Note 76

I am worried! Again. :D. But on something slightly different?

There seems to be a growing trend in the tech industry of senior/experienced engineers also beginning to see the signs of wear and tear. AI is being pushed so heavily that I'm not sure that the software engineering aspect of things that fueled the industry in the 2010s is ever going to be coming back. To some extent I think this is great. But on the other hand, it's being used to cut costs - not accelerate growth (I did not use AI to write this, but i think that's the correct usage of the em?en? dash).

Obviously this is going to have negative affects on my prospects. Not that I had much anyway. But I do think that this makes the scope of what I want to work on smaller. Even as someone who is very intrigued by AI and its uses, I don't think the trend of pushing out engineering is the solution. Engineers act as over-seers to the output of AI models, and inserting themselves where necessary. I'm honestly a lot more interested in solving interesting and difficult problems, saving the tedium of the act of coding to an AI model. I think this is the correct approach of how this interaction should be.

Does this change anything for me though, not really. Still jobless, still trying to understand who I am and what I want to do. Perhaps this is a never ending cycle. I'm sure even the 80-90 year old patients that I see every day sometimes struggle with understanding who they are. Or maybe they don't. Or perhaps it's only the monetarily successful ones that don't have this problem. It is quite interesting to see the dichotomy of patients who are quite obviously multi-millionaires doing similar exercises as patients who scrimp by on their social security. I think it's actually very... heartwarming? no. My vocabulary isn't deep enough to describe how I feel about this further than it being interesting. It's just very human I think. Regardless of monetary status, when we're physically broken down we all heal the same. Albeit body types and recovery process will differ, and there's something to speak of that the wealthy ones will likely recover faster because they have the luxury of time, it's quite similar.

On a different note, I think that I'll likely start adopting this AI process a little more. I'd like to solve difficult problems within the spaces that I reside, and currently that's within the realm of esports. Using it to speed up my data collection and processing time would probably be a decent idea. I just wish there was more money in it haha. But I think a dream job would be to work at an esports title on the game balancing team. I think that field is quite interesting to me, and if I cannot interact with esports directly then working on improvements to the game is probably the closest that I can get. If I build a tool or something that attracts enough attention hopefully this becomes something!

Honestly, this sort of reignition was started because I saw a fucking youtube short. Sad, I know. But it was by Roy Kim who is the founder of Cluely, the software company that helps you cheat on your software engineering interviews. Which is doubly sad. But I think what he said was really accurate. In this age where you could memorize a question bank and obtain a job for 200,000 dollars a year, why are you not spending all of your time memorizing? And now in the age of AI where you can, given some level of competency in software engineering, building something that can obtain users? I thought it was harsh but it does make a lot of sense. Granted, it's coming from a place of success, but I found that it was more or less true. The tools are out there and I just need to grab hold of them.

I think it's nice that this post ends on a more hopeful tone :D