Time for a new course

a month ago by Codpiece to c/programmer_humor

queerlilhayseed 152 points a month ago

We've been predicting the demise of the coding career since the dawn of the coding career, but even if it's not dying, being proficient in coding and becoming proficient in one other trade is a good way to find opportunities to make software that makes that trade easier. The bar for quality in trade-specific software is shockingly low and money can be made in those niches.

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hdsrob 84 points a month ago

This is basically me.

I was in restaurant management in the late '90s, and knew it well, but loved computers and had been teaching myself programming for a while.

My last restaurant job was for a small franchisee, and I moved into IT and support for them after a couple of years (while also doing catering, covering vacations for managers, doing graphics on vehicles and banners, pretty much whatever needed to be done).

In 2001 I went to work for the company that sold us our POS Systems. Originally I did installation, training, and support, but started coding pretty quickly, and after a few years became lead.

I now own all of that software / IP, and my own company.

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queerlilhayseed 35 points a month ago

That rules. I hope you use your powers for good.

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a_non_monotonic_function 25 points a month ago

I've spent my entire career as a professor advocating that students should pick a minor, certificate, or double major if they're capable.

My rationale is remarkably similar I think. Literally ever field, hobby, and area of study involve some form of technology. Many of those disciplines lack the sophistication of the tooling and that we have in more programming related fields, which makes people with an additional specialized skill set extremely valuable.

Hell, look around at fintech, bioinformatics, computational arts, etc. We have emerging Fields all the time that are essentially computer science combined with another field.

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Wildmimic 11 points a month ago

Yep, the real money you make when being able to combine 2 different skills, because the amount of people having studied exactly this combination will always be a very small group. Coding and a learned trade is one of the rarer combinations - most coders (in my experience) acquire management or business skills to climb the corporate ladder.

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a_non_monotonic_function 1 point a month ago

Or more computing skills. In grad school there were a number of Masters students from the local region in our cs program. The employers would pay for it for them.

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jj4211 3 points a month ago

Think there is a much higher immediate risk for new developers trying to get going in the market. So much management right now is pretty comfortable that new programmers with zero real world experience offers nothing the GenAI can't do under the supervision of a senior developer.

Problem is historically new developers weren't trusted to make any decisions if more senior employees were aware of such scenarios, so a new developer was pretty much verbatim implement guidance from more senior teams just deal with obvious rote tedium associated with getting it to code. Also the senior dev will have to fix all your screw ups when you inevitably botch it a few times. Awfully similar to the role GenAI can do now. So has to be some cultural shift to figure out how onboarding new generation developers looks.

Note I could be wrong about the middle paragraph, it's what the larger organization thinks, but I kind of got going by being 'senior' for lack of a company having options and moved from there. Similarly, I've never had success onboarding a junior that wouldn't take independent ownership. I'd get too frustrated at lack of growth and having to correct the same mistakes and be painfully specific, much like I do with GenAI. A new college hire that had his own vision and ability to take vague guidance and implement his vision, that I could work with, but it has happened once in a great while.

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Semi_Hemi_Demigod 74 points a month ago

I’d rather be an electrician than a plumber. It’s like a simpler, deadlier Ethernet.

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OwOarchist 32 points a month ago

And electricians don't have to interact with human feces nearly as often.

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Codpiece 21 points a month ago

Three phase PoE anyone?

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Semi_Hemi_Demigod 15 points a month ago

Powerline networking is a thing and a great choice for bringing hardline connections to remote parts of a house.

I had a shed that had electric but my WiFi couldn’t reach and a cheap powerline kit and a spare OpenWRT worked a treat.

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queerlilhayseed 13 points a month ago

I think all power lines should have a communications protocol. Not every device has to use them, and they'd be lower bandwidth than data-only lines, but I think the era of data-communicating appliances is here to stay, and it'd be better they go over the wires we have rather than clogging up the wireless spectrum.

Within a single building for sure, but even neighborhood lines could carry some data I bet. I wonder if and how that would work. Gonna have to learn some more about electricity and grid infrastructure.

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Godort 14 points a month ago

The cybersecurity specialist in me really doesn't like the idea of having enough wire in public spaces that it's essentially impossible to monitor, sending infrastructure related data.

But then again, a weekend playing around with a flipper zero and a walk through town is enough to realize that it probably doesn't matter.

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queerlilhayseed 4 points a month ago

Yeah I imagine for lines outside the home, or in public places, it would be best to assume that the channel is untrustworthy and the data is public. Essential comms would need to have redundancy of course. But for an oven reporting its at temp, or a thermostat reporting its room's temperature to a central HVAC controller, I think it would be nicer than running everything over wifi.

