Riveting stuff. Hard to see how he could be replaced.
Framing it as "AI" only leads to ignoring the responsibility of those who are making those decisions. It's exactly the same argument behind justifying things as "market forces": it allows everything and makes nobody responsible for it.
In my opinion it’s unfortunate and inaccurate to frame this as most likely being a problem with the quality of the work of a person who was let go or who can’t find a job. It’s also very possible that management thinks AI is just good enough to justify not hiring someone for the role.
wccrawford•48m ago
I can't even paint them in a sinister light. They couldn't afford me, and now they had a way to get all the work done with their other developers that were less senior. They were clearly sad to let me go, but they didn't see that they had any choice financially. They weren't a big FAANG company with jillions of dollars. They only had a couple dozen employees.
I do wonder how people are going to get to be senior anything in the future, though. It's only going to be people who are really into it that are willing to work that hard to make it happen. The alternative, AI, is just so much easier than it's hard to justify putting that much effort into learning it, unless it's your thing.
btreecat•38m ago
happytoexplain•17m ago
The problem is that in most cases businesses can afford you, but they choose to be "unable to". It's called budgeting, and the ceiling only represents existential limits for small or dying businesses. The rest of the time, it is defined only to maximize profit, which means using their power to shift the negative part of economic changes onto individuals as much as mathematically possible, rather than the business suffering proportionately.