As I climb into my little twin sized bed in my small RV trailer on a patch of undeveloped deep rural land in the Central New York highlands, exhausted from my 6 hours of doordash driving to make less than 200$ that day, I check my emails one last time for the night: no responses from the 745th through 756th job applications that i put in over the last week for engineering roles i’m qualified or over-qualified for. I’m not that surprised or disappointed at this point, as I close in on the 800 application mark in over the last year of being an unemployed software engineer. (View Highlight)
I’m now in the trailer because something has shifted in society in the last 2.5 years. Something that caused myself and a large portion of the talented dev teams let go at a time when our company and parent corp were doing great. Something that I’ve known was coming since beginning my study of the topic since around 2005. Something that makes getting my resume even seen to begin with a sisyphusian task. Something that has warped an already broken technical interview process into a PTSD-inducing minefield. Something that now, still only in its infancy, is already touching basically every aspect of almost all of our lives (whether you realize it or not): AI. (View Highlight)
In this last year I interviewed with close to 10 companies, getting as far as a 4th round interview twice and several second and third rounds, but not getting any offers. It has amounted to dozens of unpaid hours of my time on these interviews and the preparation for them, with nothing to show for it. I try not to think about the other hundreds (thousands?) of hours of my time in the last year trolling the depths of 5 or 6 different job listing sites, the YC message board, local listings (depressing), and manually messaging EACH of my 250 linkedin contacts asking if they had any leads. (View Highlight)
so the common wisdom goes. I have spent 2 to 5 hours per day in the last year consuming AI news, papers, and podcasts, and constantly thinking and reflecting on the latest AI trends. I have a pretty good idea exactly what the fuck is going on. I have built about 10 small 100% AI-generated codebases in the last year as personal learning exercises, and any time there is free access to any new AI tool, i go out of my way to try it out. I am in Cursor almost every day. (View Highlight)
I partially rent out my city house to a long-term tenant, it does not profit and it just about covers the operating expenses of the house. I was undertaking the renovations which would make the full house rentable and result in a monthly small profit, but I ran out of money for the renovations so I had to settle for renting half of the house only. If i was bestowed some gift of capital, I could complete the renovations and make the house income-producing. (View Highlight)
I rent one of my cabins on Airbnb, and have only ever received 5 star reviews. people love it here, but our location is so remote and winters so harsh that only during the peak one or two months of the year does it clear the income amount it would make renting to a long-term tenant. (View Highlight)
This article isn’t for sympathy or to make me feel better by making excuses. I’m sharing my real life story of how I went from a highly valued technologist to basically nothing in the course of a year or two with the rise of AI. (View Highlight)
I don’t think my story is unique, I think I am at the early side of the bell curve of the coming social and economic disaster tidal wave that is already underway and began with knowledge workers and creatives. It’s coming for basically everyone in due time, and we are already overdue for proposing any real solution in society to heading off the worst of these effects. The discussion of AI job replacement in the mainstream is still viewed as something coming in the vague future rather than something that’s already underway. (View Highlight)
I’m only mad about losing my job to AI because I live in a society that says you don’t have a right to feed yourself and survive unless you exchange your labor for capital. Let the machines do the work, and with all this new value they are creating for us, let’s share it with everyone. send me a check every month for free, we already did it a couple times during covid. mortgages went unpaid, free money to every citizen was sent, and society went on basically as normal and did not fully collapse. Why are we still upholding the industrial-revolution era notion of what role work and money play in our lives? how many more people are headed towards the same experience i’ve been living here for the last year before we decide it’s time to rethink things? (View Highlight)
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