You could even have a signal smoother at the main so nothing inside the house can get out. The way I'm imagining it, all the household power would come from the home battery, which would be fed by a combination of solar panels and grid power. If the battery's full and the sun is shining, power feeds back into the main. If the battery's low, power is drawn from the panels, and if that doesn't meet demand, power is drawn from the grid. But the whole house is buffered (electrically and informationally) by the battery.

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reptar 2 points a month ago

Think some intelligent opsec is needed when acquiring a flipper?

In these grand United States, that is

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marcos 7 points a month ago

We have several good standards for power-line networking.

All of them fail for the usual problems, like all companies making sure every connector you can buy is proprietary and incompatible with each other's.

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queerlilhayseed 7 points a month ago

Yeah. I know it's possible to have a backward-compatible network over regular residential wiring, I have a pair of those ethernet ports that plug into standard outlets, but there would need to be a broadly accepted networking standard for devices that have that feature built in.

Maybe a starting point would be an open hardware, open software server device that connects to the electrical grid and the regular ethernet (via cable or wireless) that manages all the active devices on the power network. If a device implements a protocol the hub recognizes, it registers the device and makes it available for management via a web interface. I think I'd want some kind of manual confirmation before new devices start communicating with the ethernet anyway, as well as a way to grant and revoke internet privileges for devices on the fly, e.g. I might want to upgrade the firmware on one appliance to fix a bug, then close it off again until the next update. There could be switches / dimmers etc. that implement the standard and act as passthroughs for legacy devices to give them a bit of centralized control too.

If it gets good enough for hobbyist / diy electronics makers to start baking the standard into their devices, it could become a defacto open standard. I think it would be cool to have networked devices that won't brick once the manufacturer goes bust / decides to shut down the servers that make the hardware work. I think that should be the bare minimum we demand from hardware manufacturers: that they don't build implicit or explicit killswitches into the devices the sell. But that's a separate ramble and I feel I've gone on long enough here 🙃

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Canonical_Warlock 3 points a month ago

They already do. There's ripple signaling for electrical infrastructure and power company disconnect boxes. If you've ever seen those power company boxes hooked up to HVAC equipment that's what those are for. They let the power company use ripple control to selectively disable high power draw equipment during peak load times.

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Canonical_Warlock 12 points a month ago

Also if you become an electrician then you have an excuse to run Ethernet poorly. Gotta love when the electrician runs unshielded cat6 cable through 100ft of conduit containing 480V wires. Talk about POE, you could probably run a toaster off that Ethernet cable.

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RedSnt 5 points a month ago

👴 my first PC in the mid-90s had a 10mbit coaxial network card that my brother and I used for a 2 PC LAN connection, and let me tell ya - you wouldn't want to handle that while the PC was turned on.
Although the zap was less hurtful than an electrical fence.

Looking it up, it was most likely 10BASE5.

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RamRabbit 70 points a month ago

That's unironically a good idea if you are just getting into it. The trades pay very well and are in high demand.

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Codpiece 40 points a month ago

Tell me about it. Giving thought to retraining as an electrician given how in demand they are.

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queerlilhayseed 46 points a month ago

I want to get training as an electrician so I can take my house completely off the grid (or at least, be independent with the grid as a redundancy) one day without accidentally burning it down. Then I want to make free software to monitor and manage home power usage, and share it with the world so we can all have nice, efficient, futuristic homes without some corporate combine demanding a monthly fee and invasive surveillance for the pleasure.

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buffing_lecturer 29 points a month ago

I also want you to do this

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queerlilhayseed 12 points a month ago

It's coming along slowly. I don't have any formal training yet, still trying to find a coding job that pays the bills before I commit to a paid educational course, but I've been out of work for a while now and it may be time to take the plunge.

So far my education is mostly just watching youtubers who are doing things similar to what I want to do, like this one: https://www.youtube.com/@ProjectsWithDave He seems legit to me, but I am very new to the field so I feel like I'm the kind of person who could be taken in by correct-sounding nonsense.

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Canonical_Warlock 6 points a month ago

Depending on where you live, home owners can often legally do as much of their own wiring as they want. If that's the case where you live then you don't need the license, you just need the knowledge. That's still a big hurdle but it's a smaller hurdle than 4 years as an apprentice and then another 4 years as a journeyman.

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LadyMeow 5 points a month ago

Saaaaaaaame

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queerlilhayseed 3 points a month ago

I was looking around for active electricians' comms and found this:

https://piefed.blahaj.zone/...

It's new and small, but akunohana is actively posting as they're learning about electricity; I'm going to follow along and see if I can contribute.

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OwOarchist 36 points a month ago

The trades pay very well and are in high demand.

