don't personally grieve for the likes of Strogatz or Tao, it seems likely both of them will be fine however this pans out. But many more mathematicians have been toiling away in precarity and obscurity and without tenure for years and years. And of course many mathematicians went into private sector roles as software engineers, actuaries, analysts, ML engineers and similar, and have been displaced there, too.

And highly visible blog posts written by famous mathematicians with large audiences and closely aligned with the news and hype cycles getting frontpaged on HN doesn't mean that mathematicians are disproportionately whiney, nor that software engineers aren't also writing about their plight or ending up on the front page as well.

To me this goes in the same direction as people not feeling sorry for software developers because our job is supposedly automating the job of other people (which I don't think describes the profession accurately as a whole at all).

Neither sits right with me. Can't we just all collectively acknowledge that we have to grapple with this new piece of technology that either is already or at least seems to be going to be hurtful to a lot of individuals?

Instead of looking at the in comparison limited group of people currently pushing this technology and asking ourselves whether we should be on board with their doing, we look to one another and are happy that someone else is now suffering just the same as we are. What a sad state of affairs.

As a software engineer? The career whose very reason, largely, for existing in this market is to automate jobs, with few notable exceptions? That one is somehow deserving of sympathy and that of mathematicians is not? Come off it. The notion is undignified.

This is a silly analogy, and you're comparing very different entities.

Say you have a friend who likes making music (not professionally - just a hobby).

If an invention came out tomorrow that took the joy completely out of making music, would you respond with "It's hard for me to feel sorry about you."

Just because things suck for you doesn't mean it can't suck for others (in different ways).

> Software engineers are getting laid off because of advancements made by AI.

The bean counters laying off software engineers ought to take notes from the frontier labs' own hiring practices. They're still hiring lots of humans for business and engineering roles even when they would be better positioned than anyone to automate away those jobs with their world-class models (https://openai.com/careers/search/).

Why is it hard ? It's basic empathy.

What does your being software engineer has anything to do with feeling sorry for Mathematicians' job ?

It's a classic "I have it worse than them...everyone should feel sorry for ME and not them".

It's not about universities, it's about grant funding over the next few years. It is very apt to collapse if AI is more useful than people. Why pay people to find this when tokens will do instead.

It’s only been a few months since LLMs started solving significant open problems in math. I wouldn’t jump to the conclusion that they have it better than software engineers.

In many ways it will likely be the opposite. Tech firms still need engineers to talk to customers and run experiments. What will the mathematicians be needed for?

What's your source for "Software engineers are getting laid off because of advancements made by AI". I haven't experienced that in my field and can't find any data to support that notion.

Software engineers are getting laid off because of the end of zero interest rates, wars started by Putin and Trump, and a bit because of pandemic over hiring. The part that is due to AI is less hiring of juniors. Know your enemy before starting a fight.

> Software engineers are getting laid off because of advancements made by AI.

This is said by a lot of CEOs trying to make layoffs look good, but I haven’t seen anything that suggests that it’s true.

> Yet I see far more of these blogs about the plight of mathematicians, not enough about the plight of software engineers.

Really?!? We’ve been living through 3 years of blog posts, LinkedIn hot takes, and podcasts talking about the plight of software engineers in the era of AI. There isn’t a week that goes by without an HN post about it.

I can feel empathy for the practitioners in a field that may have been profoundly changed, the same way I can feel empathy toward software engineers who are struggling with the changes in their own field.

In the end, we’re all trying to figure out where this leads. And how this will affect our lives and our work.

The difference is it takes great intelligence to be a mathematician, whereas anyone can be trained to write code. It’s like the difference between an automotive engineer and a mechanic. I would argue writing code takes less skill than carpentry.

Software engineers still can feed their families. The notion that software engineers can not feed families is not consistent with reality.

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