The Weeking #2
The Weeking offers two strong essays about what's happening to jobs right now - one from the POV of a seasoned professional, another from a bright kid trying to enter the market as a uni graduate. Plus, a lovely toy.
Two articles to read, one website to play with
Software Development in the Time of Strange New Angels
You might be expecting that here is where I would start proclaiming the death of software development. That I would start on how the strange new angels of agentic AI are simply going to replace us wholesale in order to feast on that $150/hour, and that it's time to consider alternative careers. I'm not going to do that, because I absolutely don't believe it. Agentic AI means that anything you know to code can be coded very rapidly. Read that sentence carefully. If you know just what code needs to be created to solve an issue you want, the angels will grant you that code at the cost of a prompt or two. The trouble comes in that most people don't know what code needs to be created to solve their problem, for any but the most trivial problems. Who does know what code would be needed to solve complex problems? Currently that's only known by software developers, development managers and product managers, three job classifications that are going to be merging rapidly
Work, After Work: Notes From an Unemployed New Grad Watching the Job Market Break
A surprising amount of so called automation today is really labour that has been routed through a screen. There are Filipino workers sitting in offices in Manila wearing VR headsets, remotely steering shelf stocking robots through Japanese convenience stores. There are people in one country sitting at desks, driving forklifts in another country using multi screen setups and a steering wheel, stepping in only when the semi autonomous software gets confused. Security robots patrol office corridors with a remote human ready to take over through a tablet whenever anything looks off.
It feels like immigration without immigrants. The rich country gets the labour it wants at a wage that looks more like Manila than Tokyo, but nobody has to build new housing, merge school systems, negotiate over culture or passports. On the rich side, it can be sold as productivity, which plays well politically. On the worker side, it is another rung in the long ladder that runs from call centres to business process outsourcing to micro task platforms. The worker is still human, still fallible, still earning just enough to keep going, but geographically they are treated more like part of the network than part of the town.
And to close, something delightful to play with - https://alivetheory.net/
alive internet theory is a séance with this living internet. Resurrecting tens of millions of digital artifacts from the Internet Archive, visitors are immersed in a relentless barrage of human expression as they travel through the life of the web as we created it—every image, video, song, and text uploaded by a real person on the web.
Until next week,
Mark