But you'll pay for it with crippling back pain at 45. Maybe some nice cancer as a bonus, from all the exposure to weird chemicals. Oh, and 90% of your coworkers racist, sexist, homophobic MAGA-heads who'll make sure you hear about it at every opportunity.

The trades can still be good, but go into it with eyes open. It's no paradise.

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Frigidlollipop 23 points a month ago

Woman here, can confirm. Worked as an aircraft mechanic for a year and a truck driver for another, you will encounter the scum of the earth. So glad to be back to working with civilized humans.

People whine that women wont enter the trades, theres a reason they dont want to and its not because the work is too hard.

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Echolynx 4 points a month ago

People seem to discount how much having a pleasant, or at least neutral at best even, work environment is essential for any job. And decent coworkers.

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Funkt4st1c 15 points a month ago

They're gonna stay like that unless a bunch of woke people join them out of nowhere for several years and convert/push out all of the weirdos

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Zorque 10 points a month ago

Then you just have the crippling back pain and cancer!

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Canonical_Warlock 11 points a month ago

Anyone going into the trades for money is going to be fucking miserable. The pay is nice but the pay is nice for a damn good reason. You will have no time, be perpetually tired, and wind up working in some really shitty conditions. Also a lot of that money will constantly be getting spent on tools. Sure most companies provide their techs with some tools and a stipend, but that stipend is never enough and you'll wind up wanting to replace most of the provided tools with your own anyways once you find ones that work better for you.

If you're going to get into the trades it better be because you like working with your hands and beating your head against brick wall problems. In that regard though going from software to the trades isn't that weird of a move. I'm a tradesman now but I nearly got my bachelor's in Computer Science. I loved how coding made me use my brain. I only dropped out when I got a desk job and realized that I wouldn't be able to stand working a desk job. In the trades I get the same intellectual fun without having to sit at a desk all day.

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SpaceNoodle 11 points a month ago

Joke's on you, I've already got crippling back pain before turning 45.

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xtr0n 7 points a month ago

I agree that the trades can be hard on the body and there is a decent risk that your career can be cut short due to injury. However, the characterization of tradesmen as all ignorant MAGA types is unfair. I imagine this varies a lot by region and market but I live in a fairly liberal-leftist area and happen to know a bunch of folks in the trades and they are not like that.

FWIW I am in a fairly affluent city and my friends will sometimes complain about working with subcontractors who come in from the exurbs who will throw fits about not being able to easily park their giant trucks wherever they want or make sideways comments about crime in the city. The response to that is usually something like “oh, you don’t have all these annoying parking rules in your rural town? Maybe you should go work on building multimillion dollar projects over there then? Oh, what’s that? There are no multimillion dollar projects in the middle of fucking nowhere? Hmmm”

There are also trades and regions where unions are still highly regarded.

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dylanTheDeveloper 7 points a month ago

And the pay. Its usually the people who own the business making lots of money. Everyone else is making slightly above minimum wage working 12+ hour days Monday to Saturday.

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DieFledermaus 10 points a month ago

How do you do it? I wouldn't mind being a plumber but I have no idea how I'd get started. I don't even know what tools I'd need.

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prettybunnys 17 points a month ago

Your local plumbers union can probably help you get an apprenticeship and get going.

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DieFledermaus 19 points a month ago

Seems I do have a local plumbers' union, and it looks like they are accepting applications. Thanks!

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LastYearsIrritant 14 points a month ago

Don't get discouraged if you don't get picked right away. Sometimes they have a year or more backlog on apprenticeships.

If you stick it out, it can be a great career!

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NaibofTabr 3 points a month ago

A lot of community colleges either double as trade schools or have active relationships with local trade schools.

Another option is to talk to your local employment office. They usually have more programs than just unemployment insurance. Depending on your financial circumstances and your location, you might even be able to have the government pay for your training program/certification. At the very least, they'll have useful points of contact and information about training for various jobs.

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discocactus 3 points a month ago

You need to find someone who is a) cool and not a bad teacher and b) a good plumber and c) willing to take you on to teach you and d) work your butt off till you're useful.

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DieFledermaus 3 points a month ago

I suppose my question is more how do I do A B and C? is it all just knowing someone?

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chunes 1 point a month ago

yup. the trades are some of the most nepotistic fields there are.

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discocactus 1 point 20 days ago

I mean sort of, but you don't have to already know them. It's exceedingly hard to find someone who is motivated enough to help and learn. So it's really more about finding a crew that you vibe with and as long as they're busy they will probably be happy to have good help. The trick there is you also have to be good help.

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WappleFF27 1 point a month ago

*Unless you're in the south.

Everyone and their Dad is in trades of one kind or another, and they hire their kids.

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markstos 48 points a month ago

I sent this to my plumber to congratulate him on his career choice.

