• MasterBuilder@lemmy.one
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    1 year ago

    I’ve been unemployed for 7 months. Every online job I see that’s been posted for at least 6 hours has over 200 applications. I’m a senior Dev with 30 years experience, and I can’t find work.

    I’d say generative AI is an existential threat as bad as offshoring was for steel in the early 80s. I’m now left with the prospect of spending the last 20 years of my work life at or near minimum wage.

    After all, I can’t afford to spend $250,000 on a new bachelor’s degree, and a community college degree might get me to $25/hr, and still costs thousands. This is causing impoverishment on a massive scale.

    Ignore this threat at your peril.

    • Scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech
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      1 year ago

      I’m a senior dev too, and at first I thought the same, but really it’s a market downturn. Companies are just afraid to hire right now. I’d look into generative AI, try to understand how it works. That’s how I’ve been spending my time, and yeah, it’s intuitive the way they do it but the more you understand how it works the more you realize that it’s not ready to take our jobs. Yet. Again maybe someday, but there is a lot of work that needs to be done to get something semi up and running, and the models that Google uses are not going to be usable for every company. (Take a look at all the specialized models already).

      Our job never goes away, but it does constantly evolve. This is just another point where we have to learn new skills, and that may be that we all need to be model tuners some day. At the end of the day the user still needs to correctly describe what they want to have happen on the screen, and there are currently no ways to take what they describe into a full piece of software.

    • HelixTitan@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      Hard to believe a senior dev can’t find work. Those positions are the most needed. Also 25 an hour is 50k a year. No where in the US are senior devs paid that little. I suppose you may not be US based, but your cost for college seems to imply US, albeit at an expensive school.

      • MasterBuilder@lemmy.one
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        1 year ago

        I was not saying 25 for a dev job, i was saying that for other kinds of work i might be able to get without getting a new degree.