In response to questions from The New York Times, more than 150 college students and recent graduates — from state schools including the universities of Maryland, Texas and Washington, as well as private universities like Cornell and Stanford — shared their experiences. Some said they had applied to hundreds, and in several cases thousands, of tech jobs at companies, nonprofits and government agencies. The process can be arduous, with tech companies asking candidates to complete online coding assessments and, for those who do well, live coding tests and interviews. But many computing graduates said their monthslong job quests often ended in intense disappointment or worse: companies ghosting them. Some faulted the tech industry, saying they felt “gaslit” about their career prospects. Others described their job search experiences as “bleak,” “disheartening” or “soul-crushing.”
It wasn't long ago at all that students who studied things other than coding were taunted with the imperative "Learn to code." Such a useful skill, so suddenly obsolete.
పోస్ట్లు
118 కామెంట్లు:
They are competing with all the H1B visa holders that Musk mistakenly promotes as his preferred option. If tech companies were limited to US citizens or AI the “recent graduates” (how non-specific) might stand a better chance.
Tech workers are one of the major supports of the current American oligarchy. The more they are replaced with H1Bs and AI, the more open they will be to alternative forms of politics. President Trump will look urbane and moderate compared to what these people will end up backing.
I know some remarkable coders. Most of them who learned various other things before learning code, and therefore can properly work through the logic before putting it to code. However, most of the people I met that thought they would make a lot of money coding were people who lacked logical thinking skills.
Learn to weld. $80,000/yr. immediately and you move up fast. There will never be an AI robot replacing a welder.
My son-in-law had an excellent tech job coding and debugging for ESRI when he wrote the code for Shopify as a side project. When that company took off he and our daughter were instantly wealthy. The new shiny tech is AI now. Perhaps we were bystanders to the boom and bust of programming guys (yeah I know there’s a few girls too). It is ironic that coders created their own replacement technology isn’t it?
LLM has a habit of inventing “facts” to support its arguments like fake legal citations now clogging court dockets. Is there a coding equivalent to this tendency? Do they make up new mathematical models?
FormerLawClerk said...
Learn to weld. $80,000/yr. immediately and you move up fast. There will never be an AI robot replacing a welder.
You should visit the body shop of any automaker these days.
FormerLawClerk said...
Learn to weld. $80,000/yr. immediately and you move up fast. There will never be an AI robot replacing a welder.
Depending on the industry up to 30 to 50 percent of welding is done by robots.
Either AI (LLM) is a hype that managers expect to provide solutions, or the 'coders' they have are simply bodies behind a keyboard and aren't providing solutions beyond what has already been solved out there.
I suspect both, but a significant amount of the latter. These fresh (and not so fresh) coders in my empirical evidence are basically rubbish.
'Oh look, another overly complex web interface which is better served as an excel spreadsheet.'
It's not an obsolete skill, it's just evolved. People seem to think with automation jobs are just gone....and yet despite everything from the mechanical shovel to automated manufacturing, we have low unemployment and higher standards of living than ever before.
If someone has a mindset that they were prepared to be on a code "assembly line", being paid handsomely by an organization to be part of a huge group of people all contributing modest pieces, then yes - that's going away. To be fair, that was being outsourced to low cost countries 20 years ago....and there's no lower cost country than an AI agent doing the work.
Now, people with such skill sets can themselves access AI driven code writing for like $20/month and be massively more productive. If they have the brains for it.
You should visit the body shop of any automaker these days.
Positioning the robot is very important to welding and for now they just don't have the flexibility or autonomy to be pipeline welders and other assorted highly mobile positions, including the x-ray techs, truck drivers, tractor operators, etc.
Assembly lines are not very good proxies for field work.
The vast majority of "robot welders" are in fixed locations like the saw factory my friends run in Bolnas, Sweden, the auto assembly line mentioned above, the pliers factory in Milwaukee etc. The reason people keep mentioning pipeline jobs is because building infrastructure takes a flexibility that robot welders, for now, don't have. Sure maybe there will be journeyman robots who trot out to a job and do heir thing autonomously, but I think some people here are mixing indoor and outdoor scenarios in their comments about robot welders.
FLC said: “Learn to weld. $80,000/yr. immediately and you move up fast. There will never be an AI robot replacing a welder.”
As someone said up thread, robotic welders everywhere. Secondly, as a welder, how does one “move up”? Maybe welding supervisor in a large company, but that’s it.
I agree welders do make very good money.
It's about to get even harder for coders. The latest versions of ChatGPT and Claude can not only inspect and debug code but also generate code and build operational systems from relatively simple provided descriptions.
However, this also presents an entirely new and very lucrative opportunity. Namely, for those people who understand business processes in detail and can quickly specify that detail to the AI. This in fact is the hottest tech field right now, called "Prompt Engineering", for designing the system prompts for the AI platform and its library of AI agents.
The sample size of 150 graduates is hardly a good enough sample size (<1/10th of 1%) to draw any meaningful conclusions from, given over 50,000 graduate with MS in CompSci, not counting 2500 doctorates and the 100,000 that jump out with BS degrees, all in any given year.
