Automated employees are coming.
The first to go will be support people, then UX designers and data analysts. The Automated Enployees will be chatbots based on a powerful LLM with special training in the subject material. Instead of a company paying 200k-450k USD for a human to chat in Slack/Teams, sketch in Figma/Adobe, do data stuff in a notebook or Excel, or guide people through support case resolutions, highly trained bots will do all that. Companies will pay by minutes or tokens used and will be able to scale up production to meet the needs of busy times. It'll be AI-employee-as-a-service. It'll take some time but other computer based professions, one by one, will start to be replaceable by bots. Software engineering bots will be trained on a company's own source control to learn how to properly code. Pull requests will still be approved by a human, but all coding will be automated. Safe tech jobs to occupy will be those that require decision making and customer contact. So PMs, managers, and sales are safe. Also safe will be manual jobs that require actual field or lab work, since the robotics revolution will take more time to materialize. TC: 550k USD
Wow! Those are some powerful insights. Just one question (out of curiosity), what’s the source of this? 🤔
lol. Imagine customer service so shitty they’d rather take you to court than payout a couple hundred in credits
True. But it makes for terrible optics. The story could’ve quietly gone away if they just paid out. And I doubt anyone would seriously try to exploit a bereavement loophole at scale.
So just hire people to make decisions?
And techs to help rent ("hire"), train and monitor the bots. Pretty much many professional fields will evolve to this model.
How to get 550k TC ?
PMs are literally the most useless function lol
So PMs, Sales are more safer than SWE? How do I move to SWE without experience in these areas ?!
With you on this OP, people may not get it now, we are exactly going the way you have described. There will be millions of job losses in the coming few years, I wonder how the world looks after a decade from now
“Software engineering bots will be trained on a company's own source control to learn how to properly code.”
That's exactly right. Every commit in your source control history and every review comment will be used to train the bots.
Those bots are gonna write some shitty code. My code base is full of crappy legacy stuff that we’re migrating off of
AI used well is great. However, I cannot wait for the clapback when these companies realize that you actually do need people too.
“So PMs, managers, and sales are safe.” I had a laugh when I read that
I would say sales will definitely stay. The client doesn’t want to be taken care of by some bot. The others will likely go.
Actually a lot of sales involves back office work that can be automated. Case in point https://arstechnica.com/google/2024/01/google-lays-off-hundreds-more-as-ad-division-switches-to-ai-powered-sales/