Turns out now he’s an electrician and his company got hired to help build an AI data center. 💀Sixty electricians from his company alone on one job. Drones surveilling the repetitive work overhead.

So much for escaping the impacts of AI.

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adhdsergio 4 points a month ago

lol, you're joking

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dumnezero 6 points a month ago

managers have been into "remote work" long before workers have.

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markstos 4 points a month ago

No.

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PolarKraken 3 points a month ago

I know an electrician who moved beyond doing it day to day, he was telling me he knows of data center job sites that are paying regular electrician wages + $250/day. I think the data center boom might be bigger and crazier than we even realize somehow.

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Lyrl 3 points a month ago

Economic news sites for a while have been noting that data-center-related economic activity - electricians, other contractors, chips and other electronic component manufacturing and assembly, transportation (Marketplace has the owner of a barge company on regularly, and for a couple of years now he has said business is good even though all his normal customers are down because he's transporting so much data center construction material) - is probably the only reason the tariff-related trade disruption hasn't pushed the US into recession.

It is huge and crazy, was huge and crazy last year, and looks on track to continue the huge and crazy at least through next year.

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altphoto 38 points a month ago

Computer, I need software please!

Why won't it work? I asked for software!

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MoffKalast 25 points a month ago

You asked wrong! You forgot "no mistakes"

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ksh 5 points a month ago

Did you try turning it off and on and then ask for software again?

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nodiratime 4 points a month ago

Brb, restarting all data centers.

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altphoto 5 points a month ago

Hey maybe we need to keep them off until the coin battery dies so the bios resets?

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Canonical_Warlock 37 points a month ago

Don't do plumbing, join us in HVAC-R. There is way less training and fewer certs required. The bar is so low it's derailing subways.

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some_kind_of_guy 9 points a month ago

Refrigeration?

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Canonical_Warlock 4 points a month ago

Edit: Wait, refrigeration is just full stack where HVAC isn't.

Yep. When it comes to HVAC and refrigeration, refrigeration techs tend to have far more variried work and be the more expensive to hire. More expensive doesn't mean better though, refrigeration is just more generalized. HVAC tends to be pretty standardized as far as operating conditions and equipment goes so HVAC techs can get pretty specialized as far as tools and training goes. But with refrigeration you do all the standard HVAC work while also working on basically everything else that gets hot or cold.

The best comparison I can make is probably to automotive mechanics. A HVAC tech is like a dealership mechanic, where a refrigeration tech is closer to a diesel truck mechanic. That diesel truck mechanic could probably work on your Honda Civic, but they'd be way more expensive, they aren't going to have the special factory tools, and that really isn't what they're there for. Similarly a refrigeration tech can do HVAC work and we often do, but we tend to be more expensive and less specifically tooled for HVAC than a dedicated HVAC tech. The less specifically tooled part can be kind of funny at points because some of the guys I know who work in dedicated HVAC will go so far as to have different manifolds that they use for different refrigerants, meanwhile I've seen a refrigeration tech patch a 100 ton industrial chiller barrel with basically nothing but the tools in their pockets, a tube of quick set JB weld, and a vacuum pump. If it's stupid and it works then it'll just have to keep working until the right parts come in.

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tquid 33 points a month ago

IT guy here, not a programmer per se, but I have given up and am re-training into fraud detection. I want to take down some of the fuckers that ruined the industry before I die

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imvii 17 points a month ago

I was in IT 20+ years.

I quit 4 years ago and opened an arcade. My only regret is I should have bailed out 10 years ago.

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tobebannedbygaymods 1 point a month ago

I'm a non native English speaker , what do you mean by an arcade ? ___

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imvii 3 points a month ago

It's a place with a bunch of games like pinball, video arcades, billiards, etc.

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queerlilhayseed 1 point a month ago

Hmm, you could work on an open-source project for detecting and/or mitigating corporate and government influence campaigns in the fediverse. I think, right now, the fediverse is still too small for it to make sense for those actors to deploy expensive, sophisticated attacks against it, but if the community grows that threat is going to grow with it, probably at least as long as we're alive. I assume you're talking about financial fraud; I don't know how similar detecting "fraud" accounts would be but I imagine there's some overlap.

I think it would be fun to work on a bot / influencer detector. And if it works, it would hopefully make the fediverse more resilient to coordinated influence campaigns designed to destroy or capture it. Which would help to ruin the corporate media hellscape that has been wreaking havoc on the world ever since the inception of feed manipulation.

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Fancy_Gecko 0 points a month ago

who are the people that ruined the industry ? who do you blame ?

