>Then you have tech employees who want to believe they’re irreplaceable. It’s easy to want to keep working how we’ve always worked with hope of getting back to pre 2022 levels of software hiring and income. AI stands in the way of that.
Eventually, things will stabilize to a point where we will know what the boundaries of all the new LLM based tooling is good for, and where humans add lots of value to that.
That will then drive a maximalist hiring spree, as the more people you have working at an increase in velocity, the faster you ship, and for once, perhaps the quality of code won't substantially decrease, assuming LLMs improve another few leaps in output quality and engineering workflows adjust in a normalized way.
Thats the hopeful side of the equation anyway.
I feel incredibly bad about customer oriented jobs, like white glove customer service. I already saw a trend (especially since 2020 but certainly before as well) where these AI chat bots and AI support lines will decimate that job category. These are pretty common white collar jobs, lots of people even in our industry got their starts on support lines.
I don't think any normal customer is going to want to talk to AI, once the novelty wears off. It's going to be "Let me talk to your supervisor" almost every time.
Yeah, if the AI isn't shite and has access to tools to solve my problem, I'll take it over some overworked and undermotivated human call center any day.
Co I work for creates customer support software, so naturally we have some AI solution available to people.
A lot of our customers (aka businesses deploying our customer support software for their customers) are telling us people fucking hate dealing with AI in literally any capacity, even if some of the stuff we offer actually works quite good (FAQ bots, bots that redirect to the proper channels/teams and stuff like that). The C-suite at my company have had to go back on some of their OKRs of late, because after an initial huge bump of AI usage, clients are starting to kill off the AI tooling and our usage numbers are dwindling because their customers hate it.
I get to see some of the chats people have with the AI systems, and people will straight up say slurs in chats because they know it's the quickest way of escalating to an actual human lol. People really don't like this crap, but of course CEOs and their ilk are usually psychopaths so they don't really give a shit if it means they can save 5 cents per user.
Eventually, things will stabilize to a point where we will know what the boundaries of all the new LLM based tooling is good for, and where humans add lots of value to that.
That will then drive a maximalist hiring spree, as the more people you have working at an increase in velocity, the faster you ship, and for once, perhaps the quality of code won't substantially decrease, assuming LLMs improve another few leaps in output quality and engineering workflows adjust in a normalized way.
Thats the hopeful side of the equation anyway.
I feel incredibly bad about customer oriented jobs, like white glove customer service. I already saw a trend (especially since 2020 but certainly before as well) where these AI chat bots and AI support lines will decimate that job category. These are pretty common white collar jobs, lots of people even in our industry got their starts on support lines.