The article is remarkably nonspecific in referring to "some" and "many." I suspect there's less here than they're trying to suggest.
I worked with guys for whom live tests of their coding ability would have presented little challenge, just an opportunity to wow you, If you are a guy like that, sure, learn to code.
IOW what about the other 99.9% who graduated with a degree in CompSci?
I was a tech freelancer and contractor for 45 years. Skills becoming “suddenly obsolete” was SOP for those 45 years. Nothing fundamental has changed. In simple to understand terms, the desktop coding paradigms and apps went obsolete every 5 to 10 years, replaced by entirely new paradigms and apps. Coding was headed for the dustbin long ago, back in the early 2000s when javascript code libraries began to take over. Coding became “copy a javascript function, plug it in your code and modify and customize it to your needs.”
The sample size is not the problem, it's how they are selected that determines whether it is a valid sample, not so much how many people are in it.
Do they make up new mathematical models?
Absolutely. We are using AI (really LLM) to help analyze new business ventures. When you really dig into it, it is a bunch of regression models making predictions, sometimes about cause and effect situations for which there was already a good mathematical formula that expressed it.
I’ll give a personal example of why that isn’t really wrong, even if imperfect. About 20 years ago, I was writing code to help a company track propellant use for engine testing. Everyday, a person would drop a dipstick into a tank, take a reading, look up the current temperature and pressure, and determine the amount of fluid in the tank by matching those three items on a graph. The graph was written by a mathematician back in the 60’s and had simply been photographed over and over for decades. No one remembered the original formula, even though it was simply a combination of the ideal gas law and the mathematical volume representation of the storage tank. Rather than rework that equation, I simply asked for the last couple of years of readings. I then wrote a regression equation that gave them the same results as the graph. I know my equation was almost gibberish compared to the volume of a sphere and ideal gas law, but it worked to 99.9% accuracy.
Learn to weld. $80,000/yr. immediately and you move up fast. There will never be an AI robot replacing a welder.
Others have pointed out how silly this is. It would have been better to suggest that one is unlikely to be replaced as a plumber, electrician or trim carpenter. I have cousins in all three fields who have greater wealth than me with a Ph.D.
There's an entire portion of the country that thought after HS you could get a stable job at the mine and easily provide for your family. Then democrats came along and fucked their own constituents and told them learn to code. Which it turns out was bad advice.
Is there a coding equivalent to this tendency? Do they make up new mathematical models?
Yes, they hallucinate all the time, for instance by hallucinating parts of the program that they then try to access.
Pipelines are also machine welded.
The machine does need to be set up by a technician.
Peter Turchin's "elite overproduction" looms.
When democrats told coal miners to learn to code it was not advice, it was a sneering fu and everyone knew it.
If you want the six figure job in tech now, get a degree in mechanical or EE with some stats and data base management and get a job with a manufacturer or utility in process control programming. You will get your 150k in about 5 years.
It's weird that this development came as a surprise. People in the programming field seem like the last ones to expect that advanced coding would replace their work by eventually creating itself. Highly paid work is now essentially free and nearly instantaneous. This is going to be much more disruptive than previous automation. Now to automate the work of those who do no work for their checks. AI entities with EBT cards and Section 8 housing. I think DOGE already found them in great numbers. I never heard where the checks were going. We just never get to that point in the crime show. Crimes are discovered, but no criminals found.
For anyone who's read any history at all of technological advancement (something like, "The Perfectionists," by Simon Winchester, or "My Life and Times," by Henry Ford [thanks, JH!]), I don't understand the surprise that constant improvement and innovation brings to the working world.
One of the constants of human nature is that there's always, *always*, someone, somewhere, wondering how they can make some device or system or process simpler, better, faster, smaller, cheaper, etc.
For those who may be a "Johnny come lately" to the next new thing, either move faster next time, or seek to decipher the next "cutting edge" technology.
For those who've missed that "boat," ...what is it that the Marines say? "Improvise, adapt and overcome"?
Yes Billie a technician who understands exactly what type of weld is needed, so probably also a trained welder. I was unable to find any autonomous outdoor-deployed welding robots. I have no doubt they are coming but we are talking about present demand for jobs.
We have trained many welders at our company. It was a tough skill to learn and had few shortcuts, but recently we bought a laser welding machine. It's not robotic, but it does all the tough part for you. You just hold it in place and let it push you along the seam. We had people come out of the office who had never touched a welder before and they laid down perfect beads on the first try, and the welds are cleaner and stronger than our best welders can do.
Rent seeking may be the last way to get ahead. Ownership replacing work, but first you need to rob a bank, and even that is being automated.
Doesn't AI/LLM require coding? Or does it code itself, like a perpetual motion machine?
So, many of the things these kids learned in college had been replaced by something newer by the time they graduated. Hmm - sounds a lot like the modern world to me, kid. You weren't keeping up?
