The real question is what kind of pay that work will demand.

It's will be great to still be employed as a senior dev. It will be a little less great with a $110k salary, 5 day commute, and mediocre benefits being the norm.

The market was heading for saturation anyway with more and more people getting into it not for interest but job prospects.

That's the 10-20 year cycle always, though. The .com crash led to a major downgrading in the status of "tech" people for a few years, and then a slow recovery til it was insane again.

However, I'm not eager to be living through this again. It feels very spring/summer 2002 to me right now. That was the lowest point for the local market back then.

I don't think this latest contraction has much to do with AI though. It's more about higher interest rates, recessionary economy, trade wars, etc etc.

That was already a common thing 30 years ago.

In most countries, even for highly skilled workers, this is the norm (i.e. most countries outside of the US). I know some very good engineers (e.g. dealing with large revenues (1bil plus) owning core systems) on this kind of money. Not everyone gets the lucky break.

At least for many on this forum you got a chance to earn good money while the sun was shining. AI threatens even the people that didn't.

Regardless of whether $110k is good money (it is basically everywhere except a few metro areas) your salary cap will be whatever the models can deliver in the same time as you. It follows you want to be good at managing models (ideally multiple dozen) in your area of expertise.

I think you'll find that the ability to ask the right questions is still as highly valuable as the previous version of things.

> minutiae was always borderline irrelevant, the skill was always making somebody money

That's extremely reductive, and a prime example of why everything is enshittified today.

Do you actually disagree with the "minutiae was always borderline irrelevant" part or that it comes along with "making somebody money"? I pretty strongly agree with the original quote including the "possibly with software" part.

Minutiae such as tabs vs spaces and other formatting changes are pretty clearly "borderline irrelevant" and code formatters have largely solved programmers arguing about them. Exactly how to best factor your code into functions and classes is also a commonly argued but "borderline irrelevant." Arguments about "clean code" are a good example of this.

Broadly, the skills I see that LLMs make useless to have honed are the the minutiae that were already "borderline irrelevant." Knowing how to make your code performant, knowing how to make good apis that can be stable long term, in general having good taste for architecture is still very useful. In fact it is more useful now.

How is enshitification (the gradual degredation of service and products for commercial gain) even related to what's being discussed (the gradual obsoletion of a certain set of skills of an SWE)?