[HN Gopher] The Great Displacement Is Already Well Underway
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The Great Displacement Is Already Well Underway
Author : JSLegendDev
Score : 40 points
Date : 2025-05-12 14:32 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (shawnfromportland.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (shawnfromportland.substack.com)
| adamc wrote:
| We need a solution to stuff like this. Unfortunately, right now
| we seem to be cutting everything in sight to help the rich, so...
| I don't see that help or hope on the horizon.
|
| Stuff of nightmares.
| Arnt wrote:
| PHP is his only language, right? He's in the same situation as
| Perl-only developers a couple of decades ago.
| mnky9800n wrote:
| Yeah i feel like this guy posts a lot of doomer stuff and it
| isn't as introspective as it could be. i also feel like posting
| doomer stuff is popular and so he is trying to monetize the
| doomer mentality. That leads me to kind of think what he says
| has less value because i just see any kind of monetization
| scheme like that as a somewhat implicit bias to whatever is
| being said. you can't be anti-doomer if you make money on your
| substack talking about doomer ideas. but also, i feel bad for
| the guy he lost his job that had a nice salary and didn't find
| a new one. that must suck. But then I wonder, is that exactly
| what he is trying to capitalize on? And then you must think, is
| this what the world has become now that everything is
| commoditized and we are all part of the Attention economy? Is
| everyone trying to make money on everything and thus no one is
| really to be believed about anything? That's one reason why i
| deleted most social media. It all became a grift and none of it
| had anything to do with being social.
| bizzyskillet wrote:
| Damn, the last part of this comment was such an epiphany,
| thank you!
| ramity wrote:
| I've been off socials and on forums for 8+ years now for the
| same reason. I share similar sentiment as Bizzy's sibling
| reply. I say these things because lately I've been thinking
| about lot about dead internet theory and how strongly some
| believe it.
|
| One of the most profound realizations I've had lately is that
| the perception of the medium of communication itself is a
| well that can be poisoned with artificial interactions. Major
| empahsis on perception. The meer presence of artifical can
| immediately taint real interactions; you don't need a
| majority to poison the well.
|
| How many spam calls does it take for you to presume spam? How
| many linkedin autoreply ai comments does it take to presume
| all comments are ai? How many emails before you immediately
| presume phishing? How many rage baiting social posts do you
| need to see before you believe the entire site is composed of
| synthetic engagement? How many tinder bots do you need to
| interact with before you feel the entire app is dead? How
| many autodeny job application responses until you assume the
| next one is a ghost job posting? How many interactions with
| greedy people does it take to presume that it's human nature?
| turtleyacht wrote:
| Not only PHP: "modern technologies I've gone on to learn and be
| experienced with in more recent years."
|
| Although, there's a Lisp-inspired PHP called Phel:
| https://phel-lang.org/
|
| And PHP typing with version 7.4.0:
| https://www.php.net/manual/en/language.types.declarations.ph...
| Arnt wrote:
| PHP isn't terrible any more. Necessarily, anyway. I wrote a
| PR for Symfony last year, it was quite a nice experience.
|
| But if the only language he posts about is PHP, I think the
| source if his hiring problems is clear.
| burnt-resistor wrote:
| s/PHP/PHP 7 or Hack\/HHVM/
| uberman wrote:
| I feel terrible for this guy, but he really has stacked the deck
| against himself by moving to a rural area and refusing (or being
| unable) to work "on-site". He is up against every new grad and
| every laid off FAANG programmer clinging to the notion that they
| should be able to work remotely. To be clear, I'm a huge
| proponent of remote work but I recognize that many power dynamics
| have shifted in the last few years.
|
| I could offer a number of critiques about things but instead,
| I'll encourage him to go back and un-delete his AI vlog content
| as even if he feels the ground has moved, I would likely find his
| interest in this topic as a positive thing. I would also
| recommend he move his tech vlogs to someplace where the topic was
| the focus rather than blending it into other important parts of
| his life.
| tetris11 wrote:
| what exactly are we transitioning to, economy wise? If it's
| techno-feudalism, what do the peasant's actually do when they're
| not needed?
| rightbyte wrote:
| It's a little weird living in a small trailer when I'm a
| homeowner, in fact I own three houses
|
| He owns properties [edit: Missread the place]. I think he is
| fine.
| fvrghl wrote:
| Not NY, NY:
|
| "in fact I own three houses: A fixer-upper starter home in a
| rust belt upstate New York university city, and a patch of
| beautiful remote rural land with 2 pretty humble and simple
| cabins on it an hour from the city house"
| rightbyte wrote:
| Oh ye read the piece a bit too fast.
| 42lux wrote:
| Using hands for other things than typing...