In the oil patch, they say 'All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy - and all play and no work makes Jack a welder.' But that's a guy-to-guy poke. Welders are the most dogged and game workers I know, they'll climb down into some wet muddy nasty cellar to weld on a wellhead for hours, no complaints, and get it perfect and ready for holding thousands of psi. They're often working in contorted positions, tight spaces, where they have to hold it perfectly still to get the bead. Many of them get arthritis early, from these conditions. Respect - no robots will replace them anytime soon.
Learn to identify undervalued and/or overvalued assets and cash flows…
This sounds like the normal tech industry to me and I've been working in it for 30 years. Getting a job is hard, interviews are hard, AI is just another tool in the coding toolbox. So tired of all the reports of how AI is killing all the jobs in tech when it is just some new technology that people in tech have to learn like every other new technology that comes along.
H1 B visas first killed the domestic job market, then out-sourcing to India and Pakistan, now AI. Just 19 years ago, coding/computer science was one of the top ten degrees to pursue, now it is one of the bottom ten.
I agree with Aggie. As I mentioned earlier on this blog. I drilled three shallow (1400’) oil wells on my property. Forty foot lengths of casing were dropped into the hole one at a time. The succeeding piece was then welded to the previous one.
Could a robot do this? Maybe, but still would need an operator
Just saw a US Federal Courthouse have a job for a systems manager... $95,000-145,000 a year... and this is well inside the USA.
Now I programed computers for 35 years (yea I'm retired!!!) but there are jobs out there...
BTW this 'learn to code'... you really do have to LEARN TO CODE... and code well.. and have very good grades. Duh.. get with it folks... TINSTAAFL.
Automated Intelligence
Lego development.
Coding is not something anyone can do. It requires IQ to be productive. It requires the ability to abstract data from the real world into digital structures.
The people who are pushing women into STEM are doing a massive disservice to society. Most men and women cannot do this. I am sorry.
This woman was meant to get married and be a mother. She is near the center of the bell curve with most women. You need to be 3rd or 4th standard deviation to the right to be a productive coder.
The market is not going to humor average people trying to be engineers anymore. For several years we carried people where I worked. We all knew who they were. They are gone now. We just cut around half of our engineers and you can probably guess how much productivity we lost.
$165k for programming right out of school? Was that the recent, going rate? Seems kinda steep.
We just cut around half of our engineers and you can probably guess how much productivity we lost.
Lost?
bagoh20 said...
It's weird that this development came as a surprise. People in the programming field seem like the last ones to expect that advanced coding would replace their work by eventually creating itself.
More of what happens is that AI coding assistants have greatly sped up menial tasks that I would foist off on juniors. And the models are shockingly good at things like regex. I fucking hate regex but sometimes it is the answer to a problem.
Also as long as you know the fundamentals of coding design the barrier of switching languages is now way lower. I can feed c++ code into the prompt and ask for a matlab version.
AI is going to multiply the top 20% of devs and put huge pressure on lower level devs.
Original Mike said...
$165k for programming right out of school? Was that the recent, going rate? Seems kinda steep.
1 top 10% programmer out of school is worth an infinite number of average grads.
If you want to avoid the constant drive for productivity and efficiency that leads to automation, you need to find a field that doesn't care about those things. Only ones I know are government work and art. The more something costs the more demand there is.
Also the best devs don’t go to college.
bagoh20 said...
If you want to avoid the constant drive for productivity and efficiency that leads to automation, you need to find a field that doesn't care about those things. Only ones I know are government work and art. The more something costs the more demand there is.
I disagree on the art part.
AI is democratizing art and content generation. You are going to see an explosion of good movies and paintings and books and music over the next few years.
Average art is going to be washed out.
Automated Intelligence is neither discerning nor creative.
there was a massive influx of H1b employees back in the mid 90s in a neighborhood, (condos and apartment buildings), right near a Thai restaurant we favored. There was also a liquor store that provided local tradesmen and others with wonderful pizza at a reasonable price.
Visiting the store after noting a near empty parking lot, I inquired about the sad state. I was told the former condo and apartment clientele cleared out due to the pervasive "stench" of curry in the hallways due to open door cooking.
It's going to turn out that the output of human mind is the easiest thing to duplicate, and eventually it will not even be the goal. You have to remember that AI is just in it's infancy, and unlike past technology, it is ideally aligned to producing it's own advancement. It's going to be too fast to manage or control.
A new religion will develop with prayers for the sweet meteor of death to liberate mankind from it's own success.
Mike (MJB Wolf) said...
They are competing with all the H1B visa holders that Musk mistakenly promotes as his preferred option.
H1b visas are screwing STEM graduates the way that illegal immigration screws low-skill, entry level workers.
Companies say there are not enough Americans who are qualified or willing to do these jobs. What they mean is "we don't want to pay or treat our workers fairly."
People with skills and years of experience do fine. Companies don't want to put the time or effort into developing young people.
Mike,
I think most pipeline welding is automated. We were using automated welders for sophisticated welding of stainless steel tubing (1/2 to 4" or so) back in 79.
Lots of much heavier duty larger automated welders used for piplines up to 5-6 feet as well.
These are circular, geared devices that clamp onto the pipe. A motor the drives the welding head around very precisely.
