We actually have an entire Immigration team dedicated to this area, and they’re awesome. Anyone who wishes to speak with that team is given a chance to during the interview process to learn more.
This isnt true. Cloud definitely completely changed the market for sysadmin and network engineers. Some folks managed to retrain but many were left out post dotcom bubble.
Like system engineers need to learn some new VM terminology, and network engineers need to know how to configure an IPSEC vpn to azure.
Its a far cry from the "Your job will be replaced by a puppet script" that we were being threatened with.
This might have happened to the top 5% of businesses, but crucially, everyone below that went and spent millions of dollars on reforming their business in the cloud, but ended up just moving a clone of their prod on prem environment into the cloud, and didnt make enough of a change to take advantage of the efficiencies of cloud. So they hired more engineers, not less, and they chuffed on.
At the end of the day, the cloud was a win for your CTO. The actual practical experience and costs of the cloud are irrelevant. AI is much the same.
Honestly this is my plan. I'm waiting for my time in this career to run out. In the mean time I'm trying to aggressively save whatever way I can.
This industry is going to shrink. And that's ok. We had our time. I wish it was longer and I wish I made more, but I don't think I ever saw myself here forever.
Kudos to those who made a whole career off of this.
I'm in my mid 30s with a wife and kid and I'm mostly hoping I can complete my immigration to the US before my time in this career ends.
Then, I might pursue starting a business or going back to school with the savings and hopefully my wife can be employed at the time in her completely unrelated field and cover us until I can figure out what to do next.
I'm not sad about this. I am happy I have tried to live frugally enough to never buy my own hype or believe that my salary is sustainable forever.
A part of it for me is that I never really loved building software. I might have ADHD and that might be a big factor, but honestly it was never what excited me.
The biggest fallacy I see a lot of people buying into is that LLMs being good enough to replace software developers means they're AGI and the world has other problems. I never quite bought that. I think software developers think too highly of themselves.
But they're also not technically wrong. Ya, a LLM can basically replace a family doctor and most internal medicine physicians. But the path to that happening is long and arduous due to how society has setup medics. Software devs never fought hard enough for their profession to be protected. So we are just the easiest target, same thing that happened to a lot of traders before.
If you're mid career like me, just get ready for the idea that your career is probably much shorter than you thought it will be and you will need to retrain. It will suck but many others have done it.
Good thing the high pay balances it out. Also the fact that literally every company needs them to some extent means you can find the specific tradeoffs that work for you
I'm not sure I agree. LLMs are great coders, because we have a lot of training data to make next token prediction work well for writing software programs.
A mistake to make here is to conflate 'AI' with some non sensual dream of 'AGI'.
LLMs are able to do a lot of what a swe does and if nothing else that just means we need less SWEs.
I have no plan. I'm not actually good at anything else, and TBH I wasn't great at software. So I'd need to retrain for something. I have always been a stingy spender so I have enough money to go for 10 years, perhaps significantly longer if there is no crisis.