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| I don't think the author's troubles have anything to do with AI,
| other than making it harder to get an interview. He seems to get
| a few of those. I think the real problem he has is... well, the
| meaning of life, i.e. 42.
|
| He's a 42 year old dude. Looking for a job in software? You gotta
| be joking. He says he can't clear the 25-year old Steve-Jobs
| complex SV bro mini-boss. Well, duh.
|
| That's the industry. It sucks you up and it spits you out. It
| vampires the best years of your life and then you're on your own.
|
| Sorry that the author had to find out, but I think I've seen that
| coming from the day I was first employed as a junior engineer. I
| just averaged up the ages of my colleagues and it was blindingly
| obvious how things turn out in the long run.
|
| Nor "AI" as in "Artificial Intelligence", but "AI" as in "Ageist
| Industry".
|
| P.S. Look on the bright side: at least you're not a 42 year old
| woman looking for software jobs. Hah.
| tjohns wrote:
| > He's a 42 year old dude. Looking for a job in software? You
| gotta be joking.
|
| This is such an odd take. I see lots of older folks around me -
| and 42 isn't that old.
|
| That said, it's undeniably true that expectations are raised
| the further along in your career you are. Interviewers will
| accept mistakes from a fresh college grad that they won't
| accept from an engineer with 20 years of industry experience
| who should know better (and is paid more). Not to mention
| there's just statistically fewer openings for TL positions. All
| of that definitely makes interviews harder as you're further
| along in your career.
| popularonion wrote:
| Eh, back when I got my first software engineer job at $BIGCORP
| 20 years ago, I was almost always the only one in the room
| younger than 40. Not being a web dev was the key, of course.
| goldchainposse wrote:
| Some quotes stood out to me
|
| > ...in fact I own three houses
|
| > ...I left behind everything and everyone i know and love on
| the west coast to come to New York specifically for this
| opportunity of helping care for my family and growing long term
| equity with real estate
|
| > With my full time engineering job bringing in around $150k, a
| salary that I clawed my way slowly and steadily for 20 years, I
| could just about manage covering all the expenses, maintenance,
| and planned improvements for the long-term vision of the
| properties, maintain my 16-year-old daily driver car, and maybe
| even have four or five thousand dollars left over each year to
| take one little camping trip and make a couple stock and crypto
| investments.
|
| Rather than building a career as a software engineer, he spent
| most of his time as a small-time real estate and crypto(!)
| investor subsidized by his software engineering side hustle.
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| lumping in a camping trip with investments is odd. A camping
| trip might cost very nearly zero dollars, depending on
| distance and what I have available. We'll be generous here
| and assume $100 was spent for some reason. That $100 is
| expended, you don't get it back.
|
| A stock investment might "cost" $4000, but I would hope to
| have nearly $4000 in some asset. My absolute worst
| investments, I typically still exited them with 40% of my
| initial capital.
| smackeyacky wrote:
| > I don't think the author's troubles have anything to do with
| AI, other than making it harder to get an interview.
|
| The industry is ageist, but not "900 applications and 3
| interviews" ageist. The big problem here is the concentration
| on remote work. I'm quite a bit older than this guy, quit a job
| earlier this year and went looking for work again only to find
| that "ooh, dream job, remote, nice little pay bump" were the
| jobs that got swamped with 1000 applicants.
|
| He's simply going to have to move closer to where office based
| jobs are, suck up the commute for a while and when they have
| more confidence they'll let him work remote after a while.
|
| Most of the jobs are likely getting swamped by AI generated
| applications, by overseas candidates and by every chancer who
| hates their current job.
|
| In the current job market, there is absolutely no substitute
| for leaning on your personal network. It's the only real way to
| compete against AI and foreign workers. So that means, to give
| yourself options in a job you don't like, maintaining that
| personal network is absolutely essential. Instead of wasting
| the effort on 900 job applications after you quit or get fired,
| concentrate on reinforcing those connections whether you need
| them or not.
|
| edit: I had my choice of jobs after a small wait, purely
| through people I know personally.
| fullstackchris wrote:
| Somehow it's ironic that this post is about AI replacing jobs and
| yet when I click the "accept all" option for cookies, the page
| reloads and shows the banner again :)
|
| Where are the all knowing AI bots who are going to fix this?
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(page generated 2025-05-12 23:01 UTC)