Do you really want the direction of an entire company to be dictated by AI? You act as if the CEO does nothing, which isn't true. One of the main jobs is networking/maintaining relationships, which isn't something that can be done with AI.
Jobs where you just sit and work all day with little human interaction will most likely be replaced by AI first.
"We need to stop expecting the same damn people who bought a four-bedroom home and a brand-new Cadillac convertible off of a $30,000-a-year salary to understand what it’s like to be working 40-plus hours a week with a master’s degree and still not being able to afford a 400-square-foot studio apartment in bumf-ck Iowa"
"We need to stop expecting the same damn people who bought a four-bedroom home and a brand-new Cadillac convertible off of a $30,000-a-year salary"
This hasn't been the case for many decades and not in my lifetime (I'm in my 40s).
However, many people now can afford to get an apartment in 'bumf-ck Iowa', but want something close to where they work, and can't afford it.
I’m in my 50s. Neither I nor any of my friends could afford a four bedroom home or a Cadillac at the age working Gen Zers are now. We all lived in apartments or run down houses with 3 or 4 other roommates and drove falling apart junk used cars. Most of us worked temp jobs or waited tables for a few years after college because there was a recession and no jobs to be had.
Is housing more expensive today as a percentage of income than it was then? Yes, the numbers don’t lie but there also seems to be a major misperception regarding the reality of the past and when you start spouting of misinformation about what others lived through and you didn’t it is hard to get them to listen to the rest of what you have to say.
I've seen the exact opposite. Management at my company has been trying to shove AI into everything. They even said that this year we would be dropping all vendors that didn't have some for of AI in their workflow.
"DeepSeek is the latest in a spate of breakthroughs from China to shock the U.S. It won’t be the last. The more the West refuses to tear down its own barriers to understanding China, the more it will be caught off guard in the future."
What's there to understand? The CCP is authoritarian and the only way to 'revolutionize' anything is to become more open and free. So in essence, they need to become more like the west.
China usually innovates with technologies that allow them to control their people more effectively: in the 90s it was lethal injection technology, the GFW (Great Firewall), facial-recognition and tracking technology, and now AI (which will also be used to track and control the population).
This attitude is exactly the problem. The US can barely build civilian ships and BYD makes better cars than most of Detroid. China seems awfully big on the rearview mirror and people are putting their heads on the sand.
"I've been in high tech for 30 years, and I've been laid off many times, most often from failed start ups. I _strongly_ disagree with a fully cynical response of working only to contract, leveraging job offers for raises, etc."
I've been in tech for 15 years and twice was enough for me. I now take on multiple contracts at the same time and make way more than I ever did as a regular employee.
I also won't work for startups as a full-time salaried employee anymore. They will always try to squeeze the hours out of you because they are usually trying to make a fast approaching deadline to get that next round of funding.
I had a well paying 6 month contract last summer and they wanted to hire me as a full-time, salaried employee. The problem was that I worked closely with their salaried employees and they were always overworked (many working on multiple teams) and working long hours on extremely tight deadlines.
The space was also over-saturated and when I researched the company, they were not turning a profit after a couple of years and continuing to take on rounds of funding.
When I refused the offer and wanted to continue as a contractor, they cut off all contact with me and I haven't heard from them since. It really showed me that they just wanted to overwork me and not pay.
How do you define “good”? When I looked at contract work briefly in 2023 and 2024, contract rates for enterprise dev and the type of work you find on Indeed was around $60-$80/hour W2. Which is really on the low to median end of even enterprise dev once you take into account no paid PTO, no health insurance, and you can’t even count on working 1800 hours a year.
This is also why all of the auto union are against electric cars. Some person working in their garage will no longer be able to work on cars and get a job as a mechanic/technician and instead will need to have the experience of an engineer.
It's very similar to the horse/buggy and car arguments of years past.
I have a modern diesel truck and a 1988 Land Cruiser. I’ve been a mechanic since I was 14 (farm tractors) and was a helicopter mechanic and crew chief in the marines, then a transmission mechanic on cars during college. I’ve got a mechanical engineering degree.
The Land Cruiser requires a lot more of my time working on it, but it’s a dream. I can fix something in a couple hours. The diesel, it’s a nightmare. Everything sucks working in it. Access is horrible, I end up having to jack into the CAN bus all the time, I spent a while with an oscilloscope plugged into it a month ago, and I’ve had to write my own software to interact with it.
Modern cars are more computer than car, and they are pushing more and more towards being fixed like them. I’d rather work on an electric car… what wears out? The cooling system? A bearing? Simple.
The same overcomplex, proprietary computer surveillance systems infect all electric cars because they're all modern. They're all (for some reason?) connected to the internet, subject to OTA updates, and completely locked down to the end user. If a manufacturer would make an EV with open software and systems--no useless internet crap--for less than $100k I'd buy it tomorrow.
My education is via YouTube and downloaded service manual, and I’m able to maintain my modern ICE car just fine. My hybrid scares me though. High voltage controlled by computers is nothing to play with.
There is a disconnect. And information on how to properly insulate and isolate away from the voltages that you may be dealing is also easily found.
It requires maybe a bit of research but it's not impossible.
Are you also able to rebuild your engine and transmission? Service every sensor on board your car? Have access to a diagnostic computer and dicern those codes?
Jobs where you just sit and work all day with little human interaction will most likely be replaced by AI first.
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