It’s not just tech workers, it’s also tech projects.<p>Compare how minio has advertised itself through the years:<p>2023: High Performance Object Storage for AI [0]<p>2022: High Performance, Kubernetes Native Object Storage [1]<p>2020: MinIO is a high performance object storage server compatible with Amazon S3 APIs [2]<p>I get that buzzwords and marketing are important, but it rubs me the wrong way<p>[0] <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20230628165639/https://github.com/minio/minio" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://web.archive.org/web/20230628165639/https://github.co...</a>
[1] <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20220204012915/https://github.com/minio/minio" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://web.archive.org/web/20220204012915/https://github.co...</a>
[2] <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200528195457/https://github.com/minio/minio" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://web.archive.org/web/20200528195457/https://github.co...</a>
If you can rebrand yourself as an "expert" in some shiny new thing by spending a few weeks at a boot camp, there probably isn't much there and you will be competing for the same jobs against countless others who did the same.<p>I managed to completely ignore the cool new thing for the last 20 years and instead slowly built up knowledge in those problem domains that actually interest me, and it's worked out alright.
A UK perspective on this is that the AI trend, as described in the article, would quickly turn into a class divide. Many employers in AI/ML spaces seem to want postgraduate degrees. Often the academic entry requirements to such degrees aren't that high (usually a bachelors degree with an "ok" mark like a 2:2 or a 2:1 min in a related subject - not exactly sky high attainment criteria) but the financial barriers are relatively severe - far poorer finance options are available as compared to undergraduate degrees especially.<p>The dynamic then seems to be that while software development has been functioning as a relatively effective source of social mobility, if you can do the work you can create a decent career, the current AI wave threatens to pull up the ladder for many if this trend carries on as described.<p>That said I'm not too worried about it playing out like that yet, at least not in the medium term. I think industry is at some pinnacle of optimism around AI but don't quite realise that it's not a great fit for a lot of commercially relevant use cases like maintenance of existing code bases of more than trivial complexity and it's unlikely to be for a good while and where there is sensitivity to copyright. I think once that reality sets in there will be some degree of back-peddling.
Good lord, AI engineers get paid a median salary of $243,500, while non-AI engineers only get paid a median of $166,750, how can it be so much more? Is it because AI jobs are more concentrated in big tech?
My problem with AI is that I just don't think it does the advertised task well. It really annoys me that the tech space in my area is increasingly 'embracing' AI* instead of things like Nix, Rust, Haskell, which are doing really cool things in the broader tech sphere.<p>*On that note: the phrase 'embracing AI' sounds so slimy. Why do I need to hug the robot?