Worked in oil and gas, we dealt with spreadsheets. One coworker had a tumor that looked like a neck pillow. He couldn’t stop working because healthcare in the US requires you to have a job.
Trades pay a lot to look like tough guys and trades sell that tough guy image to sell the job for less than it’s worth.
i’ll take the excel, but i’m making some scripts to automate some shit so i can screw around at least half the time
2 smart guys apply for an IT position: do you hire the reliable, hard working guy who never takes sick leave, or the lazy guy?
Always hire the lazy guy. They will go out of their way to find a better way to do the same fucking task so they can go back to being lazy.
Isn’t that Gates? It’s a solid take and one I’ve kept in mind for years as a lazy man 😆
I remember when I thought being more efficient would result in less work.
The trick is to not let anyone know you’re being too efficient. Automate an 8-hour job down to a minute, say you finished it in 7.
The trick is to tell absolutely nobody then poke your mouse every few mins to make Teams think you’re still online while playing games or reading. Or so I’m told.
place your mouse on a analog watch, trust me
That’s pretty genius, and I happen to have one a foot away from where my mouse usually hangs out lol. I’ll…tell my friend.
you must’a made the mistake of finishing something early or showing-off your ‘optimizations’
I’ve made a career of automating excel (and away from excel all together).
I miss it sometimes, but then I need a bit of VBA again, and remember that I don’t actually miss it all that much.
there’s a couple of jobs where you get to do both!
at least you can wear forced air respirators for working with fumes
I mean, so you can while working with Excel
None of you have gotten high off acetone fumes and it shows
Alternative path: become an online grifter, make millions from being a degenerate, eventually get outed as a pedophile, convert to Christianity/Islam, profit!
I hear this is the path to become president.
Ahh the Russell Brand pipeline
They’re just the simplest options. Just do something until you’re better than everybody else at it and sell your skills. Easy? Yes. Time consuming? Also yes. Worth it? Absolutely.
I’m in the physical security space, straddling electrical work and hardware with IT application/basic networking/database administration day to day. It’s way easier than it looks, but only if people put in a minimum amount of effort to learn and maintain the skill set.
I can confidently say that 95% of the techs for the three biggest companies in the industry (and many small groups) know absolutely nothing beyond what some old dude showed them when they started, and never understood why things are done the way they are or how to actually do things properly. Like setting hardware on fire levels of bad. And these aren’t just “bad techs”, they’re the “top guys in the area”.
Turnover is insane, there’s always an opening for a new field guy. That gets your foot in the door to then learn as much as you can independently and potentially being the one guy who actually knows this shit in the whole region. It only takes one or two times of saving a job from going totally south or fixing a problem nobody else could figure out (usually something fairly obvious) to look like a damn rock star. Then once the company just starts throwing you all of the bullshit jobs nobody else can do and declines when you ask for a raise/better position you take that shiny new resume and hopefully the contacts at the customer sites you worked and move to someone who appreciates the skills you bring. Repeat forever. Profit driven service business fucking sucks and none of this should be necessary, but here we all are using LinkedIn because we have to and picking up the slack for pennies.
I forget why I started writing this, and know the first step sounds like a tone deaf “just find a job” but I literally trained up brand new techs who went from bullshit entry pay to 6 figures in 2 years by being 10% better than the average old timer. If you’re looking for an industry that’s been very badly in need of competent skilled workers, physical security is something to look into and no matter how bad the market gets security is something all of these big ass companies will gladly pay for.
Related, if anyone is looking in the next few months in CA or WA hit me up, we could use another colleague and the company isn’t profit driven due to not needing to generate profit.
Imagine giving this advice to a struggling friend in the real world. Absolutely unhinged from reality, thanks for the laugh
literally survivorship bias
I am straight up gonna drink more tonight because I read that
But I bet you’re getting better than everyone else at drinking
people born on 3rd base lol
And then get no jobs because lack of recommendation/bad market/AI, etc…
Don’t underestimate the health risk of sitting.
You’ll need compression socks to stay healthy.