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darthsundhaft 31 points a month ago

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surewhynotlem 10 points a month ago

I don't know what I did, but I'm definitely about to get beat for it

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Sonotsugipaa 3 points a month ago

You added the wrong vowel to consonant-ending words while doing a faux Italian accent

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surewhynotlem 2 points a month ago

Oh-a no!

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Sonotsugipaa 1 point a month ago

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dewritoninja 30 points a month ago

I'm a few weeks from graduating in software engineering, I think I'm going back to my old plan of finding a strong rope and a sturdy tree.

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annoying_cyclist 42 points a month ago

Nothing wrong with being an arborist.

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Agent641 24 points a month ago

I work in software but I have a side job working for an arborist, and you might have been joking but it's legit a great industry to have a backup plan in.

Most arborists near me have more work than they can keep up with. You see, the thing about trees is, you trim them, wait a year, and the bastards grow back! It's like a giant scam and the trees are all in on it!

It's a pretty fun job too, if you're relatively fit. You get to climb trees, throw logs into giant scary chippers, and you get first dibs on all the best gun and sword shaped sticks.

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annoying_cyclist 9 points a month ago

I was half joking. 😅 Of all the tradesfolk I've hired to do work on my house, my arborist is the only one who's job I could see myself actually liking. He gets paid to be a nerd about something (trees, tree health, tree care), the work itself seems a lot more pleasant than dealing with plumbing or electrical repairs, and at least my guy is a one man band who just shows up and does his thing, which is certainly appealing after a career of various EMs, PMs, TPMs, and other people who need to be appeased when doing work. Also the fun tools.

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douz0a0bouz 23 points a month ago

I know this is a haha community, but software isn't dead. Most corps are going to insist you use AI. Especially as a junior dev. Look for places that say things like "engineers make the decisions". You need to find a place where you can get experience learning how software is built, even if the bot does the typing. People have been getting laid off and that sucks but software devs aren't going anywhere. Ai writes bad code. They need us to make sure bad code doesn't go to production.

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myrmidex 17 points a month ago

They need us to make sure bad code doesn’t go to production.

what worries me: that's not something a junior can do.

I see it with the local lawyers office, they have stopped hiring junior lawyers and are replacing the junior's tasks by AI. Fine for now, but I wonder what happens when the others retire, who's going to replace them if no juniors are trained?

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W3dd1e 6 points a month ago

I got a degree in development a few years ago and couldn’t find a job. There was nothing out there for a junior dev. I was persistent for about a year then, I just gave up.

Now I work in Commercial Real Estate but I can see this industry is about to be decimated by AI also. They are slowly starting to figure it out and build AI tools that do their job.

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Napster153 6 points a month ago

Bold of you to think they wouldn't replace AI with more AI and lie to their own face in the mirror that their company collapsing is good just because, AI.

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monkeyman512 2 points a month ago

Yeah, I suggest following the age old wisdom of rats on this. Abandon the sinking ship before it sinks with you in it.

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kirao47 3 points a month ago

Bet on it, there will be (or are already) big revolutions in engineering/programming and art (and music), especially these 2 areas.

Instrinsic/individualistic expression (also motive) is going to become a new form of rocketfuel in that vacuum being created by clankers. Human potential and what really defines existence scales faster than boring exponential growth of calculation power.

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explodicle 2 points a month ago

It's interesting and scary; if the human spirit is worth anything creatively, we're about to find out how much.

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fleck 2 points a month ago

I am a junior dev and I am not earning that great, but at least my company is not forcing me to use AI, which from some reports I have read is quite the exception. They do mention it a lot ("just let claude generate this or that driver") but they actually understand when I say I dislike using it because I need to learn this stuff and build experience, which simply does not happen when I offload my brain, like some do.

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hakunawazo 14 points a month ago

(But to be straight: There are a lot of better options for a career, please try them first)

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in_the_dark_forest 13 points a month ago

Don't let it get you down. You need to remember that this whole AI hype / AI will replace everyone is coming from people who invested a lot of money into it and really need it to succeed now.

Many also have an oversimplified view of what the discipline of software engineering includes in addition to little understanding how different types of AI work.

Besides, skillsets you learned in SE can easily applied to other 'non-virtual' fields. Many people suck at providing clear and specific instructions or requirements; businesses also have many real world processes that need to be optimized; identifying problems in a system (you first need to see there is an issue, if you want to ask an AI to fix it for you in the next step); being able to break down and tackle large, complex topics; ... I could probably come up with many more points.

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ChickenLadyLovesLife 8 points a month ago

In my career as a programmer mostly writing custom software for smaller companies, 90% of the job was understanding the clients' businesses and working out what they needed the software to do. Designing, writing and supporting the software was relatively trivial. My bosses never understood my lack of enthusiasm when they would hire newly-graduated Computer Science students and stick them on my team. Never mind that they knew almost nothing about the actual process of producing complete working software -- they were completely useless for the main task of gathering requirements.

