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- Hacker News
- > Even if you don’t find what’s happening right now exciting, you can at least find it interesting
I can't get myself to stop finding it terrifying
When I think about my future I am scared. Not uncertain. Not merely anxious. Definitely not excited. I'm quite frightened.
In fairness, I think I'm a bit of an outlier. I already felt my place in society was fairly tenuous. I struggle to make friends. I don't feel I fit in very well. I've never managed to stick at one job for more than a few years. The one thing I'm really quite good at is building software and that's let me stay afloat and thrive somewhat
And that's going to go away. And I'm nowhere near close to retiring.
So no. I'm probably not going to find a way to let my anger give way to curiosity any time soon. I feel under threat and I am scared for my personal future safety and security.
Is this my fault for placing too many of my eggs in one basket? Yeah probably. I regret it a lot. If I could go back in time I would have chosen a different profession and branched into software instead of being all software all the time.
I'm trying to tell myself it's not too late to branch out now, but it's been very difficult
So.. I dunno. I can appreciate what the article is saying, and I think it's probably accurate and useful for other people who are more secure than I am, but... Eh.
I guess I just hope people realize that people like me are out there, not just uncertain but AI is shaping up to be the blow that knocks us off the bridge and into the water
- I think a lot of worry/anxiety comes with the desire for stability as we get further into life and career. I remember being in downtown Dallas New Year's Eve 1999 on a headful of LSD praying the lights would go out since Y2K was finally happening. Now, I'm 50 and have a family and still trying to navigate the tech industry like all of us. Societal level mayhem lacks the luster it use to have...by chasd00
- Hey, just wanted to say you're not alone in this.
I have pretty similar feelings to what you are going through.
I was so stressed like seven or eight months ago that for two weeks I was constantly sleep deprived. Then I just asked myself "What is the worst that can happen?" The answer helped me relax a bit. I will just move to some small village somewhere, open a shop for anything and get by. Life will go on.
I seriously think software is / was hard. That means people that thrived in it were smart and disciplined.
And which other profession has so much change? My father is a civil engineer. The tools and formulas he uses has not changed in 50 years while I have to pick up whatever hype tech is asked of me. Many people are similar to me. So we are very adaptable in my most honest opinion.
If it comes to _worst of it_, smart and adaptable people is where I would put my bet on being able to find their footing in the new world.
by teyopi - Your comment really resonated with me. I grew up middle class, but both my parents grew up poor, and they taught me to be afraid of poverty. Many people in this forum are here because they love computers - I like computers, but what I liked more than computers was the opportunity to live comfortably and provide for myself and my family. The possibility of AI destroying that opportunity has me second guessing nearly every major life decision I’ve made since the age of 17.
I don’t really think that AI will destroy the field of software development, but there’s a constant sense of urgency underlying every working hour where I have to second guess whether I’m using the tools right and how much longer they’re even going to need a human in the loop (my gut says forever, but I’ve been wrong before …)
If I could go back in time, I would pick a different career. I’ve learned that I value consistency and predictability in my life, and tech is clearly not where you’re going to find that. If this was just a hobby, AI would be a godsend. But I always saw software development as my ticket to a decent life, and I’m left guessing everyday whether that ticket is still valid.
by negrewal - >> In fairness, I think I'm a bit of an outlier.
Not at all. I'm in the same boat. The first ten year of being a developer you could see things happening miles away. There was a predictable process. Someone builds a new framework. You do some tutorials, kick the tires. Then it eventually starts showing up in small corp projects, then bigger projects or its dropped in favor of a newer framework, app, platform.
Now? Its all gas no brakes. Just shove AI into everything. No vetting, no testing, just shove it into everything and see what happens. This is not software development to me - this is sprinting towards a brick wall.
I would recommend the same thing I'm doing. Branch out, network like crazy. Talk to people about your skills and see if what else is out there. Look at going into adjacent fields, etc. When I went through the first dot com bust and then the 08' crash? The only thing that saved me was networking. I had a few friends that I was talking to who were getting me interviews and telling me about openings that weren't being published.
Keep your shoulder to the wind and keep pushing, there's light at the end of this, I just don't know how long the tunnel is.
- This article falls flat for me. Maybe because I'm angry?
>Anxiety as an emotion does not require someone to blame.