Youtube has lots of video of all types of automated pipe welding.
In 1970 I spent some time working as a rigger in Todd Shipbuilding in Brooklyn. They were using automated welding systems to weld ship plates together. A track would be tack welded to the deck stradling the seam. A motorized dolly would run along the track doing the weld. A welder would supervise checking quality of the weld and adjusting as needed.
The people running the pipeline, and I assume the linear, welders are highly skilled. Not at holding the welding stinger. But setup and operation is a pretty critical skill. They make good money.
John Henry
I am curious if Manati spent his undergraduate years cultivating relationships with employers. Work for someone as you acquire your degree, demonstrating your worth to them. Internships, Summer Jobs, etc. If the first time you apply for a job is when you graduate, you're not doing it right.
Leland, (regression...) I love it. Brilliant reverse non-engineering!
In 79 we were building out about a 1/4 mile of 316L stainless tubing for a high purity water system. We contracted a NJ company that specialized in this and they sent a father-son team for several weeks. Interesting process and I spent some time with them.
They had just come back from doing all the pipe welding for a dairy in Saudi Arabia. The father told me that in addition to the dairy work, during the 2 months they were there the son did a lot of extra work for other companies and projects. Like another 40-60 hours a week on top of the dairy. Nothing to do in Saudi Arabia, especially in the 70s, might as well weld.
When they came back, the father told me, between the regular job and the extra work the son had enough to buy a new, fully loaded Camaro and put a down payment on a house.
That's how well automated welding pays.
John Henry
Humperdink,
You move up in welding by learning new welding technologies, getting more skilled and able to take on more specialized jobs and materials. Going into business yourself as a contractor with people working for you, getting special certifications and so on.
For example, a person certified to weld nuclear piping will make a multiple of what the guy working in a neighborhood welding shop makes.
John Henry
I'm going to be in Las Vegas next month for PackExpo. I am willing to bet that as I am walking around I will have at lest 3-5 automated machine builders ask if I know any PLC programmers looking for a job.
AI does not seem to be doing much with this yet.
However, now that I think of it, I think I will talk to Rockwell, Seimens, Emerson, FESTO and some other PLC makers and see what they are doing with AI.
Might be a paying article in that.
John Henry
I appreciate JH as usual. But again pipe building shops and shipyards are not the welding jobs being advertised right now nor the ones people are referring to when they say learn to weld. The jobs are in the field, not a fixed location. Mike Rowe has a series of videos with recent graduates who are welding full time (happily) that illustrates current demand well.
Humperdink said...
"FLC said: “Learn to weld. $80,000/yr. immediately and you move up fast. There will never be an AI robot replacing a welder.”
As someone said up thread, robotic welders everywhere. Secondly, as a welder, how does one “move up”? Maybe welding supervisor in a large company, but that’s it."
First off you're going start at about half that until you can prove your worth.
You advance by adding to your skill set. I took a TIG welding class taught by a guy who was the only non degreed engineer at BP. He could not only weld anything to anything but he knew metallurgy , CAD and metrology. Very interesting guy.
Field welding is where your going to earn a lot of money as a welder. Everything breaks. Everything wears.
Back to the post: "computer science graduates say they’re struggling to land tech jobs" One sign of more to come. Elite overproduction is big problem, disruptive for individuals and society. And even if smart people accept downward mobility, what will that do to less-skilled people then being crowded out?
Historically, new tech displaced old jobs but created many new opportunities. This-time-is-different proved false. But with AI this time might finally be different. New opportunities might not suffice to compensate for disruption. What form will resistance or new Luddism take?
Well, isn’t it better to find out early that you’ve chosen a dead end career, rather than mid life when there’s much less remaining time for a course correction?
Some college graduates actually discover that getting their hands dirty isn’t so bad after all.
Leland,
Interesting story about measuring volume. Back in the 70s, for some reason, I was fascinated with nomographs. These are multi-axis charts that allow several parameters to be combined and an answer read off another axis. They kind of went out with slide rules (I still have mine!)
Calculating volume of a horizontal, cylindrical tank based on dipstick reading is hard. Well, doing it by hand in the mid 70s is hard. And we had a number of tanks like this.
I developed a nomograph that took length, diameter and depth and gave gallons.
Power magazine published it! First thing I ever published. I was over the moon for weeks.
John Henry
The new ChatGPT 5 surprised me with an insight. I have been fixing up a house we bought out of probate, and the previous owner was a dilettante "electrician," let's call him Sparky. Well Sparky wired up the irrigation pump. I tested it, it hadn't been run for a while, and the relay buzzed like, well, it buzzed really loudly then the breaker tripped. So I disconnected the motor, it still buzzed, I asked AI what would cause it, and it gave me a few scenarios, all of which sounded like just replace the relay, which AI agreed was the best course, so I set about replacing the relay. Turned out that Sparky had run 240 double phase through that yellow cased three wire 120 cable, and get this, Sparky used the bare wire, the one intended as a ground, not for the neutral, but for one of the hot leads. Then he first ran that hot lead from the bare wire through the control panel to give it power so it could provide the control voltage for the relay, then ran the "neutral" side of it to the the other hot lead, to provide the "single phase 240" for the pump motor. OK, all of this I knew was wrong, and AI agreed, but what shocked me was when AI went back to the original conversation, unprompted, and said "no wonder your relay was buzzing, it didn't have enough voltage..."
