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Ask HN: Are you afraid of AI making you unemployable within the next few years?

14 points johnwheeler | 1 comments | 20 Dec 25 21:18 UTC | HN request time: 0.281s | source

On Hacker News and Twitter, the consensus view is that no one is afraid. People concede that junior engineers and grad students might be the most affected. But, they still seem to hold on to their situations as being sustainable. My question is, is this just a part of wishful thinking and human nature, trying to combat the inevitable? The reason I ask is because I seriously don't see a future where there's a bunch of programmers anymore. I see mass unemployment for programmers. People are in denial, and all of these claims that the AI can't write code without making mistakes are no longer valid once an AI is released potentially overnight, that writes flawless code. Claude 4.5 is a good example. I just really don't see any valid arguments that the technology is not going to get to a point where it makes the job irrelevant, not irrelevant, but completely changes the economics.
1. raw_anon_1111 ◴[21 Dec 25 00:36 UTC] No.46341138[source]▶
There are two competing issues. AI and commoditization. AI is just making the problem worse.

I predicted commoditization happening back in 2016 when I saw no matter what I learned, it was going to be impossible to stand out from the crowd on the enterprise dev side of the market or demand decent top of market raises.[1]

I knew back then that the answer was going to be filling in the gaps with soft skills, managing larger more complex problems, being closer to determining business outcomes, etc.

I pivoted into customer facing cloud consulting specializing in application development (“application modernization”). No I am not saying “learn cloud”.

But focusing on the commodization angle. When I was looking for a job in late 2023, after being Amazoned, as a Plan B, I submitted literally 100s of applications. Each open req had hundreds of applicants and my application let alone resume was viewed maybe 5 times (LinkedIn shows you).

My plan A of using my network and targeted outreach did result in 3 offers within three weeks.

The same pattern emerged in 2024 when I was out looking again.

I’m in the interviewer pool at my current company, our submitting an application to job offer rate is 0.4%.

[1] I am referring to the enterprise dev market where most developers in the US work