I know this isn't the "hacker mindset" or whatever. But my anger is well placed and justified. It is pointed at a very specific set of people who are actively doing everything in their power to turn the world into a surveillance spam slop hellscape while massively enriching themselves and destroying the biosphere.
They are using this technology TODAY to build a surveillance state. They are using this technology TODAY to spam the ever loving shit out of every place on the internet with a comment box. They are using this technology TODAY to fool people and to distance people from one another. They are using this technology TODAY to bomb schools and designate people terrorists and fly drones into gas stations. And they are doing all of this TODAY, right now, while literally stealing and burning books, cooking the biosphere, and making everyone's electricity more expensive. It is not a "bet" or something they are unsure of. It is something that they are doing, today.
Sorry, I am going to be unsure, curious, and anxious about this technology when the people in charge of it cease using their basically unchecked authoritarian power to immiserate myself and everyone else, literally billions of people, who are in my social class.
I am not curious or uncertain about any of this, I know exactly what is happening and I hate it and I hate the people who are responsible for it. They have names and I'm confident that when this is all over, they will burn in hell.
by mlsu - I read everything you say, can agree with everything you say, and it still doesn't answer "Why should this make you/me angry?"
As per the article, it does answer why I should be anxious. Not why I should be angry.
by BeetleB - One could have said listed those sort of things about any stage of the computer industry going all the way back to ENIAC calculating artillery tables, mainframe computerization putting people out of work like (human) calculators, bookkeepers, and file clerks while making fortunes for Silicon Valley's original founders in the process, and, stretching a bit, IBM tabulators' infamous role in WW2 Germany but everyone turned a blind eye to it. Observing the situation with a jaundiced eye, one might wonder why all this concern suddenly emerges now?by ThrowawayR2
- On my side, and to build on top of what you've said here, I think the article misses the point of the fact that anger is a useful and healthy societal tool.
The naive disney approach to anger is "you should not be angry, it is baaaad". But anger is an important signal to put limits on what is not acceptable to do in society. If my neighbour throw their garbage over the fence in my garden, me being angry at them is the uncomfortable situation they will be faced with and that will teach them it is not acceptable. Alternatives don't work: any other response will signal that what they've done is in fact "not that bad afterall, otherwise people would have been angry".
by cauch - In keeping with the spirit of this author's unsolicited advice, I will say that I am quite unsure about the author's awareness of the ways that "tech" companies are behaving.
I say "tech" in quotes because they aren't "tech" companies anymore. They surveil, exploit customers, and engage in anti-competitive activities to maintain their golden egg laying geese.
I have a whole lot of reasons to be... UNSURE about being in tech. VERY UNSURE.
by mayhemducks - Anger and anxiety are normal responses to abnormal and dangerous situations. They should not be changed or ignored, they should be used.
This is the same game. They tried to play with the mindfulness movement in tech. Ignore your anger and just keep coding. And that’s why everyone is more angry and anxious now.
by Noaidi - >But anger is different from anxiety because anger needs to be directed somewhere. The feeling of anger suggests that somebody or something is doing something to you.
>Who are you going to be angry at and why are you angry in the first place?
The author is arguing that you should hone in on the underlying reasons behind emotions. It can be easy to conflate anger and anxiety. It's up to your agency to reflect on your emotions and how you act on them.
You can be angry, but you should name at what and why. Who is propagating the mindfulness movement? How is it affecting you? What can we do differently? Calling out "they" isn't a good answer.
- There's something that really rubs me the wrong way when people use the language of healthy emotional regulation to spread unearned and unjustified placation.
It reminds me of (for the pedants out there, I'm not saying it's equivalent to) the consume product meme. "Don't ask questions, just complete assignment and then get excited for next industry trend."
>I don’t know what the future of this industry will look like, and I don’t know who will benefit from it and I don’t think I’m alone with that. However I can only urge anyone who feels anger and looks for a villain right to instead remain curious instead. To be curious enough to understand what is changing, excited enough to experiment with it. And then, from what we learn, earn the right to decide when resistance is warranted and where to direct it.
Sounds pleasant and vaguely inspirational. Then you read it again and notice guy thinks I don't always have the RIGHT to DECIDE to RESIST.
by dogleash - Yes, it is weird. One would think that we have all "earned the right" to criticize AI by suffering through hundreds of AI written blog posts by now.
Like the one from the author, who has never written in this style before AI.
by ltpart - > Sounds pleasant and vaguely inspirational. Then you read it again and notice guy thinks I don't always have the RIGHT to DECIDE to RESIST.
