Not getting a phone didn't really cost you either for the first 5-10 yrs.
But the people that didn't definitely had a harder time adjusting when it got increasingly annoying to live without a smartphone.
It's ultimately a choice you can make, but it definitely also comes with consequences - especially if your dayjob is software - as this is an industry that loves to discriminate against people that aren't aboard the hype train and don't have "10 yrs of experience in d̵o̵c̵k̵e̵r̵ LLMs"
I really dont think analogy works at all. If you did not had phone phone first 15 years of their existence, there was very little to pay. Nowhere near anything close to "living in the woods".
And no one was forcing phones on you first 5-10 years of it existing. There was advertisement and competition like with any other product. You was certainly not getting free phones and there was no real top down push to have them like we see with ai.
You forget that the vast majority of software engineering in the real world is boring tech, not the new hotness that’s being peddled on Hacker News.
There is a large market for Java, C++ and COBOL engineers to this day, despite all startups on here are talking about React and Rust. There will still be a large need for actual engineers that use their meat brain and are not paid by line committed for the foreseeable future. Not everyone is writing junior-tier boilerplate that benefits from LLMs.
Ok I didn't forget. As a matter of fact, most LLMs are outright banned at my workplace.
However, the writing is on the wall and it's likely going to become one of the bullet points you'll be expected to have significant experience in when changing jobs. And I doubt that's gonna take 10 yrs
But the people that didn't definitely had a harder time adjusting when it got increasingly annoying to live without a smartphone.
It's ultimately a choice you can make, but it definitely also comes with consequences - especially if your dayjob is software - as this is an industry that loves to discriminate against people that aren't aboard the hype train and don't have "10 yrs of experience in d̵o̵c̵k̵e̵r̵ LLMs"