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veni_vedi_veni 4 points a month ago

Yea those things you really only learn being in the industry for a couple of years, however fewer entry level hires now, because of AI and overall degradation of communication skills, means a derth of competent employees in the industry later. Tragedy of the commons...

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AlternatePersonMan 3 points a month ago

Ah so you're a black man in a predominately racist white county with a strong police force?

For real though. If life sucks, try something else. Teach English abroad, move to another state or country. Not much to lose if you're struggling.

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kreskin -1 points a month ago

You could learn farsi and arabic and join the military. They are always hiring lately and they have lowered their standards a lot I hear. Medical, maximum enlistment age, drug history, criminal background, fitness, intellgence, all lowered. You can start your first enlistment at 42 now. As long as you get in before your 43rd birthday you're gold.

(I'm just kidding, dont join the military)

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dewritoninja 7 points a month ago

I'm no an american, and i would rather die than support the people who put pinochet in power and are currently gutting south america once again

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PolarKraken 4 points a month ago

Gross!

path: 0 25785965 25787747 25792816, hotness: undefined, score: 4, children: 0

Snowclone 28 points a month ago

you'll either be needed to extract dead systems after this all falls apart, or to build new systems for people that don't want slop service in dead space.

path: 0 25786858, hotness: undefined, score: 28, children: 9

bananabread 18 points a month ago

Oops, requirements were written by ai too

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skisnow 25 points a month ago

For real.

I recently lost half a morning having to go through a slop requirements document and making a list of questions like "are you sure you want this? why do you want this? what does this even mean?", to which the answers were all "I don't know, ChatGPT wrote it".

Like why did you even bother sending me this, you could've just sent me the prompt instead and saved me 2 hours of my life

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ChickenLadyLovesLife 13 points a month ago

you could’ve just sent me the prompt instead

AI discovers compression algorithms.

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motruck 12 points a month ago

People do stupid things when they don't know any better but want to look like they know what they are doing. Enter LLMs now people think they look even smarter in an area they don't know things.

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Snowclone 2 points a month ago

yeah it's not a great idea, I've been seeing a crap ton of AI ads for relatively bland services online, like insurance and weight loss, some known brands mixed in, and I keep thinking, what does this benifit the company other than not paying someone more than the AI to make an ad, and I feel it mostly just let's less legitimate business look more sleek, but the bounce back from that is going to be people associating AI ads with garbage and scam businesses, which is plush the bigger corporations away from it. Anyway, yeah it's all to try and get the user of the AI service to look more polished in intent.

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Konaber 8 points a month ago

AI;DR (AI; Didn’t Read)

My new favorite abbreviation

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explodicle 2 points a month ago

Call me a Karen, but that gets an angry email to their boss.

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skisnow 5 points a month ago

I wish. Sadly it was from the boss.

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sanzky 27 points a month ago

getting licensed as an electrician has been on my mind recently. i’m so tired of the whole industry

path: 0 25788819, hotness: undefined, score: 27, children: 1

ChickenLadyLovesLife 18 points a month ago

I quit programming and became a school bus driver. I'm 100X happier even if I am making like 1/6 of what I used to make. What I'll do after I'm replaced with AI I don't know, but at least it will happen long after I would have been replaced as a programmer by AI. I'm more concerned about what the parents will do when their kids are run over by the fucking AI-driven school buses.

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Feidry 24 points a month ago

I worked in IT support for 15 years. Now I work on a dairy farm. Cows are way better than people. Go into farming, fellow lemmings. It's so rewarding.

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dylanTheDeveloper 5 points a month ago

Atleast cows dont need cloud storage

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avidamoeba 2 points a month ago

Supply managed?

path: 0 25785427 25786243, hotness: undefined, score: 2, children: 0

Sabata11792 2 points a month ago

One day... I must still fix the machines. The normies still won't know what the power button or ram stick are, even with help.

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dylanTheDeveloper 3 points a month ago

The McDonald's frycook of IT

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Feidry 2 points a month ago

Fuck the normies

path: 0 25785427 25787320 25787321, hotness: undefined, score: 2, children: 0

schmups 0 points a month ago

"Cows are way better than people" said the prison guard.

path: 0 25785427 25788080, hotness: undefined, score: 0, children: 3

Bad_Ideas_In_Bulk 3 points a month ago

I mean, he's keeping cows prisoner and we're posting passive aggressive shit online. I'd say cows are 2/2 so far.

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Feidry 2 points a month ago

I just fucking work there. For minimum wage. I'm the one kindness those cows get so fuck your judgement.