Author here: maybe I wasn't too clear about this, but I have seen people direct their anger about about what AI does to their jobs at people who themselves are not in a situation to do anything about it (eg: line managers or leaderships in businesses who are trying to roll out AI based coding tools).
- I think it's more a mix of anxiety, frustration, and exploration.
Exploration: Hey there's some cool new tech, let's see what it can do for me, for us.
Anxiety: What will happen to my craft? Will my skills still be important? Will I have a job in a year? How will I keep up? If we stop or slow hiring junior engineers, what happens when the experienced folks retire?
Frustration: This could be a time of fun and exploration with these new tools at hand. Instead we are measured by weird metrics (tokens, PR times, etc, etc), some of us are laid off, etc. There are $100bns spent on AI data centers.
The last one is the closest to anger, but it's not really the same.
by linuxhansl - More on the frustration: this person with no real world experience is hired and all of a sudden sending me six page articles they themselves couldn't fathom writing and they're lauded by founders and celebrated as pioneers of the company. Nobody in that chain could pick out a race condition from a lineup of cat feces. And I'm the "bad guy" for poking holes in all of the Groundbreaking Computer Science being done.
That's what's frustrating.
by junon - I’m not the arbiter of emotions but being angry is valid and it doesn’t have to be directed. It’s not necessarily a vector. If I worked very hard to transplant a tree, and at no fault of anyone, it dies in the process, I can be angry I invested my time, money and energy into the failed effort. No one has the right to say that’s the wrong emotion to feel.by aenima4six2
- I'd argue feeling the emotion is perfectly fine, but it's how one expresses this emotion and how it impacts others that has larger implications.by zoltrix303
- As far as I can tell, we've convinced companies and VCs to dump billions of dollars into infrastructure to support a vision where they can get more done with fewer people. They've been duped.
I think of LLMs as a labor-liberating tool. It's saving me effort so I don't have to drudge through enterprise codebases and memorize company-specific knowledge that is a dead end for my career. Instead I can run an agent while doing chores.
The beauty of the entire LLM stack is that it requires us. It is useless without a human-in-the-loop. The entire stack is designed around human intervention. We will not magically invent a way to remove the human without first removing it from training.
So rest assured, so long as there are humans in the training loop, there's nothing to worry about, because LLMs are a cybernetic enhancement, not a replacement.
by qudat - > I’m afraid we’re completely ignoring the impact this has on society at large, the climate, and the balance of the world as a whole.
Who's we? The impact this has on society at large is such an enormous, pervasive topic in my life - headlines in city newspapers, conversation at the dinner table - that I feel like you'd have to be living in a bunker to think nobody is engaging with it. This guy comes across as entirely disconnected from the world, but somehow thinks he knows how people who actually live in it should feel.
by lazyasciiart - I think right now I love my job. I can work 5 times faster and explore all the little things that I never had time for. All my side projects suddenly come to fruition!
But I have never been more anxious. I have a hard time sleeping, I constantly feel the need to keep up or fall behind. It didn’t use to be like this.
by Aeolun - What does falling behind mean for you? What happens if you’re not keeping up? In my personal experience, nothing actually bad happen when you take your time to do your work without feeling the need to always follow the latest trendsby dgellow
- > I have a hard time sleeping, I constantly feel the need to keep up or fall behind
I felt this way very recently about the one projects I am focusing on. I kept seeing others explore the same space already ahead of me. I thought I'll never make it here because why use my thing when you can already use those things?
There was this extreme sense of urgency, as if I needed to do nothing else in my life but finish this project and get it out there. One day it hit me, and then over the course of a few weeks it settled in, that I was thinking of this from a place of extrinsic motivation. Basically, I was not doing what I wanted, I was doing what I thought others would want from me.
The project now has only two goals.
1. Build the project I want to use for myself, but in a way that will benefit others who happen to want the same thing.
2. The outcome of the project is not the code/app, it's a "changed Me", having learned everything I needed to to build the project.
Eventually I want the project to have a hosted paid platform version. I am not making this platform because I want to make money (I do, but that's besides the point). I am making this platform because I want experience in doing the types of things that can make money.
The whole thing now has become internally oriented in a way that allows me to no longer feel time pressure or be outcome oriented.