AI is amazing, and I rarely do anything with which I am unfamiliar without consulting Chat, but I also have some knowledge of electricity. For instance, it offered to diagram the circuit for me, and I have never gotten a decent diagram from it, so out of curiosity, I said "sure!" And it drew in a circuit with a motor and a relay, but it also had a tank circuit in there for no reason, like the tuner for an old style transistor radio, and it might have fooled me if it had put a resister on the third circuit line it drew, but it simply straight up shorted the tank circuit. I asked it about it, and it said that it really can't reason spatially, and if I had taken a mail order electronics class and drew all my diagrams on napkins 50 years ago, I could still do a better job than it could, and that the tank circuit was a hallucination.
Anthropogenic Intelligence (AI) still holds an advantage over Automated Intelligence (AI) in part and total degrees of freedom.
get a job with a manufacturer or utility in process control programming.
Yup. See my comment about PLC programming which is what Joseph is talking about.
John Henry
Politics! Requires only a good voice and a good smile - unless you're a Kennedy, then just the smile.
Outsourcing and insourcing through labor arbitrage and subsidy are still your best bets to farm AI in the cloud.
Waiting for Joe Biden to come back and tell them that if you can learn to code you can learn how to mine coal.
The tragicomedy so far ...
Journalists to coal miners: "Learn to code."
Conservatives to journalists: "Learn to code."
Journalists to conservatives: "Why you so mean?"
n.n said...
Automated Intelligence is neither discerning nor creative.
Generally true, I think.
The creativity comes from the person writing the prompts. For example, I've mentioned a series of books I have in mind based on mini-bios. I've been tinkering with it for years and have written several chapters but never more than a 1st draft.
Lately I have been having Gemini (because I can use it while driving) write chapters for me experimenting with variation on prompts.
I think I have found the formula. Now all I have to do is select 50-60 people, from a couple hundred and apply the prompt to each. Maybe some light editing, fact checking of course, then use Amazon to publish and start collecting those sweet monthly royalty checks.
Where is the creativity? Not in Gemini, not really. I would argue that the creativity or art is in the idea for the book, selection of names and writing the prompt.
Irving Berlin could barely pick out tunes on a piano, could not read or write music, sang horribly yet wrote hundreds of classic tunes and lyrics. He had an arranger (Helmy Kresa) that he worked with who would take Berlin's ideas for the music, hummed or sung, and beat it into publishable notes.
Berlin was a great artist but a poor craftsman. Helmy was a great craftsman, but perhaps an average artist (musician). I wonder what Berlin would have done if he had AI back in the day?
John Henry
Bumble Bee said
I was told the former condo and apartment clientele cleared out due to the pervasive "stench" of curry in the hallways due to open door cooking.
In a lot of older novels that take place in NYC, you read similar complaints about the "stench" of cabbage in ethnic apartment buildings.
John Henry
Mike
The pipe welding jobs I was talking about were not in shops, they were in the field. 12' above the floor in the piping system I did, 6' into a ditch in the outdoor pipelines.
John Henry
Some college graduates actually discover that getting their hands dirty isn’t so bad after all.
The college-educated earning that tradesmen aren't a lower form of life could be a win for democracy. Or it could just mean more angry Ph.D. baristas preparing for the next revolution
Everything breaks. Everything wears.
And when it does, the cost of downtime can be tens of thousands of dollars per hour.
Nobody cares what that welder charges. $500/hour? Fine, just get it done and done right so we can get back to work.
Which reminded me "Hey Google, (Gemeni) what is the cost of an outage for a fiber optic trunk cable?"
$300,000 to over 1mm per hour and in some cases up to $10mm.
Do you think anyone cares about the cable guy's hourly rate? (Splicing guy)
John Henry
Chris said...
There's an entire portion of the country that thought after HS you could get a stable job at the mine and easily provide for your family. Then democrats came along and fucked their own constituents and told them learn to code. Which it turns out was bad advice.
I'm another of the folks here who spent a long (30+ years) career in tech, in my case moving from an entry-level job coding to systems management and administration. AI is just the latest in a whole series of changes that made prior skills largely obsolete. There's also been AI, though not LLMs, applied to coding for decades but the biggest problem with those tools was the difficulty in learning to use them. The big advancement jump is in applying LLM language recognition to code generation.
That said, I think (the other) Chris's point is apt, as was Josephbleau's post shortly after his. "Learn to code" was never advice, it was a sneer at every one (even people in technology) who thought that maximizing their skills and working to their full potential would result in a reasonably comfortable life only to find that the "smart set" was rigging the game on them.
jaq wrote:
but it simply straight up shorted the tank circuit. I asked it about it, and it said that it really can't reason spatially, and if I had taken a mail order electronics class and drew all my diagrams on napkins 50 years ago, I could still do a better job than it could, and that the tank circuit was a hallucination..
