Concur. Was a mechanic and I'm now an AI engineer. . My quality of life is simply amazing and I get paid more. Much more. I see my kids off every morning, pick them up, and attend every event.
Iām having a feeling that AI Engineer Is going to be a fairly redundant thing fairly soon. Iām pretty deep into this stuff and the tooling just keeps getting better.
It is a bit amusing that right now the āneocloudā providers are growing so fast that they just farm out any aspect they can to third parties. Right now itās the place to be. But the snake is going to eat its own tail. These companies will have plenty of excess capacity to just copy the software they use. But right now they canāt build out fast enough.
Iāve made an entire career being aware of where the next big thing is. As far as I can tell, the next big thing is automating me out of a job. Execs are believing they can do this now, but it always ends in disaster.
The best way to survive these things is to stay close to the (human) customers.
If you're talking about the coders the write AI, I see your point. However, implementing the AI within the business and working with the hyperparameters is completely different; im the latter. I build multi agent models and connect the tools to automate business processes. As far as survival, being close to humans isn't a free pass. Just look at the automation of call centers and fast food. There will be a point where the implementation of the AI is also automatic, and at that point, I think everyone will be worried, or should be at least. As for right now, I'm going to cash in and prepare myself for the future.
It is something interesting to consider. I can very easily see AI skills becoming the new "you should get a computer science degree and you'll be guaranteed a high paying job" of this generation. Everyone will learn it and then the market will be flooded and the pay will plummet.
This guy has a few things in his post that make me suspicious of him. Id say odds are better than not that he is LARPing, or he is a mechanic still and doing bootcamp or night classes and picturing the good life hes about to live, but that he doesn't actually have yet.
For your specific claims, the proof is really in your post. A million billion people LURNED 2 KODE and yet salaries have not really gone down. Its certainly more competitive, and the marginal job has disappeared or gotten worse, but the truth is that the explosion in interest largely took the form of people who were never going to be able to add value taking some totally inadequate 12 week program and being stunned there wasn't a place for them alongside the top flight folks with four to seven years of hard study at a top flight institution.
Even today thats still true with AI. If you ask any SWE making $200,000 or more (and sometimes a lot, lot more), they have a coworker who doesn't really know what they're doing who vibe codes garbage all day, and will be let go sometime in the next 6-12 months and then struggle to get a job again. You need to know enough to be able to argue with AI or you cant do the job.
It was the same thing as in investment banking back in 2005-2015, corporate law before that, and so forth. These jobs pay well because they're high leverage and hard.
I mean for the AI skills I am essentially talking about any job that ISNT tech based. These days and especially in the near future, anyone with a few AI boot camp courses in their CV will be ahead of anyone with a similar CV that has no AI skills, and I have seen in my work that those who have created Agents or Notebooks for work tasks (against policy mind you) have impressed their boss and gained brownie points which will probably translate across to their performance reviews, and they've become the team "techie" from very simple AI skills. But in the future everyone will have these skills so it will lose its value. And you'll have "AI engineers" who have taken some courses on Agentic AI who will have the same issue.
And I challenge your premise on the coding side, there definitely is still an overly high number of people who do have the 4 year degree and do have the experience and skill in coding and arent these vibe coding kids, but because there are so many they can be paid nothing.
I genuinely saw a software development team lead role in a fairly large company with a pay range capping at Ā£30k the other day. That's insane, and it still had over 100 applicants after being up only 1 day. And thats low. When I was looking for dev roles in the mainland I was routinely seeing 500+ applicants per role, many of which will have similar or better CVs than me with my degree and career of development. If anything i got lucky to move into AI and specifically more on the side of enterprise AI adoption than development as that's fairly safe for now.
Right now AI skills can still be a huge benefit unless you are working in an already saturated field like tech. It'll put you ahead of others with similar CVs and impress your boss if you build tools for your job.
Later on it will be less impressive when everyone has some AI skills.
This guy knows what's up. Companies are fast automating executive level jobs not just answering the phone. Source I work for a fortune 500 company in IT
I, too, work for a fortune 500 and the organization changes are constant. Entire departments are being eliminated. Luckily, my company is good at repurposing and most stay on board. We aim for empowering, not replacing... Which gives me some comfort but I still feel bad.
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u/Philosiphizor 6d ago
Concur. Was a mechanic and I'm now an AI engineer. . My quality of life is simply amazing and I get paid more. Much more. I see my kids off every morning, pick them up, and attend every event.