I went from feeling burned out spending all my time on this (I shed all other hobbies and activities), to having a great time spending all my time on this. The same amount of time/effort now feels indefinitely sustainable.
Framing is really one of the most powerful methods of emotional regulation. Whatever you are doing, make it relaxed and fun!
by hankbond - I was taught that anger isn't an emotion. It's a reaction -a defensive surge of adrenaline, binary thinking, and motivation to fight. It can feel empowering and energizing. We aren't just sitting here. We're gonna do something.
The emotion is fear. Anger is just a reaction to fear. Basically, if we are angry, we are also scared; whether or not we want to admit it.
It's a long topic, and one I know well (I agree with the above summary), but I really don't think that discussing it, would be particularly welcome, here. I know that it isn't often welcome, even with folks that ask to hear it.
I've spent the majority of my adult life, learning to curb and sideline anger. In my experience, my anger has always caused problems. It has never solved a problem.
Ever. Not even one single problem.
Quite the opposite, in fact.
It's just drained my energy, stunted my reasoning, and poisoned relationships. It has caused others to strike back at me, when they didn't need to (which, of course, caused me damage), it has caused problems, where none existed before, and magnified existing ones.
We can't help getting angry, but we sure can help staying angry. That "staying" part is the corrosive agent. Anger is meant to be a temporary burst of energy, to deal with a threat. After the threat has (or has not) been dealt with, anger is supposed to dissipate. It's not supposed to be an "at rest" state (unless you're Bruce Banner).
- Serenity Now! (Seinfeld reference where the guru of George's father who specializes in anger suppression goes insane.)
- Fear and anger are generally distinct emotions. You can have one without the other. Many of the same pathways are active with fear that are active with an anger in your mind, mechanically speaking. You can have anger without fear though.
I see a lot of people can conflict the two, but they are distinct as label labels and mechanical processes in the mind. Anger surfaces when there is someone to blame. Or something to blame. Something you can pin the emotional and surge on.
For your hypothesis above to be true, you generally need some sort of risk involved for fear to be the actual emotion. Anger can appear with zero fear and simply something blocking your way.
So I’m just not sure that I really agree on anger needing fear. There are plenty of situations where it doesn’t hold.
by bitexploder - Actually, I find it's helpful to privately admit that you do negative things because they DO have some positive side effects. Everything is a tradeoff.
Maybe anger helps draw attention to you. Maybe it garners some form of sympathy. Maybe people get out of your way when you're angry, giving you a certain kind of power.
The reason why you want to stop being angry is because you want to accomplish things without all the negative side effects too.
Being very honest about what you're getting out of something can give you the bigger picture on why you rely on it, so you can more effectively find solutions.
by asdfman123 - -> I was taught that anger isn't an emotion. It's a reaction
After spending the last year in and out or rehab, and intensive outpatient dealing primarily with alcohol addiction, I've been told by many different people that anger is the emotion, its unhealthy to just ignore it. That's one of many things (anxiety for me) that keeps people in active addiction. Your statement is close to my belief and experience, except that Anger IS an emotion and all emotions are neutral, neither good or bad. Its how you respond to the emotion that can become the problem, weather its violence, drugs or any other harmful activity. Processing any emotion in a healthy way and being able to understand the reasons you feeling the emotion is the gamechanger. Speaking only from my own experience.
- > I was taught that anger isn't an emotion.
Yes, this is a school of thought I've seen in a few communication circles. It's not entirely accurate, but it's a useful exercise. They teach that anger is really a derived emotion, and is a result of a fundamental emotion, coupled with a narrative in your mind. The fundamental emotion is the real one, and the narrative in your mind maybe inaccurate. As a result, when you're angry, examine that narrative and ask: "Is this the only narrative that fits the data points?"
There have been occasions where I felt instant anger as a result of a stimulus, and there really wasn't a narrative behind it.
But those are the exceptions. In well over 95% of the cases, it is a derived emotion.
Related: A lot of people really seem hardwired to blame. When something goes wrong (at work, in their life, wherever), they seem to be incomplete if they can't find someone to blame. They often refuse to accept that "Accidents can happen."
Separating the act of "solving a problem" from the act of "blaming someone" was something I learned early in my career. It's useful to know which people you work with are those who can't distinguish.
Pro tip: Never work for a manager whose first question when something goes wrong is "Who owns this?" It's OK to get there eventually, but not the first impulse.
by BeetleB