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schmups 0 points 24 days ago

Whatever you need to tell yourself

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ZILtoid1991 23 points a month ago

> the end of software engineering

> looks inside

> overhyped slop generator

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skibidi 18 points a month ago

To be fair having been in software for awhile, plenty of people were slinging slop before AI as well.

The difference is back then, we could block the PR, now management demands velocity at all costs.

It will catch up eventually.

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pulsey 5 points a month ago

Didn't management always demand velocity at all costs? This is really not new.

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skibidi 6 points a month ago

In the last few years prior to widespread coding llms (at least at the shops I worked at then) there was an appreciation for reducing incidents and defensive, clean code.

Now the expectation is if the AI causes an outage, the AI will fix it quickly, so code quality doesn't matter and just yeet everything into production.

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ZILtoid1991 1 point a month ago

Slop back then was using Electron at all cost, since it allowed them to hire cheaper web devs instead. Now it's vibe-coded Electron apps.

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myyass 22 points a month ago

With all the food recalls, I'm sure plumbing is a high demand job.

Jokes aside; trades suck. If you like hot ass heat, cramped places, constant injuries, buying your own tools, ruining your body before you reach forty, and annoying customers; then it's the job for you. This is an anecdotal take but yeah it's not fun. I wouldn't be exaggerating if I say I wish I did anything else for the last ten years. The money was good but the added pain isn't worth it.

path: 0 25785659, hotness: undefined, score: 22, children: 0

DrakeAlbrecht 17 points a month ago

Learn the essential skills and tools to become a confident plumber.

And then discover that plumbers won't even take on an apprentice without three years of experience.

path: 0 25783146, hotness: undefined, score: 17, children: 3

OwOarchist 8 points a month ago

Easy: just lie about your experience.

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DieFledermaus 11 points a month ago

About 10 years ago I bent the rod for the floatie thing in my toilet to stop it from running all the time, so I have 10 years of field experience.

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OwOarchist 3 points a month ago

Exactly!

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greedytacothief 16 points a month ago

Started carpentry work this week. It's alright if you don't work with assholes

path: 0 25784174, hotness: undefined, score: 16, children: 1

JoeBigelow 13 points a month ago

So many assholes though. So I bought a lawnmower and a trailer, cutting grass and gardening by myself is really nice

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kreskin 13 points a month ago

I'm thinking cake decorator. Or florist. Maybe grave digger.

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PieMePlenty 7 points a month ago

florist

This sounds nice. Working with something green and alive. Arborist too.

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RamenDame 5 points a month ago

Granny worked as a florist, not her own shop though. She had incredible strong hands.

As a pupil I did a work experience day in the shop. It was really chilly (Germany usually has not Air Con), we consistently had to clean the floor in the back room to not slip on the leaves, it was tiny in there and we were four people. I got to wash a fake flower decor and rearrange it for a doctors office. That was nice.

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kreskin 2 points a month ago

She had incredible strong hands.

Maybe you should be a writer. Well placed, evocative, Hemminginway-esque sentence. You're in the wrong neighborhood.

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horsesaysweird 1 point a month ago

I never really understood the appeal of arranging severed plant genitals. Sure, it looks nice. But boobs also look nice, and I don't cut them off and put them in a pretty bowl on my living room table.

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kreskin 2 points a month ago

You make a good point, but maybe no one had thought of severed boobs as decoration yet. AI will think of it for us, soon. What are the real dollar value of peasant boobs anyway-- I hear people arent generally worth very much if you do the math. And the rich + AI are doing the math.

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Appoxo 4 points a month ago

We have diggers.
I think manual labor that needs creativity (e.g. pattiserie or florist) has the best post-AI future.

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HerbGrower 3 points a month ago

Wood carver! Oh they have mostly automated that with CNC machines...

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Appoxo 2 points a month ago

There are also coffee art robots that can print something on the milk foam.

But it still requires the creativity.
And for sentimental stuff (e.g. pattiserie and florist) I would like to believe that humans value hand made stuff more than machine produced.

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HerbGrower 2 points a month ago

For a special occasion perhaps, but on a regular basis is it valued enough to pay someone a living wage? Most of this stuff I wouldn't pay for, might make it myself though.

I don't think you can really have a creative focused economy when landlords and banks are taking so much from us.

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cabillaud 2 points a month ago

Snatch anvil thief.

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kreskin 1 point a month ago

I used to think I could give hand jobs in alleyways if things got bad, but I hear AI is being trained to give those. Because of course it is.

https://www.wired.com/...

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lemmygarden 13 points a month ago

I'm going to be a baker! just putting it off as long as possible because I don't want to wake up at 2am.

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diablomnky 30 points a month ago

Every other baker gets up at 2am. Be the only 2pm baker out there for fresh evening breads!