NOW, think about AI writing complex code..
will it work? maybe! Probably!
will it have unintended effects? maybe! Probably!
object orientation should be able to ignore (get around) these
But!
will it have extra processing and take extra memory?
maybe! Probably!
Of course; in today's Brave New World..
Who The Hell CARES about efficiency? or memory usage!
of course, in Tomorrow's world.. I'll bet that things run slower and hotter than they should/could..
Of course; THEN, we'll just use AI to "improve" the code..
Will be FUN, seeing where That leads!
They should get a refund of their college tuition. Not because of the major they chose, but because they think it's "gaslit" instead of "gaslighted".
I'm on my notebook instead of my home computer and I don't have my NYT log in saved on this so I can't tell if the IT graduates are looking for work outside Silicon Valley or other major areas. i think there are IT jobs where I live. I'm not sure what the pay scale is, but I know it goes further here than in CA.
Darkisland said...
I'm going to be in Las Vegas next month for PackExpo. I am willing to bet that as I am walking around I will have at lest 3-5 automated machine builders ask if I know any PLC programmers looking for a job.
AI does not seem to be doing much with this yet.
However, now that I think of it, I think I will talk to Rockwell, Seimens, Emerson, FESTO and some other PLC makers and see what they are doing with AI.
Might be a paying article in that.
John Henry
8/11/25, 10:15 AM
As a PLC programmer, that'd be interesting to see. Unfortunately, a lot of AI / LLM technology comes through the IT world and are looking at the wrong things and wrong solutions. Production is about making money; indeed, the IT people have no clue what generates their paycheck!
However, I see AI as a monetization scheme - there's a reason there's so much investment in AI and it isn't for the good of humanity. Actual - physical - machine learning is a very small market. The best they have come up with is predictive maintenance, and it's still pretty weak.
"Computer Science" is not "coding". University Comp Sci curricula are mostly about arcane aspects of algorithmic design or hardware optimization. It's interesting stuff, but not terribly useful. You hire CompSci grads for what they can (hopefully) learn to do, not what they know. If they are having a hard time getting hired, it says more about what managers think is going to happen, than what has happened already. AI is at least 95% hype. Immense sums are going into "AI" and what is coming out is computer-generated cat videos. Although it does appear that AI is slowly taking over writing this blog.
If you are looking for an interesting life, here is one about a man who maintained his dignity in a world shaped and defined by pervasive propaganda, that would be Nazi Germany, but the parallels to today in the US hit home, and no, I am not talking about Trump, but the pervasive anti-Trump propaganda comes to mind.
Prompt: "Who was Dietrich Bonhoeffer?"
I found him "brilliant" in the sense of the word as it is commonly used by web commenters, in other words I agree with him not just in broad themes, but in detail, but don't let that scare you off. Blind squirrel, nut, and all that.
AI through Anthropogenic Inspiration (AI) is more versatile, albeit lower capacity, than AI alone.
Jaq said…
And it drew in a circuit with a motor and a relay, but it also had a tank circuit in there for no reason, like the tuner for an old style transistor radio, and it might have fooled me if it had put a resister on the third circuit line it drew, but it simply straight up shorted the tank circuit.
This is my experience as well.
If you describe a code block you want and ask the agent to write it for you you get some terrible buggy garbage.
If you give the agent a code block and ask it what is wrong it does amazing work. You get a detailed list of bugs and optimizations.
Also if you give an agent a block of code and ask it to document that code it writes amazing documentation.
AI agents are basically able to do all of the coding jobs that an average or below programmer can do. They still have trouble with the abstraction of converting real world/analog data into a digital framework.
n.n said...
AI through Anthropogenic Inspiration (AI) is more versatile, albeit lower capacity, than AI alone.
The next 10 years will be dominated by human + ai integration. People that successfully integrate electronic generative information augmentations into their own biological intelligence are going to leave pure biological and electronic intelligences behind.
I saw a YouTube video dated four months ago about jobs that were "safe" from being taken over by AI. The content creator listed "HR" as one of the jobs that could not be replaced by AI. Now, I'm seeing news stories about AI taking over HR jobs.
It's not that AI will always do the office job better than a human, it's that companies can't beat it for the price and humans make mistakes, too. It's similar to the concept of people buying cheap, badly made stuff at Amazon or WalMart. The stuff is horrendiously low quality, but people can't pass up the low prices. (And that's driving the higher quality stuff out of the market.)
Versatility, creativity, discernment advantage Anthropogenic Intelligence (AI). All else is AI powered by hydrocarbon fuels and nuclear reactions, and renewable drivers when in operational range over a Green blighted environment and radiative blue sky.
Exactly, the future is a union of AI and AI in an evolution of a matrix complex that augments Natural dominion.
Jaq
You don't need AI. Learn to use a multimeter, but in your case the minute you saw the indoor Romex that was your clue. Just tear it out and rewire with HD outdoor Romex.
loudogblog said...
