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118 points LordAtlas | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.194s | source
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8f2ab37a-ed6c ◴[] No.46184133[source]
With little growth and hiring happening outside of firms betting the farm on AI—and getting the funding to stay alive and play the lottery—what is a random tech employee supposed to do here?

It seems like right now the most rational move to stay in the industry is to milk the AI wave as much as possible, learn all of the tools, get a big brand name on one's resume, and then land somewhere still-alive once the AI music stops? But ultimately if nothing outside of AI is growing, it's one big game of musical chairs and even that might not save you?

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1. swatcoder ◴[] No.46184443[source]
If you're a tech employee in a large company with lucrative compensation, you should be aggressively reducing your expenses and banking your excess so you can weather what might be long period of unemployment and can adapt more smoothly to employment at more modest compensation when you manage to get back in.

Unless you're working very obviously outside the blast radius of an AI-bubble correction (you'd know if you were) or are a very high-value VIP (again, you'd know), you should assume you'll be spending some time without a job within the next few years. Possibly a long time.

You might get lucky, but it's not really going to be in your control and "milking the AI wave, learning all the tools" isn't going to change your odds much. It really is musical chairs. Whether you lose your job will depend on where you happen to be standing when the music stops. And there are going to be so many other people looking for the same new chair as you, with resumes that look almost exactly like yours, that getting a new job will basically come down to a lottery draw.

If you think the AI stuff is cool, study it and play with it. Otherwise, just save money and start working on the outline for that novel you've been thinking about writing.