Yeah but “just stand occasionally” is much easier than “don’t breath or get anything on your skin for 40 years”
While this is true, the risks from sitting pale in comparison to the risks of industrial work. Also, they can be easily mitigated. You can’t mitigate the damage done in an industrial setting much.
fr. I have issues because of this, even though I’ve incorporated a standing desk for a decade.
you gotta actually move to make up for a sedentary job
I worked construction and plant shutdowns when I was young. By the time I was in my mid twenties I had quit and went in to IT. The reason was simple. During my time in a union over ten of the old timers had died of cancer and other related illnesses. Only one of them was in their sixties. Over half were under forty. One of the best friends I will ever have died when he was fifty four. A month or so shy of when he was going to take early retirement.
When I was a student, I wasn’t really motivated and didn’t have any idea what to do with my life. But then I worked as a window cleaner during the summer holidays and that gave me a very clear idea about what I didn’t want to do with my life.
Sort of related, in my last year and a half of HS I started a commercial electrician assistant program which was supposed to be like an accelerated apprenticeship path. I kind of liked it, and it legitimately the best pay available to a 17 year old at the time, but it was the master electrician I worked with who convinced me to quit and go get an EE degree instead. I distinctly remember the conversation where he asked me how old I thought he was, and I guessed he was close to 60, nearing retirement. He was 43, and he’d fallen off a ladder a year earlier, which was why I was doing all work over 8’ for him way fucking beyond what your typical HS assistant would normally be doing. “Go to college” he told me. “I chose this instead of Mechanical Engineering and now I can’t do the job anymore, with 20 years to retirement.”
I work in the permitting side of the world and the only time I’ve ever seen a Master Electrician on a job site is when we specifically told them to be there for an inspection. Most of them essentially rent out their license.
This is not a very convincing argument anymore: with AI, there’ll only one path left soon. And it’s not the one where you sit on your ass in front of a computer all day.
There’s still plenty of jobs that straddle code and the physical real world that no spicy autocorrect will ever be able to do, let alone better than a human being. If you’re feeling vulnerable now, spend some time identifying the niche jobs that are immune to the marketing hype and be one of the people who pops into anyone’s head as knowing this stuff.
Maybe I’ve been in a lil industry bubble for too long and I definitely don’t have writing any production code beyond basic scripting daily on my resume, but a lot of this seems pretty overblown. I hope I’m right and the damage to the average dev role is minimal long term, but IT has always been an uphill battle to keep up with the latest toolset.
I do wish all of you pros well, hopefully this doesn’t come off as minimizing the issues you can clearly see better than I can say to day.
Llms can’t even do math. And odds on them figuring that “highly complicated” technology out before the bubble bursts seems low.
Llms can’t even do math.
Neither can a substantial amount of high school graduates in the US. Corporate is just hedging their bets that AI does slightly closer to accurate math and that meat machines are cheaper for physical labor than having to build robots. Besides, math is unimportant to capitalism. A company that loses billions a year is still worth investing trillions in.
It’s crazy that no one has integrated them with a graphing calculator, spreadsheets, symbolic logic software, etc., in order to increase their deterministic reasoning capacity.
Like, human brains aren’t just the language centers, so I don’t know why the people trying to build an analogue haven’t done more than merely trying to make the linguistic capacity more complex…
I mean the poster above you is wrong, they use math tools internally now when you ask math questions. Very obvious in Gemini. Yes the raw LLM trying to autocomplete the answer to a math problem is gonna be wrong but that’s not the way they are used to solve problems like that anymore.
no way i’d want to drive on a bridge built on their supposed math
The LLM has to choose to use the calculating tools. Gemini tried to do this one solo:
4 + 2 + 2 + 2 + 1+ 2 + 0 = 15
Tbf, it did four of these calculations, and 75% were correct.
That makes sense. I clearly don’t keep up on the frontier models…
Some of them write and execute Python internally for stuff like that
It doesn’t matter what LLMs can and can’t do well: all they have to do is do stuff a person does well enough for the price of the tokens they consume to make that person’s occupation vanish if it’s cheaper - and it almost always is. The metric companies use is cost, not quality. Because that’s how capitalism works.
The bills are coming in now and much like all other cloud computing, it suddenly becomes much more expensive to do anything useful once you are dependent on it
It’s so easy to sucker capitalists with labor replacement schemes
I also like folks mentality that “once they see the real price of AI everything will be back to normal”. As if the very same companies didn’t get baited into becoming dependent on American cloud service providers like AWS to find themselves later paying out the fucking ass for them once they are dependent on them. Guess what ? THEY ARE STILL PAYING FOR IT, after more than a decade of being swindled. They will do the same with AI.