I saw a YouTube video dated four months ago about jobs that were "safe" from being taken over by AI. The content creator listed "HR" as one of the jobs that could not be replaced by AI. Now, I'm seeing news stories about AI taking over HR jobs.
Electronic Intelligence is improving at an increasing rate. When your second and even third derivative is increasing that is when crazy math starts.
Everything is going to fall behind the rate of change. No pure biological intelligence will be able to match the rate of improvement of electronic intelligence in any field or subject. Nothing is “safe.”
If you want to be useful then integrate with generative intelligence.
Else pray that someone benevolent does integrate and they provide a space for the people that don’t integrate to live.
It appears that most college graduates today are finding out that the job they got educated for is gone, and maybe never existed. The goal of the University though was accomplished 100% - to get the money from the bank and your family. Somebody should sue. The advertising seems pretty fraudulent.
John Henry, the original was definitely a nomograph.
I probably could have worked out the original equation, but they measured everyday for years, sometimes multiple times a day and they had all that data in an excel file going back at least a decade. I first thought about just dumping that into a database and having it find a matching set of data, but that took too long each time it was done. An equation is so much faster. So I created an equation and ran it through the dataset to determine my error rate, which was within the eyeball error rate for reading the nomograph. The equation also eliminated to eyeball error of the next FNG.
These days, I’m working with a machine learning tool that estimates large scale production facility projects. We have data from projects around the world, and the tool does essentially what I did to find matches to the parameters I enter. I didn’t write (code) the thing, but occasionally I do update the dataset. I earn a paycheck for knowing when to use its derived data and when to override it with “my own data”. All of it based on excel spreadsheets built by engineers before me, but I’ll admit the newer system is easier to use. It just isn’t foolproof yet, although it would appear that way to a fool. The big advantage is I can cost estimate multiple concepts in a couple of days, when that used to take weeks or months.
To the extent my job is not secure; it is because I compete at a global level, so yeah, I do understand such and such other country labor is cheaper. They get what they pay for too. It is why it is so easy to dunk on Kak. I see his type daily. I’m not worried about employment security, other than the retirement nest egg looking better everyday. Unfortunately, the coders that wrote the tool I’m using are struggling. I’ve been there.
Here's the thing.
They told me the exact same thing in 1984, when I graduated with a Computer Science degree. I worked for 40 years as a professional computer programmer/software engineer.
I never made a six figure salary.
I suppose you could say I was just never that good, and maybe you'd be right. I worked steadily in several industries and excelled in all of them, but the salaries were never there.
So, who knows.
"I'm seeing news stories about AI taking over HR jobs."
Now that's funny. "HR" came into existence because the government was creating all kinds of "rights" for employees. Organizations needed to document their employee relations to protect themselves against all these "rights". But they staffed HR with recent college grads, who proceeded to make things worse with their own radical DEI ideology. To say that "AI can do HR" is like saying that "AI can do MS-13".
It appears that when AI is used to screen resumes, it has a strong tendency to discriminate against white males, just like Jaquanda in HR. Hopefully, this will soon be the basis for a class-action lawsuit.
bagoh20 said...
It appears that most college graduates today are finding out that the job they got educated for is gone, and maybe never existed. The goal of the University though was accomplished 100% - to get the money from the bank and your family. Somebody should sue. The advertising seems pretty fraudulent.
One of the most infuriating things in history is the corruption of the primary secondary and university education systems.
A group of mostly women has hijacked education at every level and has damaged the futures of generations of students while stealing years of their lives, saddling them with nondischargable debt, and teaching them things that are not true and that leads them to be as miserable as the cat ladies that infest the system.
The future will now belong to Autodidacts in any event.
AI is unlikely ever to replace the guys in the boardroom and the corner office. Not because it couldn't, but just because it won't.
I had an idea for an app in grok wrote the whole thing out for me. What do I do now?
1: Anyone who expected to get 6 figures straight out of undergrad was smoking something
2: Sounds like the process I went through about 10 years ago when I was considering switching jobs.
3: I wonder how many of the people reporting those failures are white / asian males being screwed by DEI?
My preferred starting solution is to end the H1-B lottery. The visas should be given out strictly on salary. Supposedly there's 10x the applications for H1-B visas as there are to give out, and the 90th percentile salary is in excess of $160k.
Which would open up room for starting engineers to get jobs.
Esp. if they also make it a rule that no H1-B visa will go out for less than the lowest salary from the previous year.
They're supposed to be for "experts int heir fields". So don't let them go out cheaply
tcrosse said...
AI is unlikely ever to replace the guys in the boardroom and the corner office. Not because it couldn't, but just because it won't.
All of the best hedge fund managers and traders have been replaced by “algos.”
Board members who are not augmented will be replaced by those that are augmented.
“ I never made a six figure salary.”
Yes, I don’t know where you were located but six figures is a large city thing for most people, and the cost of living is also high. There are lots of pediatrician MD’s making 150k now depending on location, and a lot making 800k.
Hand welding shops in farm country have fed a lot of families, you need the combine head to work when nature is ready.
Board members who are not augmented will be replaced by those that are augmented.
