If you are very fortunate you might find a career that excites you. That has certainly been the case for my career in software development but I am not sure it will be for much longer, and in a way “It’s payback time”.
Even if you have managed to snag your dream job, in the majority of cases there will still be tasks you don’t like doing. You also probably spend more than half of your working life doing tasks you don’t mind doing but don’t “push your buttons”. Well, it could be about to get worse due to AI.
As long as the amount of time you get to do the tasks you enjoy exceeds the time you spend on the tasks you hate, most people can cope. A little advice if your job falls short in tasks you enjoy:
If (and it’s a big if) you have a good manager, you should discuss the situation. There might not be opportunities to change things but if there are, a good manager realises a happy employee is more productive than a reluctant one.
Alternatively, you might have to take more drastic action and find a new role, maybe in another company. I realise this is far easier to type than done but life is too short to be doing what you don’t like if there is the slightest chance there could be something better.
Finally, you might want to consider that there might be a different career path that offers you more opportunities to engage in the tasks you enjoy but that is the biggest leap of all, and very few have the option for one reason or another.
These days we have to consider that AI might take your job, if the hyperbole from our tech overlords is to be believed. What is almost certain is AI will impact our jobs and take tasks off us “so we can be more productive”!
If the tasks being taken away are ones we rather not do anyway, that’s a good thing and means we will hopefully have more time to do the tasks we actually enjoy. However, it is just as likely that AI will take the tasks we relish, replacing them with more tasks we loath. This will drastically impact the quality of our working life.
It is with this realisation that I fear my career might have been built doing this even before AI entered the picture. Truth be told, this realisation dawned on me some time ago but I cowardly chose to bury it in the back of my mind. I suspect this fact is now coming back to haunt me.
As a developer of bespoke business applications my primary focus has been on simplifying the business process, delivering business efficiencies and producing "business value" (whatever that means) with scant regard for the potential impact such changes might have on the end-user’s enjoyment of their job, that was none of my concern.
Well, I could regard the way AI is likely to negatively impact my job as payback, guilty or not, and I would hazard I am not alone.
Top comments (3)
Really thoughtful piece — especially the point about AI not always causing immediate job loss, but gradually reshaping how work is structured and distributed.
One angle I’ve been thinking about is how the impact of AI on jobs isn’t uniform globally. In low-resource or low-connectivity regions, the conversation is slightly different — it’s not just “replacement,” but often “access.”
For example, in education contexts I’ve been working on (offline-first AI systems like LocalMind using Gemma 4), AI is less about replacing roles and more about filling gaps where there simply aren’t enough teachers or support systems.
It raises an interesting question: are we optimizing AI discussions for productivity in already-developed systems, or for accessibility in underserved environments as well?
Hi Allan, You make some really interesting points that were not obvious to me; thank you.
I was watching an interview recently with a US entrepreneur who stated the role of radiographers was dead due to AI. Here in the UK the role is in high demand, I can see AI supporting this role (as it does in Australia) to fill the gap rather than replacing them.
Software developers in the West (me included) all to often fail to consider users that might access their systems with reduced resources. I sadly do not know the answer but leaving them to their own devices does not seem to me to be a sound strategy.
As for us in the West, just wait for the AI companies to demand payment at the cost plus rate rather than the heavily discounted prices we are paying at the moment.