I would be ok with robots taking our jobs if you could trust governments to pay us the taxes they charge the robots.
According to Startrek you need a deadly riot first before that happens.
You can 3d print a whole house with one technician nowadays even. So that’s not even true anymore.
It will be an extremely extremely long time before any industry domain will be able to remove humans from the loop for software development. The whole idea is idiotic.
Sure, many places are trying, then failing spectacularly. It will never happen for anything even remotely important.
Still need to have a foundation, plumbing, windows, doors, rebar, electric, drywall, roofing etc. At this point, I have to ask what makes it better/cheaper/faster than ICF construction? 3D printing for houses is just a weird way of using concrete.
The technician does all that and it’s just windows plumbing and electrical. The foundation is printed, the roof is printed, the walls are printed.
One cheap technician instead of a dozen high paid trades? It’s cheaper, faster and consistent quality. Do you even know what we are talking about?
Well, I have done plenty of construction in my days but I admit I am not up to date on the latest. I have my doubts on the roof being 3D printed, you will have to show me that my friend. Also have reservations on the foundation being done by a single person running a 3D printer. Who is even feeding the machine during all this?? Also one technician is not doing the plumbing, windows, and electrical. And wow “just”? That is a lot of work.
It is absolutely not cheaper currently. I will die on this hill. Also you are going to have to show me how it is faster than ICF. Consistent quality? I have no freaking clue what you are comparing it to.
I don’t know much maybe, but I certainly know more about home construction than you.
lol this is nothing new the tech has been around for over a decade. It’s not like you’re going to be building large custom homes.
What foundation? You can build houses on slab on grade in lots of places. You keep saying ICF, I don’t think you understand the usecase here if you’re thinking it’s replacing ICF type housing.
The machine is fed automatically by hoppers, like any other automated machine. They get filled up probably every couple of days, leaving the tech to install the windows when it gets there.
Just because you’re ignorant, doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist or do something cheaper.
Slab on grade is a foundation. It’s honestly what I assumed they were building these on as well. Alright if you don’t want me to mention ICF what should I compare it to? Concrete block? Stick frame? I picked ICF because it was somewhat comparable.
Listen, I think the technology is cool. Concrete shell on the outside would be naturally fire resistant and no need to paint it. Awesome! The dome houses that are sprayed on concrete are also interesting to me. Enough that I toured the facility in Texas long ago. Concrete is not a cheap building material though.
That would be one insanely large hopper. Not saying it is not possible, I just don’t see it being logical to have a hopper loaded with days of mixture. It’s heavy!
A 3D printed house sounds cool, but again I think it is just saying “concrete layer frame”.
You will not have one technician doing the windows, plumbing, heating/cooling, electrical, roofing. They are gonna do the frame printing, and peace out. Specialists do their job fast and well because that is all they do.
You will not have one technician doing the windows, plumbing, heating/cooling, electrical, roofing. They are gonna do the frame printing, and peace out. Specialists do their job fast and well because that is all they do.
It’s literally plug and play. If you can build IKEA furniture, you’re already overqualified for the job. You don’t need an electrician to plug in a fridge do you? That’s how these are designed, modular, and to be able to be built by ONE technician.
I’m not even addressing the rest of your comment, if you can’t understand that the machine has a base and a long ass arm like anOverhead concrete pump, you clearly have no more experience than what Google is providing you. This isn’t new tech and you’re inventing problems that aren’t actually problems since they are already solved by other tech ages before.
And this’ll shock you apparently, they have concrete trucks that carry the materials and mix it on site already…. Shocker eh?
It’s simply not possible never mind cheaper.
Are you gonna be building mansions with them…? No. Can you build affordable housing, yes.
Are you personally invested in some 3D house printing start up or what? Affordable housing starting with an expensive construction material (concrete) for the walls is not happening. You have a concrete frame, wow. The housing market has been saved!
What about being a porn actor?
That’s covered by the “toxic fumes” part
AI can do that as well now. Anything digital or with computers is out now.
So off to the mines for as all. For our glorious overlords, of course.
Live performances
Yeah we’ll just have naked people in our house willing to have sex with us, take that AI!
…oh wait
Sounds like an improvement to me.
Since short clips are popular, maybe I have a chance…
No, AI will take that to.
Don’t worry people will pay to watch irl.
Some Days (most) I’d rather be a bricklayer than work with computers