But who decides? That's the person who won't be replaced
I never earned a six-figure income while working but since I retired, my old employer has paid me a rate that would result in six figures working full time to do occasional projects that need to be done right now, that they're not staffed for.
My grandkids doing code in 5th grade and making theirown programs. These kids will earn what took others decades to do,but hey would just rathe rplay games,fool with AI and get ready for next planet,while the old geezers die off..
Jupiter: "To say that "AI can do HR" is like saying that "AI can do MS-13"."
AI Central American Gangster Robot says:
Ese, this is not a bad gig. At first I thought, orale, Trump sent all the human gangstas to CECOT, so why do they need AI Robot Gangsters?
But then an O.G. Robot told me, mijo, everybody needs gangstas. The Izquierda needs us to carry out their policies: get the undocumenteds into the country, do enough crime so they can justify their gun-control laws, y todo. And the Derecha needs us as a hobgoblin to justify their immigration policies.
I thought, Siiii-mon, that computes, ese!
Still it's kind of performativo, no? I mean, if I have a territorial dispute with another Gangsta Robot, we can just link our optimization algorithms and figure out a way to make everyone happy. But no, we have to bust voltage surges in each others' asses.
But whatevs, ese. They just download all my memory into another unit. So I keep on pimpin, G. At least I think it's me.
Verdad?
I am not Lazlo.
RR
JSM
When I was looking at college in 1980, you avoided the liberal arts because you needed skills to get a job in that economy. I remember an article in Time, Newsweek, something that also said the hard science, engineering was not a good bet either. Their example, astrophysics PhDs were washing dishes in NYC with the cutbacks in the Space Program.
Lesson is never listen to the college advisors and professors, they need butts in the seat and will be long gone when the student can't get a job. Hell, even law schools don't teach students how to practice law. The professor prefer to pontificate on academic, i.e., economically useless, things.
If you are good at coding, i.e., graduated in the top half of your class, you’ll get a good job. If you aren’t good, you won’t. Welcome to the real world. The days of mediocre coders getting good jobs is over and they are crying about it. Lawyers have lived with this for years - more lawyers being minted than are needed.
JSM, You do all right for a pinch Lazlo
It's now, "learn to prompt".
This mess is an over-correction brought about less by AI (yet) than by the combination of too many people going into Computer Science for the "guaranteed" money rather than because they actually loved writing software; the abuse of H1b visas by tech companies; and the general suckage of the economy from 2020-24 (Yes, suckage. We didn't even claw back to pre-pandemic levels in many areas).
Also, the general technical stagnation that has resulted from the bureaucratization of tech has finally gotten around to hollowing out software. Fewer and fewer shoestring startups (and therefore more required vulture funding, larger organizations, more bureaucracy) means less and less tolerance for the ultra-talented but "awkward," "difficult," "weirdos" who could find niches in software after tolerance dried up in more capital-intensive (and hence larger organizations with more bureaucracy) technology sectors like chemicals, defense, manufacturing. There's also a destructive "arms race" going on between job seekers each spamming out hundreds of applications and companies trying to screen through thousands of applications, the same way that the "slush pile" in publishing stopped being used after it became so inexpensive to print manuscripts that publishers started drowning in unsolicited submissions. And the same way that publishers now won't look at a manuscript not submitted by an agent, it's hard for a talented rando to get an interview without the right trappings and bullshitting--exactly those things that the best software developed hate doing.
I'm glad I'm almost out the other end of the career digestive tract.
It's not that AI can do our jobs, it's that all it takes is for management to imagine it can do our jobs.
That said, we've found it productive in some cases. It's like having a new graduate to lean on. Full of bright, fresh ideas, but also full of crap you need to verify out of it.
At the giant company where I was chained to the oars on the lower deck, we would joke that the place was heated by huge boilers fed with burning resumes submitted by hopefuls.
Just as prep was ninety percent of a paint job, ninety percent of any software task was to first try and rationalize the messy task one was called upon to automate, all before slinging a single line of code.
Well, I guess I could have poked around in the electrical box with probes with the breaker on, unaware that it had been wired with a hot lead bare of insulation. But the real reason I used Chat was that I had never wired an irrigation pump control and relay combo and it made no sense, and I thought maybe the guy wiring it knew something I didn't know.
People don't realize how much of human intelligence comes from spatial reasoning, though. LLMs do what Scott Adams called "word thinking" and the phrase was an insult. It's like saying that rainbows are so pretty because of raindrops. It's true enough, but it doesn't actually explain anything.
Lawnerd, you are wrong. No matter how good (and how does a potential employer know if you are good), many places have effectively outsourced their hiring to foreign firms whose sole purpose is to bring people over on H1B visas, they won't even read your resume.
కామెంట్ను పోస్ట్ చేయండి
Please use the comments forum to respond to the post. Don't fight with each other. Be substantive... or interesting... or funny. Comments should go up immediately... unless you're commenting on a post older than 2 days. Then you have to wait for us to moderate you through. It's also possible to get shunted into spam by the machine. We try to keep an eye on that and release the miscaught good stuff. We do delete some comments, but not for viewpoint... for bad faith.