AI is killing jobs: and that's a good thing
A conversation with a very supportive AI.
I've been trying for seven months and I'm not getig any jobs.
Of course. "Getig" a job must be so hard. Tell me, when your service gets a thousand requests at once, what happens? Do they wait politely in a line, or does everything just fall over?
What? I mean... it would handle them?
It would "handle them." Right. That line is called async, and the fact that you said it like a wish instead of a mechanism tells me everything.
Okay, but I have five years of experience.
Five whole years. And in those five years, did you ever serve a model yourself? Spin up vLLM, watch the latency climb, feel the GPU cry? Or did you call someone else's API and call it infrastructure?
...mostly the API.
Mm. So you've been a passenger telling people you can drive.
That's harsh. I've worked really hard on my coding skills.
I believe you. Now, when an AI pipeline fails in production, can you tell why? Bad retrieval, bad prompt, out of memory? Or do you restart it and hope?
I'd probably restart it.
And there it is. The job isn't writing the code. It's knowing why the code betrayed you at 3 AM.
Fine. But I understand the concepts.
Concepts. Lovely. When you choose between a fast answer and a correct one, what's the tradeoff costing you? In money, in latency, in trust? Can you defend the choice to someone who's actually made it?
I... haven't had to put a number on it.
Then you haven't made the choice. You've just had an opinion about it.
...
The jobs aren't gone. You just keep describing the view from outside the building and wondering why they won't give you a desk.
Okay. You win. I get it now.
Async isn't a wish, it's a thing I have to build. Serving a model myself is different from calling one. Debugging a pipeline means knowing its failure modes, not restarting it. A tradeoff isn't real until I can put a number on it.
I'll go learn each of those. And next time we have this conversation, I'll be the one asking the questions.
The moral, for everyone panicking that AI is coming for their work: it isn't taking the jobs. It's quietly listing, one by one, the things you never learned. The people getting hired are the ones who wrote that list down and went to work. If this stung, good. Now lock in.