This isnt true. Cloud definitely completely changed the market for sysadmin and network engineers. Some folks managed to retrain but many were left out post dotcom bubble.
Honestly this is my plan. I'm waiting for my time in this career to run out. In the mean time I'm trying to aggressively save whatever way I can.
This industry is going to shrink. And that's ok. We had our time. I wish it was longer and I wish I made more, but I don't think I ever saw myself here forever.
Kudos to those who made a whole career off of this.
I'm in my mid 30s with a wife and kid and I'm mostly hoping I can complete my immigration to the US before my time in this career ends.
Then, I might pursue starting a business or going back to school with the savings and hopefully my wife can be employed at the time in her completely unrelated field and cover us until I can figure out what to do next.
I'm not sad about this. I am happy I have tried to live frugally enough to never buy my own hype or believe that my salary is sustainable forever.
A part of it for me is that I never really loved building software. I might have ADHD and that might be a big factor, but honestly it was never what excited me.
The biggest fallacy I see a lot of people buying into is that LLMs being good enough to replace software developers means they're AGI and the world has other problems. I never quite bought that. I think software developers think too highly of themselves.
But they're also not technically wrong. Ya, a LLM can basically replace a family doctor and most internal medicine physicians. But the path to that happening is long and arduous due to how society has setup medics. Software devs never fought hard enough for their profession to be protected. So we are just the easiest target, same thing that happened to a lot of traders before.
If you're mid career like me, just get ready for the idea that your career is probably much shorter than you thought it will be and you will need to retrain. It will suck but many others have done it.
I'm not sure I agree. LLMs are great coders, because we have a lot of training data to make next token prediction work well for writing software programs.
A mistake to make here is to conflate 'AI' with some non sensual dream of 'AGI'.
LLMs are able to do a lot of what a swe does and if nothing else that just means we need less SWEs.
I'm bored of IT. Software is boring, AI included. None of this feels like progress. We've automated away white collar work...but we also acknowledge most white collar work is busy work that's considered a bullcr*p job. We need to get back to innovation in manufacturing, materials etc. i.e. the real world.
Outside of the most psychotic organizations, this just isn't how organizations work. You want to keep your best people, no matter the market. You don't want to drop your hiring bar to hire someone "desperate". A lot of FAANG engineers have claimed to struggle to land jobs at "lesser" companies because the recruitment team rightly realized it would just be a stepping stone for them to get back into a "better" company.
Stop calling it networking, and stop optimizing for your career, and just keep up with people who are people you're interested in talking to. Then it's not a chore and the conversations are meaningful.