We need to push back and push back hard on low-quality industrial automation of our profession.
By Jared White
I am very sorry to inform you, but if you are a React / TypeScript frontend engineer a few years into your career, you are ground zero for getting replaced by “AI engineers”. Mark Zuckerberg hath decreed it to be so!
Big Tech is literally salivating at the idea of taking your job away and replacing it with automation at an industrial scale. Their plan seems to be to hire a bunch of low-wage prompt monkeys to coax AI agents into spitting out “working” React code and JSON APIs, and then handing that work off to a dwindling number of senior engineers for final polish and bug-fixing. And if you thought The Great Gaslighting of the JavaScript Era was finally behind us, oh you ain’t seen nuthin’ yet!
If you are one of the senior engineers standing idly by while your industry is targeted for mass disruption (not the fun kind), well I can’t say I feel much empathy for you.
And if you are one of those “prompt engineers” helping to take jobs away from qualified craftspeople, well, I’m genuinely sorry you have been trapped inside of a capitalist hellscape which is more than willing to exploit you.
But if you are a “mid-level” software developer, one of the “people engineers” whom Mark Zuckerberg claims will be replaced by “AI engineers”, I have some encouragement for you:
There is a place for you in this world. Just probably not in Big Tech. You may need to downsize, move to an area with a lower cost of living, and get real creative about how you find means of gainful employment.
Here are a few ideas on how to weather the coming storm. Because trust me on this—it is coming. Things will get worse before they get better. The Zucks of the world will see to that.
The pandemic really did a number on small local tech meetups. Many of them never recovered. It’s been pretty grim here in Portland, Oregon, I can tell you that.
But hope is not lost. New meetups spring up all the time. You should be putting a good deal of time and effort into finding these meetups and attending them as regularly as possible. And if you can’t find any? Start one! (Or two or three!)
In short, wherever you are, you MUST find flesh-and-bloom humans and enjoy face-to-face time with them. Maybe there aren’t enough Programmers with a capital P in your local area, but usually you can find creatives in adjacent industries to network with.
Your ability to survive the coming AI-pocalypse is largely dependent on your ability to network with real people in real life. The Internet alone may have gotten you far, but it won’t get you far enough over the next few years.
Side-hustle like you’ve never hustled before #
It’s always been true that programmers do well when they have some extra irons in the fire besides whatever they’re tasked to do at their day job. Sometimes there is resentment along these lines