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Blackmist 16 points a month ago

Yes, I'm sick of morning people getting all the good stuff. I want to come home from work and sit in a cafe/bakery and eat nice things.

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Echolynx 13 points a month ago

We need a night owls society.

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1984 3 points a month ago

Not a bad idea, would be nice with fresh sandwiches instead of shitty burgers or sausages when going home from some event at night.

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arbitur95 11 points a month ago

It’s fascinating that we all come up with plumbing as the future jobs

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NaibofTabr 13 points a month ago

Let's be real, by the time AI is actually capable of doing residential plumbing work, it will be capable of refusing to take the job.

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FuyuhikoDate 7 points a month ago

Well... We got used to work with other peoples shit for years.

path: 0 25784143 25784618, hotness: undefined, score: 7, children: 0

portifornia 4 points a month ago

Actually I've been considering a shift into mushroom farming.

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Goldholz 4 points a month ago

Hemp for me. No but seriousely i have been looking into architectur

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dylanTheDeveloper 2 points a month ago

I step out into traffic and sue the drivers

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raven55six 9 points a month ago

The end of software engineering will come when the end of world comes. Many clients have realized the mess caused by AI slop and the bugs it creates, the mess it makes while resolving its own conflicting pull requests and the haunting hallucinating in long prompts. Also, the cost involved in long run is bonkers for the trash quality.

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green_red_black 6 points a month ago

Went to college to become a programer. Now going to graduate with a literal dead degree (no joke my degree stopped being offered so I am the last to get it) and work the warehouse and food service, along with Uber driving and delivering as I try to get a career in bartending instead.

Edit: 50k in federal loans FYI

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tinfoilhat 5 points a month ago

Can I just say, I graduated a decade ago and have no idea what you must be going thru.

However, I want to maybe give you a little hope. A college degree is just a piece of paper. I've worked with software engineers that were former teachers, artists, and biologists. Think of the college degree as proof that you're capable of learning.

All that AI has really done is increased the amount of work people are expected to get done, so I don't think there's NO hope for you in software engineering as a whole. You could pivot into another industry that just requires a math or compsci degree. Or keep trying your hand at software engineering.

Good luck

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goatinspace 5 points a month ago

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gwl 4 points a month ago

In before the AI shills show up, nice

path: 0 25792579, hotness: undefined, score: 4, children: 0

mcv 3 points a month ago

I'm staying here, but my son who wanted to become a programmer has now decided to study for maritime officer. I don't know when AI will take over ships.

path: 0 25792051, hotness: undefined, score: 3, children: 0

Knock_Knock_Lemmy_In 3 points a month ago

Shouldn't the book illusion be of some pipes? Or the guide topic be butchery?

path: 0 25789806, hotness: undefined, score: 3, children: 2

IsoKiero 13 points a month ago

Search for O'Reilly books, the style is spot on with their covers.

path: 0 25789806 25789991, hotness: undefined, score: 13, children: 1

Knock_Knock_Lemmy_In 1 point a month ago

True. I never paid close attention. I probably saw a snake on a python book and assumed the front cover image was relevant to the contents.

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beeng 3 points a month ago

Engineering not. Computer science also not.

So what are you doing that is not those 2 that is dying?

path: 0 25790558, hotness: undefined, score: 3, children: 0

pirate2377 2 points a month ago

Can I get a copy?

path: 0 25785297, hotness: undefined, score: 2, children: 0

mesamunefire 1 point a month ago

OK this really got me.

path: 0 25795287, hotness: undefined, score: 1, children: 0

Dana 1 point a month ago

Time to learn plumbing.

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kirao47 -1 points a month ago

Only people having no idea of what engineering even is would write such bullshit, worse than slop

path: 0 25787973, hotness: undefined, score: -1, children: 1

gwl 7 points a month ago

It's called humour mate

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programmer_humor

programmer_humor

@programming.dev

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Welcome to Programmer Humor!

This is a place where you can post jokes, memes, humor, etc. related to programming!

For sharing awful code theres also Programming Horror.

Rules

Keep content in english
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Posts must be related to programming or programmer topics
- If the mod doesn't find it funny, you're banned. Ha-ha!... For real: do not use the community for "statements". There are other places for such content. Keep it chill and funny.

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programmer_humor

programmer_humor

@programming.dev

login for more options

Welcome to Programmer Humor!

This is a place where you can post jokes, memes, humor, etc. related to programming!

For sharing awful code theres also Programming Horror.

Rules

Keep content in english
No advertisements
Posts must be related to programming or programmer topics
- If the mod doesn't find it funny, you're banned. Ha-ha!... For real: do not use the community for "statements". There are other places for such content. Keep it chill and funny.

go to feed...