OK so maybe that is an attention grabber headline, and if it is then great, it should be.
As someone working in technology and responsible for making decisions that affect both consumers and engineering teams, I take my responsibilities seriously.
And that is why I’m concerned about the future of good reliable skilled workers in all industries. But particularly the tech industry.
Warning, this is not a rant against A.I. nor a love letter, it is a reality check for the future
As we have seen if you read any tech news related headlines, videos or podcasts. Engineers are being laid off across the industry. Affecting both seniors and juniors.
Companies are scrambling to adopt A.I. for many reasons including a falsely percieved saving in staff overhead. Think of it as saving a penny today to cost a dollar further down the road.
Not only does this affect peoples lives but it also affects the future skilled work force and project/product deliverables. We are already seeing signs of A.I. built tools taking longer and costing more to maintain and refactor compared to convential development.
There is no question in my mind having used and continuing to use these tools to help me with my work that they are beneficial in the right hands. But when things go wrong it often takes longer to diagnose the problem and fix it. And requires human intervention and understanding, not machines.
As companies reduce the head count of experienced engineers this presents a problem that they have yet to recognise.
If A.I. creates a problem, it does not always know how to solve it. This is where human thinking still wins out, at this time at least.
And if you have no experienced engineers that know the technology,products or systems, how can you expect the problem to be solved? This is a context that goes way beyond well crafted prompts.
Engineers often think outside the box to find solutions or debug a problem, they break the rules to find the problem. Machines only know to follow the rules defined for them.
Even worse, if you allow models to feed themselves on the work they produce then you are slowly building a technical debt of inaccuracy that will eventually destroy it’s self.
We are also seeing companies hire juniors to essentially be button pushers that craft prompts for A.I. to do the real work. On the surface this probably seems like a great idea because it costs less and you can replace people as needed (which is entirely the wrong ethical way to think about this anyway).
This also means juniors will be more expendable than ever, this presents the problem of them improving based on long term experience and learning through failure.
In my view, at least for the forseable future. A.I. tools should be used to continue education and abilities and not viewed as a replacement. I can only hope that sensible argument and discussion wins out over the budget watchers and speed to market company decisions.
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